Cedar City and What Happened There, and also a story about a Suicide
This won’t be interesting. Maybe don’t read it. It will be self-involved. It will be depressing.
But I feel like writing instead of messing around with pattern digitizing, that being a process that feels like it continues to not ever be finished. Wait, both of those things feel that way; writing and pattern digitizing.
Oh well, I mean that’s the nature of most things I do in life, and I guess I don’t actually mind too terribly.
By the way I had a surgery a little over two weeks ago, and it went kind of wrong. It was supposed to be a simple hernia repair and it was not supposed to involve my colon, but it did involve my colon; specifically removing a piece of my colon which had gotten trapped in the hernia, which was not supposed to happen, especially since there had been no real indicator that the bowel was trapped in the hernia, so the surgery took about three times longer than it was supposed to take. And I had to stay in the hospital for five days instead of less than five hours.
But I went to the doctor yesterday for a follow-up and everything currently seems okay, despite the things that went kind of wrong. I’m still in pain some of the time, the recovery will be slow, going to the bathroom is sometimes a bit of an ordeal now, but I guess I don’t want to write anymore about that.
Instead I want to write about Cedar City and Christopher Dean, who killed himself last summer. That sounds much better to think about than bowel surgery.
Last summer Jeff and I and my two kids went to Lake Powell in southern Utah/Arizona, which is a long drive away from where we live. We, that is Jeff and me, decided to take a different route home because we both like road trips but we both dislike tracing back over the exact same route that we’ve already seen; the thing we like about road trips is seeing different stuff than what we see at home.
So, we drove there through Utah, and we drove back home through Nevada. It was a teeny bit longer to go back that way, but not by very much.
In taking this route, we passed through Cedar City before crossing over into Nevada. Cedar City is in Southern Utah. I have some family roots that derive from bad things that happened near Cedar City; specifically The Mountain Meadows Massacre and a great-great-great-grandfather of mine whose name was John Mount Higbee.
Higbee died and was buried in Cedar City, where he lived “in exile” following the massacre; my grandma once told me that her grandma, who was his daughter, said that when she was growing up she had no idea what her last name was because it changed all the time. Bearing in mind that she was the daughter of his second wife—he was a polygamist—it’s possible that she didn’t know her last name because of the weird nature of her family, but it’s unlikely to have been for that reason, because polygamy was so common in that time and in that place. It could have been because her father was sort of “on the lam,” so-to-speak.
But who fuckin’ knows? As a person with a history degree, I guess I know better than anyone that most history-stories about dead people come down to something like, “but who fuckin’ knows?”
Now, that is on my paternal grandma’s side of the family, and there is also drama and criminals and things like this on my paternal grandpa’s side of the family, and also on my mother’s sides of the family, and also in literally every family everywhere from the beginning of time. Which is why all these defensive morons in the American south who can’t take it when people want to point out that many of their ancestors yes, actually owned other human beings as slaves, are being big fucking diaper babies to want to suppress true-and-honest analyses such as Critical Race Theory. They think it will make their kids hate themselves, which is utterly stupid. I don’t hate myself, despite having drama and criminals in my family, I mean why the fuck would I? I sometimes hate myself for my own drama, but that is at least sort of appropriate!
Oh, but this has very little to do with my recent experience in Cedar City, other than that it was on my mind; a thing I knew about Cedar City that had something to actually do with me.
Another thing I knew about Cedar City is that my first ex-husband’s sister lived there and had a record store there. I didn’t know if she was still living there and whether she still had a record store there, so it was also on my mind, just sort of incidentally.
I had always liked her, and was thinking about her, and got curious. So I googled the name of her record store to see if it was still there, and in fact, yes it was still there.
Now. Before I say anything about her, there are many things I could write about my first ex-husband. Like, I could write about all the reasons I never should have married him, for example. Or I could write about how he seems to have ghosted me, and I’m not sure why, because we always remained on fairly friendly terms, despite kind of an icky breakup, we were still basically friends.
