October 24–November 26, 2003 — Just descend

We woke up on October 22 in Regina. Then we drove to Winnipeg and Cuff The Duke played a show. Then we drove home. We arrived in Toronto at about 4:00 am on October 24.

Because we drove through the US on our way back from Winnipeg, I was out of contact with E         until we returned to Canada and Canadian pay phones. In the time I hadn’t been able to call her, a lot had happened. When I called her the day before from Regina, everything was fine; when I called her an hour or two outside of Toronto, I was talking to a different person.

After Wayne dropped Jeff and me off, I walked into my room and stared at my bed; it had been about 40 hours since I’d been in one. Then I called E        . I’d been missing her for almost three weeks, and we’d talked every night about me going to her house as soon as I was back in the city. On the phone, she argued with me and said I should just sleep there. It took a very long time to convince her that I needed to see her.

I took the night bus to her end of the city. The sun was almost ready to come up as I stood shivering on her porch, waiting for her to open the door and hoping her mother wouldn’t wake up. She hugged me. She was so warm, and she smelled of her bedsheets. She took my hand and led me upstairs. I lay in her bed and thought about how hard it had been to convince her to let me sleep there. I worried until exhaustion made me stop.

By November the weeks that had seemed perfect were fading and I was becoming accustomed to the steady decline of our relationship. Sometimes I stumbled across reminders of when things had been better: more than $100 worth of long-distance cards in my wallet or the note she’d written me while I was away. But most of the time I just felt it would soon be over.

It started the first week of November. One night she was talking to someone else on the phone when I called, and instead of saying she’d call me back, she stayed on the phone for long enough that I’d given up and was getting ready for bed. And then she called and told me she thought we should take a break.

The confusing part about the next few weeks was that nothing changed. Neither of us was seeing someone else, we still saw each other as much as we had since I returned from tour, and we were still acting like we were together. I didn’t understand what was happening, and I didn’t know how to make it better.

The night before my birthday, we got into an argument and she sent me an email that made me think she had ended things completely. But she hadn’t; she said this was the way relationships work, that I was supposed to fight back and that we’d both feel better if I did.

I never learned to fight back. And we kept trying until we’d been “on a break” for longer than we’d been seeing each other.

I just wanted to be with her. Failing that, I just wanted to be alone. I didn’t manage either as often as I needed to.