Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
~The Man in Black

We live in an “old neighborhood” as neighborhoods go in the United States. It was erected in the early 1900s as a place for employees of the American Locomotive Company to live and has become a place for folks who can’t afford to live anywhere else. Most of the buildings here appear similar. Many have turrets or big bay windows, and most are at least two family homes. And many started out being built from floor to ceiling out of wood.

You can smell it on the streets and in the hallways and over the stench of pollution. Though most of the buildings have been renovated numerous times over the hundred or so years (give or take a decade), most of the wood is still there holding them together. The undertone in Schenectady smells like old, lived in wood.

The building in which we live looks like a house on the outside, but has four flats inside. The place may have been all one house in the beginning, but I don’t think so. There are beautiful hutches built into the walls of my apartment and the one directly upstairs. Or they were beautiful before the inch thick layer of painting and repainting that covers what I’m sure was once bare wood. Space savers and a place for the railroad workers’ wives to store their meager collections of cherished knickknacks. And though it’s over a hundred years since this house was built, and people have stored countless fragrant items like cleaning supplies inside (I know because I’ve known a number of the previous tenants), when we open it to get something out the smell of “old” assaults my nostrils like so many years of pent up despondency. There have been very few happy moments in Schenectady for the general population. And I stick my head in and breathe it in deep, lest I forget its essence.

I used to love this city. I used to love its people and its buildings and its night life. But something’s changed under the surface. Something’s become a little more dark. A little more twisted. A little more angry. And while I still cling to the hope that she will pull herself out of this rut her people have dug so deep, I find myself letting disappointment and distaste creep in.

It reminds me of M when things get crazy around here. A little more sadistic. A little more forceful. A little more demanding. But unlike Electric City’s rise in crime and complacency, M’s change draws me in closer to him every single time.

Fall coming means long sleeves, turtlenecks and pants. Bruises don’t show in those clothes. And things are crazy around here again. Every time something good for us happens, it’s followed up with something going wrong. And when things go wrong, they really go wrong. We’ll be okay. It’s all solvable, it’s just a pain in the ass and will take forever.

It’s delicious when he takes his frustrations out on me.

The past week or so has been incredibly stressful for him. Add to that our most recent disagreement, and he’s feeling like the only thing he has control of is himself. For a control freak who takes quite a bit of pride in being responsible for what he is allowed to be in control of, that might as well be a death sentence. He’s antsy and depressed. Frustrated and angry. And with all that emotion roiling around inside him, and few socially acceptable outlets, I take pride in him trusting me enough to turn his darkness on me.

Unless I’m in a bad place, too. And then I have a hard time figuring out what I did wrong, not realizing that it’s not about me. It’s about him and what he needs from me at that point in time.

He can’t always be concerned with my emotions. That’s part and parcel of the whole slavery gig. (Hell, life as a whole, not just slavery.) Sometimes, no matter how much I want or feel like I need them to be, my emotions just cannot be the most important thing in his mind. Even if I was just M’s wife and not his slave there would still be things that are more important than how I feel about something that’s going on in our lives.

For example, I hate his job. It causes him all manner of frustration and eats up all his free time. He’s constantly browbeaten and insulted in ways that I’ve never been even at minimum wage jobs. I would take on as much work as I needed to, and cut costs wherever I could, and deal with how tight things would be if it meant he’d be able to get out of it. And I beg him to get out because it hurts me to see him this way. But when it comes right down to it, we’ve gotta eat. And his job pays the bills. So what I want, and what I think would ultimately be best for us has to take second chair to what he knows will keep us afloat until he’s sure he has another viable option.

And that’s just the simplest example.

It’s not easy, and people who just aren’t ready to plunge headlong into every obstacle with their partners rarely survive it. How dare you invalidate their emotions? Who gave you the right to put what you know over what they feel? Why should they fight for a relationship with a person who doesn’t even care about their feelings?

But it’s not about that. It’s about being there for each other and understanding that you’re both stressed out over things you can’t control. Even big strong dominant men need someone to lean on sometimes.