Thirty Five: Catastrophic
It’s one thing to realize you’re broken and to have no clue how to mend yourself. It’s a completely different battle to see the exact thing you know you need to fix yourself in front of you everyday and to not be able to do anything about it. It’s frustrating and almost creates this sense of hopelessness- like nothing can ever get any better.
It’s been four years… four agonizingly long years. For four years I’ve been repressing all this passion for Gabrielle Carter and yet it still persists. When I first got married I really believed that in time I would move on from Gabrielle- that I would fall out of love with her like she insisted I do. I believed that if I tried hard enough I could fall head over heels for my wife and be the model husband that I wanted so badly to be. I fantasized about making real, passionate love to my wife and waking up in the morning and seeing the woman I was happy to be spending the rest of my life with. I took Natalie out to fancy dinners and spent romantic, summer nights with her lying on the roof of my car and looking at the stars. I bought us expensive wines and mounted our wedding picture in the center of our living room. And yet no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t force myself to love her the way she needed to be loved- the way a husband should love a wife.
You see, I love Natalie. I love her for being one of my best friends, my protector and comfort, and most of all, the mother of my children. She is very good to me even though I don’t offer much in return. When I get cold, she gets warmer. When I push her away, she holds me tighter. I mostly appreciate her unconditional love. I sometimes resent it because it reminds me how guilty I feel about loving another woman. Sometimes it’s smothering.
Maybe I shouldn’t feel guilty, because it’s not my fault I love Gabrielle. I have good intentions… intentions to treat my wife well and love her deeply. I do not mean to lust after Gabrielle, to picture her face when I’m sleeping with my wife, to think about her whether she’s in the next room or she’s miles away. I fight my love for her, but it prevails. My therapist told me that I should not necessarily feel guilty about my love for Gabrielle, but should I betray my wife and act on it then I should feel guilty. I’d like to think I wouldn’t cheat on my wife- not even with Gabrielle Carter. That’s just piggish.
But I don’t know what else to do. It’s eating away at me inside. I’ve kept this secret for years. I’ve hardly told a soul that I am still helplessly and hopelessly in love with Gabrielle. But it’s been too long and I’m convinced if I keep this up, I will not make it much longer. There is a hole in my heart that gets larger each day and eventually my heart will be nothing but a hollow pit. It gets harder to force a smile with each day. I have a family of twelve surrounding me, thirteen if you count my brother’s fiancée who he’ll marry in one month, and yet I feel so lonely. I am the only one who understands how this is consuming me and so I am an island- a lost island not yet discovered.
I tried to tell Zac about this once because I know he understands true love… he has been in love for the past five years of his life. I told him that I love Gabrielle in a way I could never love Natalie and hiding my love is driving me insane. Zac said it was selfish to feel that way. I have a perfectly good life and he said that I need to just move on- force myself to get over it for everyone’s sake. I almost broke down crying right there in front of him and you know what he told me?
“Taylor, this isn’t a tragedy. You act like you’re coping with a death or something else equally catastrophic! So you married the wrong girl… you didn’t wind up with your first choice. Big deal… you still have a beautiful wife and beautiful children. It could be worse, Tay. You need to just get over this for the whole family’s sake.”
And perhaps that’s the problem. I married Natalie for everyone else and it made me miserable. Maybe I have no other choice but to be selfish. I know that I don’t deserve the privilege of being selfish, but maybe I have no other option at this point. I may perish if I have to go an entire life time drowning in Gabrielle Carter.
I thought it would be easier to get over her if I didn’t have to look at her everyday. After I got married, I instantly regretted asking Gabrielle to come home and live with us. I was happy for her… thrilled that she was getting to experience a normal family, delighted by her friendship with my Mom, and proud to know that I had helped change her life for the better. But at the same time seeing her every morning… every evening… it was hard. We finally got back into touring… first the acoustic tour, then electric, and finally our greatest hits tour- delicately titled- “The Live and Electric Tour”. How creative.
With each tour I thought being away from Gabrielle would help me move on- that I might become the man so devoted to his wife that he never even thought about other women- the man I tried to pretend to be. But it only got worse. During the first two tours I realized that not having Gabrielle around at all was far harder than standing by falling in love with her all over again each and every day. I craved everything about her- right down to her organic fiber bars and her ugly, crocheted handbags. She was a breath of fresh air to me that filled my body and without her I was gasping for air.
Before the final tour- last August- I told her everything I’d been repressing for so long. I told her that my feelings for her hadn’t changed other than the fact that I loved her even more than I did before. I told her that I couldn’t live without her- that I couldn’t go on pretending. I told her that I didn’t want to be so hopelessly in love with her- that I wanted to be free from it all- but my love persisted. I asked her to run away with me… for a day, a week, a month. I no longer cared about the consequences. I just needed her.
I laid my heart before her and she turned me down. She refused me and my longing. She broke my heart when she said she no longer loved me at all. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t believe her- that she was lying to me like she had so many years ago. But as time passed since last August, I came to realize that perhaps she had fallen out of love with me. She had done what I hadn’t been able to do. She moved on, I suspected.
During the end of the Live and Electric Tour things got really bad. I hadn’t seen Gabrielle in months. When the family came out to go to shows, she stayed behind attending school. She didn’t call once. Before our confrontation in August we had been close. All those years that I lusted after her, I had pretended to accept my friendship with her and we spent those years growing not as lovers- but as friends. Suddenly I was left without even that friendship to hold me together. She was furious with me for breaking our promise and for pursuing her, and quite frankly, I was pissed at her for turning me down so harshly. Friendship was impossible. Still, I wanted as much of Gabrielle as I could possibly have and suddenly I had nothing. Depression hit hard. I think I’ve been depressed for awhile now… years even. That’s what my therapist has suggested, at least. But suddenly it was so much more suffocating. Everything made me sad.
When I returned home from the Live and Electric Tour my new therapist told me I should be focusing my energy on spending time with my children and being close with my wife. I did that some, but I mostly spent all my time trying to get closer to Gabrielle. She refused. She pushed me away- avoided me like the plague. During her Christmas break she spent the entire time surrounding herself with my siblings- sledding with Zoe, taking Mackenzie to the movies, shopping with Jessica and Avery. She made sure she didn’t have even a moment left for me. On weekends she’d come home and spend half of the time out with my Mom and the other half of the time working on school work. When I did find her alone in a room, she’d make an excuse and hurry out.
I had no choice but to start harassing her. I needed her to notice me and I needed to interact with her so negative interaction was all I could seem to achieve. I started making cracks at her outlandish style, her strange eating habits, and her feminist, left-winged ideas. I started debates with her at the dinner table about abortion and gay marriage. I challenged her beliefs and her goals. She took notice. She began talking to me to tell me to insult me back or to defend her position. I wasn’t proud of my behavior, but Gabrielle was the one thing I needed to survive- more than water, more than air, more than a roof over my head. So I took what I could get.
May 2006. Things weren’t looking good. We were bickering, cold towards each other, and downright resentful. I was back to repressing my love- only suddenly I was masking it through harassment. Somehow, it almost made my intoxicating love for Gabrielle a bit easier.