"Come on, take a walk with me baby, tell me who do you hate?"

How many of you, after breaking up with someone, have literally found things about the other person you actually hated? I use that word sparingly... I usually use "dislike" in conversation because I don't want the word "hate" to be devalued in all its succinct, percussive splendor. But I have been able to find things I genuinely hate about someone I used to be with... I mean, hate with a blind, white rage.

And no, this is not about Melody. More about her in a moment. This is about my ex-wife.

I absolutely hate what she is now. Maybe I am the only one she shows that face to, but even if I AM the only one, even if I "deserve" it (whatever that means), then it's IN HER HEAD and it must come out in some other way eventually.

So, let me ask you guys: if you're Jewish, or if you had relatives who died in the Holocaust, do you "hate" Holocaust-deniers? If you're gay, do you "hate" the gay-bashers and people like Jesse Helms? If you've been raped, do you "hate" your rapist?

What does hate mean to you? How does it feel? What brings it back into your mind, what makes it go away for a while?

Here's what I realize it means for me: I hate the way my ex-wife seems to have a gradually-increasing anger about me, about having been married to me, and in some ways, about everything that reminds her of me, her marriage, or even this area in which we lived. It's as if she dismisses all of it, including her own role in it as if it never happened, and more, as if she doesn't have anything to learn from it. It's as if in doing so, she is repeating a mantra that I was always the broken one, she was the perfect one, she was always the one to be disappointed in me, never the other way around, and I was always the one to be demanded to compromise, to change, because she was already perfect and I was perpetually and completely flawed.

Yes, that's biased, of course.

Hate comes from frustration, and frustration comes from the failure of reason. Over time, I've come to think of my marriage as something I learned both bad and good things from, something I probably had to do to be the person I am now, something that's part of my history but not part of my life now. The frustration is that over time, she has seemed to get MORE angry, MORE upset over the failure of our marriage, even though, being 500 miles away and largely incommunicative, she has not gotten a fresh supply of fuel to feed that fire in a couple of years now.

When she told me a year or so ago that she was in counseling "to deal with issues of anger and frustration," my first response was a little disbelief. I asked her, "you know, I thought you dealt with your 'issues of anger and frustration' by leaving!" Seemed like it at the time... I mean, she flitted off to another part of the country. New job, new friends, new apartment, new life, no thought about the things she left behind in wreckage. If anybody was "supposed" to be angry and frustrated, seems like it should have been ME, right? I was the one left. Left with the house (maybe she's still pissed about not having gotten the tens of thousands of dollars-I-didn't-have out of it), left with all the cats, left with the prospect of trying to put my existing life back together when it had been built around a joint deal.

I got over the anger because I got over my depression, thanks to modern drugs and a long, long history of being able to work problems through by talking, even if it was only to the cats. And sure enough, now the only time I feel that kind of anger is when I actually talk to her. She makes no pretensions about concealing her exasperation with me. Yet she's talking to a near-stranger, and so am I. If what she is now is what she "really" is, then I have no idea who I was married to. And the person she was married to was in deep depression, easily angered and frustrated, and easily disappointed. I am none of those things in great abundance now.

We're strangers. But like all people, she expects me to be exactly the way I was the day she left. That she even expects that, let alone reacts to it accordingly, is what I hate. I hate it because it is outside reason. It can't BE reasoned with. She seems to want to preserve it, cling to it. Being angry at me gives her some weird focus, gives her some way she can continue to dismiss nine or ten years of her life as a big-ass mistake. If she actually saw me as I am now, she wouldn't be able to be angry at me, and she'd have no focus.

But seeing me as I am makes too much sense. It's that lack of sense that has caused me to hate her, to wish ill upon her. I don't like that feeling.