Nora Kinkaid Wants Her Life Back

Resentment

I feel the pressure weighing down on me. I get the fearful feeling of doubt creep up when I think I spot him on the street. I am deliberately not talking to you. It's not like I don't feel you around. I simply cannot address it. I am not going through December again and that's that. Yes I recognize the comfort and familiarity you bring but you didn't serve me. We didn't work. We didn't work as we were and you and I know that. You knew it first. I don't feel it so often anymore. But my mind and third eye are still limited. I try to separate them from you and will keep trying. I have to keep trying. I don't want to uproot my life to ask a million questions about yours. No matter how curious I am. It's not fair to me. I have all the questions but what do the answers really matter?

---

We went to dinner days after I cheated on him. I deliberately ignored this fact. He was taking me out for my birthday and I was excited until I wasn't. I asked if we were having dinner or just drinks and he made a wise crack about not wanting to pay for dinner. I was pissed. It was the least he could do really. He had missed my actual birthday, been gone for God knows how long and oh yeah, I forgot, I had cheated on him.

Needless to say, the night started off rough. We sat icily across from each other and I said nothing about it. We chatted and I ignored the idea that I could easily just say, "hey, it upset me when you implied you didn't want to pay for dinner. It makes me feel like it's a burden for you to take me out." I could have said that. But I didn't. I was passive aggressive and kept looking over at the table of women to the left of me eyeing him up. I selfishly thought, "you can have him. Be my guest. I can let him go, just watch me do it."

I was completely ignoring the fact that in normal moments, when I thought about him my heart swelled and I felt buoyant. In normal moments, I felt like I could wake up next to him every day. But we weren't really having many normal moments. We were having a bunch of crisis on my side and a bunch of avoidance on his. I say avoidance but really it was job responsibility. Could I really blame him for that? He was driven. He wanted to be successful. He was working towards a promotion he eventually got. But I didn't think about that. What I was thinking about at this dinner was how I was stuck with him. I was so far away from myself I couldn't even be grateful that I had a partner kind enough to take me out to dinner to celebrate my birthday. In short, I was a total bitch.

During drinks we talked about Christmas and I asked if we were doing gifts. He seemed squeamish. For the record, I would have been fine with no gifts. It made sense to skip it but somehow at the end of the conversation we were doing gifts. We finished our drinks and I fought off the sensation of vertigo as we walked back to my place. I physically shook as my body tried to right itself. He took it as me being cold and laughed at our drastically different tolerances for the Boston cold. When we got back I didn't even try. I was so over the exhaustion, the unnecessary fighting and his lack of trying that when he left the next morning I unleashed every ounce of passive aggressiveness I could. He tried to help me change my sheets for laundry day. I fought him off. He tried to make coffee for us and I told him he wouldn't know how to do it. He tried pretty much everything and I sent him out the door with a slam.

He called me later that day to ask me how I was and how did I think we were doing. I collapsed on the couch and released the honesty I had been keeping from him. We weren't doing well. I felt disconnected and oddly angry with him about pretty much everything whether it had to do with him or not. Couldn't he understand what I had been going through? He couldn't. He just kept saying "you've been so understanding with me" as if I was winning the trophy for putting up with things no one else would.

As a matter of course, that's exactly what I had been doing. I had been tolerating Oliver's behavior for so long I forgot what tolerance does. Tolerance wounds your soul. When you put up with shit that you don't want to be putting up with you are essentially telling your soul, "you're not good enough for me to protect." How cruel is that? For all the months we had been dating, I had been deliberately tolerating his behavior in an effort to get through Darkness. But when you go through Darkness you don't always come out whole the other side. My soul felt like it had been through Darkness so many times it was unsure what was left to protect.

We made promises to each other to make it work. We could get through this. It was only a matter of time before we got back into step with one another. Could we try and do that through Christmas? Of course. Do we think we can make it to New Years? Yes but he would be away until the second week of January. I sighed and pushed the resentment I was feeling way down to the bottom of my soul right next to fear. He was trying, he told me. I know he was. I just wished he didn't have to try so hard. I wished he wanted to make space in his life for me as opposed to me begging for it at every turn. I felt like a record on repeat. Can you please make room for me? Yes of course. Where did you make it? Oh I haven't done it yet. Will you get to it? Of course. And weeks go by and we're in the same spot.

Speaking of records, Oliver loved them. He had a collection of vinyl's from his dad and bought himself a vinyl player for his apartment. When we broke up I told him things don't sound better on vinyl just to piss him off. For Christmas, I got him a vinyl brush to clean his records and I walked to Newbury Comics to pick out a record. I already knew I was getting The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It was iconic. It was one I knew for a fact he didn't own so it seemed like the easy thoughtful choice. I walked to Newbury comics in Quincy market which was a big feat considering I hadn't gone more than a ten block radius outside of my trip back home. I remember feeling independent and eager to prove to myself that I could do a simple task. I walked there and got into the record store and started combing through the racks to find where they kept the album I was looking for.

I sensed him before I saw him. I felt this thing following me. I didn't know why but I could feel it behind me. It kind of trailed me. I turned around to come face to face with a random man. He was no taller than 5'9 wearing a yellow beanie and a red flannel. He had sunglasses on but we were inside. I turned back around and kept combing through the racks. Perhaps I wasn't being followed. It was a small store after all. He could easily have been coming through the same albums as I was and politely waiting for me to move on through the alphabet. But for every step I moved, he moved. If I went around a rack, he followed. This happened a few times before I abruptly changed course and back tracked the way I had come, running right into him.

"Hey, where ya going honey?"

I froze up. I didn't say anything. I tried to move past him but he blocked my path. I glanced over my shoulder and took a step back. He took a step forward.

"Hey I want to talk to you." He reached out to grab my arm. It could have been harmless but I didn't care. It was invasion of my personal space. I turned around and walked briskly towards the staircase and down to the ground floor of the store. Once outside, I took off running.

This was the second time my personal safety had been threatened in less than three months. It was ridiculous. It still seems ridiculous now and incredibly infuriating to think that all of these things happened to me in such a short amount of time. But this is how non-light beings work. They get you when you guard is down. For the first time in weeks I had felt like I could do a simple task. But here they were again, showing up and ruining my day.

I ran through Government Center but had to stop running when I hit the Boston Common. My lungs and body physically couldn't take it. I hobbled home at the slowest pace possible and forced myself to walk down to the other end of Newbury Street to the original Newbury Comics. I bought Oliver the album. I didn't care if he wanted it or not at that point. I bought it because I wasn't going to let some 5'9 stalker ruin the first Christmas with my boyfriend when our relationship was hanging on by a thread.

When I gave Oliver the gift, he laughed because he had literally gone to the store that day and bought the album himself. The same day he had also bought himself a vinyl cleaning brush. We had gotten him identical Christmas gifts. Now some would say that's a good sign because you know your partner. But I knew better. This was a universal test and I was failing. Oliver's Christmas gift to me was a weekend away in a cabin in Vermont. Sounds nice right? It's a great gift but I had convinced myself it was thoughtless. He had planned the date, picked the house and done all the things right. So why did I feel excluded? I selfishly wanted to do those things with him but more importantly, I wanted to feel like he was doing this for me, not just because he wanted to go away. If he wanted to go away that would have been fine but don't parade it as a Christmas gift. I sound bad. I know. Trust me, I've done enough beating up of myself to know that this was one of my worse moves in our relationship.

The real kicker was that he planned it for the second week of January. We hadn't even made it through Christmas and New Year's yet. I couldn't foresee us making it two more weeks let alone six. It seemed daunting and senseless and yet, I said and did nothing.