Dragging and milking

I am tired tonight. Was tired all day.

I hope it’s just tiredness.

But I admit that I am feeling a little weary, a little worn down, a touch depressed, in the Joe department.

We pre-broke up on New Year’s night.

We real broke up the following Friday.

Then the whole gift exchange. I never wrote about what happened, so here it is:

The next morning I wrote out a card because the gift was very personal and filled with meaning and required some explanation. Plus how I was saying goodbye, ’cause of how we’d broken up the night before. I wasn’t in a hurry but the post office said that the priority mail was only twenty cents more. But then Joe and I got quiet, and I had no interest in haunting him about the gift’s arrival. Then that Wednesday was the whole Joe finding the necklace piece thing, which was amazing. During that exchange, all via text (many, many texts) he actually went and checked all the doors of his big farm house but the gift had definitely not arrived. I said if it didn’t come the next day I would look into it. It didn’t. And I didn’t. Then Friday it wasn’t there either so I finally called the post office which informed me that the gift had been delivered to Joe’s house on Tuesday. Except for how it hadn’t. And now it was on Joe; he needed to check his post office himself.

Only now Joe was IN A CAR ON HIS WAY OUT OF TOWN FOR THE WEEKEND. And he’s thinking it probably went to the wrong house. I’m wondering if in my denial of grief I somehow wrote the wrong address (his house number is an easy one to flip around). I am kind of freaking out. I have been calm and not fucked up all week, but if the goddamned last gift I was ever to give him disappeared, it just wasn’t FAIR. And how could the universe do this, especially after the whole necklace thing? Then later he says, again via text, that he hoped the big dogs on the land hadn’t gotten a hold of it and chewed it apart. Joe never ever chooses his phrasing for the benefit of others.

So it’s Friday night and I’m powerless until Monday. Well let’s face it I’m powerless altogether. So Joe is back and I don’t bug him and then Monday I realize IT’S FUCKING MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY. Which is wonderful and important but I mean JESUS the postal gods were laugh laugh laughing at me.

I check in with Joe Monday night, to prod him in his role of gift retriever. And he is intent on searching his farm for debris, though he warns me that he can’t really spend the day doing it. He is convinced that this is what happened, and that this is the most important course of action. I have to go through a whole thing where I’m convincing him that this package was insured and tracked and they said it was delivered so his very first priority should be to go to the post office and he got that, but still wanted to walk the grounds first because precipitation was due in the afternoon. Joe is a very large rock at times, and I am a very small woman.

Anyway, at 4:00 he went to the post office and they had it. According to their paperwork, it had been delivered as well as two subsequent notifications that it was at the post office (which contradict the initial delivery, of course). Crazy.

Okay but then Joe still hadn’t sent me my gift. That is another long story that I’m skipping, but he didn’t send it for another week after I let him know it was really REALLY important that I get it in January, that I get it before Imbolc, so that this season could end, and the relationship stay behind.

So he got my gift. And I finally (this past Wednesday night) got his gifts. And the necklace bead.

And then Saturday night, the night before last, I finally finished a song I’d written about him/us. I’d written the words last year and set it to some preliminary music, but I’d never been happy and I’d not been able to make the music what I wanted it to be and I’d dropped it.

So I completed it. (It has work to be done, yet. But it’s whole.)

And I sang it last night at our bardic circle, for Imbolc.

And I wore the necklace that I had repaired.

And today is Joe’s 40th birthday. Last year was the beginning of my birthday odes, when I wrote his.

Today I sent him a double haiku and some loving wishes.

But okay I mean this has to be it. I have been prolonging and dragging and I have milked it to death but I’m out of excuses to continue engaging with him in this way.

And I think that today I felt so tired because I am sad.

Joe is so over it. Joe was over it a month ago. Or maybe months ago. Or maybe about two months after we met. For Joe this has been a matter of staying in separate corners. Or something.

And for me it has been dealing with the very simple fact that I won’t see Joe anymore. No more Joe. No more visiting, no more kissing, no more beard and curly hair and Joemade meals and running errands and sipping his wine because I don’t really want any. No more astral visits. No more text tuck-ins.

The prolonging and dragging and milking has helped me not deal with it. I don’t want to deal with it. I want to make it some other truth. I want it different.

I have to go to bed. I am so tired.

My weekend was really busy and Saturday night I was up until 1:30 and then up at like 5:30 to bring Albert to the airport. So maybe I’m just tired from that.