Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 3: Aries' Cage (1999)

Alas, poor Aries! I knew him ... Horatio? (holds bird skull in hand and weeps)

What can I say? I was in a dark place in the late 1990s, and "Aries' Cage" marked my third tragic short story in a row. I had inner demons to expunge, and I was on a roll!

I don't recall offhand whether I wrote "Aries' Cage" in '98 or '99, but I want to say it was April of '99. I could be wrong about that. The original draft is in a box somewhere at the moment, and I'm not feeling the need to dig for it. Fortunately, whichever year I actually penned this one, I definitely remember where I was emotionally when I wrote it and what was going on in my life to inspire the tale.

I mentioned in "Part 1" that I had gone through a bitter break-up at the end of 1996. Granted, time had passed before I got to poor, little Aries, but I was still deeply affected by that relationship. I think I always will be. With time and distance, that's not a bad thing. It was a learning experience for me, and I'm grateful for it and for all of the illuminating pain it brought me.

This particular relationship lasted four years, and I allowed myself, slowly but surely, to be isolated by it. I'll be honest; I don't like to talk about it. Actually, I hate talking about it, but, as I said, it was a valuable life lesson for me, and I would be remiss not to share it.

The first thing to know about codependent relationships is that they're sneaky. Before I got involved with this guy, I was quite the social butterfly. I had so many close friends that I could never have picked one out as my one "best" friend. I was involved in the world around me. I volunteered. I was on committees. I had friends to spare, though I wouldn't  have dared. Or, so I thought.

When he came into my life, we bonded so powerfully, so quickly, that I didn't see the relationship for what it was until it was far too late to stop it. We spent every waking moment together for four years. And whenever we weren't together, we were talking on the phone to each other. The festering problem was that he didn't like any of the other people in my life. Truth to tell, I think he always thought he could do much better than to spend his time with me, but it took him four years to act on that thought. So, being as deeply connected to this person as I was, I didn't notice the growing number of invitations I was turning down, or the plans I was breaking, because he didn't want to go. I didn't notice that I was slowly putting myself into a cage and giving him the key.

He was a misanthrope. He had no other people in his life, aside from his parents and his dogs. We were social opposites, but we had so much else in common that it was insane. I could go on a tangent here, about all of the great things in the relationship, but those things have nothing to do with the story I'm reminiscing about. Still, to be fair, there were a lot of things that genuinely brought me joy in that relationship. It was only in the end that the toxicity reached lethal levels.

I wont say too much else about it; not only because I hate talking about it, but because this relationship is not what triggered the writing of "Aries' Cage." It was added fuel, for sure, but it was not the flashpoint.

Suffice it to say, his disdain for my other friends and my family began to weigh on me a lot. I was still too naive and codependent to break it off. When someone sneakily pulls you into a codependent relationship, cutting you off from everyone else, the cage that traps you there for years is the fact that you've already lost everyone else. He became my entire world. So, when he broke it off, I was devastated.

Side note: Several months later, my dog, Barney, who'd been my brother since I was nine, passed away. As I think back on that time, I'm beginning to see what put me in the mindset of writing nothing but tragedies.

I was fortunately able to pick myself up and rebuild my life, better than it had been before. I regained old friends and discovered new ones.

I mentioned before the girl who fell in love with me, turning on me when I came out of the closet. The next part of that story is that we reconciled and became very close friends after I got out of that bad relationship. We became best friends. I even introduced her to another friend of mine, and they started dating, which eventually brings us to the true flashpoint for my sad little bird story.

I watched these two friends of mine form an intense bond in no time at all. It raised a lot of red flags for me. I saw too much of the man who'd broken me in her and too much of me in her boyfriend. Neither one of them had ever been in a real romantic relationship before. They were young and inexperienced. Before either one of them knew what was happening, they'd become nearly as codependent with each other as I had been in the relationship I'd just gotten free of. It was one-sided. It was her way or the highway. And he went right along with it, losing friends just as I had. He didn't lose all of them, but he did cut off anyone she had a problem with. She started making all of the decisions, and he was too frightened of losing her to argue. It was hard to watch.

It was witnessing this other relationship that pushed the story of "Aries' Cage" onto the page. It was so obviously about them in my mind, that I was afraid to ever let them read it. But, art is expression, and it may as well not have been expressed if no one reads it. So, I let them. They had no clue. It was both funny to me and horrifying.

Their relationship lasted longer than mine had, before they met their own bitter breakup, years later. To me the lesson of both my experience and theirs was to run screaming from any close relationship with clingy, needy, insecure people. These things can never end well.

So it was, with Aries, though I wrote the story long before my friends' relationship crashed and burned. I wrote it to process what I was seeing happen to two people whom I dearly loved. I was powerless to stop it, so writing about it in code was my only solace. All the better that it helped me to define what I myself had so recently been through.

I don't really have much else to say about "Aries' Cage." It was short, to the point, and depressing as Hell. I dare say it's the saddest thing I've ever written. I almost never revisit this story. It's painful for me. It brings up the memories that I'm sharing with you now. I suppose if this blog entry is a downer, it's apropos.

I posted "Aries' Cage" on my website in September of 1999. I think it was up there for months. I don't recall if I took it down when Cry, Wolf was published in December, or if it was when I posted "Night Light" the following February. That information is floating around the archives somewhere. As with the previous two short stories, "Aries' Cage" returned to the website the following year as a downloadable Word file. Over the years, it's been re-issued numerous times, most definitively as an e-book on Amazon.com.

As I look back on it now, I find that the greatest gift this story holds for me is the ability to measure just how much I've grown over the past two decades; both as a writer and as a human being. I'm proud to be someone who has grown impervious to such cages. I'm happy and singing and free!

Thank you, Aries. You were there when I needed you.

Rest in peace.