[the explaination]

everyone has relationships in college that go on for a few months and then just fall apart, in the way that these things do. sometimes the end hurts bad, sometimes it's no big deal, sometimes it's a pleasant relief, but mostly it's nothing that a few days of sitting on a friend's couch with a box of tissues and a bottle of gin can't cure.

anyone looking on from the outside would have deposited my involvement with kev into that slush pile of short-term loves that don't quite take off, though a long expired one. anyone who didn't know the particulars would have said we were a young couple with youth, timing, and distance beyond the first ninety days. we were incompatible, geographically challenged, not ready for commitment (him) - those would be among the usual litany of excuses for our demise, and they would even be the stock answers i would give to people who asked, innocently enough, whatever happened to that kev guy? and no one would have any reason to doubt me. anyone who didn't know better could never have imagined what an intense folie �� deux we had come to inhabit during our last brief union.

kev took it upon himself to absorb my anguish completely. part of what he liked about me was that i was depressed. he was like one of those people who is terminally attracted to alcoholics or drug addicts, only in my case i was an abuser without a substance. at times he relished the idea of being my personal Jesus, of setting up a safe haven for me in his little house in providence, rhode island. i would lie in his bed for days on end, and he would bring me toast and tea and tell me he loved me and ask me to talk to him about my pain. he liked the idea of salvation. his mother was a high-maintenance hysteric, his god-sister was some version of a pre-adolescent psychotic, and kev's natural role in life was as caretaker.

it's not that unusual. throughout the ages, troubled individuals with a knack for self-preservation have mated themselves to people who groove on their pain, knowing it's the best chance they've got to find love and care. i mean, who else but a voyeur of misery would have put up with me during my deepest depression? i got lucky when kev found me. and in my dating career, i've taken up three different guys who, at the time i met them, had girlfriends in mental hospitals. surely that can't be normal, can't be a claim every girl can make. at the point of initial attraction, i didn't know that these men tend to fall for crazy women and they didn't know that i was the very thing, and still we sniffed each other out, sensed the odour of a certain cerebral mutation, saw each other across crowded rooms and made introductions because some things are just meant to be: sid will always find nancy; tom will always hook up with roseanne; and ted (truly a reprobate case) will manage to get involved, in tandem, with both sylvia and another woman who died with her head in the oven. f. scott will always recognise his zelda; samson will always fall for delilah; and jason would wed medea all over again, even if he were fully apprised of their marriage's macabre denouement. do i detect a pattern here?

July 16, 2005 - 5:46 pm