I have been thinking about love these days.
This is of course nothing new.
Relationships end and they begin, relationships maintain themselves and they wither. These days I am both buoyed by love and burdened by it. The last vestiges of my marriage unravel as we discuss the fate of what we once used to call “our rabbit.” I grow back the thickness of skin I had flensed from me last year. The Raven’s patience with me is endless-seeming, and I begin to feel as though I might actually be capable of being loved.
Last year it took the whole Mojave to contain me, though there were days I didn’t leave my house. Dust devils swirled on the dry lake five miles west and I watched them through the shades, thought of walking into one to be stripped clean of my grieving flesh, subsumed into the dry Ivanpah sky. They swirled violently, subsided in an eyeblink leaving nothing there but patterns on my retinas.
Days spent mostly alone in the middle of the forsaken desert and still there was not enough space between me and my old life. I am not ashamed to tell you all that I was shattered, the loss of Zeke and the loss of home and the loss of everything I thought I knew about myself within the space of a very few months, and yet still I persisted in the damnable world. I spent a few hours a week in anguished phone calls across a continent, a doomed friendship on which I had pinned what hope I had left, and when she told me that she met more talented, less narcissistic writers than me hanging out at the donut shop on a typical morning I believed her. I took the criticism to heart, or what was left of it.
When even that was over I spent a few days just breathing.
I still hear her voice each time I try to write. It is fading. It has faded almost to silence. But I still hear it.
Not long ago I found an old friend online, a woman with whom I shared a dust devil of a love a generation ago. We planned to marry but never did, each of us suddenly thinking the other had lost interest. What would our lives have been like had we asked? But we were 22, and stupidly afraid, and neither of us felt worthy of the other.
She asked what I’d been up to. It had been 25 years. I may have left out one or two things.
What have I been up to?
The Raven and I went to the farmers’ market in Hollywood this morning, bought some bison and tarragon, some herbs. Drummers on one corner, a frenetic hipster swing band on another, passersby startlingly beautiful enough to seem of an entirely different species from the likes of me. We ate pupusas with plastic forks, drank perfect coffee, and I wondered at the lightness in my heart. It has been growing these days, that lightness. Troubles enough to eat my stomach lining still, conversations tying up old rabbity loose ends in which I strain to be my better self, death and penury and bankrupting illnesses all there on the horizon to haunt me, and yet I felt light dodging the random beautiful amid the produce today, the most beautiful woman there walking with me, talking happily about our move back to the desert.
I have been thinking about love these days. I have been thinking about the pain and pull of it. I have been thinking that a love who tells you the worst things about yourself is irresistable, if the worst things about yourself are what you long to hear. I have been thinking about what it is like to have lived long enough to turn my life story on its head, to lose soulmate after soulmate and then find each one again. I have lived long enough to grieve secretly for one love of my life and in the glare of public sympathy for another.
I been thinking about how a quiet, happy hour walking each morning with an ailing dog outweighs subsequent months of rancid grief, of love curdled sour. I would go through all of this again just to have had those moments with him. Pain in the lead-up to them and pain in their wake, and I would do everything all over again just to have had those walks with him, even just as memory.
I have been thinking, finally, about how rare and wonderful it is to be loved by one from whom I need keep none of this.
Beautiful, Chris. I wish I could be as honest, whether publicly or privately.
What a marvelous introspection, heartfelt and heartrending, and shared, I’m sure, with many others, even if on principle alone rather than details. A very moving piece; I see my own scars in it.
All I can say is, that must be some donut shop. You are always one of the first people I name when someone asks me about great writers in the blogosphere. Since I don’t really know you aside from these occasional, brief online contacts, I can’t speak for the narcissism, except that if present, it certainly doesn’t infect the writing.
There’s an awfully fine line between public introspection and narcissism, and where that line is varies from reader to reader. It takes a courageous writer to push that boundary, knowing its variability, and knowing it will cross for some.
That’s one of the reasons why I don’t do it. Another is that I’m just not good enough to annoy discerning readers in quite that way.
I can’t tell you how happy I am so to hear that the lightness in your heart is there and is growing. May you find a hundred ways to nurture it so it keeps expanding.