The last time I saw him was in 2015, at his mother’s funeral. He seemed to think it was strange that I had come to his mother’s funeral, whereas I thought I was just showing him support, and maybe that was strange? I don’t know. His sister had hugged me at the funeral and had seemed genuinely glad to see me, genuinely moved that I had come to the funeral. You know, that I had come to show support.
These kinds of things are sometimes categorized as “emotional labor.” That is, things like going to funerals of the mothers of distant-past people, to “show support.” It has been pretty well established by people-who-think-about-things-like this, that men don’t seem to understand emotional labor very well, I mean as opposed to women. When I say they “don’t understand” it, this is exemplified by how my ex-husband didn’t understand the point of me coming to the funeral, whereas his sister fully understood and appreciated the point of me coming to the funeral.
See?
If his mother’s ghost was aware of me coming to the funeral, I believe I can say with great certainty that she would have understood and appreciated it, but even with my great certainty of course the real true story is, “but who fuckin’ knows?”
Oh well anyway that was the last time I saw him, and then he ghosted me. His phone number seems to have changed, and I completely lost track of him.
Now, meanwhile.
Shortly after my first-ex husband and I split up, which was in 1998, I started dating his friend, whose name was Christopher Dean. Chris Dean. Say it fast, it sounds like “Christine,” which he was very grouchy about a lot of the time. His friends called him “The Strawberry Boy” because of this song.
I say all this in past tense, because Chris is now dead, of suicide, as I already mentioned.
But before I say anything about that, I will point out that there was an excessive amount of drama attached to my dating Christopher Dean. This is because many years prior to my knowing either first ex-husband or Chris Dean, they’d had a falling out over a woman, whose name was Diane. I never met her, but I heard all about her.
All about her.
She had been the love of Chris’s life, and then she abruptly dumped him, and then he attempted suicide. She dumped him for—my first ex-husband. Got it?
This happened many years prior to my knowing either of them, recall, which isn’t exactly important except I guess it is? I mean because it was ancient history drama, to my thinking. I am seven years younger than either of them. Their birthdays were very close together, not too far from my own birthday, so just about exactly seven years, and the Diane thing had happened when I was probably only about 13 or 14 years old. So, it was ancient history, to my thinking.
But it was still fresh in some minds, apparently.
Now, later, they became friends, and one of the primary things they bonded over was their shared hatred of Diane, because of course she also dumped first-ex-husband for someone else, which is a thing that pretty girls often do.
I mean to say, pretty girls often inherently know that they can typically “have” whoever-they-want, and this sometimes makes it difficult to not abruptly dump someone when someone “better” comes along, especially if the relationship has turned sour in any capacity. I mean, honestly, why wouldn’t they, though?
Ask me how I know. I mean, I’m not a pretty girl, but—
I was once. Reasonably pretty, I mean. I wasn’t like a fuckin supermodel or anything but—I was medium-pretty. Pretty enough.
Oh yes so, when that happened—when Diane dumped Chris Dean—he attempted suicide, and wound up in a mental institution. He, that is Chris Dean, had a massive vertical scar on his wrist (I think it was only one wrist? Maybe it was both) from the suicide attempt.
Yes it was a really massive, prominent scar that was a very obvious suicide-attempt scar. Just sayin’. He didn’t have any tattoos or anything, he was a sharp hipstery-type dresser but not like rock star over-the top in his presentation of himself, however that obvious suicide-scar was all you needed to see to know that this person is maybe going to bring me some drama.
Okay so. Now here is the story of how Chris and I started dating:
There was this guy, at that time, who I used to kind of hang around with and I’m going to give him an alias. I’m going to call him…I don’t know, Jerry. Sure, I’ll call him Jerry. He hung around with other guys I hung around with at that time, which was a time during which I drank way too much. In bars. I was really into “bar culture” and drinking a lot. Especially after I split up with first-ex-husband.
I am a loud drunk, but I’m also a lightweight. I crash and burn fast. None of this is exactly relevant except for the loud part. So, there were lots of times when I was around this Jerry person where I’d get loud and obnoxious, and a thing I used to do a lot when I got drunk was fake flirt with all my male friends, and sometimes also with my female friends.
