Fairy Gifts
How did I meet Maisie? Well, when it started, I knew her as FairyWand. I joined an online newsgroup for fantasy writers and book lovers, right around when my relationship with Candace was starting to go south. It wasn’t that things were all that bad, but I guess I knew it was close to the end. Maybe somewhere inside, I was making sure I’d have something to focus on, when we finally broke up.
So I’d post my stories, and one person who always responded was FairyWand. She’d usually have something good to say about them, but it wasn’t the gushing “Ooooh, you’re SUCH a good WRITER” stuff that a lot of people would say. If something needed polishing, she would mention that, or she could be specific about what had really worked in the story.
It was platonic, all the way. So far as I know, Maisie is either straight or asexual. Plus, as it turns out, she’s twenty years older than I am. Not that that would make a difference to lots of people, or that it would even make a difference to me, with the right person. But still. Plus, when I was first getting to know her, I was twenty-four, which made her about forty-five. And that’s a much bigger difference than the space between thirty-three and fifty-four.
Back to my point. We got to know each other on the forum. It wasn’t just talking about writing, because it never is just writing. You talk about books, obviously. And you talk about why you like the ones you like. People wind up talking about what they’re interested in in the real world, too, and as you get to know each other, bits and pieces of your life sneak in. So over those months, with my relationship with Candace going more and more to pieces, bits of that naturally snuck in.
I was friends with several people on the forum, in the way that you’re friends with people you’ve only ever written to, and never met in person. But in some ways, it’s a lot more intimate, writing with strangers. That forum was definitely the first place I told anyone about the nightmares I had that probably were memories. I mean, I didn’t even tell my therapist about them, but I could write about it to people I never actually saw.
Who knows. Maybe if I’d focused some of that emotional intensity towards Candace, things would have gone differently. But I don’t think so. We had a good relationship, don’t get me wrong. If it hadn’t been for her… well, she helped me with a lot of healing, as well as being a good girlfriend just as a girlfriend. I might not have really talked about stuff that went on at home, but she’s smart enough that she guessed some of it, and sometimes I’d show her the stories. We wouldn’t talk about them, but she did read them….
Really, I think our relationship was running on inertia after college. We were comfortable together, but there wasn’t much more to it than that. Plus, I was really stubborn in some ways. I figured, if there was going to be a break-up, it wasn’t going to come from me. And Candace wasn’t going to rock the boat, either.
We didn’t fight, but we really drifted apart. It’s funny. I might have expected her to totally dump me one of the times I was really depressed, or when I was freaking out constantly from flashbacks. But she stuck by me for that. I’d get so depressed, and tell her she’d be better off without me, and she would absolutely refuse. She stayed around, really, until it got to the point that I actually believed she meant it when she said she loved me. And coming from me, that’s a big deal.
She still does love me, too, just not in the romantic way.
I’m not even entirely clear on how we wound up breaking up. Looking back, it seems like we would have drifted along forever, not quite satisfied, but not unhappy. Certainly neither of us was going to rock the boat.
I guess the ending came when it seemed like I’d really gotten everything together, mentally speaking. It had been a few months without a panic attack, without any of the weird spacing out. It seemed like I knew what all of my triggers were, and had worked through them. So Candace started talking about the future.
It wasn’t even that that freaked me out…. I guess it’s that I started to realize we had really different ideas about what we wanted. She wanted kids, and a dog, and all of that. You know, own a house, plant a garden somewhere that the rent can’t get raised and you move away from it. I guess Candace wanted all of that grown-up stuff. So we’d talk about it. We’d even go to open houses. We had a realtor and everything. But the further we moved into doing that, the more I felt like a little kid playing house. I mean, it just wasn’t real to me.
I talked about it in therapy, and my therapist at the time assured me that it was normal to feel that way. I think that if I told that therapist that I wanted to strip naked, paint myself blue, and go running through the streets, she would have assured me it was normal to feel that way. If not for regular people, then for people who were abused as kids. She was very invested in helping me to feel like I was normal.
I guess that’s what Candace wanted, too. For me to just hurry up and feel normal already, so we could get on with our lives. Maybe she and my therapist thought my reluctance was some after-effect of abuse. I don’t know.
So we started with the dog. We went to the pound, because that’s the right thing to do. Politically correct, I mean. No dog breeders, we’d give a home to some dog that needed one. And damn. That dog was just such a PAIN. You have to always be paying attention to the dog.
