Interlude
I am interjecting my own story to provide a bit of an interlude after talking to my editor:
I am fervently working on revising Part IV. My feedback, from my editor was the piece “was too on the fence.” I was trying to make sense and justify Jerry’s behavior instead of calling it as it was. That’s how you stay in a boo boo relationship for eight years. I revised half of it last night. Annnnnd its taken quite a turn. So, I’m inserting this so my intentions are clear – because I know he’s going to read it; not comprehend it *cough*
This story above all is an illustration of my self love.
It highlights the humanness of my existence. Highlights the karmic work I have to do.
I have compassion and love for Jerry and his humanness. So much so, that using his cover name “Jerry” makes writing this feel a tad insincere.
I am aware ego is the strongest voice in this story. My reasoning, balance. I have spent years in my head and heart sorting out all of this out. Growing from it. Learning from it. Sharing it with Jerry. Trying to understand why I care so deeply about someone who has never taken the time to understand me, to see me.
I know there are plenty of people who can not see me or hold space for me, and that’s perfectly fine. Compartmentalize me how you will. Know I am here if you need space.
I need a space to laugh about this. Space to laugh at the absurdity. The absurdity which makes this story so human. I need a space to see that regardless of my active compassion and love for Jerry that hurt happened in our relationship and that hurt was never mended. Most of my stories have been about the ugly side of Jerry and the reason for that is writing is my cope for my undressed wounds. Ironically, what Jerry hates about what I say, is really about Jerry hating what he has done. With these stories I carve a simple space which allows me to provide the compassion and love I yearned for from him and never got, to give it to myself. A space to heal.
To Jerry, I am in the wrong either way. If I love sincerely, I am wrong. If I use my voice and don’t advert my eyes, I am wrong. Instead of staying true to Jerry, I am being true to myself.
I do not want to be together with Jerry. I simply want the pain to go away. That’s why I talk about it. Write about it.
He could not say sorry and I did not leave.
I am grateful to Jerry everyday. He taught me how to love endlessly. He has taught me that although I can give my love easily, I must be thoughtful where I place it. He has shown me the duality of love and fear. He has shown me how critical it is to grow and where I need to grow. He has taught me how to let go. How to hold on. He has shown me my strength. He has given strength to my voice and my personal value. He has taught me compassion. He has shown me that we cannot heal anyone but ourselves and more importantly at our own time. Behind my words on this page, there is a well so deep that is rooted in nothing but love and gratitude of which Jerry has been on the receiving end since the day I met him and remains firmly in place today.
Sweet Creatures – Part II
Slight digression.
I met Jerry on December 20th, 2003; I was 17 and in high school, and he was 19 and a musician. We spent the better part of eight years together. In the first year and a half, I was given a promise ring one night at a fancy romantic dinner. Shortly after that dinner, I found out he was sleeping with my best friend after suspicion led me to snoop his cell phone. I broke up with him, and then we got back together. We tried and did, to an extent, build a life together. Unfortunately, massive portions of that life were filled with lying about anything and everything on his part and disrespect. He constantly lied about who he was talking to, where he was, money and bills that were paid or not paid, weed use, and in general, who he was. We fought a lot because of all the lying. I could never trust him. There was no recovering since another lie was just on the horizon. We were always slipping. I never felt secure. I was never considered. Things that were important to me were disregarded by both of us. We both put him first. I’ve beaten our porn issues to death, but it is a perfect example of how everything in our relationship went. I had an issue with Jerry and porn, not because I had an issue with porn. I had an issue with how the porn affected Jerry and thus me. I wouldn’t sleep with him because his lying directly impacted my ability to be vulnerable or intimate with him. I didn’t feel secure or loved by him. He’d watch porn to compensate and then lie about it. So I wouldn’t want to sleep with him because I was hurt that he lied. My feelings were rarely taken into consideration. So, I was always on the defense. Therefore, we rarely we’re on the same team. Yet, I loved him so much. We had these cycles, which became our norm. We’d have months filled with good times and love (cards, flowers, and wonderful words) but, then a month would come up, and it would slip us back to the last slip up, and then we would start all over. Wash, rinse, and repeat. I later learned this is classic love bombing.
