Recognition

Here I float in the deep sea of “Hey I know you” with Marvin. I’ll tell you why I call him Marvin. Later, I will tell you why the recognition scares the life out of me.

I call him Marvin because I have been trying, valiantly, to resist him since the moment he sent me the first email proclaiming that he adores me. I say “trying” because there was no actual resisting going on, just a lot of trying. And one night in the dark womb of my bed with the sleepy penny baby ear pressed near to the low speaker phone, I am doing the “you hang up, no you hang up” thing without saying the words when he said something to me that caused an actual physical TUG in my body. How can words spoken by someone 80 plus miles away over the phone operate as a biological magnet to tug your body one little smidge closer to theirs?

I made a noise. (Do you know that little sound you make when you start to fall from the top of the rollercoaster? That was it. I made the “I’m falling” noise). Apparently, it was an ambiguous noise. He is concerned. Do I laugh at him? Do I mock him? What’s with the noise!?! So, in an effort to reassure him because god-please-do-not-go-away I say “You’re Marvin.”

You know that little Martian from the cartoons?

“Resistance is futile.”

The Doctor is in...

Right this very moment in life I struggle with the question: How do you ever trust yourself again? I know that I am susceptible to some purty dark shit. Apparently you can lie in my face and I smile. And I have this history of filling up my lonely bits with the wrong people.

WRONG PEOPLE.

So, I suppose I shouldn’t trust me any father than I can throw me cause I suck at this.

But what if I SHOULD trust me? What if what this new suitor – let’s call him Marvin, I will explain later – is offering me, in gilded phrases and wide open adoration, is just what the doctor ordered? (He calls me doctor sometimes. Is it vanity that allows me to just smile and say “Yes?”).

This Marvin rang my door bell and said “Come out to play, Penny, I think you’re SWELL.” That’s good, huh? Ack. I need a bullshit detector.

UP DATE! (do not become ill)

At the behest of a long lost friend I am asked to blog again. Yikes. It’s not that I don’t miss you guys, cause I do. It’s just that I am loath to open up old wounds. Truth is I sat here reading much of this and it made me cry. Some of it because it reminded me of things that were painful (the baby and all my married lover bullshit) and some because it was just bittersweet (tweeting number three and the noodle dog).

I do not think I have the time nor the inclination to get all the way back. Maybe just part way. Here goes:

I had to end it with the Bartender. It is sad to say had to like there was any hesitance but there was. I am puzzling it out still. I cringe when I write this because one of the many things he did to me was to take away all of my private places and thrust me into the blazing sun with out even the shade of an occasional “Whaz up??” from you guys. One of those private places is here. Does he stalk my Penny Blog still? Who knows. But there is a teeny part of me that flinches a bit because that’s what happens when you are repetitively smacked (emotionally) down. Wince.

I don’t want to catalog the whole thing but I will tell you that my boundaries went all to hell and I lost myself. Lost. Myself.

Do you remember all the work I did on my project? All the painful looking and tweeking and working and making myself “Hot When Naked Writer Chick?” In a fit (little infantile baby piss fit of pique) he called me a wrinkled up old bitch. And it deflated me. All the work flushed down the toilet of his selfish, purulent snit. I was lost. But now I’m found.

But in this effort to stay found I suppose I best admit some stuff. Like the fact that I did not put him out after he followed me into the locked bathroom and ripped the curtain down and screamed at me wet and naked and small and cornered and crying so hard the snot runs down my chin. He does not consider this abuse. After all, I EARNED it by being bad. I don’t recall what the bad thing I did was but clearly it was bad. How about the countless nights where the lights were kept on and the interrogation did not cease and when I hid my head under the blankets he ripped them from the bed and demanded I attend to him NOW.

How about the day he sat in my office across my desk from me and pointed out that my hair clearly indicated I had been fucking someone at work that day.

And how about the day I saw the email he sent to 20 random women on MySpace looking for a girl to fuck him AND some girl from work without waking me, asleep on the other side of the wall, grateful that I was not being subjected to the interrogation? This one I do not have to admit because that was the day I put him out.

But why, you might wonder, did it take so god damned long?

I suspect that I was punishing myself. He was brutal about the affair. He twisted my soul apart and I let him because I AGREED WITH HIM. I had done a hateful, ugly thing and I deserved to be punished for it.

That’s my best answer. What do you think?

Um... Remember me?

Well old friends, if there are any of you remaining. I started reading some of this and got weepy.

Turns out I miss you guys.

So, I'll be remodeling. Stay tuned.