I’m a cat person, deep down. At least, if I’m going to have a pet with fur, it will be a cat. You want to go away for the weekend, and you have a cat? Make sure the litter is clean, put down an extra bowl or two of food, leave the faucet dripping, and you’re good to go.
But a dog. Sheesh. You have to walk that dog, two or three times a day. Even if you’ve got a nice big yard, that dog has to have its walk. You have to pick up its poop right away, while it’s still stinky. A cat, she’ll go and do her business in the box, you wait, the litter sucks out all the smell, and you dump it every day or two, end of story.
You can’t leave a bowl of food out for a dog, you can only give it as much as it should eat for that one meal. A cat, she knows how much she needs, she’ll stop when she’s full. Not a dog.
Anyhow.
So the dog, definitely Skyler was Candace’s dog. He still is, and I guess I miss him sometimes, now that I’ve moved away. But I miss him like I’d miss some nephew that I really only want to see for about fifteen minutes a year. He still remembers me, from his puppy days when we lived together. Or else his overall doggish friendliness is sufficient to make him rush up to me and drool all over me, wagging his tail the whole time, every time I come up for a visit.
But after the dog came the house and the car. Well, the car came first. Candace said she wanted it so she could take the dog to the park. Because, of course, a dog needs somewhere to run, and she thought he needed more variety than the park near our house. But it was right around when she started looking for the car that she also talked me into seeing a realtor. So, to me, the house and the car go together. One thing, in my mind, since the car was used more often for going all over town looking at houses than it was for taking the dog anywhere. Well, I guess we did need it to take him to the vet, but not so much for looking at houses.
Candace really wanted a house. She had all the sensible arguments, that it was better to build up equity, and smarter to have stability. All I could think about was, if you own the house, something goes wrong, you’re the one who has to deal with it. Me, I like having a landlord. Sure, I’ll fix things if they need to get fixed, but if the problem is out of my league, I don’t call a roofer or a plumber or an electrician. I call my landlord, and it’s not my problem anymore.
So we were looking at houses, and driving around in the car, and finally…
I guess finally nothing. There were months of this. The dog, it was a few weeks of Candace talking me into it, then we went to the pound, and bingo! we had a dog.
The car might have taken a little longer, except that our upstairs neighbor decided to quit his job and travel around the world, and he had a perfectly good station wagon looking for a home. So we bought the car, he bought a plane ticket, and everything was dandy.
The house wasn’t such an easy deal. We looked and looked. For one thing, it’s not like I was a great credit risk. At least, I shouldn’t have been, but in that market, I think they would have given a house loan to anyone. I’d spent a couple of years temping after college, and then went back to grad school in creative writing once Candace had gotten her MLS and a job as a librarian. So I still hadn’t paid off the debt for undergrad, and there I was, back in college again, in a program that was unlikely to lead to any kind of decent paying job.
Then things started moving a little faster than I could handle, because Candace’s parents decided it was time to sell their house, get a condo and an RV and become roving retired people. And since they wanted such a tiny condo, there was a big chunk of money left over, and they offered it to Candace as a down payment on a house.
I’d been writing about all of this, on and off on the newsgroup. Not a lot of details, but enough to get my thoughts out. And the more I wrote about it there, the more I realized that this wasn’t the life for me. I couldn’t have said what I did want, but I was pretty sure that the dog/car/house/kids progression wasn’t it.
So finally, I sat down with Candace, before we were going to head out to another open house, and we had a talk. I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to be the one to break up, but sometimes, you have to break that kind of promise. I loved Candace, and I knew we’d be miserable if I kept trying to pretend to be a kind of grown-up that I really couldn’t be.
My therapist thought I was absolutely wrong, by the way. She thought Candace was great for me, a supportive, loving partner, all of that. She told me it was “normal” to get cold feet. Normal for someone with my experiences to fear intimacy. But she thought I should stick it out. So I pretty much dumped my therapist right before I was going to dump Candace.
In both cases, I still think I did the right thing. Well, maybe I could have found a nicer way to tell Candace, but really…. she’s as stubborn as I am, maybe more stubborn. I had to come right out and say it: I love you, I love you a LOT, but this relationship isn’t going to work out very well for either of us, and it’s time to split up.
I think both of us hoped, afterwards, that it had just been one of my little fits, cropping up when I got triggered. But it wasn’t. A few days, a few weeks, a month… and I still felt that way. So we started the rather difficult process of untangling whose stuff was whose, and figuring out where to go from there.