At this point, you may be asking: why did I stay? My blind love, his promises of change, his pleas for me to stay, my lack of self-respect, naivety, my love of personal torment (chaotic childhood/attachment issues), the glimpses of hope, and my thoughts on his potential are what kept me hooked. I did truly love him; I know it says a lot about me. Failure is a huge childhood issue for me. I felt, if I gave up on my relationship with Jerry, it was a mark of personal failure.
Another core belief of mine is actions speak louder than words. I told you, my core beliefs are so fundamental they are kindergarten lingo. I even tattooed, “they can say they love you, but it still won’t change a thing” on my back. Jerry would say, at times, the most wonderful, nice, and validating things, but (big but) he never toed the line. He could talk the talk, could never walk the walk. I always saw him as having untapped potential. If he could just stop lying, things would be better.
After five years of dating, we broke up. He moved to Maui in 2008, and I flew to Maui to get him back. On the heel of that, he cheated again. Broke up and got back together. He wrote me a song and proposed; I got a ring! And at 25, I decided to go back to school to finish my degree. We needed to relocate for me to finish my degree. I was, for the first time in our relationship, in the driver’s seat. He couldn’t hack the move. He felt his music career was taking a back seat to my goals. He began texting about meeting up with a “lesbian” who sent him multiple pictures of herself in lingerie (lesbian is in quotes because it was a copout). He set up a dating profile looking for a girl who possessed both my personality and physical qualities, but just not with the knowledge of him, which I unfortunately possessed. All of this I, of course, found out on my own. I confronted him. We cried together on the floor of our bedroom. We realized we were nearing our end. We came down to LA to visit family, and I slept with someone else and lied about it.
End of relationship.
::::
In 2017, I wrote a poem, if you will, concerning Jerry and I emailed him about it. Got no reply.
Then in the Spring of 2018, Jerry and I corresponded through email. At this point, it had been nearly 2 years of rolling around the idea of amends. We talked about a lot of different things; my emails were reserved. Still, I put it out there that I was feeling bad about a lot of things—mainly how things were between us. To sum up Jerry’s emails, he was thoughtful, kind, and sensitive to my expressions of sadness and remorse. He was worried about me,
“I really hope you are okay. It worries me whenever you reach out to me. I always feel like you are going through something and can’t really tell me. Life is weird as shit but were not strangers. We’re the same dumb kids we always were but with adult lives to live.”
Taking this as a sign of personal growth and change for him, I felt some safety, and I dispensed pieces of pain that were on my heart in those emails, moving towards amends. He said all the right things. Things that should have been satisfactory, but I found myself doubting if he were put face to face with me, what would he say? It’s easy to respond to an email because you can type whatever. Being face to face and on the spot is a whole other thing. You can’t calculate. You can’t delete. He also shared with me that he got a new dog and “was totally in love” with the dog. (Keep this in mind for later).
We also talked about music his new band was putting out. He sent me a few demos, and they were really good. Seriously, good. But hearing and reading his lyrics got me so caught up in how he was really doing. You see, one of my regrets with Jerry is, while I was dating him, I was constantly feeling frustrated that I didn’t know who Jerry really was because he always lied. Arguably, he clearly expressed who he was or how he felt in writing his heart in his songs. And if I listen back to the stuff he recorded while we were together, he was communicating how he felt about all the issues we were having. The issues he was having. But in my self-righteousness and pain, I never heard what he was saying. So, when he sent me over these songs, one in particular, “lost in my head again — avoiding existence — but I stay trapped in the same routine — push everyone I love away — and I felt my best — when I was all alone” I couldn’t help, but listen.
::::
In my email to him on August 7th, 2018 (shown in part I of this story), I asked him two questions. His reply to my email came a week later, only addressing the first question. I could labor on about our email exchanges and how much frustration it gave me, but in full transparency, here ya go:
The amount of gratitude I felt for getting the opportunity to see and talk to him, I cannot put into words. What I felt and thought this would do for me was quite frankly the opportunity of a lifetime—healing for a disease that seemed as if only he had the cure for.