I used to fake flirt with my first husband’s best friend a lot, as a matter of fact, and my husband understood that it was fake flirting and so did the best friend. On that note, one time when I was out with my first husband and his then-best friend, we were talking about people in our sphere who we would or would not ever fuck, and I was yelling that I wouldn’t fuck Chris Dean if he were the last man on earth! Which was a statement that was later used against me.
See, but I was yelling that, I mean we were having such a conversation in the first place, because casual sex-talk was a huge part of my dynamic with the people I knew, including my first husband. We always said that there was one rule between us, which was that we couldn’t openly flirt with someone else right in front of the other person, if it was real flirting. But fake flirting was fine. Of course it was fine! It was just a joke. And we were also fully allowed to talk about people we found attractive, or would/would not fuck, and we never really got jealous. When we were together/actually married, he was not at all a jealous type except in very specific situations—I mean to say, situations where it looked like the relationship might really end. If it was just—shit-talk, then it was fine. Because he knew it was just shit-talk.
We would sometimes practically try to outdo each other with shit talk, and I guess we did make each other laugh with that, sometimes, even though ultimately I didn’t think he was very funny and he didn’t think I was very funny, that was the one arena that we used to crack each other up. That exact sort of rowdy shit-talk, including lots of excessive talk about exes that were of the “funny crazy anecdote” variety.
Honestly that is a huge large ginormous part of why I married him. I mean, that we could share all of our funny crazy anecdotes with each other, with no editing whatsoever. I super-duper value a dynamic where I can be open and honest about things like that, and I super-duper do not like being in relationships with men who are stupidly and pointlessly jealous in situations where they do not need to be jealous.
Which, unfortunately was what I got in my second marriage, but I’m not talking about that one right now. I’m talking about my first marriage.
Around the time of first marriage, I was pretty accustomed to that dynamic, I mean being open, talking about sex stuff, and also fake flirting, because it was just what I did with most of my male friends. Fake flirting. So, a few times, both before and after I had officially split up with first husband, I fake flirted with Jerry.
I mean, saying stuff like, Whoah yer lookin pretty fuckable tonight ha-ha or Didn’t I tell you never to wear those tight pants around me cuz you’ll find yourself in my bed in the morning ha-ha.
That sort of thing.
I thought I was really funny back in those days! I mean people did laugh at my jokes, or even told me I was very funny, but—well they were usually all very drunk, so who fuckin’ knows?
One of the people who told me I was funny was Chris Dean, who was a major barfly at the time even though he barely even drank. He was much more of a pothead than a drinker, plus he was recovering from a brief bout with heroin-ing.
The heroin-ing, by the way, was one of the reasons I had said that I wouldn’t fuck him if he were the last man on earth—because I had decided long before that I didn’t want to dally around with guys who messed with heroin. I had done so one time before, and I regretted it.
But because Chris was cleaning up from heroin at this time, he was hanging out in bars a lot to try to—you know, not be doing heroin. Which meant that often, he would show up at the bar, buy a drink, (because there was usually a one-drink minimum purchase at least implied, if not an actual requirement, then to be polite at least), and then Chris would not actually drink the drink he bought. Which meant that sometimes when I’d run into him at the bar, he’d say, “I just bought this drink but I don’t even want it, do you want it?”
And I’d say, “Absolutely!” And then, as I drank the drink, which was usually some gross martini or something, I’d fake-flirt with him, just as I did with everyone.
Ah but Jerry, who may have been really emotionally stupid or something, (pretty sure he was), didn’t get it that I was fake flirting with literally everyone, even though he could plainly see that I was doing this. I mean, I did it with other people right in front of Jerry’s face, but he still didn’t seem to understand that it was a sort of trope, a sort of routine. Somehow, he decided that my fake flirting was real flirting, despite its incredible over-the-top silly ridiculous nature, and he decided that I must necessarily really want to fuck him.
And then, Jerry started being weird. Like aggressively so, up to and including saying overly intense weird things when I’d see him, and also leaving me an extremely aggressive handwritten note on my porch, a note that informed me that he had been ringing my doorbell for ten minutes and obviously I was just pretending to not be home even though my car was parked in front (the car was broken down) and so obviously I was avoiding him which, according to the note, “Smells Like Horse Shit!” because I had made it clear that I liked him, so what the fuck?
