I’m going to tell you a story I’ve told you before, but this time better.

Once upon a time, I was madly in love with a man named Matt and I married him. By madly in love, I mean I loooooooooved him. I mean I made him shirts with puffy paint and rhinestones that said “The King.” When he got home from doing whatever, I would yell, “The King is home!” I mean I worshipped the ground he walked on.

I felt like he was the front and I was the back. I felt like it was him and me against the world. I felt like the fact that he was such a difficult person was perfect because I could dedicate myself to him and give him what he needed. With me, he could really let loose.

Was he deserving of my love and grandiose demonstrations of adoration? Hell the fuck no. Yet deserving or not, I really did love and adore him. After years and years have passed, I can say that with certainty. I really loved Matt.

But that’s not what this story is about. This story is about the pain I went through when he was gone…the first time— in 2010. It was not until 2014 that I left him for good. That time came with its own pain too, albeit very different. In 2014 it was the sad pain of resignation and acceptance that my love for Matt had long since died.

That 2010 flavor of pain, on the other hand, had nothing to do with acceptance. It was about a the loss of love that was very much still alive inside me at the time of our (literally) violent separation.

Matt and I separated in January 2010. I reached out to him every single day thereafter for five months to tell him I loved him. Some people told me that wasn’t the way to “win” him back. Others, the wiser ones, told me I shouldn’t pour all my energy into trying to win back the love of a man who smashed my face into an air conditioning vent and threw coffee mugs at my head.

But it didn’t matter what anyone said because I loved him, goddammit. And, as I said before, I really did. After a while, it became clear that my declarations of love weren’t working in terms of reeling him back in. This didn’t matter, though, because I loved him regardless of whether or not he loved me back. That was an important realization for me at the time.

So, I decided to sit alone with my love for him. But you know me and you know I don’t sit still with love. I like to express it. Even if there’s no apparent audience (as with this blog). As I’m pretty sure I’ve said before, love, for me, is an action.

Anyway, that’s when I started making things. I made that damn mobile of my stupid wedding vows. And painting things. I painted the same flowers from my wedding invitation video on the wall of my apartment (see pics below). I campaigned for my love by wheat-pasting the word “LOVE” all over the Montrose neighborhood.

The saddest thing I did was sit up all night every night looking out the sliding glass door of that shitty apartment, the one I showed you that day after we ate at Empire Cafe and went to the Rothko Chapel. I would stay up waiting to see if he’d ride by on his bicycle or drive by in his truck to check on me. He never did. Not that I saw, anyhow. My heart remained nonetheless committed to loving him.

In June I finally started going out a bit and soon met an artist named Willy who quickly moved in with me in my shithole apartment. Then, in the dead of night, as I lay asleep with my new boyfriend, who also made claims of love for me, Matt came a’knockin’.

Willy who?

Matt took me back to the house we bought to spend our marriage in. He wasn’t sleeping in our bed. In fact, our bed was gone. He had moved our mattress into the living room. He had spray painted his graffiti tag, “SHADO”, throughout the place. He had taken to throwing knives into the drywall. There was a huge cockroach he referred to as “Sam” living in the kitchen.

I should have been horrified. Instead, I was just happy to be there. I was happy when he kissed me too hard. Happy when he made a big deal about the size of his dick. Happy when he pushed me down on the gross mattress in the living room and put it inside me. I was not happy when, in the middle of grudge-fucking me, he reared back and punched me in the face.

No, I wasn’t happy about that. Thusly, I pretended it didn’t happen. But I don’t remember many details of what happened after that. I know that Matt stalked about rambling about our falling out and how I’d betrayed him by calling the cops on him for body slamming me. And I apologized for doing that. And he took me back to my shithole apartment early the next morning where Willy may or may not have been waiting—I don’t remember.

Willy did break up with me, understandably. I just don’t remember when or where it happened. And I didn’t see Matt again until August when he picked me up and took me to have the waiver of service for his divorce petition notarized. And I didn’t see him again after that for another year, when he came back and invited me to move home for good. Where I would have stayed, for good, if he hadn’t have done a lot of weird shit like shoot holes into the mattress on my side of the bed….and If he hadn’t told me that he wanted me to leave on a regular basis.

So, that’s the story I wanted to tell. There are, of course, other things that happened during this time period that are related to the pain I felt over losing Matt. Those things do not support the thesis of this blog entry, though, which is this:

The way I feel now is similar to how I felt in 2010. I love you like I haven’t loved anyone since Matt. My love for you is very much still alive and active in the absence of its object. It takes a lot for my sort of love to die.

A lot.

Here are the flowers I painted on the wall.