The Semi-Fictional Life of Jack and Diane...

I'm playing with a narrative novel.

 I'd like to treat you to a glimpse into the lives of Jack and Diane. Though all writers have to draw from their own pools of experience, this is a fictional work. Here's to the joy of the written word...

I can't believe it's been a year since Jack came back.

After six long months away, Jack returned as emaciated as he had left. Although he'd managed to quickly snag two jobs, juggle them and gain esteem at both, the loneliness of being alone out in Deliverance territory had gotten to him. In his absense, I'd been treated to an average of ten hateful calls a day from him that had usually ended in my tears. I was suffering here in the city, through my own hardships..but hurtful words wore at my soul more than my life broke down my body..

Jack fell into a deep depression there. When he said his parents whom he had supported in the past would not return his calls because he'd asked them for money to buy a pair of workboots, I'd told him to come home. His stubborn father was just angry and his mother was missing her son..

When he called in a drunken stupor and said he hated me and that a doctor said he couldn't have children I'd said, "Doctors say stuff like that everyday to couples who end up getting pregnant...Come home, Jack..."

When he said he'd made a bad business decision and had lost everything, said he was worth more dead to me than alive..said that I wil never know how much he loved me and hung up on me..I cried and left him a frantic message after trying for hours to get him...

" Time heals all our heartbreaks, Jack..." I was speaking from the heart, using concrete examples from my own life.."We have our whole lives ahead of us. No one can do it alone..Come home, Jack."

I hated myself for what we had become.  How many times had I been curled up and crying with my pillow as he cursed my tears..until I learned how to sob quietly. We were virtually children in the eyes of this vast life when we met, Jack and me.. Life is a series of stages and I'd watched him cycle through quite a few. My changes would take years more. My life would weather me gradually, carve me slowly into who I am today. But Jack was living too quickly...bumping upruptly into glaciers and sinking again and again. If burning your candle at both ends signified a need to slow down, Jack's candle had to have been aflame from end to end, shaft and all..

Without a doubt, As man sheds coat after coat in the journey to becoming who he will ultimately be, it is the woman by his side who will feel those growing pains.

As bad as the bad times were, the good times had been electric. We were extreme people, both of us. Maybe that was the flaw in our bond. This is the same man who had bathed me..cooked me meals..made love to me as we held hands..who laid his head on my breast like a child and asked me to kiss him again in that way I did-like I was in love with him. He had been my baby..and my rock...my best friend..and my worst antagonizer.

Through our vicious fighting and our passionate joinings I had come to believe that some people are just drawn together without explanation; they can share nothing in common. The combination of personality and mentality can blur the line between love and hate, logic and lunacy and yet...separate from one another is an unnatural state for them.

I couldn't believe how uneasy I felt the day he appeared again from a black sedan. I didn't feel like the woman he'd left behind. I had forgotten what it was to be a woman in the way I once was with him. His raven eyes didn't have their wild glow. He had a crew cut that ended with a cowlick which for some reason made me think of Ben Afleck. And thankfully, he looked as uneasy as I felt standing there before me with his hands jutting into the pockets of his jeans..He looked like a Southerner in his plaid shirt, said hello with a slight drawl. One thing that always amazed me about Jack was his incredible ability to assimilate. It irked me as much as it intrigued me.

Seeing him again reminded me of the last time he'd been so skinny... During the affair. My own life had fallen down around me when it hapened. Maybe I'd been looking for an escape from it all. I was cursing my circumstances and either crying or biting his head off all the time. I don't blame myself completely as he'd done as much pushing away as I had. I'd grown tired of the 18 hour work days of a truck driver and of watching the toll it took on him. An on and off pain he'd complained about for years became an almost constant one.