I mean to say, the note was implying that I must be a cocktease, even though he thought I was cool, and now he was letting me know that I was acting not cool, and he was pretty angry about it.
So, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do, due to how stupid I was. I mean the obvious thing to do would have been to say very bluntly and plainly, “Jerry I do NOT like you like that, I was just messing around and drunk, please do not leave aggressive notes on my porch.” But I didn’t do that because I was, wait for it—
A little bit scared.
Which was still a problem for me, back then. I mean, being too scared to tell people the difficult, dirty truths, especially dudes who “liked me like that.” And I was scared because I had already experienced dudes who had “gotten weird” when I didn’t automatically fuck them just because they wanted to fuck me, and then those “gotten weird” dudes had sometimes turned into dudes who had “gotten mean, and/or emotionally or even physically abusive” a few times.
Moreover, Jerry had lots and lots of friends who were also sort-of my friends. And Jerry was a bigtime shittalker, I mean he was a terrible gossip; thus I didn’t like that all of this might turn into Jerry talking loads of shit about me to these people, who I wanted to become actually my friends instead of just sort-of my friends.
So I wasn’t entirely sure what to do.
Well here’s what happened:
One night, I went to the Satyricon for some punk show or other, and I see Chris Dean sitting at the bar by himself, looking bored and agitated. I approached him, to ask him what was wrong. He said, “Egh, I dunno…I just bought this drink and I don’t even want it, do you want it?”
I said, “Absolutely,” and then we started chatting a little bit and then—I saw Jerry across the room. I interrupted whatever Chris was saying and I quickly said, “Hey so Jerry is here and he’s been super weird with me lately, could you like—” and Chris caught on instantly. He said, “Yeah, we’ll be together tonight. We’re together—for tonight.” I said, “Yeah, yes, exactly, thank you.”
So, we stuck together very closely that night. We talked and watched the band and Chris was very diligent about not leaving my side, specifically to ward off Jerry, which worked.
And then at the end of the night, I offered to drive him home, because I guess he didn’t have a ride. I don’t remember why but I do remember that I drove him home. (I’m thinking now—his truck was in the shop? That might have been why he was agitated when I first saw him. Probably.)
We had been mostly jokey the whole night, but once in my car, he said, very earnestly, “I had a really good time with you tonight.” I thought about it and said yes, I’d had a good time too. Then he said, “Y’know something I’ve always had sort of a fatal attraction to you. But even after you and (first husband) split up I didn’t wanna pursue you, because I knew it would look bad and cause drama and stuff.”
Now, at that time, I had been sort of seeing someone already. I say “already” because this was not too long after I had split up with first ex-husband. But the guy I was sort of seeing had turned out to be a douche who was constantly playing hot-and-cold, and I was, after three months of that, very fed up with him. I told Chris Dean about this, in the context of “Well you shouldn’t worry, because I’ve already started dating, but to be honest it ain’t going so well.”
Then he said, “Listen, if you ever wanna fuck someone, like—no strings attached, I’m here. But no pressure. Whatever.”
So I thought about that, a lot. I actually appreciated that he laid it out like that, just plainly.
And then we started hanging out. And then we started fucking. It took me a little while to make up my mind to fuck him, but yes ultimately that happened, and then we started “dating,” which is of course different from no-strings attached fucking.
And it did look bad and cause drama and stuff, just exactly as Chris had worried it would, because first husband instantly decided that the only reason Chris was dating me was to get back at him, for “stealing” Diane all those years before.
First husband and I had an icky and messy breakup anyway. Part of why we broke up was because he did not want kids and I had decided that I did, but that was absolutely not the only reason, and the other reasons were emotional kinds of reasons.
I mean to say—I had decided, to be blunt about it—that I wasn’t crazy enough about him. How else do I explain this? I liked him a lot, I trusted him, but I did not feel like I was madly in love with him. And I had decided that I wanted to be madly in love with my husband, I had decided that I deserved it. Maybe that was wrong of me, but it was what I had decided. It was hard to tell him this, but I did tell him this, and it hurt him a lot.
