My Etching is Rubbed

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When I was younger, I believed all the songs I’d heard about love, about it being all you need and it keeping couples together, that it was the be-all and end-all.  Then I fell in love and learned love was not all you needed.  That love can hurt and make you go down roads you need not go down.  I became a realist at a young age.

In Captain Sarcastic, I finally found the right balance of head and heart.  I loved him, and still do, completely.  I think of his presence in my life and know his absence would hurt more than a shotgun blow to my chest.  And he’s reliable and dependable and lots of other “-ables” that made him a logical mate for me.

We’ve been together for 10 years now and married for just over five years.  I had to recount those five years three times just now to be sure.  Time has flown by–that’s what Katrina and fertility treatment can do to you.  And now that we have a daughter, that love is in many ways stronger.

But.

Sometimes, the act of being married can wear you down.  Nietzsche wrote

If we live in too close proximity to a person, it is as if we kept touching a good etching with our bare fingers; one day we have poor, dirty paper in our hands and nothing more. A human being’s soul is likewise worn down by continual touching; at least it finally appears that way to us–we never see its original design and beauty again.

One always loses by all-too-intimate association with women and friends; and sometimes one loses the pearl of his life in the process.

I agree with Nietzsche that living close can wear you down, that it can make you forget the original design and beauty of someone.  But I don’t agree that we always lose by all-too-intimate associations, by marriage.  Sometimes?  Definitely.

Things have been rough for me lately.  Mainly due to my own insecurities–worries about money (I will never not worry about money; it’s just the way I am hard-wired) and this impending economic depression; worries about my career and any loss I may have as a result of cutting back due to having Sun (see, money again); worries about my father who was recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer and the fact that I can’t imagine ultimately living in a world without parents; and worries about my relationship with CS.

CS and I have been fighting.  A lot.  Like, every day.  Partly because he dropped a ball that has real impact to us.  And that ball is tied to money.  Ah, money.  You bitch.  And partly because I dropped an equally as financially-impacting ball, too.  And with each ball dropping, my base, my sense of security, the etching of my very soul, gets chinked, rubbed.  And now it has been chinked and rubbed so much, so regularly, that I am raw, exposed.

And we both want to get back to where we were.  We both want to rediscover each others’ original design and beauty.  We love each other, even on our worst days.  But that love isn’t enough to carry us to the finish line.  Nor will me bathing in patchouli fix this.  No; there is no quick-fix to this problem.  There’s work to be done; time needed to heal, rebound, regroup.  But we are up for the challenge, determined to do the work.  And that resolve is there because of our love.

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