Symbolic Purchases

A little bit more to get you from my landing to now...

The day after I caught my husband was a Sunday, and I called Maggen. The one thing to know about Maggen is that she is my family - nearly in it's entirety. I met her when I was 21 and she was 18, working at a pizza place. She is, and has been since the day I met her, the person that makes me feel the most alive.

My first tangible act of revolt - before I bought the tickets, before I definitely-definitely decided on coming out here - was buying a suitcase.

I always wanted those hard cases... The kind that were more common in the 60's and 70's, the kind you see going around the conveyer belt at the airport with all sorts of stickers on them from the carrier's travels.

A few days after this whole thing was set in motion, I went and bought one at a thrift store an acquaintance of mine works at. It was sort of symbolic... I had never gotten one before for a few reasons:

1). I had been on a plane exactly twice in my life, and very few weekend trips.
2). As odd as it may sound, to me it seems like the sort of thing a person can only have if they're going someplace... Like a passport.
3). When Rick and I picked out luggage ( because everyone should have them, nevermind whether or not they use them) he hated the idea of a hard case. Said they were tacky. And so, we ended up with two camel rollers that were used once to go to stay overnight in Baltimore for his sister's wedding.

This is part of the reason I ended up not taking much, ultimately. So few of the things in my house felt like mine. My dog, a few framed photos, some clothes, my straightening iron, a negligee Maggen once talked me into buying ( but I never wore), some books and DVDs. Everything else in my house was exclusively Rick-style. And I will die a happy woman if I never again own anything beige, camel, sand, khaki, off-white, etc. etc. etc.

So I managed to find an old robin-egg blue hard suitcase, which made my decision for me. If I bought this lovely item, I would have to take it somewhere. So purchasing it, for me, was more or less a promise.


So right now, I'm living with Maggen. That was something we decided on post suitcase purchase, and pre-confrontation.

She lives in a two bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, and I adore the building. It's 80 years old, there's a fire-escape that reminds me of "Pretty Woman", and she has 8 million windchimes hanging on her balcony (I was never allowed to have one in my old house).

It's messy, it's colorful, it smells like apples, and I am absolutely in love with it.

The first week I was here, I didn't really leave the apartment. Maggen went to work ( she's an assistant for some nightmare-of-a-woman at a studio) during the day, and at night we would watch movies and talk. I spent the days without her watching T.V. I think mostly I just needed as low-key an activity as possible, so that I could fully let my brain wrap around where I was and what I'm doing before I could venture outside.

By about ten days ago, we had talked so much I was.. Over it. Not over the situation, just fucking over talking about it. ( And again, let me reiterate - in these first couple of entries I'm talking a lot about my husband just for backstory - that's not what I want this to be about).

So I started venturing out a little bit.

Last Monday, Mag went into work a little late so we could go to this little farmer's market they hold in this park a neighborhood away. Believe it or not, I had never actually been to a farmer's market before. You could write an entire novella just about the characters there... The grizzled old man who plays guitar and sells sprouts, the grumpy old Russian men arguing over fish, the ways people try to make their strawberries stick out from everybody else's.

I bought a bed ( I suppose I should point out that part of what makes this adventure possible, was Rick's insistance that we always keep seperate savings accounts). It's the first bed I ever bought for myself. There is this terrible local commercial with this hideous elf-man screaming about his mattress store... And so I gave in, drove Mag to work and ventured into one of his mattress stores. I bought myself a full size, and am thoroughly enjoying sleeping in the middle of it without any real space for another human being.

I bought sheets - these amazingly soft, lavender sheets. I could seriously write an entire sonnet just about my love affair with these sheets.

Equally important, I went to Petco and bought Murray blue bowls and a little plaid bed.

I've spent the past ten days taking little walking excursions as a warm up. On one walk, I went into this little boutique and got myself this amazing magenta lamp with beads hanging off the shade.

So when I walk into my bedroom now, there aren't that many possessions, but they're mine. I have my little lavendar bed, Murray's bed, a nightstand Maggen let me have with a couple of books and my lamp on it, a closet with alarmingly few clothes, and one, hard, suitcase. I cannot wait to fill the room.

I left my Husband.

That's the jist, anyway.

I'm 31, and I left my husband of 8 years, 3 weeks ago.

That sounds mighty flippant, just stating it like that. It's not what I'm going to make this blog about, but it's the beginning, the backstory, of what this blog will be about.

Later on, I'm sure, I'll go into the more detailed account, if you like, but for now I'll stick to the short story. The business side of things. That's a little less messy until we get to know each other a little bit better.

As I'm sure a lot of women can/have/will say, I had a wedding with one man, and several years later ended up married to someone completely different. We'll call him Rick.

I met him when we were college age. He went to college in the small town in Virginia I lived in my whole life, and I was a waitress. When I met him, he wanted to be an artist. We were both sort of spacey, sort of artistic, had the common dream of having a life that was an alternative to the lives of our parents, grandparents, even friends, etc. Like some Bruce Springsteen song, striving to get out of our small town ways. We were a stereotype.

