2019.08.03 A Love Letter

To S:

Hey you,

I know I already apologized for being surly about your trying to clarify my understanding of who Matt is, and that you already said that you forgive me. But there's more interconnected with that that I can't just put down inside myself.

The easy part is pointing out how out-of-phase my intellectual process is with my emotional core, with the latter dragging considerably behind. So, obviously, it's really difficult, and dangerous, to wrangle with my feelings about the person who is fucking my wife. No matter how it is intellectually possible to imagine something positive, it's an internal dissonance I don't feel a need to fight right now. I know you get that, and I appreciate your understanding.

The hard part is snagging on the deeply-buried mesh of our dynamic of mutual identification. The very high bar of holding you as correctly as possible, for all our relationship, is a task that I've applied myself to with all the powers available to me. You needed it, in an impossible way, and I still struggle with the idea that I did it just-well-enough to convince you to marry me and have a family with me, but ultimately would never be trusted enough. So, maybe your version of Matt is a part of you that you continue to need me to reflect as correctly as possible, according to the love language we hold.

Existing with that love language - my being a polished mirror reflecting nothing tonight - is fundamental to my process of re-making my identity. This piece of my transition is the most delicate fragment.

We've both alluded to how it's possible that our relationship served as a sort of proxy fatherhood attachment process for you. With my purpose of unconditional love and making you safe being the nest you needed, and now after 17 years you need to spread your heart's wings and fly like a simulated teenager creating healthy individuation from a parent. The idea explains well the love we can still hold, and the profound sense of family we share. But it was not my process.

My process was discovering you after I had spent time learning how to love myself. And by feeling my heart turn inside out in an irreversible way, our relationship was - for me - about learning how to love the whole world. Love the world in so profound a way that I discovered I wanted to add to it, by having children. Our marriage was what gave me license to become forgiving, to become altruistic in fact instead of in theory, and to reach out to everyone that is important to me with real connections. You gave me the ability to be a dad, but even before that you gave me more of my own dad before he was gone, along with the ability to hold onto him in a beautiful way through a sense of belonging in the world. In an ever growing way, I've become an understanding and loving man who can listen and appreciate who people really are, and able to make the world around me just a little bit better through that love and understanding.

So here I stand, trying to figure out how to negotiate being hurt by love and being confused by understanding. I know exactly what I should do, but my heart doesn't know how to do it. The compromise is to just do my best, and hold on. But I do find solace in being able to share my feelings with you. In this:

A love letter.

-Clayton