Surviving an LTR

A new analogy/metaphor/comparison hit me today. Not sure how applicable it is, but it feels right. It's about relationships and the troubles they go through and at a deep level, how I look at them.

Kami and I have been together a long time. It will be twenty years in October. They have been mostly good times and I cherish her. But ther have been horrible moments that still hurt years later and sometimes the hurt or the memory drifts across my mind and everything is gray for a while.

I realized today that Kami isn't my longest-term relationship. It's not my birth family, either, since I moved out when I was sixteen. The longest, stormiest relationship so far is with my own body . It's not the years, as they say, it's the mileage. If you look closely there's a lot of scar tissue. Very few of the joints in my hands look they way they were designed to. There is a screw in one knee and probably should be one in the other and if I remembered all the shoulder dislocation it would be in double digits or close to it. Relationships or body, I've never held back much. Not expecting to last long, I've always been driven to get the life and the love out now, on the table, in the open. I've never, ever had a problem telling someone I loved them because I never believed I had a lot of time to waste.

The first time I dislocated my shoulder was decades ago, showing off that I could do a "human flag" from a stop sign. Don't know why it popped that time and not before. It hurt and I reduced it and for a long while I didn't trust it. I worked it hard, never wanting it to be weak or fail again. I actually felt betrayed by my own shoulder. When I judged it strong enough, I tested it... and it popped again, of course

So I was angry at a part of me.

What am I trying to say here? Not sure. Sometimes, under great (or not so great) pressure, things snap. Sometimes, that thing is a part of you. If it's truly a part of you, you work on it or get it replaced. I replaced my knee. I don't trust it, it always hurts, there are numb spots, the hamnstring they cut the replacement out of is as tight as a guitar string. It may not be as weak, but there are more parts damaged in the replacement process than I understood when I made the decision.

I haven't had surgery on my shoulders and I don't want to. They crunch. They hurt all the time. But I know what they can and can't do and how far I can push them before they pop and how to fix them and what I can get away with in the heat of a fight after fixing them. They're my shoulders, dammit. Even if they aren't the uninjured and untested teenager shoulders they're mine and we go well together.

Besides, they match the scars.