Death Throes
Excerpt: Paladin looked aggrieved, but did it anyway. He went to leave my room without hardly having spoken a word to me. I followed him out, as I needed to pee.
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"Something is burning," I said. The stench in the hall was very obvious.
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Paladin moved slowly, like he was suspended in syrup. I couldn't understand what could be burning.
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I prepared two "salads to go" for Hibiscus in addition to our lunch. The "salads to go" consisted of greens, toppings, and dressings already mixed within a plastic salad tub, secured by two rubber-bands.
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I didn't make lunch for Paladin, as he preferred all of his greens washed before eating them, and also stated that he preferred his greens in smoothies rather than in salads. Not to say that I never made food for Paladin anymore; I had brought him frothed goat milk with powdered stevia, vanilla, and cacao to help him wake up and get laundry started that morning.
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Hibiscus spent some time with me reading side-by-side Dragon by Steven Brust. We'd already read Taltos and Yendi together, reading silently side-by-side. And then he was off on a five-hour drive to the east for a business meeting he would be attending the following morning. I'd have him back by the following night, but still, he traveled an awful lot for work.
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Maybe Paladin and I can spend some time together, I thought.
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Paladin brought a load of clean laundry into my room. I had just finished writing to my dad.
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"Is it possible you could do some lymphatic work on me?" I asked. I didn't really want to ask him, but my left ear was most certainly going to break-out quite painfully. I could feel it creeping up beneath the surface and I was none too pleased about it.
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I shouldn't have eaten the honey with sesame seeds, I thought to myself as I pressed my ear. Paladin looked at me helplessly. He didn't want to do it. He didn't feel up to it. He never did.
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He came up to me and started pressing on the area below my ears on the lymph valve there. It hurt like blazes. Why me? Why do I get this crazy build-up despite my very clean lifestyle? It doesn't make any sense. Am I really so damaged?
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My stomach began to hurt as he pressed. It had already vaguely hurt before. Now I felt nauseated besides.
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"Can you do the armpit stuff? I think that was the part that Hare did that made such a difference in the lumps in my breasts," I said.
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Paladin looked aggrieved, but did it anyway. He went to leave my room without hardly having spoken a word to me. I followed him out, as I needed to pee.
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"Something is burning," I said. The stench in the hall was very obvious.
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Paladin moved slowly, like he was suspended in syrup. I couldn't understand what could be burning. When cooking with the pressure cooker, why would anything burn? It had timers and was only a few months old. It had been working well. Why does he move so slowly? Why isn't he running to find out what is burning? What if the house was on fire?
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I opened the stairwell window and finally Paladin passed me and moved down the stairs. He approached the pressure cooker and put his hand on the lid. He turned it off. Meanwhile, I opened another window and turned on the stove vent on "high."
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Then Paladin turned away from the pressure cooker, suddenly moving very quickly. He closed the distance between himself and the trampoline. He picked it up and threw it. He turned around, ready to throw something else. I poised, ready to intervene if needed. He closed his fists again, thinking better of overturning the table. He banged his fists on the basement door instead. I cringed, hoping he wasn't in any real danger of hurting the door.
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Don't you dare hurt Hibiscus's house, I thought, feeling my own anger rise in me as he banged. Then, just as abruptly, he stopped and stomped up the stairs.
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I turned about, taking stock of the situation. I noted mushrooms on the counter. I moved the trampoline back.
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Standing there in my own anger, breathing in the burn-fumes, I huffed and went up the stairs after him. I wanted a bath, but the fumes had already permeated the bathroom. I opened more windows, went into my bedroom, and turned my air filter to "turbo."
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It figures, I thought. I asked him to help me with my backed up lymph system and as a direct result, he lost track of some creative cooking project he'd begun and created fumes for my body to deal with, potentially undoing any good he did. I felt disgusted, and now my stomach really hurt.
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Why did I even ask? I asked myself, laying on my bed and holding my stomach. Because I felt desperate and didn't think to ask Hibiscus before he went, I answered myself. Yet I wasn't satisfied with the answer.
