Just Breathe

So you know that feeling?  When you have been underwater and you break the surface and expel a gust of air from the huge breath you've been holding and immediately suck in another huge lungful to relieve the uncomfortable pressure in your chest and fuel your brain cells with oxygen?  Sometimes the sensation leaves me dizzy and slightly disoriented.

At the end of April of this year I had that experience.  Metaphorically.  I had spend nearly a year 'under water' and once I started breathing normally again after I resurfaced I was disoriented and confused as to where the year could have gone.  Looking back on a lot of it has the slightly fuzzy quality and bright edges of a fever dream.  Some of the details have been lost in a haze of vodka shots and bong hits, but most remains painfully sharp in my mind's eye.

In the year that I was here but not, a kind of passive absence is how I think of it, I let everything that was previously important fall by the wayside.  I wasn't interested in working, my children were nearly neglected (not to the point that social services should have been involved - I made sure they were fed and had at least a vague awareness of where they were - but enough that they became scarily self sufficient), and I didn't take care of the necessary things that needed to happen just to keep the household running.  Sounds like depression, right?  Not exactly.  Sort of the opposite.  Infatuation.  

You see, in April of last year, I met someone. He has a name but since we are being all anonymous, we'll give him a nickname.  I've considered, asshole, dickhead, and douchebag.  Fucktard, cocksucker, motherfucker and sonofabitch.  But I am going to go with Twat Waffle or TW for short going forward.

Now, those of you who have been keeping up, yes, I'm married.  Answer to the next logical question: No I wasn't cheating.  You see my Darling Husband is secure enough in himself and our love that he just wanted me to be happy.  And in fairness, he seemed to fit well into our family.  He was handsome, frighteningly charming and played the role so well.  He helped us move, came to stay after my husband had elbow surgery to help around the house, we even gave him his own bedroom for when he came to stay.  And when he stayed he would get up and make pancakes for the kids before they left for school, take care of the yard and all the while was working some sort of magic on me because he made it seem like we were somehow 'connected'.  He got my corny jokes that normally only Darling Husband got, he made obscure references and when he went to explain them was pleasantly surprised that I already understood.

 He was also really young and really good in bed.  I know the young thing doesn't exactly go hand in hand with good in bed, but they go together in my mind because I felt like such a cougar.  And he was as attracted to me as I was to him regardless and maybe because of my age.  I didn't exactly seduce this innocent young man.  There was nothing innocent about him.  And I think that's part of what made it possible to fall under his influence so easily.  He seemed a lot closer to my age.   Once I found out his birth year I forbade him from speaking it out loud because it was my sophomore year in high school.  Go ahead, laugh, I do.

Clearly it hasn't lasted, he went his own way after a year and there are some amazingly good reasons that he is gone and I say good riddance. Honestly, when I think of all the tears he wrung out of me in the space of 12 months.  I have married to Darling Husband for almost 17 years now and I cried so much more in the year he was in our life than I have in that whole 17 years.  It was almost like he fed on my tears but I'm getting ahead of myself.  It wasn't all bad, obviously since we kept him around for a year.  As I review the memories that we created, I'll try to draw as fair and complete a picture as I can but it will be colored naturally by my perspective.  And that's the beauty of perspective, its one of the few things that belongs exclusively to ones ownself.

Be well, y'all.