::::
All the way to meet him on that Thursday afternoon, I was full of nerves. I came prepared with notes. Yes. Notes. I really wanted my intention to translate and I wanted to do the work. Take responsibility. I tried to brace myself for whatever was going to happen, including him not showing up. I got to the restaurant. Grabbed a beer. Sat alone at a tabletop in the rear of the restaurant. I didn’t see him come in the door; I just felt his presence as he approached the table. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here he was, this stranger I knew better than most. I was utterly overwhelmed with nerves, anxiety, love, and familiarity when I saw him. He looked different. A lot different from how I remember him. He looked burdened, heavy. His chest was more barreled. His hair was bleached, fried. He was dressed in all black, per his norm. The lines in his face had gotten harder. Time will do that; my bags have gotten worse. But he looked like he’d let himself go a bit. I am not saying this to be mean through judgment, but I felt concerned. His light had dimmed. His birthday was that Saturday. So, as a gift, I offered to buy whatever beers he drank. I had a few myself to calm my nerves. I also brought him a few crystals, specifically Rose Quartz, which is for the heart chakra. I told him he “could throw them away” if they didn’t resonate with him. I told him about how he was coming up for me. I said, “You are like cancer in my brain that I cannot get rid of.” I told him how sorry I was, and I read off my notes:
I told him I will always accept him for who he is. A failure and regret of mine. That I will always love him for how/who he is. He did not reciprocate. Not even with apologies. Just like in our relationship, I apologized and tried to undo everything I had seemingly done to him in an attempt to restore him.
We caught up on his family and friends who have drifted through my memory. We talked about his mom. My only conversation with her is carved into my mind. Where I was and what I was wearing, and what she said to me. It echos time and again. Like when we found out, she had passed. Jerry and I were sharing a twin bed at his Grandpa’s house in Ontario. Sitting on our bed one night, his brother calls, and he doesn’t answer it. I tell him, “call him back; it may be important.” I will never forget his face and the reaction he had. It was heartbreaking. In the time Jerry and I spent together, while it was fractured, we saw each other through many life changes. Particularly loss. He was there for me when I found out my uncle committed suicide. He was at the funeral. Helped. I was there with him when his beloved Grandpa died like died. I was there when his mother passed. Our memories are intertwined. Moving on is more than moving on from each other. It is moving on from everything because it is all enmeshed.
We talked about our respective relationships, which I will keep sacred. We joked. We were happy in each other’s company. We only had an hour since he met me on his lunch break. He was working at the same job, I submitted his resume to years ago. When we got to our cars, I popped a white head on his face that had been bothering me the whole time we talked. Hugged and said goodbye. After I left him, I sent him an email with the notes I had read to him before heading home. Jerry replied, “I think we were probably sending each other an email at the same time. As I keep saying, you have no need to be sorry but I appreciate your effort to apologize. I will try my best to not be a stranger but in reflecting, it was pretty hard to see you. It brought back so many memories and feelings. I do have so much love for you too and I hope you are able to get yourself into a positive mental state. I’m here if you need anything. Just let me know.”
And “I genuinely miss you.“
To which I replied, “We need to have another lunch, there is so much more to cover.”
He sent me a text and said, “Lets have lunch again tomorrow.”
Fuck me.
::::
Sweet Creatures – Part I
Through the wave of postpartum hormones and the loss of an old identity, my brain forced me to reconcile old baggage as I transitioned into a new chapter of my life. Rinse the sin. I was forced to contemplate the type of human example I wanted to be to this innocent life I haphazardly brought into the world. I wanted to identify as someone who represented and abided by my core beliefs. A fundamental core belief of mine, stated simply in kindergarten lingo, is to treat people how you want to be treated.
Following a very traumatic birth through the first 16 months after my daughter was born, I struggled immensely. I can’t even conjure up the words to express it. I have no words to describe how difficult it has been for me to adapt and change, to find acceptance.
The birth of my daughter was the catalyst of my beginning to make amends.
