NOTE: As I mentally deconstruct the demise of my marriage, I am publishing a series of short essays about things that happened, the way I felt, and so on. It's intended to illustrate my mental state at the time, and provide a kind of chronicle of my emotional state, hopefully helping me not make the same mistakes in future relationships.

5/19/03 4:30 PM:

There's a line in the Matchbox 20 song "Push" that goes, "I don't know if I've ever been really loved by a hand that's touched me/ well I feel like something's gonna give/ and I'm a little bit angry."

That's been the method to my madness.

With a great deal of foreknowledge and what could arguably be considered a sound mind, I chose to marry a woman who had drastically different ideas about our committment, whose attraction to me was not what I believed at all, who'd spent her life hiding in her shell and trying to outwait pain, and who really left me more than a year before we actually vocalized the end of our marriage.

The cloud of doubt and confusion that hangs around my head is almost tangible. How could I have made such a catastrophic mistake? How could I not have seen this coming? Am I really that stupid? Are my decision-making processes that screwy?

I've commented already that one of the first disconnects in my marriage was that I made a committment to Yuri, and she made a committment to us. I realize now that the "us" she committed to, a fictional construct that I never agreed to nor signed off on (let alone was fully cognizant of).

I was able to work my way out of the uncomfortable and ridiculously painful depths of depression with, strangely enough, talks with my dear friend and "big sister" Marsha. I'd been moping around the house (I'll explain the living situation later), doing upwards of 50 push-ups a day, unable to sleep and wracked with embarrassment and loss. It was debilitating.

Now I'm swimming through the much much more familiar waters of anger. I don't remember a time in my life when I wasn't, at some level, angry. My relationship with anger is the most stable, longest lasting one I've ever had in my life (telling people that normally disturbs them, but in my experience, more males can relate to that than would admit it aloud). When I discovered that anger was the third step (I actually went through denial pretty quickly, because Yuri has so thoroughly ostracized me from the glory of her love that it was pretty hard to fight that one), it was kind of like a relief.

Until I found out what I was angry about.

It is true, Yuri has done a bunch of stuff that hurt me deeply, that dehumanized me and was unfair. It's true that, truth be told, Yuri really left me late in 2001, and had been abandoning me piece by piece for months before that, but neither of us was brave enough to face it. It's true that I have lost a boatload of respect for her, that I feel she was a fairweather friend who claimed to have bared herself to me, but never really confronted me with the things I was doing wrong until things were long done. It's true I think she's wussied out of this marriage and ran from mechanisms for change and hard work at every turn. It's even true that her attraction to me, which was based on at least two different sets of external factors that I could only affect parenthetically, was never what I believed it to be, and was on a one-way trip to her eventual pulling of the rip cord and skydiving out of my life.

Yet, I have no anger at Yuri.

Not a drop, not even an inkling of animosity towards her. Why? Yuri loved me the best way she knew how. She had no malice nor premeditation in the things she did to me. She never chose a path of causing me pain. She was doing her best to love me and work her way through some very serious personal issues, as well as deal with the disappointment from my loving her inadequately (still, the best I could do, just not good enough).

No, the hard part about being angry is that I'm angry at myself. I'm angry that I was hypercritical of her. I'm angry that I couldn't see that her decisions to love me changed when we changed addresses. I'm angry that I chose to ignore some really disturbing details because I loved her and I was committed to her. I'm mad at myself for not letting her out of this on the morning of our wedding when she completely freaking flipped out.

If Yuri said, tonight, "Hannibal, I wanna come back to you," I'd say yes. Now, we'd have a ton of terms to settle on, and we might have to renegotiate a thing or two, and sooner rather than later, we'd have to find a mechanism to get past our respective laundry lists of war crimes ... but I love Yuri more than anything or anyone in the whole universe, I made a committment to her, and I would honor it, willingly and (truth be told) with considerable relief.

On the other hand, I've watched Yuri, I've watched her mother, I've watched her family. I don't believe she'll ever do that. Even, as time goes by, and she dates other people, and remembers how happy we were. Even if she has a string of bad relationships. Even if she has a string of good relationships. I believe she's painted herself into an irrevocable corner, despite the openings I have left, and she's done, and I have to accept it.

I am a better person now than I was before February 1999. I wouldn't say I did the wrong thing. I made mistakes -- primary amongst them was not accepting that like so many others, Yuri would one day abandon/fail/betray/disappoint me. I'm on my way along the stony and challenging uphill path towards healing, and despite my comfort inside of it, I won't stay in this angry place. I won't make the same mistakes again, I will not let this ruin me. I can admit that and hopefully grow from it.

I know I was wrong to place my hopes and impossible expectations in her. I know I never was, nor never could be her star. I know that, with the people we were, this probably never could have worked out. I know. Believe me, I know. Now I have to find out if I'm man enough to act from that knowledge and do better.