« Kitty pi with all the cat filling | Main | Spoiled Cat Habitat; Bob loves kitty pi »

March 23, 2005

Dumped on the crosstown bus.

All we're missing are the locusts.

Los Angeles is being punished by nature. We have wind, and rain, and lightening, and thunder and we even had an earthquake today. I'm looking for the locusts and the three horsemen of the apocalypse. I'm sure they're here somewhere.

You would think that a few raindrops wouldn't be enough to bring the second largest U.S. city to its knees. Other cities face REAL weather, like snow and hail and tornadoes and hurricanes. But we're just not built for weather out here. I suspected traffic would be bad, BUT I HAD NO IDEA what was in store for me (oh, in so many ways) when I got on the bus around 4:45 p.m. By 6:30 p.m., I concluded that I was a prisoner of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. In almost two hours we had managed to creep about 15 miles. For those of you doing the math, that means we were going MINUS FIVE MILES PER HOUR. Who knew it was humanly possible to go slower than zero? I knitted through the entire body of my hat, but foolhardy me didn't bring the pattern (or my dpns) with me since I had no idea I would be knitting for THREE STRAIGHT HOURS.

I got this much hat done on the bus (switched to dpns this morning before picture-taking time):

Luckily, I brought Jennifer's Noro scarf as well and it's a damn good thing. The mindless diversion of endless knit and purl helped me keep from going stark, raving mad and crying in a heap on the (dirty, germy) bus floor when Mr. X called.

In the six months since he moved out, I have received approximately zero phone calls from Mr. X to check in on my well-being. In fact, after he moved out, he did not bother to call me for an entire week. I could have committed suicide, or run off with the gardener, or revived the legwarmers trend of 1986, or become a snake handling Born-Again Bible Thumper, and he couldn't have cared less.

When Mr. X is calling my cell phone at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday night it's not to shoot the breeze, chew the fat and talk about the good ole' days. Since he begins his phone calls with a lot of diversionary chit-chat to get you warmed up, it can take a while to discern his true agenda. By now I have discovered that the amount of prep work/chitchat he does is inversely proportional to how bad the bombshell is going to be.

About five minutes into our conversation, I could tell we were in deep chitchat, so I finally said, "You know, I'm on the bus, so .... was there something you needed?" More stalling from Mr X. This had to be a real whopper. And I knew the bombshell was bad because before long he was saying, "Well, we can talk about this later. I don't think you want to hear this on the bus."

Ahhhh. So this must be a big one. THE big one. I was quiet. Silent. Panic set in. And then, oh fuck it, is there a good place or a good time for whatever new piece of bad news he's going to spring on me? No. There isn't. "Just tell me now," I said.

(cue violins, as now we begin our sob story, the story Of Mr. X and his one sleepless night.)

He tells me he's having anxiety. Anxiety! He woke up the other night -- in the middle of the night! -- because he was anxious. (Anxiety? Poor guy! I mean, I haven't slept a full night in SIX MONTHS since my husband rejected and abandoned me, and sometimes I cry for no reason, like when I see a tomato and remember how he hated tomatoes, and I think how I learned to make all these new dishes for him that were tomato-free, and then I think of how I used to make dinner every night, but now I eat microwave popcorn from the bag five nights a week for dinner, alone, and then I realize I am ALL ALONE, and I look at my cats and wonder if they're going to eat my dead body when no one comes to find me and I die alone, and old, and ugly, and yet he has anxiety! Poor thing! Wow, I really feel bad for him!)

I chose this moment to refrain from asking him how the creativity was going. Because, you know, he moved out so he could GET HIS CREATIVITY BACK and be free of responsibility. (His words. A drect quote.)

Mr. X continues. Sad music all around. He tells me he "needs to get his life together." He needs to "move on." He needs to be happy. ("I really just need to move on with my life and be happy." Translation: He has a new girlfriend. Me, the wife, I am repulsive. The only way he can be happy is if he divorces me.)

This whole conversation, in fact our whole situation, is happening because what he really wants is to be happy. (He says this about five times. Because it's all about him. And his happiness.) (Fucker.)

And I start feeling like I'm going to throw up, right there on the bus, because he's basically telling me that happiness, to him, means getting away from me. At some point, I found myself unable to make out a single word of the conversation. I was sitting there, on the bus, and he was talking, and I could hear the sound of the talking and I wanted to hear him (because when you're getting the final nail in the coffin, you want to hear every last pounding of the hammer!) but I must have slipped into a weird, spinster-to-be form of shock because it all sounded like "Immuffle erga waaaalamma ahargh erghuffle." The more I tried to hear him, the worse it got, so finally I said, "Um, I have to go..." and we hung up.

Then I concentrated very hard on knits and purls and tried to keep from crying. On the bus.

Frankly, I'm surprised by how upset I got. It's not like this was a big shocker. He moved out. He met another woman. He went to Italy without me. He started wearing an earring. (Desperate attempt to regain the bloom of his lost youth.) At any moment a red convertible was going to appear in the driveway. For him, our relationship was over months before he told me he was moving out.

Maybe I was in denial. Maybe I just hadn't really faced up to the reality of divorce. It's almost like ... even when you know someone is dying, their death is still a sad shock. It's the finality. Maybe the death of a marriage is similar. I knew the divorce was coming, but having him tell me he's starting the paperwork was like a kick in the stomach. The death of a marriage, my marriage, the disintegration of the years that make up practically my entire adult life... all going to hell in a cross-town bus.

Posted by laurie at March 23, 2005 2:17 PM