2014.04

Monday, 04.21:

Long hard day

Long hard day at work: truck at 7:30, seven pallets to unload and sort, lunch break at one then back to pull freight and try to motivate Elliot and Shawn to work while talking instead of just talking. My feet hurt, mostly I think from being up on the ladder so much to pull things down. I need new shoes; can’t afford them.

Home: R with a headache. I leave him alone downstairs and come up to write, tinker on an old draft that’s never really come out as I liked, get into it, rough up the stanzas and line breaks, throw a lot of it out, find ways to say what it needs to say with less. About an hour into it R comes upstairs: Are you on the computer? And I say yes, just finishing a poem, then go to his room a few minutes later to talk & see what’s going on. (Does your head still hurt, Did you take anything for it, What did you eat today.) And the talk ends up at money, how he has none, and I tell him I have $45 to last through the next couple of days until my Paypal transfer goes through (money from JB’s copies that should be going for toner I’ve been needing for two weeks), and he says Did you buy a book today?

And off we go. Yes. A chapbook. It cost eight dollars and I made the mistake of mentioning it on FB to Will, the author). How he never buys anything for himself. How he saw something the other day that cost $3 but couldn’t get it. How T says that the rental assistance they’re providing is for him, “not for Ron,” and when I ask what does that mean, what do you want, haven’t I tried to talk to you about this and be honest and sensitive to how much money you will need each week? But none of it seems to matter. He feels neglected. He feels that he threw away money on me and ruined his credit because of me. I’m the one who broke up with him. As soon as they can find him an apartment he’ll move out and I can have someone else move in, someone I want to be with.

It makes me want to shoot myself. Honest to god, it makes me sick to my stomach. No matter what I do, it will never be enough. When I point out that I’ve tried to abide by the agreement he set down re: each paying half of everything, and when I point out that many times we run low (he runs low) and I just go ahead and pay for meals and groceries, he looks at me blankly and says this isn’t true. I swear I am going to fucking itemize every fucking penny of this next paycheck. It makes me want to bang my head against the wall.

He feels bad whenever he has anyone over for sex because he’s leaving me out. “That’s not my fault!” I interject, and he agrees, but it still makes him feel bad. Because I should be having fun, too. (Believe me, I have tried. And I can’t help but feel that if I were, he’d be hurt and upset about that as well.)

When I finally walked away, I said “I’m done. I’m done.” I’ve said it before. I’m a stupid fool to think that we can live together and take care of each other when he believes he is the only one doing the caring. I should never have told him how much money PSU was paying me. I should have put ¾ of it aside into an account, something tangible towards moving away from here and into the rest of my life, whatever that will be. I don’t want to see him hurt. I don’t. But I don’t know how much longer I can live with his sadness.