The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Exes

According to my sister, P., R's wife is not a hillbilly. She makes something like $60,000 a year!, was how P. reasoned it out. I spoke over her, drowning her out until she was laughing quietly on her end of the phone so I could make myself heard. I have no interest in liking her, or thinking about how accomplished she is because she is married to my ex-boyfriend, and I'm logical enough to know that if I hadn't broken up with him, she'd not be married to him right now, but the fact is that she is, and I'm allowed to coddle my mean feelings.

I suppose I attribute the label 'hillbilly' to her because she lives in the country, always has, and comes from family of drunk people who live on a farm. She's a chain-smoker, a girl who enjoys 4X4 trucks and snowmobiles and she is married to R., a hillbilly in a Slipknot t-shirt.

I know it's wrong to be so infantile about it, but hearing about how well he's doing, while I may wish it to myself, is hurtful. I don't want to know that he's better off without me because it makes me feel as though I failed. If he's happy now, then it means the problem was always me. Right? I think an 'ex' should be an ex in every respect. Having siblings so involved in his life is just wrong, on every level. Though my sisters know how wounded I was in the relationship at times, they have come to the conclusion that it was a two-sided thing, that I got my 'revenge' in the end so I should be fine now. Oh, how simple it is to speak about something you have never gone through. So many judgments, so many opinions from people who only see the outside. The bruises are still there, you see, though they were never physical. I don't get it, but there it is.

I don't really hate the woman. How could I? I don't know her. It's just that I'm an average sort of human at the best of times, and though it would be a lovely thing to be able to rise above all the animosity and juvenilia, I can't pretend that it's what I do. I wonder what she thinks about when she lets herself wonder about me. Oh, I know she does, how could she not? His only girlfriend ever. Thirteen years, ten of which were spent living together. I left him and he went crazy, landing in jail, messed up on drugs, losing himself for over a year. She knows about it, surely, because she knows people from our former circle and the stories would have found their way to her. He wouldn't have told her, but she knows anyway. Apparently, I've even met her, though I have no recollection of it. It was at a wedding, a bonafide country wedding complete with country music star Jason McCoy (who I've met several times and never recognized, even when he told me his name) as a guest, and a groom strumming his guitar and singing a ballad for his bride as she glided down the aisle. R's new wife was married to someone else, then, and I don't suppose she made an impression on either of us at the time. Funny, that. I remember that wedding as being the most excrutiatingly romantic weddings ever, and the fact that the bride and groom divorced two years later doesn't diminish the experience of having heard him sing his lovely little ode to her. Come to think of it, not too many of the key couples on that day are still intact. Strange. It's like the romanticism was too much, raised the bar too high for established couples to aspire to, so we all gave up and started again. Hmm.

I don't hate her, but I don't want to know her. I don't want to see her face and connect her lips to his. I don't want to see her body and know that it bore his child. I don't want to see her and think that she's more attractive than I am, or thinner, or younger or any of the things which will only cause me to study myself in the mirror and grimace. Though my sisters are not able to understand why it bothers me to hear about her, why I get defiant and difficult when they attempt to humanize her, I can't be bothered with making them see my side of it. Sometimes I think about getting personal, like asking them what it would be like sitting down with a woman they know their husbands have loved more themselves at one time, a woman whom he has seen naked, stroked, kissed, fondled and penetrated. Imagine, I think to myself, what it must be like to have a superficial conversation with her, talking about the weather, the great sale at the local Walmart (oh, I just know she shops there), and the whole time you're picturing them having sex, or sharing loving words that they meant as they were saying them. Maybe they're able to visualize it and walk away unscathed, but I'm not. I do not want to think of his hands on her, or stare at her belly and know his baby lived there. That was our love once. All of it, and now it belongs to her, and it will always prickle my skin.

Oddly enough, I don't often think about this when it comes to M. I do not imagine his ex-wife's hands on him, nor do I taste the kisses of ex-girlfriends on his lips. He has always felt like he was mine, which is why I was so far gone when the marriage argument presented itself. It doesn't make sense to me, his reluctance to seal the deal, because I don't sense any lingering love for another on his part. I can't explain why that certainty is in me. I am still trying to figure out how I feel about all of that, though. I am never easily placated. I have been mulling and mulling and finding my own truths in the words we spoke, and I know that if I can't make sense of it all I will go back and ask for more clarification. I deserve that, I think. I don't know that I'm satisfied with his arguments, but it is my way to analzye and analyze again. I usually do that with the negative stuff, rather than with the positive, but that's just how I roll.

All of it seems to be too much, like it should be much easier. Maybe it should be more difficult to get a divorce, so that people would think twice about marrying someone they're not completely certain about. Marriage should be more positive than it currently is, something concrete and unshakable, instead of the transition period so many have come to regard it as. M. said that he thinks too many people rush into it, like he did some years ago, and that it needs a specific time period to settle some, so that the sheen weakens and reality can shape itself, letting all parties involved make smart choices. I think he's right, but then again, we've been a couple for six years.

I wonder if people in countries where bullets fly and grenades explode wonder about these kinds of things. Somehow, I doubt it.