This morning, I woke up and realized that it’s been about a week since I sat down or had a day filled with the good kind of nothing.  Along with being caught up in the excitement of election night and news coverage of the events of the past few days, I’ve been working through a host of Exster-related minutiea and processing all the muck that all those tiny things combining to form a massive whole drummed up.  

I’ve likened it to food poisoning or the after effects of my twenty first birthday.  Maybe “psychological poisoning” or “life hangover” would be good descriptions, but those seem too severe.  Regardless of what name I finally tag onto the ramblings and rages I find myself indulging in as I mow through the last of the unpacking, it was like a hastily, but sturdily, constructed dam had finally cut loose and busted wide open, making a huge mess of things, but with the deluge getting rid of some unhealthy underbrush and unearthing some really great stuff.  I think I worked through an entire year’s worth (or more) of anger in one week.  No phones got crushed (ha!), nothing got thrown.  I was actually functioning quite well on the surface, or at least I hope I was - - I’d hate to know that I’d actually been jotting around town with my face looking as crazed as I felt.  Scaring people isn’t my hobby.

I’m having a hard time thinking of how to describe how random this series of little moments has been, actually.  Have you ever had a new key made, that doesn’t quite want to work the first few times, and the fact that you know it should makes the process more frustrating? The whole time you‘re getting more and more angry at the key for not working, cursing while hoping the neighbors don’t hear you, and knowing that you‘re being a little silly by getting so mad because the blasted key really is going to work eventually - are you with me?  Okay, that made no sense whatsoever.  Some little thing will happen, or I’ll see or read a thing that’s seemingly minor and perhaps totally unrelated, but I’ll get get a little angry....that’s not going to work, either.  Lets try the example approach.

Barney, the Bush’s adorable little black terrier, bit a reporter recently, and I watched the video yesterday.  What might that have to do with Exster?  Well, nothing - not really.  Enter the random:  Barney’s a Scottie.  Scottie is the name Exster gave himself on a “networking” site I found out he’d been playing on, that led to the discovery he’d been “networking” for the duration of our relationship.  But it wasn’t the memory of those discoveries that made me so angry - it was recalling something he said when I confronted him about his details.  His profiles said he was a parent, carried on about it, in fact.  But nowhere did they say he was married.  He wrote a blog entry referring to an upcoming trip to Hawaii, his first (can you say, “oooOOOOoooooo“?), but didn’t say why he was going.  (I am currently present with a strong desire to slap the snot out of him....) He was going to Hawaii to marry me.  And when I confronted him, asking why he could say “parent” but not “married“, he slipped up, and said, “I knew I would always be a parent.”  

Okay, multiply that incident times about two hundred and seventy three, and you'll have an idea of what this week's been like.  Just writing about that episode has me fantasizing about vice grips and wanting to send him snarky text messages.  (Not going to!) But as low as things have been, and as many times as I've been surprised at the intensity of negative feelings I can have towards him, I find that I'm left with a comforting detachment every time I move through something like what I just described.  The bad's always offset by the realization that I don't have to live the life he swindled me into anymore (more on that later - I cannot currently afford a new MacBook, so don't want to risk throwing this one like a shiny, white Frisbee), there's a huge sense of relief over having "gotten out".  The happiness I described in my last entry, the celebration of being able to breathe and move again has sort of tapered into acceptance - the new is wearing off, leaving me with an even greater sense of distance and perspective.  My marriage is starting to seem more and more like a dream, and I feel like I've moved closer to (dare I say it?) closure by moving through this week.

In spite of the feeling of having moved on such a tremendous amount, however,  I would still very much like to bop him upside the head.  Perhaps finally achieving closure will mean that feeling has passed, or it might mean I accept that I will always feel that way.  After this week, I'm honestly cool with either option.