I have been so fortunate to love deeply a handful of times. Some deeper than others. But still, my relational life has been full of love and disappointment. Examining my past, my feelings regarding my actions are littered with guilt, shame, sadness—a longing to fix the unfixable. I loved deeply but didn’t always act with love. I blame myself for not knowing myself better and making wiser decisions. I made decisions that were unconscious and rooted in fear. I blame myself because I should’ve known better.
During this self-flagellation, I began to feel the pull to contact my relational foul-ups of the past. Right my wrongs, if you will. I had all this guilt I put on myself about how I treated others – ones that I loved. I felt I needed to step up and take personal responsibility for my fuck-ups. I needed to dig myself out of the emotional hole I put myself in. I needed to address the effect I had on the ones that I loved. I needed to find personal peace and acceptance, and forgiveness.
::::
Following the birth of my daughter, I was experiencing uncontrollable intrusive thoughts and feelings for months. Trying to sort them out and make sense of them was agonizing. My ex, Jerry, was the person who came up all the time. Not in a romantic way, but he just kept coming into my thoughts randomly. I’d wake up thinking about him, he’d pop in my head during the day, and by night, I had been pushing out the thoughts about him all day that after I’d fall asleep, I’d dream about him and then start the cycle all over again. I was conscious of my thoughts, but I could not control them. These thoughts became so invasive that his name began to escape my lips more regularly. It was awful, consuming, and I needed it to stop.
I am married and have a child, and I have so much shit on my plate, it didn’t make sense why all of this was coming up. I talked to friends at length (god bless you all), trying to sort this out and make sense of it. What were my options? What could I do to address this and fix it? Stop it. My friends suggested I try writing a letter first, to see if that would help. It didn’t. I drank. Wrote. Got rid of everything. Prayed. Read books. Used crystals. Meditated. Exercised. Nothing made the incessant thoughts stop.
So at the end of my exhausted rope, I decided to reach out to Jerry to see if we could meet up and talk
For those of you concerned about my husband: I am so beyond grateful and lucky that I have a supportive husband. I communicated, honestly, every step of the way. So, there was no freak out or any jealousy. I was able to walk my individual journey as I needed to, without projected fear from my husband. Lord knows, I had plenty of my own fear. He supported me and told me “to do whatever I needed to do to be happy.”
(Side Note: Marry this person. The one who walks alongside you. You are a couple, but you are still forever you).
So here we are. Amends.
::::
I think my empathy got to me.
I promised a story. A story I have written. But, I think my empathy got to me.
My salacious story about my ex boyfriend. Jerry.
He is the only character that I write about or have written about. I told him when I saw him that he, “was like a cancer in my brain that I just can’t get out.” And it’s true.
Though, the prolific character I write about is me.
Jerry, to me, is like a childhood home, that I can go back to and see myself through stages, memories. To remember who I was and most importantly, how far I have come. Jerry is also someone that I deeply admire and wish I could possess some of the traits he has, of course, mixed with my brain.
The way my recent amends panned out with Jerry was satisfying for me. I was given the space to say sorry. I was able to say all the things that have been on my mind for years. I went in with no expectations, because I knew I would be let down.
Following our meeting, insanity, “normalcy” for some *cough, cough*, ensued.
At the time, I thought, “Wow! This is absolutely crazy and unbelievable. I cannot believe this same reality is being played out again. Nothing has changed.” This reality was my old story. A story of lies and deceit and insanity. It was unbelievable to me, because it showed ME how much I have grown. How much I have changed. How much my old “normalcy” was unfathomable to me. How much self love I have actually have for myself, because I would never accept this now. Most importantly, it cemented for me that I was not the cause of chaos in my life back then. I was most definitely a willing participant, but I was not the master mind. I could never have done more, loved more, accepted more, to get the relationship to be healthy or how I envisioned it. It showed me that although I have a tendency to romanticize the past, because I have a seriously amazing trauma blocker, that Jerry had remained much of the same; rooted in fear.
I have been on the fence about publishing the full story.
Although, I do feel it is illuminating and I know it could serve to help others. I also do feel for Jerry. He sent a snarky message, to which I replied and has gone unanswered, telling me, “he wouldn’t have met with me if he knew I was going to turn it into another story.”
