Mara is lying on the couch. She's apparently been crushed by the weight of her existence. She was playing Everquest and I made an off-hand joke about her being a junkie. She immediately signed off and went and laid down on the couch in front of the television. Christ. Does she think that's what I want? Everquest is bad, but television is good? Either way, you're still sitting on your ass.

What I want from Mara is for her to be a little more invested in this household. Hell, just for her to be a little more invested in living and having a life. That's the most important aspect of all this. She doesn't seem to want to live, but she's afraid to die at the same time.

I wish I could help Mara. I wish I could reach out and talk to her, and get her to understand that we have a lot to be grateful for. Our lives might not be the ideal, but it could be far worse. Sometimes I think that's the root of Mara's problems. She's never experienced that “far worse” (our year in Ware Shoals excepted).

Our lives are what we make of it. If it's not what we want and we can't change it, then perhaps the whole point is to make our peace. I have not and will never give up on the idea of writing and making music and being an artist, but I have to eat in the meantime. The primary difference between Mara and I is that while I do what needs to be done in the day-to-day, I never let go of the hope that tomorrow might be better. Mara seems to prefer to wallow in her suffering.

I realize that a lot of Mara's problems have to do with her age. I just looked back through my journal at the painfully melodramatic crap that I wrote at about her age. It took being tempered in the fires of Faith's betrayal to wake me up from my fantasy world.

Yes, I realize how melodramatic that sounds, but that's essentially what happened in Florida. Faith fucked me good and cost me everything that my life had been centered around. I may have come back from Florida with, as I put it at the time, “smoke rolling off of my hide,” but it proved to be a very real tempering process that burned off all of my pretense and self-delusion. I had to take a long, hard look at myself in the hard light of day for the first time.

Whatever I am now, and whatever problems I might have, I prefer the person I was after Faith to the person I was before Faith. For better or worse, at least now I'm not kidding myself. At least now when I smooth things over, I realize that I'm just doing it to make it through the day, and not because it's some great price that I have to pay in the overall scheme of things (in order to accomplish those might deeds that I was put on this planet to achieve).

I don't know what it will take to wake up Mara. Hopefully it won't come down to the dissolution of our marriage. Sometimes I think that's what she really wants. To be free of me and free of this marriage, living alone somewhere in a personal place where she doesn't have to share breathing space, much less emotional space, with another human being. I don't like to think like this, but I'm well aware that I'm not going to be able to push back against her pathos indefinitely. Sooner or later it's going to break us, because she is absolutely unyielding.