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That morning I'd noticed looking at my log that I'd hardly spent any time at all with Paladin in the past few days. It wasn't that we couldn't. We just weren't. He was right there in the room next door to me, day after day, and yet hardly did we enter each other's rooms - or lives.
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Sure, he'd been there Friday to play a card game with Hibiscus, Polecat, Otter and I. And sure, he'd come along for errands on Sunday when Hibiscus and I were going. And yes, he'd helped loosen some dirt on Saturday when I was working outside on digging a drainage trench. He'd been there at Sanctuary of Dance on Thursday. He'd been there when Lyssa visited on Wednesday and we'd played a game of ethical quandaries together with her and Hibiscus. He'd driven me to my dance classes on Tuesday.
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So yes, we were in each other's lives. But where was the connection? Where was that deep fondness that made one feel warm and fuzzy? Why did he trigger me negatively so very often, and hardly have anything kind to say to me?
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Does he still actually love me? I wondered. Or is he just attached and uncertain what to do with himself anymore?
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It was becoming increasingly hard to believe he still loved me. I'd told him I'd fallen out of love with him over a week ago and he'd hardly responded. No change in behavior, no attempts to do anything romantic. No suggestions to go out walking together, or to play a game together. He hadn't come to me with his feelings, or inquired more deeply about mine.
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I had the eerie feeling that I had left him and he had simply surrendered, just like that.
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Monday evening with Hibiscus I had said, "You're in a unique position to view what being in a relationship with me is like when it is in its death throes." My own words fluttered through my mind over and over again: death throes.
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Hibiscus pulled me closer and squeezed me reassuringly. I frowned. He wasn't particularly startled by my choice of words, and yet I was. It was like there was something obvious to both of them, and yet so hard for me to swallow that I just wasn't getting it - even from my own lips.
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Yet, Tuesday afternoon, with a cloth over my face to extra-filter the air, my filter set to "turbo" and my stomach bulging, bloating and aching before me, I felt distinctly disillusioned. Or simply reminded of what I already knew but didn't like to face.
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God, isn't there someway to repair this?
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. . .
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By an odd turn of coincidence, I found myself reading an entry I wrote almost exactly a year ago, March 15th 2015. In the writing I was reflecting on polyamory, and how I had trouble imagining loving someone else as I loved Paladin. I was reading the trilogy When Women Were Warriors, which had a strong love theme that carried me into many reflections about love.
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Reading my own past writing made me feel a mix of despair and hope. I was so worried about losing him, and that was a whole year ago. We've had some deep experiences since then. All is not lost, I thought.
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As I got to the end of the post I felt an interesting twinge of emotion. I was wrong, I thought. I wasn't going to just lose Paladin and thereby lose the greatest love of my life. No, I'd wait until I was thoroughly more in love and more impressed with my relationship with someone else first.
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It had actually already been a running theme in my head all week: Hibiscus is my favorite. I've finally reached the point where he is my favorite all around. Hibiscus was even getting better at helping me through emotional processes than Paladin was, although, I knew that was mostly due to Paladin's increasingly levels of anxiety.
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It was while I was having these somber thoughts, breathing through a cloth, that Paladin came into my room and sat down.
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He looked at me sadly. "I'm sorry," he said.
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I just looked at him.
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"I'm sorry for making it smoky," he said, "And for losing my temper."
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I remembered something Hibiscus had suggested around a month ago and said: "I think, since you lost your temper, I'm supposed to give you a back massage."
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Paladin began laughing. He almost sounded like he was crying as he laughed. He dropped his head into his hands and I almost expected his laughter to turn to tears, but it didn't.
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"I have to pee," I said. I got up to go pee. I checked the air. It didn't smell smoky anymore after all. I said as much to Paladin and he closed some windows.
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Maybe our relationship will never be what it was, and maybe it'll never be like the relationship I have with Hibiscus, or with anyone else, I thought, but it isn't so hopeless.