The Last Sundance
True to your word, you did not see me again until Sundance.
In the past, we’d talked about staying at your cabin and going to the festival together. Now, that was not offered. I stayed at the house of some mutual friends in Park City. They were very generous and very kind to me. Compassionate. They did not understand why exactly, but they did understand what was happening. Once again, you were invited and welcomed to stay with them and me at their home in Park City. Once again, you did not accept.
You spent thousands of dollars on festival packages and made lots of plans to attend networking events. Pushing yourself. Meeting people. In all past years, we had always made plans together. This year, I was sort of a last-minute afterthought, and we only ended up having plans to see a couple of things together and not spend much time together at all.
Still, you sent me pictures of yourself in the outfits you’d bought for the events and the networking parties. Showing off how beautiful you looked. This was all very confusing. It was like you were still maintaining access and some kind of intimacy, but also keeping me away and refusing to connect with me more.
I won’t include the pictures of yourself that you sent me, but I will include the picture of myself that I sent back. I was at the climbing gym, alone, when you sent them. It made me happy to see you. It felt like you stepping towards me. I liked it. Even though it was not healthy. I did not understand that at the time.
I went to screenings, and parties, and panels. I stumbled around the city and met some locals. I met Lionel Ritchie and Zack Galifianakis. Made friends with some filmmakers and the bouncer at one of the press lounges.
Self Qualifying
I remember I sent you this picture while I was waiting in line in the cold for a screening.
I remember this because you had texted me something about someone spiritual that you had met, and it had provoked me to remind you of my own spiritual practice. What I was trying to do was to express frustration that you had declined the repeated invitations to share more faith and spiritual practices with me, while at the same time talking with admiration about these qualities in other men.
The way you experienced it was what is known as “self-qualifying,” or a man trying to qualify himself as attractive rather than allowing a woman to discover those qualities in him for herself. This is naturally repulsive and unattractive. And you voiced this to me. Telling me that you didn’t want me to be reminding you of these things about me and showing off, but for me to just relax and be myself.
Which, obviously, under the circumstances, I was not able to do. I acknowledge that in trying harder to make myself attractive, I made matters worse and pushed you further away from me and only served to harm your interest and attraction for me more and more. However, I was following a pattern that is common. I’m not the first man who’s made this mistake. I understand now that I should not have been in contact with you long before this, but, at the time, there was still a toxic hope. There was also a kind of stubborn will to fight for us that took ages for me to see was only hurting me.
Peter
Another thing that happened at this Sundance that I found very strange was Peter.
You did not share your schedule with me. You did not tell me who you were with or what you were doing. But you did tell me about a store owner you had met between events at the festival named Peter. Peter owned a little store on Main Street in Park City.
Peter was in an abusive relationship. Peter’s partner had just cheated on him. Peter was caught in a toxic, abusive pattern that he did not understand. You told me about Peter. You wanted me to meet him. I think your idea was that we might console one another. The next day, I did find him, and we spoke at length. I mostly just listened to him talk about how he’d been cheated on. It was all very sad and ugly.
Peter is on the left. The man on the right was a poet who had a film in the festival. He heard Peter telling me his story and shared his own. Later, we held a poetry reading event in the store.
I just want to say, this was very strange. I don’t know what word to use, but I will just put it like this. No man ever wants to have the woman he loves and who has been sleeping with someone else tell him, “Hey, I met another man who had his heartbroken by an abusive partner who cheated on him repeatedly. You two should hang out. I think you’d be good friends.”
I did not appreciate this. I did not like this. I wish that you had not done this. I don’t think this was about me feeling better. I think this was a way for you to make yourself feel better. Like you knew you had done something terrible, and instead of taking accountability or trying to repair it, you tried to act like you were being kind and generous about looking out for me and finding someone else who understood how terrible what you had done was, so I would have someone else to talk to about it. Something like that. But I don’t feel that it was really about me. I think it was about you making yourself feel better. But then again, who’s to say?
I felt terrible for Peter, but there was nothing I could do for him. Peter was an alcoholic. His way to cope with this was by getting even more drunk more often. I gave him my number so I could text him the videos I shot of the poetry reading we held at his store. In the weeks after this, he called me several times very late at night, absolutely blackout drunk, screaming and crying and cussing and asking for money.