It broke his heart, according to him, when he was drunkenly and angrily leaving me lots of drunken angry voicemails.
And he really really did not like it that I was dating other people so soon after the breakup, especially considering that my dating eventually included Chris.
Oh yeah and it also made Jerry really mad, but the good news is he mostly backed off and left me alone.
So, in essence, that is the primary reason I never should have married first ex-husband. Because I knew I was not “wild” about him, but I had decided that it was okay, he was good, he was trustworthy, he was super in love with me, and that was “good enough.”
In other words, I had settled. My final analysis of that situation is that sometimes “settling” is appropriate, I mean if you’re like 50+ years old and very lonely then settling makes a lot of sense. But if you’re still pretty and still in your twenties, then it’s probably a dumb thing to do, because it’s almost certainly too soon to settle. You have no idea what else is going to come along, for crying out loud.
Because, like I already said, pretty girls often know full well that they can have almost whoever they want. Or at least—they can have lots of people, due to the whole prettiness thing. It sucks that this is true, because prettiness is hardly a valid sole criterion to have so much power—but it is, nevertheless true. I did know that I was reasonably pretty, but—I thought I was too fucked-up, and there were other reasons why I felt like I should just grab the first/best man who came along and, you know, snag him. Tie him down. But then, after an almost-year of marriage, I started to think that perhaps it had been a hasty thing to do.
Because of what I’ve already said, at least twice. Because a pretty girl has a reasonably broad spectrum of possibilities, when she’s still young, which is why “pretty girls make graves,” you know.
See, but, in my own defense …it’s really hard to not pass up a thing you’ve settled for, if you could, theoretically have something that is or seems to be better, because why wouldn’t you?
If I’m living in a terrible apartment and then I find a cheaper, nicer apartment. If I have an awful job and I’m offered a better job. …But, on the other hand, people are not apartments or jobs. People have feelings, which apartments or jobs do not have.
Now but wait a minute, before you make any assumptions— I did not dump first husband for anyone else specific, just to be clear. I dumped him because I realized that someone better might come along, and I realized that if that happened, I would dump him. So, in that theoretical scenario, I realized that the relationship just did not have enough staying power, and the sensible thing seemed to be to pre-emptively end it, before it got bad.
Yes, to me that made perfect sense.
The trouble was, my feelings had been enormously dampened and ground up and weirdly affected, for a whole big long drama plethora of reasons, which all amounted to a thing that is clinically referred to as “Complex PTSD.” So, I often didn’t understand other peoples’ emotions about things that were actually perfectly normal.
I often didn’t understand why men reacted so badly to getting dumped by me. I really often didn’t. I thought if I said, “This isn’t working for me, let’s end it,” he ought to just nod and mostly go quietly. I mean—maybe one or two nights of crying or sighing heavily—and then, he ought to just go quietly.
I honest-to-god did not understand why it never looked like that.
I had made a rule for myself about only dating or getting involved with guys who seemed “fucked up enough,” which really would be a post all by itself. But to summarize it, by “fucked up,” I meant, in my own mind, that I was looking for a man who had some version of my same sort of “Complex PTSD” -way of looking at the world—but I didn’t know to call it that at the time.
In essence, I’d have to say that first ex-husband was not “fucked up enough” by my own metrics, in fact almost none of the fucked-up men I dated really were, but—Chris Dean certainly was.
He absolutely was.
Well. There was much about all of this that I didn’t understand, and when I look back on it I feel stupid. I think the reason I truly didn’t understand it was primarily because I had started to use much more of my “thinks” than my “feels” when I made most relationship decisions. When a relationship no longer “made logical sense,” I would end it, and I would genuinely believe that if I could just convince him of my sound reasoning, he would go quietly. He would not leave me drunken voicemails about his heartbreak.
But it just never worked that way, and I really didn’t understand why.
