Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it’s the same with people.

Her life was one in which everything was left undone—letters unanswered, bills on the floor, the butter sitting out all night. Perhaps that was why her husband had left her; he was even more hopeless than she. At least she was gay. She stepped from her littered doorway in pretty clothes, like a woman who lives in the barrio walking to a limousine, stray dogs and dirt on the way.”

“Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they’re ready to leave

“I’m tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I’m hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don’t want to have the same vocabulary I’ve always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?”

Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits.” 

Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.

Perfect, After All?

Many years ago, I requested that my then-husband and I attend marital therapy. After years and years of covert, hidden abuse, I thought I was losing my mind. I had reached a point where my fragile sanity was questioning whether I was making the abuse up.
This is what happened when we entered therapy for the first time.
I sit down on the sofa first, my husband sits in the seat opposite before standing up to remove his jacket and stare idly around the room looking I know, for somewhere to hang his precious clothing. I note our therapist clocking this. He takes my husband’s jacket and hangs it on the back of his door.
My husband has shown his hand.
I wonder to myself if our therapist has noticed the first clue of my husband’s character — his unmistakable self-importance. As the three of us have never met before, I know he will be absorbing every cue, both verbal and non-verbal.
I am stiff as a board — my body is tightly wound up; clusters of agony from our 12 years together: heartbreak, tension, and anxiety and trepidation are scrunched up like a ball of old paper. My mind and my soul are heavy with anguish.
When our therapist asks us what has brought us here today, my husband — the love of my life answers coldly —
“Well I think Charlotte should tell us as I don’t even know myself.” A disinterested scoff leaves his possession.
He has shown his hand again. How he — the smart and cunning one — doesn’t realize is beyond me. Despite the depth of heartbreak moving my soul, I still see him for all that he is  — deeply self-loathing, and fervently motivated to prove that the opposite is the case to a human being that he has never before met. That cause is more important to him than his loyalty to his own wife.
I wonder to myself: Don’t you think our own therapist can see through you?
I feel for him. And I am reminded why we are still together; because I have forgiven a thousand sins in the name of empathy and understanding. I have chosen him above myself from the day we united.
I open my mouth to speak and struggle to find voice. Heaving arrests my form; you can hear it in my vocal chords — the hoarseness coming from difficulty breathing, deep in my diaphragm.
I tell the room in between heavy sobbing, that I love my husband more than life itself — that we have been together for 12 years, but we are broken. I tell the space in front of me, that my husband is aggressive and passive-aggressive, that I can’t discern what is real anymore and I don’t remember what is normal from what is not. And I say that I no longer feel safe in our union, that my spirit has been under attack for as long as I can remember.
I break down. I literally, cannot cope.
For all the seriousness of my words, they are underscored by a fear that our therapist will view me as the perpetrator and my husband as the victim — cognitive dissonance running amok and wreaking havoc in my broken mind.
Our therapist spends time listening to my husband’s response, which I don’t recall. I just remember that he was complimenting him — on his intelligence, and his power. My husband was confused, I was not. I knew what he was doing — road testing his instinct that my husband may have NPD.
I know my husband agreed with our therapist’s compliments, but he so dislikes being swindled, or rather — having somebody one step ahead of him, so I see the cogs of his mind whirring fast — trying to establish or verify the authenticity of our therapist’s comments.
I don’t remember exactly, but I think around 40 minutes in, our therapist suggests that taking a personality profile test may be useful — for us to understand each other better. We both agree to take the test.
I know what’s coming.
We spend the next week apart, and seven days later we return to our therapist’s little room, our eyes not meeting once as they have done day after day for eleven years.
Our gentle therapist tells us the profile assessments are complete, and he will now hand us our spouses report to read.
I feel like something or someone has died and he’s announcing the death to us much like a surgeon does to grieving loved ones in the waiting room, when he has failed to save the life of their beloved.
Our therapist explains we will then swap and read our own reports, and discuss whether each one is commensurate with our own perceptions, of each other, and of ourselves. We acknowledge the instructions silently and take the reports he hands to us.
I read the first paragraph in milliseconds before collapsing into uncontrollable grief. I can’t cope with what I am reading. My brain hurts, my spirit is splintering for certain. This is a pain like I have never known before.
The assessment of my husband confirms that he has Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
In this micro-instant, I think my heart shatters into a thousand shards. A million thoughts and fears race through my mind.
I am heartbroken for my husband; the little I know about this disorder tells me that NPD is borne out of suffering and neglect in childhood. What fate befell him as a child?
I am heartbroken for myself too — as I thought it was me that was the source of all our problems; years of covert gas-lighting have totally eroded my sense of reality, I have come to believe that everything my husband had said over the years is true —that in his words — I am “the damager of everything”.
The bittersweet pain of relief is literally overwhelming. I finish reading the three pages of his report, whilst he is still reading the first of mine.
Over the course of the following weeks, I watch as our therapist so carefully ‘handles’ my husband’s personality disorder. He is clear, firm, and plays along to all my husband’s character flaws; his need to be seen as all-powerful, supremely intelligent and superior, and his need to be seen as the victim.
Our therapist plays into his hands. And this is for one reason and one reason only – that were he not to, he would lose this client – my husband would have abandoned the process of therapy if our therapist had tackled him and his personality issues head on. Instead I watched in admiration and awe, of how skillfully he brought out unconscious drives and behaviours in my husband.
In the end, I asked my husband for a divorce. He never returned to therapy after that moment – entirely normal for someone suffering from NPD. Why would they need therapy, when they are perfect after all?