Finally, I blocked his number.
Psychic Documentary
We went to a screening of a documentary together at the Egyptian Theater.
The documentary was called Look Into My Eyes.
The documentary was a study of a lot of psychics and their lives. As well as the relationships between them and their clients, and between them and their relationship partners.
Before the screening, we talked about how you were going to go to New York to finish the coloring on your short film. I offered to go with you. I talked about how it would be fun to see that part of the process and to have some time in New York together.
“Yeah, maybe,” you said.
Which meant “No.”
At one point during the screening, one of the psychics’ partners said to them that they loved them, but that they were no longer in love with them.
Afterwards, you told me that that was how you felt about me now. “The feelin’s gone, and I just can’t get it back,” to quote the song If You Could Read My Mind, which you’d added to one of our playlists recently.
Without going into explaining this too much, after reading and studying a lot about abusive relationships and personality styles. I think a lot of these psychics are really just highly empathic people. People who are naturally more inclined towards narcissistic partners. Many of those relationships end with the narcissistic partner finishing the cluster B personality style relationship cycle and discarding their partner without feeling any emotional attachment left. The deactivation and detachment that you always felt at the end of your relationship cycles.
I’ll never watch this documentary again, but in hindsight, it taught me a lot about the many mistakes I had been making in my relationships and how badly I needed to correct many things and maintain stronger boundaries. The need for self-respect and to refuse to self-abandon to appease others. The need to change my life so that I do not spend it being abused like one of these people. I cried a lot during this screening. It was brutal and ugly seeing other people being abused in so many familiar ways.
You found this repulsive, and you became inert. Deactivated. You didn’t even try to comfort me. You just sat there. Gone. Done. I was not of any further interest or value to you. Discarded. You saw me as a crying baby, not as a man. I had been trained by you to see myself that way too.
However, now, I see things differently too.
It is true that I should not have ever allowed myself to get to this point of being so cruelly abused, and it’s also true that you should never have abused me to the point where I was this broken and hurt. It was all toxic and abusive, and both of us were at fault at different times and in different ways, but the way you framed this at the time was that I was a big baby who alone born the shame and responsibility for how things ended. That is very far from the whole truth.
By coming to this screening with me yet also refusing to offer repair, you were trying to relieve your guilt about what you’d done, and at the same time, putting me in a very unsafe and harmful position. You were close enough to not feel like you’d lost access, but refusing healthy repair and restoration. Doing this to me was about making yourself feel better. But it was very harmful to me. I know you didn’t understand this at the time. But it doesn’t change the impact that it had on me.
“You Mean Devon?”
After the screening, we exchanged some words. I remember telling you that I felt that what you were doing was repeating an unhealthy pattern. You insisted that you were following what you thought was best for you.
I remember at one point giving up and saying, “You have everything you want, and you have a new relationship that you’re excited about.”
And you said, “Devon?”
As though it was ridiculous to suggest that. It wasn’t ridiculous. You had started some kind of relationship with him. You were pursuing it. You were just ashamed to admit it so directly in the way that I did.
The way you said it like it was ridiculous confirmed that you were hiding from me a lot of the truth by this point. I don’t know why I include this. It just stands out in my mind as a moment when I felt betrayed. A moment where your words and actions confused me. I could not understand any of this. In fairness, I know it was messy and complicated, and I don’t think you fully understood it yourself. I don’t mean to sound harsh about this. I just want it noted that this moment was very disorienting for me.
Jodi Foster
There was a moment when we were at a party near the end of the festival when we were with a group of people. You openly talked about how Jodi Foster had walked by you earlier that day, and you had felt a surge of sexual attraction toward her.
Setting aside your right to have your sexual desires and thoughts, and your freedom to share them with whomever you wish, this was very disrespectful to me. It hurt.
Having to stand there next to you listening to you tell other people about a lesbian attraction you’d felt was cruel. It was so emasculating and inconsiderate. It felt to me to be almost deliberately cruel and disrespectful. Minimizing me. Erasing me. Discarding me.