See, and that’s largely because I had never actually been madly in love with anyone ever before. I’d been hurt by men plenty of times, but had not been devastated upon a breakup. Only hurt. By 1998, with the exception of one time, which I do not want to write about, I never really had that “my world is ending” feeling. The first time I had something like that, it was so terrible that I think I effectively cauterized it, protected myself so it could never happen again— until many years later, (2010) when it caught up to me and I finally found out what that was really really like when you’ve got it truly bad for someone and it seems to not be working out.
(Jeff)
Ah but. Meanwhile.
Chris was polyamorous, which I knew when we started dating. He had like—I think five other girlfriends besides me. I was good with that. If anything, it sort of gave him bonus points, to my thinking, because at the time I did not want him to get too attached to me.
I would never get into a polyamorous thing in this phase of my life, partly because of feelings, partly because of what happened with Chris and partly because of STI’s, but—for the record, Chris was paranoid about STI’s , and was constantly getting tested for everything, in no small part because of his heroin use. I mean to say—he was worried about things like hepatitis because of heroin, but he was also paranoid because of heroin—I mean, I don’t know why, but heroin makes people weirdly paranoid, even after they kick it.
Or at least, it did him. It was his worst personality flaw. It was another one of the reasons why I had previously said I would not have fucked him, even if he were the last man on earth. Because I did not like his paranoia.
There’s more to the story as far as the nature of my actual relationship with Chris, which was tumultuous, because I curiously fell somewhat in love with him, which was the absolute last thing I expected to happen. I thought we were just going to have kind of a fun/nothing relationship. I was not madly in love, but I was somewhat in love. Moreso than I had been with the first ex husband. So in some ways, the polyamory started to hurt me.
I fucked other people, too, by the way, and then I realized that I didn’t like it. At all.
In fact, one time I fucked first ex-husband, who was well aware of the polyamory thing and had decided to “get in on it,” so to speak, but after the fucking was done I started crying, and when he said “What’s your problem?” I said, “I feel like I shouldn’t have done this,” and first-ex husband snorted at me and said, “You would make a terrible prostitute.”
So I realized that I didn’t want to fuck several people at the same time, it felt weird and wrong and bad. I had a major epiphany about it, as a matter of fact. It was that for me, sex and love were in fact more inextricable than I had previously known, because I had been in too many loveless relationships. Polyamory was fine just as long as I was not genuinely in love with anyone, but as soon as I fell in love with anyone—even just somewhat in love—it was no longer fine. I realized too that I had never been in love with more than one person at a time, and I was pretty sure I was not capable of it.
After a couple of months of dating, Chris started to tell me that I was his favorite of all his girlfriends, which I admit I liked hearing. Once he gave me a gift that he said he’d actually bought for a different girlfriend, but decided it was more appropriate for me than for her; he said he thought I would “get” why it was so funny and interesting and cool and whatever, and she maybe wouldn’t. It was a CD compilation called “Las Vegas Grind” of old 1950’s and 60’s burlesque music. We listened to it almost nonstop for a few weeks, during which time we kept going on many little pointless road trips around the area. We would laugh our asses off at the silly songs on that CD. We would laugh our asses off at the dumbest shit.
He had a pretty infectious laugh. When I first met him, I rarely ever saw him smile or laugh. He was always grouchy, when I first met him. My initial impression of him had been that he was completely uptight, a total asshole. I eventually came to understand that it was because of heroin, at least in part. Once he was clean he was like a completely different person. I guess, as I think about it, I started to genuinely fall for him the first time I made him laugh so hard he couldn’t stop laughing.
See, a thing that has always been attractive to me is when a man actually really thinks I’m funny. But I also have to actually really think he is funny, too. This was a huge problem between me and first-ex-husband. We didn’t think the other was terribly funny. In fact, he routinely told me my jokes were dumb, and/or the things I laughed at were dumb.
Like, I mean we had drunken laughing sessions when we would tell each other crazy stories about our respective pasts, but not so much with just—jokes. Especially not when we were sober. We practically had to be drunk together to really get along.
Now, why would I marry someone who thought my jokes were dumb? Oh well, I was naive. I mean, in so many ways.
