Going Solo at The End Of The Line

 

I thought this year would be different, and funny enough the damn time signature turned out to be quite different. Just not the way I envisioned. I must remember to be more specific when making those wishes near the New Year. The cosmic genie always lurks, and apparently still works from time to time.

I became hooked on George R. R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" books, and television series, this year.  "Winter is coming." Even for Bakersfield, CA where very mild temperatures fill the autumn days, the growing dark hours and chilly nights sap the tree limbs of their juice and force the annual plummet of leaves to the ground. What once pulsed and thrived in green just yesterday turns to wet brown mulch so quickly. The dampness of the soil lingers throughout much of the day, and the six or eight legged little creatures have crawled back down deep below, or left as a last will and testament to their lives a hopeful promise of progeny attached to some wood or stone. The circular events in the northern hemisphere on a small round rock circling a star hurtle through space with wills of their own. 

Last year at this time my wife and I were celebrating a new car purchase. It was a gift from her to me.  We had a 2003 BMW 525i that ran well but had begun to suffer those annoying little traits that conspire to all parts in the universe with hoses, linings, belts, lights, pads and you-name-it beginning to wear out and need constant replacement. We've lived modestly here for our 10 years in this town, and the repairs on the Beamer were beginning to look like monthly car payments. So Vicky convinced me a new car, just for me, would be the ticket. She had the still sporty Celica, which she loves, to do the commute to her job a few miles round trip each day.  Her dream job as the executive director at a local non-profit was secure, and so we took home a new Hyundai Sonata after trading in the BMW. 

A year later the car and its purchase puzzle me because I find I will be, in the immortal words of Ray Davies, "Going Solo." So low.

All the emotions people confront when their personal universe shifts into brain chaos hit me these past several months trying to work through the relationship woes with the one I love. Everyone knows the three Gs- gut-wrench, guilt and grief when breakup calls. There are plenty of other descriptors anyone can freely apply to note abrupt individual change when it happens to them, but sadness mixed with confusion fits me best today. I made it past anger, finally.

Anger made the scene untenable at the end of the line. After 20 plus years of togetherness being told  four months ago that she did not think the relationship could go on caused all my synapses to fire every round in the their tanks, and put me at a total loss. After feeling so comfortable in my skin being around the love of my life for so long the new order, these past 100 days or so, has meant I now felt childish and unsure at every moment in the day. What to do? How to repair the damage? What the fuck has happened? And how did it get to this?

Different perspectives over time on issues personal and professional, which never resolved themselves, apparently ate away what I considered an unshakeable foundation.

I grew up with arguments. My parents argued with themselves frequently, and loudly on many an occasion. Most of my relatives argued with one another, and often. My grandmother once told my mom when she called one time to complain about a fight with my dad,  "If you don't have a fight with your partner from time to time there is no point in having a partner." She then hung up on my mother. Some people might be made for arguments, others not so much it appears.

It's not as though there were no clues in front of my senses over the past several years that maybe things were not all hunky-dory in our little couple world. The various physical ailments that afflicted my loving partner over our time in Bakersfield, CA were in all probability symptoms of stress, and although many conversations brought up that possibility these talks always ended without a resolution of the dis-eases, or unease of the soul to be more precise. My lingering unhappiness over the failure to land any meaningful work in the Bakersfield job market had to be a constant irritant, and even though I was mum on the subject for the past several years, let's face it a few years of unhappy bitter is hard to live with. 

We had, I thought, compromised on a one earner one stay-at-home lifestyle. All her efforts could be on pursuit of success in the job world, which she has achieved, while all work on the property and household would fall to me. The ten-buck-an-hour gigs that I was able to land seemed pointless to keep pursuing when we had a bunch of aging pets to maintain on top of large properties in a town where poverty was so prevalent and opportunity for home burglary ever present on every street. We just had different perspectives on how that would play out, I guess.

Cue the Traveling Willburys "End Of The Line" on our lives together. This is not, however, a boo-hoo pity party on this page. Just an acknowledgement it is one more time to change tracks with the hope that lessons learned will stick, and that complacency and inattentiveness never reside with me in the years to come. Time for new horizons.

Happy Holidays to friends and families everywhere.