Three and half years

It's hell being old. They say it's better than the alternative but I have yet to see any credible studies on the matter.

I've known a couple people named Bryan or Brian and I think the man I'm thinking of was named Brian with an i but I knew him mostly under a forum handle unrelated to his actual name, so maybe I'm misremembering that.

Brian was gay, newly out of the closet after divorcing a woman and he ultimately committed suicide. Perhaps it's not so weird that this man I wasn't particularly close to is the person I told once "I would sell my soul to the devil for twenty-four hours without pain."

Memory is state dependent so I don't really clearly remember the three and a half years I was in constant excruciating please kill me NOW pain. During those years, I could remember the birth of my first child, something I normally can't remember.

I have a condition classified as a Dread Disease so I've suffered a lot and eventually figured out my memory isn't anywhere near as keen as I once imagined it was, which likely helps explain my mystifyingly bad reputation as a child.

In my teens and twenties, for several weeks after the fact I could nearly quote verbatim things I had written. But I also likely have always had short term memory issues when feverish and Swiss cheese for brains because memory is state dependent and my physical state is sometimes incredibly impaired.

YouTube seems to never have the movie scenes I want clips of. I want to say there's a scene in the movie War Games where David and Jennifer think the world is about to end and Jennifer says she's still a virgin and I guess is inclined to get laid before she dies. Their romantic moment is interrupted by Dr. Falken showing up in a helicopter and whisking them off to a secure military facility to save the world from David's idiotic mistake of innocently asking a military computer if it wants to play a game.

I once said something on Metafilter to the effect that this resonates with me, if you know you are going to die so disease, pregnancy and social consequences etc are irrelevant, sounds like a good time to get laid. Or something like that.

Metafilter being Metafilter my observation got completely dismissed as utterly unrealistic because NO ONE can POSSIBLY know they will die for certain and have time to get laid. Or something.

Jokes on you, asshole. I wasn't speculating. I was being polite about things I've actually in some sense done while in constant excruciating please kill me NOW pain and waiting to die of my incurable condition.

I don't remember when I met Tom. Sometime after GIS school and before my divorce papers were actually filed. My sons knew a year before GIS school that a divorce was coming. My husband learned it during GIS school and was extremely upset that I denied him his neurotic plans to hide it from the kids until the last minute, then emotionally throw them off a cliff for HIS comfort.

Too bad, so sad, asshole.

Anyway, Tom was a friend of a friend, so he knew before he met me that I was facing a divorce at a time well before this was "public." I wasn't looking for a relationship and had he not happened to already know this detail about my private life, he most likely would have never hit on me.

But he did know and he did hit on me. And we did get involved long distance.

And then like so many internet relationships, he disappeared one day without warning, without explanation, without any reason to believe I would ever hear from again.

And I was still in constant agony and unable to sleep before 7am my time and Americans went offline at 2am my time and people on the East Coast didn't begin getting online again until about 5am my time.

I was suicidal from age twelve until my mid fifties and three hours of agony with nothing to do was unbearable. So I soon was discussing politics and what have you with someone else during those hours, someone who, like Tom, lived in a very different time zone and it was daylight where he was.

This man wasn't a friend of a friend and didn't know ahead of time that I was facing a divorce at some future date though no papers had been filed. We talked platonically for six weeks before that came up in conversation.

I'm clearly an IDIOT because I NEVER expect something like that to lead to men hitting on me though it frequently does. With that information, he changed his tune about what kind of relationship he wanted and I saw no reason to say no.

I was just trying to get to dawn without slashing my wrists while facing a divorce under such terrifying circumstances that I did all in my power to put on my blinders and just get through TODAY because otherwise I couldn't function AT ALL.

So we began passing the time more pleasantly than merely talking about politics and did so for some weeks before Tom showed back up out of the blue and still wanting to marry me.

Tom already had a history of introducing me to his friends hoping I would hit it off with them AND had proven to be rather unreliable. I didn't see any reason to "break up" with this new guy and be monogamously faithful to a man who claimed to want to marry me, couldn't manage to TELL me "I have something going on and won't be around for x amount of time." and whom I had never met.

Rinse and repeat and there were eventually six or seven men keeping me company during the ugly wee hours while I tried to make it to dawn without slashing both wrists.

It rather annoyed me because I made sure to tell ALL of them in no uncertain terms they weren't the only one HOPING a few of them would simplify my life by dumping me or something and instead they said amazingly stupid shit like "I don't care how many there are as long as I'm one of them."

Once in a while I would have a hair-on-fire moment and go "OH! MY! GOD! WHAT AM I DOING!!!! Panic panic." 

This would last about 30 seconds before I would go "Oh, right. I'm trying to make it to dawn without killing myself AND also desperately trying to not think about how I'm getting divorced having been a homemaker for two decades while too sick to work and expecting to have custody of the kids and I'm TERRIFIED. That's what I'm doing. I have no clue what these fools are doing. I've tried like hell to let them know I'm trash and you clearly don't want me."

Navarre was the last of these men and as my pain subsided and the amount of prescription drugs I was on ramped down, one by one I dumped all the others because I got tired of their shit until he was last man standing.

That taught me SOMETHING, I don't know what exactly, but it made something clear in my mind about what I needed from a man to have any hope of having a happily monogamous relationship in spite of what my father and brother did to me.

It's apparently useless knowledge for actually sorting MY problems out, but that's the story behind that and it shaped a lot of my policies and you should know that if you have any hope of getting any value out of my writing.

I'm basically the most uptight white bitch ever in the history of the universe who spent years certain I would die because doctors were telling me "People like you don't get well." and Dr. Falken failed to show up to interrupt my plans to have a good time before I died under circumstances where there shouldn't be any consequences for it.

And, oops, I lived. 

I don't really care what your opinion is of me. You're probably an asshole.

But I do hope to write stuff about social stuff that I hope makes a difference to a few people and I don't think I can do that while trying to sweep this under the rug and pretend that merely being in agony for years got me over my hangups, honest!