On Thursday, I went to the drive through at Taco Bell, ordered two burritos, paid for them and then drove away. Without the burritos. I was at work when I realized I did this, so I just had to get through half the day hungry. The day prior, I couldn’t find my company issued iPad and ran around a one million square foot warehouse frantically looking for it. It turned out to be in my truck where it was supposed to be. Oh, and the poetry. The poetry that has been pouring out of me has been a mixture of joy, ecstasy, fear, insecurity, passion, repressed sexuality and tenderness.
Have you guessed yet? I’m in love.
I don’t know why, but I keep seeing Dr. Watson from “The Man With the Twisted Lip,” sitting back in his chair and asking, “You have been in this place before, have you not?” Ironically, the line was referring to Isa Whitney who was a respectable businessman with an opium addiction. Our brains work in strange ways. I mean a lot of it has to do with the fact that Sherlock Holmes, particularly the BBC productions with Jeremy Brett, have been a security blanket for me for close to twenty five years. I watch them when I need to restabilize–even though I have seen every episode countless times.
The other part of why I keep seeing this in my head is because my subconscious is making some sort of connection. And I really don’t know why.
I stopped dating altogether in late 2021 after I hooked up with a woman from Portugal that I met through an article I wrote for Elephant Journal. The article was called “The 90 Day Expiration Date,” and it was about my inability to keep a relationship together for longer than three months. It totally resonated with her. The fact that this romance lasted three months should’ve been seen as hilarious, and would’ve been if it didn’t almost destroy me.
Ah, but what doesn’t destroy us only gets us into therapy. And it was in those sessions that I realized I needed to work on what was wrong with me if I ever wanted a chance at having an intimate relationship that went on longer than three months.
What we uncovered was astounding. There were issues that were so deeply hidden, they were being repressed before I was even twelve years old. The seeds of what drove me toward substance abuse, bad relationships, self destructive tendencies and a deep foundation of anger were all planted from about seven to ten years old. But once we kicked over that hornet’s nest, those bastards were flying in every direction.
There was so much to sift through. It took over two years before my psychologist realized that there was complex PTSD hidden in the corner of my brain like a poisonous Easter Egg. It was a long and slow slog to that conclusion because it took a chain reaction of memories to find it. I told her about this strange thing that would happen to me when I was watching a certain children’s movie. A certain scene that would fill me with an overwhelming sadness. I was confused because it was supposed to be funny.
I asked her if it was possible for a nine year old to have depression and she said that it wasn’t depression. It was a trigger. It kicked off emotions that I was just far too young to understand and definitely not in any place to process them properly. I just had to leave the room whenever my brothers were watching the movie. It was just too much.
The next week I spent in a state of anger. There were all these things that I had to learn to live with as a child because, frankly, whenever I brought them up to my parents, I was told that what I was seeing and feeling wasn’t really what was happening and furthermore, they didn’t want to hear it. The overarching attitude was “That’s not true, so shut up and set the table.”
Well for any future parents who might be reading this, if you want to know how to build your own drug addict, that’s a good place to start. With any luck, if they survive and make it into therapy, there will always be the chance they’ll be able to decipher it and work it all out in their fifties. But that’s a lot of “ifs.”
Anyway, all of that anger seemed to dissipate when I received a text from a woman I met in 2020. I always found her to be beautiful and charming, and even though I would’ve been ecstatic at the idea of being romantic with her, I felt like I needed to be realistic. I just didn’t think it was in the cards. So when these texts started making me feel like it could be possible, I nervously let her know how I felt. When she told me that she felt the same, I thought I was going to explode into a million little pieces.
It’s that thing that happens maybe a half dozen times in a lifetime. That thing where a distant daydream begins to worm its way into reality. It makes you feel like the world just handed you the grand prize. And it’s hard to think about anything else. I’ve had Eckhart Tolle audiobooks on repeat for this entire week and it did nothing to keep me in the moment. I couldn’t think of anything else besides getting to the same room she was in. Hence all the fuzzy headed mistakes at work.
When I had my appointment this week, my therapist knew that this area was a danger zone for me. This was, after all, the entire reason I started going to therapy. “What am I doing wrong?” So she listened to me and shared in my joy and then at some point asked me what I loved about her as a person. When I began to answer, she said, “Forget about how beautiful she is or how she makes you feel, what is it about her as a person that you love? If she was a guy would you want to spend time with her and do things with her and share ideas with her?”
And there it was. The missing piece. Sit down and write a page or two about what you are in love with after you remove all the romantic and sexual aspects. This brought me to my childhood friend, Sean. I never let people in on this part of me, but when me and Sean were young, we believed in a kind of magic that no one else would’ve understood. It was too fragile to be scrutinized by the awful people of Long Island.
This secret part of me, alive with childlike wonder, was totally in alignment with this woman. Not only that, but I have a feeling pulsing in my heart that she would not only support my crazy ideas, she’d get in on them with me. I can tell that she’d never tell me to “be practical.” Like a teammate. To me, that is more than enough to start with. Besides that, it will be the first relationship I will attempt with the calming voice of reason observing every aspect of it. So, if the defeating patterns begin to crop up, they’ll be a very intelligent third party to point it out instead of allowing my own poor judgment to run the show.
Finally, we’ll see what’s what.
Looking forward to some interesting thoughts in the coming three months Billy. Protect your heart, but be brave and curious.
This will be an interesting chapter Billy Manas.