Jack seemed to get more irritable everyday until finally the pain had affected every facet of our lives. There was no joy in anything. He distanced himself from me and I suspect it was because the pain had driven him to lows he didn't want me to observe..I felt so alone that I learned to embrace my solitude and I all but disappeared from his life. He was alone when he found out his pain was Crohn's Disease. Alone when he sat across from a doctor who told him he'd have to have surgery. He'd been by himself through the whole demeaning medical procedure..He wouldn't tell his family because he thought the stress of that news would agitate some health conditions they'd had and he recoiled into himself..

I became wrapped up in what were once just diversions for my loneliness. I realzed there was a me beyond the us that was Jack and Diane, and that I had interests and could actually enjoy them myself.

Not to mention I had been somewhat busy..falling in love with someone else...

After Devon came into my life, the Jack and Diane who rarely spent a day apart had already become once a month Jack and Diane. On my birthday, after I'd been scarce for months, Jack had made his way into the house with an old key he held onto, snuck up behind me and "caught me" talking to Devon on the web. I wondered why he even cared enough to stage the whole intrusion.

Jack always hated the fact that I was an avid web surfer. He hated anything that took time away from him. Most of our fights centered around the time I spent with my parents, or at my computer or anywhere but in his bed. I don't measure love in terms of time, but to Jack every moment I wasn't with him was a degree less that I loved him. He's Piscean, that way. I once read that people born under his sign are more spiritual than their secretive, laid back nature would imply; They need love to be the sky above them and the stable floor beneath their feet. I'm a Gemini. I need to be out in the sunlight feeling the world shift and the wind in my hair. I'm unstable, lighthearted, unserious-the opposite of the secure kind of person a Pisces needs to anchor his heart.

Months after my birthday "surprise" Jack said he wanted to be wth someone else. We drove around for hours the night we met to have "the talk". When we lived together,we often stepped out in the middle of the night for drives like these. It's an "us thing". Except at the end of this trip we cried and held each other...and then he was gone. He had left me.

I stalked him for a good week, calling him constantly in tears. I was in shock. Up to this point, I'd never understood not being the center of his world or the world of anyone in my midst for that matter. I had been taking it all for granted. Strangely enough, Jack answered his phone every single time to berate me and argue for a good hour. I wonder how you can fit calls of that length into your Saturday nights when you're cheating..It started to feel as if he were feeding off my misery.  Perhaps I was the volatile object that fueled the affair in the first place.

So I took myself out of the equation. On the seventh night, I let him go.

I was emotionally spent. I hadn't

told him or anyone that I was losing my home. With packing, work and torment from the landllord who was asking me if it would be alright if he could knock down my walls and build around me, I couldn't even sleep to escape my sorrow. I apologized to Jack for being a nuisance andexplained that I had only needed the last week to prove to myself that I had done my part-I needed to know I had fought for us, laid down my pride and bore my soul so that I could move on without regret. I didn't want to lay up anymore thinking of one more thing I could've said..but didn't.

Then I wished him well. He seemed stunned by the cool, calm revelation. Afterall, I was sending him towards a better life we never seemed to be able to have. I had a shameful home with no plumbing to speak of to scotch tape together, no life to offer anyone, not even myself..and now, I was prideless. I hung up and cried alone at my desk the rest of my shift. I walked the long way to the bus after work. It's a desolate stretch of warehouse district I call my trail of tears. I cried all the way home, then cried myself to sleep in the wee hours of the morning.

When Jack called the next evening, I was entertaining myself during a late shift at work, singing online karaoke. I had pretty much figured we had said all we needed to say during our last phonecall. Not knowing what to do or say, I simply continued to sing. The song was Bryan Adam's "Heaven". Had the phone not rang, the ironical meaning in every word would've made me lose it mid-song..but as I sang it to the person it's words were intended for, I was empowered.

"I made a terrible mistake.."

"I know..." was my only response. I had no idea the dove I freed would return so quickly.