(23 is too young to get married.)
Well. Meanwhile. Chris also had great taste in music. He’d been in a few not-too-bad punk bands. Here’s an example of one. He was the vocalist and he wrote the lyrics for that band.
Chris and I used to go to Seattle a lot because he had to go up there for his work pretty frequently. He’d had a girlfriend up there so at first he would not take me with him, but then he had cooled things with her, and informed me he’d rather spend time with me than with her—while being sure to let me know that he did still love her, but—well, he was having second thoughts about certain aspects of his polyamorous lifestyle.
We had a lot of fun on some of those Seattle trips. Laughing at the dumbest shit. Smoking weed. That was one of the only times in my life I ever genuinely enjoyed smoking weed. But then I started get the paranoias, and that caused problems. And there were other problems. He didn’t understand anything about my particular breed of social anxiety/introversion and used to get mad at me when I couldn’t deal with being around people, characterizing me as “rude” when I would need to withdraw.
And other stuff. Other problems.
The breakup was a little messy, though not too bad. It happened partly because one of his other girlfriends had come around—she lived out of town, but was visiting—and he asked me to essentially back off and leave him alone while she was around, which I did do. I felt a weird combination of things about it, but I did it, because that had been our agreement. I didn’t complain, I didn’t tell him that I felt jealous and hurt. I just—did what he asked.
But after this particular girlfriend went back to where she lived, he informed me that he had missed me the whole time, was not so into her anymore, and ultimately he was strongly considering the possibility of dumping all his other girlfriends and seeing—you know, only me. He said he was even thinking about asking me to like, marry him. I was honestly stunned. I said, “Yes but, I want kids someday, and you’ve had a vasectomy.” He said, “They can reverse them, though.”
So, I had to think very long and very hard about that. I realized, in the end, that I did not want him to dump all his other girlfriends for me, and I definitely did not want to marry him, and a large part of the reason was because he’d had that vasectomy. I thought to myself—if you were once so sure that you didn’t want kids that you’d have an actual vasectomy, then I do not trust that you would really want them in the future, just because you think you like me better than your other girlfriends, right now.
And also because I knew he had a polyamorous heart. I knew he could never commit to just me, despite what he kept saying.
It was a painful decision, honestly. He did not like being dumped. It got ugly-ish a few times, though mostly he went quietly. Not entirely. But mostly.
He got back into heroin a few years later. I stopped talking to him. I mean, I think I spoke to him twice during that long-stretch time period, saw him once—roughly ten or eleven years ago, and determined that he was just all fucked up. He was—uptight, paranoid, couldn’t follow a simple train of thought, all the things I hadn’t liked about him when I had first met him. The good version of him, the funny version—that version was dead to me, I decided.
I had to mourn him while he was still alive. I’ve had to do that with a few people I’ve been close to.
I don’t know what was going on with him when he died of suicide last summer. Maybe he was back on heroin, or maybe just methadone, or maybe some other drug. Maybe he was horribly aware that he had burned a lot of bridges with people who cared about him, and he was lonely and alone. Maybe there was some other relationship drama or family drama. But who fuckin’ knows?
I heard about his death from my first ex-husband’s then-best friend, I mean the guy who I used to fake-flirt with, the guy who was present when I had yelled that I would not fuck Chris Dean if he were the last man on earth. He was the one who told me. He texted me about it, just a few days before we left to go to Lake Powell.
I replied to his text, “Does (first ex-husband) know?” He said, “He doesn’t care. He’s ghosted everyone. He doesn’t care about any of his old friends.” I said, “I think he would want to know.” He replied something like, “I doubt it. Fuck him.”
Chris Dean is the third ex-boyfriend of mine who has died by suicide. Because I really know how to pick ‘em. (See above: the thing about how I deliberately chose men who seemed fucked up enough. That is…relevant.)
I still can’t 100% believe that Chris Dean is really gone. Even though I already mourned him a long time ago.
Well, I haven’t really written much about Cedar City, have I? This is too long. The Cedar City part is kind of boring honestly. Maybe I’ll write it another time.
I don’t know. Who fuckin’ knows?