Despite the way I write or depict my truth in my stories, which are about my life, I have nothing but love and respect for Jerry. I mean it. I said it straight to his face. I said, “no matter what you do or who you are, I will always love you.” And thats the fucking truth.
I have no attachment to him or needs met from him.
So with that, how do I write a story about him? How do I reconcile judging someone else’s journey, although slower than mine, who am I to judge it? How do I criticize lying and fear in someone else’s life, when its not mine? How do I put in the spotlight, a girl I have never met, but know better than she can even comprehend?
How do I tell my story, my truth, without telling the whole truth? My empathy has me on the fence. I am hoping to find a way, perhaps a time, to share this story.
Past As Present
I am here again
Reality fades out of focus
The past and present begin to blend
I am ruminating in the memory of what we had
The memory of what I wish we never had
Our lives could have been different
If we would have tried
But we remained the same
Burning scars unto one another with our words
Drowning in our actions
Forgetting all the hope
Forgetting all the promises
That were made to one another
Wrapped up in each other’s words
Tangled in our selfish love
On the verge of forever
But couldn’t mend broken hearts for the better
All your lies and confusion
Simply appeasing my delusion
Until I finally surrendered
A coward when finally it was too much
I escaped a life
So hurt, so unloved
The pain and suffering
Was too much
A new life now
Void of our existence
Do you ponder the memories
“Summer nights under the stars”
Wondering the same as me?
I am filled with regret
For hurting the one I had loved most
I was simply trying to love you
Yet for eight years I wasn’t allowed too close
Too close to see the cause of all your pain and sadness
The fault of all the madness
The pain I caused to you
Was merely a reflection of me
Which took time and distance to see
Please forgive me for the ruins I left behind
In the shadows of the darkness, I have yet to find
Please forgive me for the loss of innocence that made us blind
And keep us held hostage like the ties that bind
I am sorry I wasn’t there for you when things got bad
We were at once, the best friends we had ever had
I am sorry I didn’t have the courage to acknowledge my weakness
Instead, I claimed victory and reveled in your weakness
I am sorry
I hope for you a life filled with promise and peace
I hope for you a love that grows with you
Accepting you for all your imperfections
While relishing and delighting in your restless wonder
One who refuses to surrender
When you push her too far
Knowing she must self-sacrifice
To push you closer to who you truly are
Time has past
Past is time
You are a stranger to me now
Yet, inside of you dwells the heart I once loved so deeply
Inside of me are memories that have yet to fade
They burn in low slow light day by day
From a distance, I will send you my love
And hope that someday “you’ll forgive
Because I know you’ll never forget”
The time for amends is lost
Now there is only room for regret
Hello.
My name is Ashley.
In the sum of a short introduction to those who do not know me – I am an endless ponderer. A searcher for meaning, understanding and truth. I sift. I mull over every detail and incident in my life to satisfy and insatiable appetite for understanding of my responsibility in the world. I am forever restless.
I am at the center of my own world. My experiences are filtered through me. However, my experiences and the way those affect me affect other people as well. My understanding and reaction to those experiences always provide a reaction or projection that can be positive or negative. Therefore, I try to reconcile them.
It would not be far-fetched to say that non-fiction has helped to heal me. I cannot comprise ironically, the words, to describe how healing it has been and how it has changed my views about my experiences and provided me with endless reflection. The process of confronting some of the insane situations that I have put myself through is nothing short of masochistic. It is not a joyful process to relive some of the events that have happened, especially once you begin recalling some of the details surrounding your life which help culminate the experience. Writing has taught me to like who I am and the choices that I have made. Digging through the past has served to educate in a way that in the present I was not attune to. In reliving these stories, I have become confident that the path that was chosen was the right one no matter how I felt about it at the time. I have been able to come to take accountability for my failures and short comings that have affected me and the people that surround me. It has helped me find peace and understanding with those that I have not had peace or understanding for. I have been able to find my voice for everything that I have ever wanted to say – I have been able to speak my truth.
Love and Light
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