That night, Jack turned up in my hallway at midnight. He showed me the respect of not letting humself in. That night was the first time I'd noticed how much weight Jack had lost.. Never in my life had I seen him looking so fragile as he did tonight. Jack was always as solid as he was lean. He now had the painfully ethereal profile of one of those Ambercrombe and Fitch models. I can't bare to look at that particular catalog. The cuts at the hips, the shallow cheeks..It was starvation, not fashion. I never thought I'd se Jack like that.

He wanted to go for a ride again.

Before I could decline, I was wrapped up in a feeble hug. I wanted to push him away, wanted to hate him, wanted his touch to feel dirty like it should, but I wasn't holding an adulterer..I was holding a human being, one who I once promised myself I'd love for better or worse andthat human being was suffering.

My arms slid around his tiny frame and I was gripped by this awful, instant alarm.  It felt as if he might break in my arms. I asked him if he were alright. He'd just smiled dumbly and said, "I'm fine...now".

He hadn't told me at that point that he needed a second surgey.

So..fast forward to the hick coming out of the black sedan. I wasn't so sympathic that night. I heard the shriveled woman inside me wake up on the wrong side of the cave and thank Jack sarcastically for the six months of torture and inconvenient phone sex he had shared via phone. At this point the logical Diane writing this story was floating outside myself just enjoying the show.

It took seeing him again in person to make me realize I wasn't over the whole tramp incident. 3 months later, Jack was drinking Mylanta straight from the bottle. There didn't seem to be a conversation that didn't have the perfect opening for me to bring her up. I was making him miserable and every meeting ended in a screaming match and hurt feelings. I wanted to be the mature woman who, when the disbelieving girls at my office said I should make him pay, shook her head and said, "I have to REALLY forgive, not just say I will if this is going to work".

I wanted to be that woman, alright.. Instead, I stopped answering Jack's calls.

I was officially freaking out and decided that I needed some time alone to do that. During my phone hiatus I accumulated messages. LOTS of them. In 24 hours, Jack had warped my voicemail. "You think I'm just going to give up on us...I'm going to keep calling and calling..until you talk to me..!!".. I ended up in that black sedan sitting beside him, both of us twiddling our fingers..He hadn't given me my time and naturally SHE came up again.

Then something strange happened...

Quietly...Jack began to cry. Jack isn't a man who does that. In a decade, I'd only seen it happen twice. It was the first real sign of remorse I'd seen. I didn't consider him getting drunk in that other state and angrily describing another woman's naughty parts to me until I cried an apology.

"It was a bad experience..Please. Don't punish me anymore...I love you..." He'd said.

Sometimes it's hard to be a good friend. I was reminded for the first time in years of the me I once was. Time and time again, Jack had told me what separated me from other women was that I was his best friend, someone he could talk to. Jack needed that person again. He needed to hear that we were going to make it through this. Standing at this fork in the road, I could be the angry, bitter crone his mistake was making me become..or I could find it inside myself to be me again-the me I admired.

 So I made a completely insensitve wisecrack that didn't fit into the moment one bit and we laughed. Even I was shocked that I could joke about it..but I guess love gives you strength. I loved myself enough to decide that I wouldn't let another woman define who I am. You want to believe that your lover is half of who your are. That night, I had to loosen my figurative deathgrip on the whole soulmate theory. Romance wasn't the only thing I was about. I was my own woman-creative, ambitious and hungry for all that life had to offer, not just to be "Mrs. Jack". I had learned that during our time apart.

 A dialogue started-not between a man and a woman, but between two friends... Friendship was as much as we simply could handle for a while. Jack always did need a lighthearted Gemini like me in his life.

I'm hiding in my toilet with a swiss cheese sandwich as I type this. I can't seem to eat anything these days without finding Jack on the other end of it. One year and 25 pounds later, we're still fighting over my delegation of time...but I grin at the fact that Jack's pants with the 32 waist are starting to cut off the circulation...

Next Up,

Chapter 2: Devon and Diane

10:46 PM - July 10, 2008 - post comment