So we sit back and watch it unravel… slowly letting go of all we held dear. You light the match, I put the fire to everything….just one more dirty battle in our dirty little war. We’ve done nothing but give each other the hard lessons but we aren’t learning… drawn lines in the sand, but the world keeps on turning. So as our dance winds down, and our music fades, we get few opportunities to say what we feel, even fewer to feel what we are saying. So as we take one step up, in slow time to the music, we must take two steps back and somehow get through it.
Last night I dreamt I was in your arms, the music played and we loved each other for just a minute…
just one little minute to represent all the millions of minutes we’ve loved and hated and wasted and thrown aside. But waking stole the moment away. Leaving me with yet another debt to pay the sandman.
And here I am, in my car, driving somewhere, anywhere, away from you, which painfully only circles back around to you. I fumble for a pen and any piece of paper, and as the gorge rises in my throat and my eyes mist over.. I lay it all down. I lay down the happiness and the outright joy, the passion spent, the labors, the feeling content. But no matter how I put it to paper, it still does a slow dance in my imagination. Painfully, one step up and then two steps back, lives in suspension.
I wonder, do you get quiet and think of me? Bury your face in your hands so you can’t see? Does the regret, and pride, and the bleeding ever set you free? Because pride will bring us both down a good measure, just wait and see. It will keep us from each other’s pleasures. Stop the sharing and stave off any caring. Leave our beds cold as we grow old. I see you look at me, and say I am still the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen, but it does me little good, and you less… Because there is no room for you and me. The mistakes we have both made are unforgivable. And I beg you to stay your blade.
I was your something fragile, something to be handled with care. But if you care, then hopefully you will someday regret your rough handling, your pride outstanding. I am not sure when you stopped loving me, but I guess I needed to be free.
Now the music comes to a close, our movements nearly imperceptible. I see that muscle hammering in your jaw, and you must hear my heart beating. We stand there and let it all slip off track, the line has reached its inevitable end. And all that exists now is the space between, which might as well be an unnavigable fathomless place of darkness and little grace.
…and I say let it go, and you agree, but we are both liars of the first degree.
Charlotte Greer Slater 2.17.13

Driving

In the late winter evening she passes familiar landmarks.  The traffic is thick but moving. The stores are clotted with people.  The flashes of eye-catching signs making for distraction. It is dusk now, she is moving into the country… Headed home on the long curving stretches, lost in thought, egged on by the music on the radio.  By the time she crossed the river the trees were black silhouetted by the deep blue of twilight. She flew along, in the left lane only, above the limit, tired and wistful , filled with plans. Her eyes stung with tears held back.  On the seat behind her were bags of groceries, on the floor were gas slips, parking tickets stub, dog leashes and water bowls, mail that had never been opened, bills. Every scrap of paper filled with near illegible ramblings of her prolific muddled mind.  Penned at stoplights, in carpool, and even braced on the steering wheel while headed down the highway. All left on the floorboards to be trampled underfoot. Maybe the trampling of her thoughts serves her right.  

The road runs along the throat of the mountains, for most of the way there is no house visible, not a store, nothing except the long galaxy of distant houses on the hillside beginning to shine in the dark.  She turns from the main road onto a side street. She sees houses she knows intimately without any idea who lives in them. She sees parked cars she recognizes, a wooden fence with the same rail missing, the same two dogs tied and looking lonely in the same backyard.  She is nearing home, but she doesn’t want to go, she wants to keep driving. Driving till the street lights run out, till there is nothing but country. She wants to find a pasture somewhere and lie down in the dark to scream at the stars. She wants to accuse the satellites of mimicry.  She wants to feel cold ground on her back; she wants to feel something, anything but this. She wants to breathe, she wants space unlimited. If she let go of the wheel, the car would surely take her there. She rakes her fingers through her long hair in a frustrated moment. She rubs her nose, and then wipes her eyes angrily.  The tears flow now, and she hates the tears. She wonders if she could go to the barn this late, would they detect her? Huddled in a stall somewhere, her face buried in a sympathetic mane. She craves the smell of soothing horses and calm, quiet munching; the occasional shift of weight, swish of tail, anything to soothe her. She would stay there all night if she could… Hiding like a naughty child.

But here is her turn, and she dutifully puts on her blinker.  She regrettably makes the turn for home. She steadies herself for the onslaught…whether intended or not, it will be waiting for her…it always is.