The first two years we were married, it was great. Happy, in love. So good that it would be embarrassing to let you crawl into my brain and look at the memories from my point of view - you would think it was the cheesiest romantic comedies.

Here's where I'm shortening the story a little bit, for now. Fast forward a few years to two strangers. I stayed artsy, spacey, wanting an alternative, creative life. We're living in a slightly bigger town closer to Washington D.C. I publish a couple of books that have a mild amount of success, am one of a million "freelance writers". Rick went from being someone who wanted to be a painter, to someone who went to work everyday with a suit and tie. Someone who wanted beige furniture. I hate beige.

He comes home late, he usually falls asleep in his home-office, me in the bed or at my best friend's house. I become invisible. We don't really speak to each other, and when I attempt to do the things I used to, when I have the rare opportunity to touch him or to speak to him, he looks.. Disgusted. Annoyed. But will never talk about why.

I feel trapped. Even though he never says it, he looks at me like I am a silly house frau. He didn't beat me, he didn't berate me. He's an eye-roller, but never outwardly mean. It just becomes stale, and boring, and you can't remember how you ended up living with this person... Did some adult R.A. set it up? Did you answer a roommate ad in the paper that you're blocking out? Maybe he doesn't live here at all... But wait, every morning there's a used coffee mug in the sink...

When it first started, I thought 'ouch, this is painful' and tried to do something about it. Then it becomes.... normal.

My one solace has always been my best friend, Maggen. She's three years younger than I am, tons of fun, gorgeous, is delightfully single and refreshingly crude. Rick hated her, of course.

Maggen wanted to be an actress. Maggen is exactly the sort of woman who should be an actress. Maggen announces at a New Years Party, 2007, that she's finally moving to Hollywood (motivated, in part, because of a messy ending to a two month fuck-buddy relationship with a much older, very married, man). Solace is now 3,000 miles away.

So, to get to my point (I'm giving more details than originally intended)...

The last year, for me, had been miserable. Rather than try to describe how miserable I'll only use one word, an over-used word, and ask you to try to re-sensitize yourself to it and feel the real heft of it: Depression. An endless, abysmal black hole.

I started to fantasize about coming to Los Angeles. I started to fantasize about what it would be like to be single ( I lost my virginity to Rick. I had sex, thoroughly enjoyed it with him for four years, and then pretty much ceased having it). What it would be like to do things that were unfamiliar and exciting. To actually meet characters instead of just writing them or watching them on T.V. I was still in a bottomless pit, but it was the one trick in my mental arsenal that relieved some of the pain.

Basically, if I'm being honest with myself, I felt like I was in this marriage because we made an agreement. And if he was sticking it out, that meant that somewhere, he thought there was something to stick it out for. So I was going to stick it out.

Then last month, I caught him having an affair. Physically caught him. (This is a story all unto itself).

I caught him August 23rd. I spent four days crying ( for most of which he was absent, and when he wasn't, he didn't really ask). Then I went into organizational-mode.

Saturday, September 6th, I confronted him. Why did I wait? Because I had to know what I was going to say, do, etc. He might have made lame excuses or screamed or denied it, but I know him well enough to know that at the end of any argument, I'm not going to feel any resolution, and I'm not going to know where he stands. Post-argument decisions about what to do next are always best made by me, and this time I definitely had to do just that, make sure that I had a plan in place for the dreaded "next".

So, in short, I told him I was leaving. I was leaving his sight, the city, the state. He had had this affair, that was for him - I had assumed we were both being martyrs and not thinking about our own desires, and he had spent God knows how long taking care of his own needs without my knowing it. Not fair.


Tuesday September 9th, I boarded a Jetblue plane with minimal luggage and headed out here to L.A. I'm staying with Maggen. I left behind a small handfull of proximity friends, a husband, and a townhouse. I took my dog, Murray, though. I'm trying to start over, and to live out my fantasy. I am having no contact with Rick whatsoever ( to be fair, he does have my email address - so don't go thinking I'm a missing person, or anything).

This may sound rash, the way I'm telling it to you now.. But it wasn't. This had been brewing inside of me for over a year - the desire to leave, the desire to start over - and it was torture. I didn't give in to said desires because I didn't think they were a possibility, or that I could. The plans were there - in fantasy form - and seeing his hairy ass pump up and down on top of a 20 year old quickly set them into reality.

I kept up a blog for a very long time back home, which I loved.. But I don't want any connection between my new life and my old one, for now. I want to be more honest in writing in here, and so more anonymity makes that possible.. Not to mention the obvious, I don't want the people of old knowing anything about my life of new. I want to just be.. Gone. (I'm not even going to use real names.... except for my dog).

That's the story of how I got here, or rather why I got here. I write about this trying to use as little emotion as possible because, to be honest, I don't feel anything about it. Maybe I'm numb, maybe I'm being robotic - but the only thing I feel right now is liberated. Excited. What's happened since is another entry, and what happens next is delightfully unknown.