On The Street Where You Live

Driving through beautiful, charming Fells Point and Canton after a quick trip to Blockbuster to procure these treasures, I asked Sarah to try to find Gordon's new street. I knew it was near my job and hemmed in by a couple of other avenues I know of. We happened upon it easily enough, though our orientation was too far south of where his new digs are. I wasn't too concerned with finding the exact house and doing a stalker's driveby. I know I'll see it for myself upon an invitation to do so. I just wanted to place it in some kind of geographic context in the meantime.

My conversations with him of late (on the phone or over e-mail) have an increasing sense of wholeness to them. In addition to openness, I have also been practicing honesty. I told him that my anger is the primary reason I'm in counseling. I do not want to be an enraged, damaging person to the people in my life. He shared with me that I don't seem like an angry person to him, serious, but not angry. I never want that to be part of his image of me. I don't want to take my pathological struggle with rage into a relationship with him, or the children I hope to have someday. I know the pain that comes from having an angry parent.

I can relate to my stepfather because of my struggle with the very beast in whose clutch he still lives. I can have compassion for him. Sometimes when I think about him I can't bear the thought of how lonely he must be. He is not yet 53, and he has nothing to show for his life but a room he rents, a debilitating sickness, and 3 wounded women whose lives he bent up, whose souls he terrorized. He is not the reason for everything that is wrong with us, but a significant amount of the damage is his to claim. I hurt for him that he has no one around him, flanking him, because the only thing he ever inspired was fear. or disdain.

I think of him as a little boy, with the world ahead of him, everything possible. I know he did not imagine this for himself. But this is what he has sown, so whatever he thought might come is of little consequence. You can only bleed the ground so many times before it stops yielding even weeds.

I need to forgive him, and I will use my ability to sympathize with his feelings of powerlessness as the basis for that. I don't need to have a relationship with him, but I have got to stop living my life trying to get payment for the terror I felt as a child. That punitive streak has made me the same as what I fear.

I want to get on with my life unhaunted. Free.

Free to love Gordon, whose friend I am becoming. Gordon, who is starting to trust me. Gordon, whom I've not yet hurt with a cutting remark or icy, soulless stare.