i'm midway through the third night alone. saturday was the day she moved out.
monday was the night my son slept over.
third night.
WHOOO. scary.
i can handle three nights alone right now as easily as...well...shit...can't think of an example...but i can handle it. and i can handle all the nights to come.
except at the moment i'm not handling it.
i'm devolving.

it's that that backslide we all experience from time to time.
you're in a good place - walking high steppin' tall, back straight, chest out, shoulders back, jaunty head nods to everyone you see.
then...
that feeling like when a wave runs back off a beach and you're standing there in the shallow water and you suddenly feel that sucking sensation around your ankles, pulling you down...
now imagine that happening over and over, slowly pulling you further and further into the muck, the mire, the dark wet sand that will choke you and blind you and...god damn - the idea of a slow, agonizing descent into my private Room 101 is my darkest fear.
aka devolving.

i think i've done a pretty good job of holding it together. but it's been piling up...

in february they annouced we were being laid off. i was supposed to be severenced out in June, but i was let go six weeks early.
i was suprisingly bathed in shame; i know i hadn't been fired, just cut loose early, but it felt like being fired and i was embarassed for myself.
i cut myself off from work friends to spare myself.
i was able to get another job before my severance ran out, but it pays half of what i was making and is the kind of position i used to manage.

prior to my lay-off, we lived pretty close to payday-to-payday, trying to stay up on the personal and family bills.
so now, what was tight is tighter, which totally freaks me out: behind on bills, dodging phone calls, bouncing checks, scrouging couch coins for gas money the day before payday.
during my BIG meltdown 13 years ago i found myself, at the lowest point, in a rat-infested, one-bedroom three-story-walk-up manifestation of my dank mental condition.
the guy living next door to me committed suicide; it took a week before he was missed - and only then because the landlord was looking for him to collect the rent.
it was hard not to think i was next. i was collecting nickles and dimes to buy vending machine food as my meals. when things started to turn around for me i swore i would never, ever, never, be in the kind of situation again.

as part of us cutting costs we were going to sell our house and move into something smaller, something we could more realistically afford.
third day the house was on the market we got an offer.
with a three-weeks-from-now closing date.
three weeks to find a new place and get through all the sell a house/buy a house rituals.
now, days away from the planned back-to-back closings of new place/old place, we're hitting snags in the sell the house deal.

my soon-to-be-former wife would say there is some significance that our martial "challenges" are listed behind all my shit. she'd be right.
there is a selfishness in me i've never fully acknowledged until recently. to be happy and successful going forward i need to address it as a character flaw and as part of my "operating system."

long story short - throughout our entire relationship i was never honest with her. i corresponded with old girlfriends, i skirted dangerouly close to inappropriate work relationships, had "emotional/sexual" online affairs, and had one real, actual affair.
i will not defend my behavior. i will not excuse it. i stand up and admit that i hurt a very dear friend, over and over, repaying her marriage renaissance efforts with more lies and more pain.
the affair, the last straw, started in february, the begining of my slide, my devolution - acting out my desired self-destruction.

one month after discovery day we were making some progress.
she was really committed to working everything out.
we had a number of long, open, very honest talks about what i did, what she needed to help her recovery, and what we both wanted from our new marriage.
maybe it lasted six weeks.

i really believe that i wanted to make the relationship work. i was prepared to help her through the up and down emotions that typically plague adultry victims.
i was mapping out my minor internal modificaitons to focus more on her, put her first - action-actio-action demonstrating love, no more getting by on what turned out to be very hollow sonnets of endearment.

here's my last confession, the one i haven't made to her yet...
i had given up all my up-to-no-good e-mail accounts and online chat identities.
walked away from all of it without a look back.
except for one e-mail account.
fuck.
through all my confessing, in all our tearful confrontations where i reassured her/reassured her/reasured her there were no more accounts - i never gave up the jerkyl to my hyde e-mail account.
an alter ego designed to explore my sexual identity.
ninety-nine percent of my actual sexual experiences were vanilla, boy/girl, standard positions, basic props and "not just for medical purposes" mechanical devices.
yet - my earliest sexual fantasies generally included some combination of the following elements: male partners, female partners, minor acts of degradation and submission on my part. as they say in the adult personal ads - no children, no blood, no scat.

i'm at work one night six weeks into the recovery and i pull up the account.
hadn't logged in the whole six weeks but tonight, tonight i was thinking if i was going to really make our marriage successful i would truly and honestly have to walk away from this account.
so i logged into it.
and opened pandora's box.
i realized at the moment that i was never going to be really happy in our marriage, no matter how strong my feelings for my wife.
there would always be these aspects of me that would be crying out for attention, for gratification, for acknolwdgement.

and so i did the honest thing - i told her.
after six weeks of trying to make things right, planning a new life together in a new place, i pulled the plug.
i - i - i.
her.
i hurt her deeply. sitting there on the bed. talking.
i watched her feelings for me died in her eyes. i watched her crumble inside.
she was haunted by images of me and the other woman; my ghost is her sitting huddled up under the comforter, legs wrapped tight around her knees as i walked out of the bedroom.

To summarize -
- loss of self esteem, loss of comfort zone, loss of stablizing relationship.
- additional external stresses involving my basic need for shelter.
- not consistently taking my mother's little helpers, trying to stretch my supply into the new year when my new prescription plan kicks in and i'll be able to reasonably afford my buddies Cym and Bel (cymbalta and welbutrion).

so alone for the first time in seven years i find myself
- self medicating with hemp's classy, flashy city cousin.
- inducing nose bleeds (my nasal version of cutting).

devolving.
maybe.

i love surfing.
never actually surfed but i love it, the the concept of it, riding the wave.
not trying to beat nature's force; rather balancing in its mouth for few moments.
i want to learn to surf.

sitting here, devolving, buzzed to a fuzzy muddle, drying blood on my upper lip and index finger, i wish i was surfing.
i wish i was sitting out there just beyond the break, straddling my board, waiting for the next set of swells to signal go time.
paddling as the water starts to push under me.
paddling hard enough to get caught in the momentum of the wave.
feeling myself moving up the wall of water.
balanced on my board.
lost in the rush of the moment.
i'm not thinking.
i'm not caught up in the killer weight of strangling minutae.
i'm free.
in the moment.

all of it - all the losses and stresses and pressure - the wave.
not letting it pull me down in the muck of the shoreline.
no.
no.
no.

i'm surfing the wave.
balanced out there on my board.
riding the wave not drowning under it.

kawabunga!