Other diaries in this series are: Fade to white, Somewhere warm, Day to day, and Haunted. They discuss my former partner of six years, her transition to living as a woman in 2009, and her death in January of 2013.
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The one email account only goes back to 2006, although this is a new kind of eternity in digital time. I sift through hundreds of chat logs the way archaeologists uncover cities and deal with many of the same problems: is this room an archive or a trash pile? Methodical, colonial analysis. Mark with string and stakes, brush away dust and catalog items. This period of my life seems to exist only in faded photographs. There is no audio until sometime in 2007 when I started going out on my own—which I never did—to listen to a friend play guitar and that was probably when I tried to end things. Of course, she didn't hear me even when I jumped up and down in huge snow drifts screaming I can’t marry you. She was quite committed to being a boy at the time and insisted I stay and continue my role of Good Likely Wife. Every day she was making this possible by alienating me from people who might have guessed there was a problem. I was allowed to have friends, but those friends were always treated with uncomfortable suspicion, if she acknowledged them at all.
“I don’t like that guy,” she said of another student in my department. “He follows your voice.”
“I hate her,” she said of a new friend who is now working on a PhD in social justice issues. “But you can talk to her if you want, I guess.”
“Don’t turn your back to me and talk to other men,” she said. Eventually I was no longer allowed to use the words assume or burden at all, even in discussions unrelated to our relationship. I was forbidden to use the washer and dryer after she came home from the bar because it was too loud. I did not discover this until she returned one night and used the circuit breaker to cut power to the entire house. The steady erosion of my autonomy became more explicit. Today, the archaeology of these things is like standing in a crater without understanding where you are. I find black boxes, uncovered from some unspecified disaster.
“You’re sick,” she said. She spoke the way I imagine her nurses did at the end, her voice filtered with empathy and care when I tried to make clear that I liked my guitar playing friend—and other men—in ways I should not if I were happily engaged. Again, she did not listen. “It’s like you have cancer,” she explained. She held me and said not to worry, that she would be here when I got better.
“Your writing’s worse now. I don’t like it,” she said after I made friends who were fiction writers. “You should quit taking his classes.”
“It’s going to be amazing,” said the majority of my friends. “They’ll take such good care of you. You’ll never have to worry about a thing.” Though none of them said it I could always hear what followed: what did you think you were going to do with a humanities degree, anyway? I gained weight and cried on the scale in the student health center. I was fat and depressed—who else but her would love me anyway?
“Is that why you’re leaving me? Your friends? All your friends think I’m scum!” Over and over again. “I’m the reason you can even go to school, you owe me.” And this was true. She’d sat through the financial aid hearings with me when we were just friends. I didn't lose my temper around her. But they were my loans, and I paid for everything. Still, I felt as though she was right.
I tried to go and she threatened suicide. I know now this is a bullshit move for two reasons: one, that’s profoundly manipulative and two, she was killing herself already anyway, drop by miserable drop. I scrapped dregs of courage and tried to leave again. She responded by threatening friends and professors. A gifted computer scientist, I was afraid she might actually be capable of ruining careers and character assassination. At Stupid Mountain Town University, I was the unstable one, I was the one with the problem. She was trustworthy and award winning. By then, I think some form of delusion or encephalopathy set in: she alternately claimed my degree was more marketable—why didn't I have a better job?—between promises of sending me to Europe to study.
I broke away for a month of solitude in a tiny cottage with inflated rent. Even as I packed a few possessions, she told me to enjoy my vacation and that she’d see me soon. Again, she did not hear me: I was finally moving out. I went back to Stupid Mountain Town and took my old job with the boss whose management style varied with the local employment rate: do what I say, there’s always someone else who will. I brought some clothes and books, and a small clock radio that only received right-wing talk radio or the BBC depending on the time of day. Sometimes there was only static. My ears filled with an enormous silence until Stupid Mountain Town University offered her a job. She had nowhere else to go when the reality was she’d refused relocation assistance. She bullied me into letting her stay and the story repeated itself. When I moved across the country several months later to escape everything, I signed the cottage over to her.
And yet, she was supposed to have a birthday last weekend. I don’t know how I am supposed to feel. Relief seems wrong, happiness worse and cruel somehow. Thirty-six seems too young for death. My memory of her past is now finite, and often marked in stakes and string.