It’s funny, though. Once we’d decided to break up, I was thrilled to go along with Candace while she looked at houses. But that was complicated, and maybe led to as many problems as it solved. Every time I got excited with her about some new house, she’d get this gleam of hope in her eyes. “Oh, good, Nora’s come back to herself. Now we can go along with our carefully planned out normal grown-up life. What a relief!”
So eventually, it made sense to take a break. That hurt. Candace was the one to suggest that, and boy… even though I knew breaking up was the right thing, you can’t imagine the panic that came up, when she said we needed… she needed for us not to see each other for a while.
I can understand it now, but at the time, it was nothing but hurt. It was summer by then, school was on break and I hadn’t lined up anything much for the summer. I was going to do some writing, and I holed up in my new studio apartment and mostly posted to the newsgroup. I spent a lot of time on the newsgroup, just then. Most of our friends felt like I’d been a jerk to Candace over the break-up.
Or maybe I just expected them to feel that way, because I know I felt that way. So I wasn’t seeing many of them. And I wasn’t seeing my therapist anymore, because I was tired of being assured that my feelings were normal. Who knows, I thought, maybe I’m not normal. What about that? But it’s not like I was a danger to myself, and there was no way I was going to check myself into some psych ward, just because I had this creeping suspicion that I was a hairsbreadth away from being seriously not normal.
But then things settled down. Around the middle of August, Skyler dashed out the door as Candace was coming home from a party. It was about 2 in the morning, and Candace probably knew I was the only person who would be willing to be dragged out of bed to help her find that stupid mutt. Well, if by “dragged out of bed” we mean “dragged away from reading unedited stories and finding polite things to say about the 30th poem about dragons this week.”
She also knew that I was better at getting myself into the dumb dog’s mind, and figuring out where he’d want to go when he ran off. It was never the same place, so it wasn’t just about remembering where he’d been. It’s like I could imagine being Skyler, and think, “Hm, warm summer night, where’s fun for a dog tonight?”
So I threw on some slightly cleaner clothes, and went back to the old place to help Candace track the dog down. We found him in the alley behind the grocery store, rolling around in half-rotted produce. So I stuck with her as she dragged him home, and helped her to wash him. By the time all the madness was done, the sun was getting ready to rise. Candace offered to take me out for breakfast, and somehow, during the months we’d been apart, the pain of the breakup had worn off, and what was left was a good, solid friendship.
She came over to my new place, a couple of days later, and insisted on bagging up my laundry and cleaning out my sink. This was major, since Candace is not the housecleaning type. But she knows what I’m like when I’m depressed, and she’s always been pretty good about picking up the pieces.
So things were better between us, after that. She had found a house she loved, and gone through all the rigamarole required to turn it into her house. I went over to help with things like cleaning and painting and all the stuff you do before you move your stuff in. And boy, it was then that I was absolutely sure I’d done the right thing by breaking up. That was a house that screamed “GROWN UPS LIVE HERE! THEY WILL HAVE A DOG AND A CAR AND 2.5 KIDS.”
The only problem, of course, was that now Candace was single. I knew she was sad, but something about my studio apartment must have done the same thing for her. Maybe it was the posters on the walls… I had spent a chunk of my stipend going wild and getting the kind of posters I’d always wanted, but couldn’t afford, when I was a teenager. It wasn’t a big chunk of my stipend. When I was a teenager, I was lucky if I could afford an eight pack of crayons and a pad of cheap paper, let alone a poster that cost all of ten dollars.
That, and the stacks and stacks of books, and all of the other things that make me me, and not some mythical responsible grown-up… I could see it in her eyes, the first time she came over and the apartment was clean. Once she wasn’t distracted by the dirty laundry and general grunginess (I’m normally fairly tidy. Cluttered, but tidy.), she paid attention to things like the carefully arranged Playmobil collection, and it was like a light went on in her head. When I would buy a Playmobil toy every week after therapy, it wasn’t for some mythical inner child. It was for me. And yeah, they were gonna be out in the open, just like anything else I had.
So I guess she finally caught on, and realized that I wasn’t the right person to fit in with her carefully arranged grown up, 2.5 kids life. And that made things even easier. I helped her move, I helped her settle in, but it was really clear that I was doing this as a good friend, and not as an almost-partner.
I wrote a short story about it, the break-up, the dog, seeing the two different houses. But I didn’t post it. I only sent it to a couple of friends on the newsgroup. FairyWand, or Maisie, was one of them.
Uncharacteristically, her only response was, “Good story, very expressive.”
