a few days ago i read the folllowing in remembrance of things past, that love and its inverse, jealousy, are still there,

"...until time has enabled one to regain one's
composure and to learn one's successor's
name without wilting."

i smiled when i read that because i knew that when i learned the name of b's new love i would still wilt. and, of course, i was angry at her and myself.

i realized today how jealous of and in love with her i still am because i saw her with a wedding band on and felt the blood rush out of my head. i had not known. although i knew that she had bought a house with him.

it has been a year and a half since our breakup and it's still there. i have never had this before. in that year and a half i have told myself that i was not in love with or jealous of her, i have written it but as i was doing those things i was also aware that if i had been put under hypnosis my deepest soul would have acknowledged what my conscious was only dimly aware of and in denial about.

i have less jealousy in me than any person i know. i suppose the converse of that must also be true, that i have less love in me. but though i have been willing to admit to myself and others that i have many other faults, temper, pride, a mean streak, i have never been able or willing to admit to anyone that i am jealous.

i think that must be because of my feeling of abandonment by my brother, and surrogate father, mike when i was a teenager. i loved him more than he loved me and at an unconscious level i think maybe i decided i wasn't going to let that happen again.

i've been married twice, in love three more times, and in all cases but this one with b, i was the one to have broken it off. to be more accurate, i was the one who, by infidelity, caused the relationships to end. there's a difference there. the one is direct and active, the other is passive aggressive.

maybe that's not entirely true. this one, with b, i tried to break off more than once but she balked and i remained. even the final breakup was a completely mutual decision. but i was still in love with her and i've never gotten over it.

she was in love with me too for a short while after the break up but within two months had fallen in love with her now husband. that that "bothered" me is self-evident but does so on so many levels, some of them completely unrelated to a proper definition of love/jealousy that a complete discussion of the subject is, as they say, "beyond the scope" of this writing. but that i was not in love with the others when the break occurred and was still in love with b when it did, is correct.

it's incongrous to me, but quite typical i'm sure in the psychology of these things, that i should still be in love/jealousy and still know (1) that the break up was occasioned by my refusal to marry and have a family with her (2) that marriage would never have worked out between b and me. i was too old and exhausted from two failed marriages to embark on number 3. (3) most importantly, i had my children, long away from their majority, and it was just not possible for me to start a family with b when i had one already. (4) i have never sought contact with her, much less a reconciliation, since the break up. in fact i have rebuffed repeated efforts by her to stay in touch.

(5) too, i came to see so many faults in b in the last year's death throes that i had serious doubts about whether i could stay with this new person i was discovering. it was so disconcerting, literally at times breathtakingly so, that i wondered after the breakup and now, whether i ever really knew her all that well.

when i first met b, as her supervisor, i did not trust her. as a supervisor one becomes attuned to faux respect and friendship. i was so suspicious of her on this score that i documented every interaction we had so that she could not later say that i had not adequately supervised her (a complaint that has been made of me). but once our relationship started that all ended and i NEVER, with anyone else felt more secure and more loved.

so even with all of the five above--all truly true--i guess it is the last, the feeling, that trumps them collectively.

i am a difficult, eccentric, "enigmatic,"--in one of my friend's words--man. i have always run up against situations, with women or in male friendships, where i was being myself and insouciantly thought i was being completely transparent, only for one of those people to say something that startled me at their misunderstanding. it's not necessarily that what they said was negative or critical, it was just such a completely incomplete understanding of me that i was taken aback and, as is my wont, i withdrew.

for a person like that, the way that b told me that she loved me was the most powerful thing that had ever been said to me:

"you told me never to say this, so i won't. i'll
write it. i love you benjamin harris, whoever
and whatever you are, i love you."

the blood rushed out of my brain on that occasion also.


i know the distinction, made by nietzsche and others, between the mind and emotions and the sometime irreconcilability of the two.

proust has also greatly helped me with the central point of remembrance that our memories are not of one life with different stages but really of completely different lives, of different people, ours and the others we "know." i am still in love with the b i knew from august 10, 2001-august 9, 2002. that is a different person than who b is now, and has been for the last two years. i am haunted by the thought that even that person was a chimera, that i really never knew b. but i am still in love with that person and i still grieve the loss.

but damn, even understanding all of tha i still would have "thought" that i wouldn't be so vulnerable to the feelings i had today.

and i still don't know his name.


-benjamin harris