Forever Homes

My parents' home is unbearably hot.

It is my parents' home now. It has not been mine for a while. I don't know if I've mentioned this.

There was a time, when I first moved to Austin, that I had no real home. I wanted to come back to Houston all the time, but that was because I missed​ having people. I missed my friends. I missed the guy who said we'd get married at the time. I missed having a social circle I could depend on, people I could talk to, a support system.

And then I found Myex. 

And he wasn't home at first. 

But when I wake up confused in the middle of the night I think I'm with him, at home. I never think I'm at my parents house. My apartment is more similar to their house at this point, but I look around and expect to see a door I can enter to find him playing games in the living room. A game on one side and whatever show would keep me up on the other. Sometimes I'd be angry. Sometimes I'd keep myself awake to spend the time with him, my home. Sometimes I just wanted to sleep next to it, my home.

Now it's him and his daughter. She was so far away before, but she's become a new addition. Like a neighbor's house I bought out and built a walkway to. I'm quite grateful for this. She held my hand. She reached out for me and I felt secure. It's probably supposed to go the other way around. She wants to share things with me. She's going to stay with me for a week. Now my biggest fear is not just losing him, but compounded into losing this expansion of my home.

My parents' house has a lot of mistakes. There are light switches and doorknobs that are counter intuitive. Things that don't match because my father put a lot of it in and he's handy, but not handy enough. There's spots of paint that don't match. They cover cracks I should probably be concerned by. My mother's garden is stuffed to the brim. It's beautiful in it's excess. She planted flowers, herbs, vegetables. I gave her tomatoes but the birds ate them and apparently they only last a season. When she's better I'll give her avocados, although the climate is probably wrong for them.

Myex told me recently that he didn't leave because he didn't want to disappoint me. I wonder if that's love. He wanted to try to make things work. I wonder how hard he tried. He wanted me to love him the same way he loved me. I wonder what kind of love that was. It wasn't an easy love. I know I'm not easy to love. 

He is. 

And people love him deeply. 

People love him desperately and in a way that changes your heart. It's like an infection. It makes your brain swell and destroys rational thought. He turns women into zombies who feed on his affection. It's an incredibly easy and incredibly destructive love. I wonder if I love him in this unrealistic way. In this gnawing, decaying way. If it's senseless. He says our love is one sided, and I feel it too, but we feel it in different directions. I feel like I might lose myself to him, he feels like he contorts himself for me. It is not an easy love. Realistically neither of us is willing to give up enough.

But with her in tow I might be. I could negotiate away my bitterness, my resentment, my natural disposition to fight. With them both on the line, now, I could be more willing to change. He says he wants to be a better person, too. He makes the same mistakes. I make the same mistakes. Ours is not an easy love. Not like Stosbet and him.

She was easy. She was accommodating. She loved him in a way I would consider suffocating. She was able to give him all the attention he wanted that I refused to adequately provide. And now it's not something he wants. It's probably still not something I'm willing to give. I'm trying to stave off the illness. I want my affection to be real. If I give up things I don't want it to be things I shouldn't. I don't want to be her. I don't want to be them. I'd rather be Cassidy. The one that walked away. The one that calmly assessed this wasn't enough for her and left.

I was watching a movie called Everybody Loves Somebody, I think, and there was a line I liked. "People move out of their first homes." This isn't his perspective. Maybe that's the kind of love he has. But I couldn't have been his first home. He is buying a house and he calls it his forever home. I fear he is mine. I fear it and I want it. This conflict probably drives all the conflict. It probably drove all the conflict before. I don't know if I truly want things to work out because I don't know if I trust things to work out.

He says he doesn't love like I love, and I'm not sure what that means. He has a new girl and I wonder if he loves her, but he says he doesn't love like people love, so I wonder if that will feel like enough for her. He says it's important that he makes his partner happy and he's never been able to make me happy. He could make Stosbet happy, but that was easy to do. The things she needs to hear are simple. Theirs was an easy love. She is easy to love. I wonder if this new girl is easy to make happy.

The movie also said love doesn't have to be simple, but it should be easy. I agree. It would have to get easier. A home is no good without a good foundation and ours has always been slanted. 

I've always been waiting for it to crumble. 

It did and now I wonder if I should move rather than invest in repairing the damage. Foundation repair can be very expensive.

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