For years you used to make such a big deal out of the fact that I used to get you insanely wet. Soaking your panties. Dripping on your leg. You liked to show it off for me or have me touch you to feel it. Which is perfectly natural and I think a very healthy and intimate thing to share with a partner. You told me multiple times that you’d never enjoyed giving blowjobs until you were with me because you actually genuinely wanted me to feel pleasure. You weren’t just doing it because it was expected.
That moment in the bar when you openly shared with a group of strangers a lesbian desire you’d felt for Jodi Foster while I was standing right next to you felt like another attempt to attack my masculinity and my manhood and aggressively devalue me. That was cruel. It was rude. It was base and classless. Perhaps it was an unconscious cry for me to bring more masculine energy to the relationship. But I had tried and offered many times in many ways and been rejected at every turn and every opportunity for years. This moment made me feel like I had no idea who you were. It was disorienting and hurtful. I don’t think you had any deliberate or conscious intention to be hurtful in saying this, but it was an awful experience for me.
There Stands The Glass
One of the lowest points of self-abandonment I ever reached, one of the moments I’m most ashamed of now, was the moment when I had a sip of your pale ale at the party in the bar that night at Sundance.
I said that I wanted to drink if it would bring me closer to you. You protested and said that one of the things you liked the most about me was how strong I had been about my convictions.
But I did not listen.
I was already convinced that the course of action I had followed had failed, so the only solution was to radically change myself and the course I was taking to better align with what you wanted.
Obviously, this is badly misguided, but at the time, I was being so badly abused and was in such overwhelming emotional pain that I couldn’t see how destroyed I had become. I was acting out of survival instinct. Desperate. Digested.
I took a sip of it. I didn’t like it. Of course.
I watched your glass while you used the bathroom. I remember staring at the glass. Knowing that in my attempt to show you I was willing to change, I had paradoxically become even more repulsive to you. I couldn’t understand how to behave in such a way as to stop ruining everything. But now I understand that there was nothing I could have done. There never was.
I remember one moment of us looking in each other’s eyes in that bar. I remember that I asked you to dance and you said no. I remember we exchanged a few words. I remember how much I wished things would go back to the easy idealization that had lasted for so many years. Before everything had changed and I had gone on a long, slow devaluation slide into worthlessness and agony.
Lunch on Main Street
Once near the start of the festival, we met to have lunch.
I remember you told me how good I looked. I remember you were trying to let me down easy the whole lunch. I remember I was in a state of shock and also still trying to revive your interest in our relationship.
It was futile.
You wanted to leave on good terms so that you did not have to feel guilty about what you’d done to me, but this was not possible for dozens of reasons.
Eventually, you left. I can’t remember much. All I remember is heartbreak. All I remember is how much I was suffering. How agonizing this was. The kind of pain that blanks your mind and distorts all experience and memory.
Linkater
Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and The Before Trilogy had been very important parts of our story since the first time we met.
I went to a screening of his new film. I wanted you to come too. You weren’t there.
You chose not to be there with me.
Infinite Boundless Loss
I remember we were walking on Main Street in Park City. You had to leave to go to a networking event.
You were in a hurry to get away from me, but didn’t want to be outright rude. I remember telling you that I felt like Jimmy Stewart at the end of Vertigo. Looking at the corpse of the only woman I’d ever loved. Totally helpless.
“Boundless, infinite loss,” I said to you.
You were half-listening, trying to get away from me so you could go network with other people. I could feel that you didn’t care. I could feel that you were impatient and wanted to leave. I let you go and turned away. When you’d left. I sat down on the curb.
Dysthymia
The medical term is Persistent Depressive Disorder. It’s a chronic, low-grade form of depression. The symptoms are generally milder than major depression, but they are much longer-lasting. Diagnosis requires feeling depressed for most of the day, more days than not, for at least two years.
Like living death. Being alive with no pleasure in one’s existence.
Like a body without a soul.
Like a man whose soul has been murdered.
I have been forced to learn a lot of new words in the years that I have spent surviving this relationship.
One of them is dysthymia.
Blind Dates
One night during the festival, I met up with someone that a filmmaker friend introduced me to as a kind of a “blind date.” I told you about this to make you jealous, I suppose. It had the opposite effect. You encouraged me to see her. Hoping that if I met someone else, it would relieve you of the guilt you felt about having another partner.
Around this time, in response to the huge amount of crushing, emasculating pain I was in, I had gone on a couple of other dates with women in Salt Lake City. I’d specifically been drawn to sexually submissive women, and, although I didn’t have sex with them, I did engage with them a little bit. Things like spanking their asses and having them call me names like “Sir” or “Daddy.”
I told you about this. I also told you that I discontinued this activity very quickly. I immediately recognized that I was just doing this to cope with the huge wounds that you’d put into me. I knew that just using other women to make myself feel like a man again was wrong and harmful to everyone involved. So, I stopped. This wasn’t easy. It would have been much easier to just continue using women to make myself feel better.
Anyway, this period of both of our lives was full of pain and sorrow and unhealthy romantic and sexual activity. I’m not proud of any of this. It was such an ugly, sinful time.
Two Memories of Losing You
I have two memories I can’t place in the timeline exactly.
One is of you driving me back to our friend’s place in Park City and begrudingly kissing me good night and leaving. Declining my request that you stay there with me for the night. I remember how cold and distant you felt. How frigid and lifeless your kiss felt. How sad I felt when you drove away.
The other one I have is of coming to find you at the bus stop by Main Street and telling you that I did not have to give up just because you refused to be with me. I told you that I could stay in Utah, and build, and have faith, and that someday I would win you back.
You didn’t say anything. You just looked at me with deep pity in your eyes, but no affection left.
Another filmmaker friend saw us and interrupted. You went right on chatting with him as though nothing was going on between you and me. Hiding the truth of how horrible our relationship had become from the outside world. More concerned with how he saw you than with how it impacted me.
I remember watching you get on the bus with him to go to your next networking party together. I stood there in the dark watching you. Hoping that you would give me some kind of glance. Some kind of look that you remembered that I existed. You never did.
The doors opened, and you got on the bus. You didn’t look back at me. You didn’t care.
I walked home alone in the dark.
The Shorts Program
The last screening I ever went to at the Sundance Film Festival and the third-to-last time I ever saw you in person was the Shorts Program Retrospective hosted by Jay and Mark Duplas.
Tacos
I remember we met for dinner on Main Street. We had tacos. It was a horribly uncomfortable meal.
I remember telling you that I did not mind if you needed more space and freedom from me, but that if you weren’t going to see me for a few days, just letting me know that would be helpful. Setting expectations.
I told you that if it was Tuesday and you were going to be busy until Friday, then texting me and saying, “Hey, just wanted to let you know I’m going to be a bit out of touch until Friday, but I’m looking forward to seeing you then!” would mean so much to me. It would help me adjust my expectations. This way you could have your freedom, and I wouldn’t be left wondering when I would see you again.
You told me that this made you feel like you were reporting in to your Dad.
To reframe this more generally, I was asking for the bare minimum. For basic communication and clarity. You were uncomfortable offering this because you had already decided that, not only were you not going to stop seeing and sleeping with Devon, you were going to do more of both. However, you did not tell me this. You just told me that you were feeling like I was overwhelming you. This left me feeling like I was the problem. Again. Apologizing for having the most basic relational needs.
The Last Screening
When we finished the tacos, we went to the screening. We sat together near the front.
I held your hand. As we’d always done together at Sundance screenings. I lifted our clutched hands and asked you, “Can you feel this too?”
There had always been an ineffable kind of magic knowing in the physical touch of our hands. I felt insane feeling that same feeling there while at the same time knowing that you were choosing to throw it away forever.
“Yes, John.” You said.
But you didn’t say anything else.
And that was the last time I ever felt that feeling.
A Senseless Man
I pray that God will mute my speech
To stop my lips from confessing that I still love you
I pray that God will deafen my ears
To keep me from hearing our songs again
I pray that God will blind my eyes
To keep me from seeing you with another
I pray that God will quench my nose
To keep me from the scent of your perfume on a passing stranger
I pray that God will numb my hands
To keep me from feeling the phantom touch of your hand
I pray that God would make me
A senseless man
To match what I am
What I feel
Without you
