Vignettes of Ordinary Love: Part I

<Originally published 30 December 16, date changed to put it above Part II>

~Lost and Found Causes~

(noname noname noname)

**[Warning:  This narrative will reveal no great ideas or profound revelations.  If you're bored, don't say you weren't warned.]**

We lingered at under a dark-hued sunset on a brackish shore littered with rocks the unsettled-raspy-smooth texture of fresh eggshells rubbing across fresh skin.  On the horizon, the faint haze of the sun’s circumference alternately disappeared and reappeared as the thick clouds slid across the sky.  Because a powerful storm lurked out there, at the very limits of the ocean, the sunset colors were more black than purple, more blue than orange. 

It was storm season along that Georgia shore, or fairly close to it.  Summer’s end had passed almost without notice.  Autumn had begun to drift slowly across the world, an impenetrable sullen grey whispering of the winter to come. 

The air from the sea turned cold, filling me with an indistinct sort of ambient chill.  At the back of my mind, I could hear a listlessly dreary shoe-gazer tune in the rush of the wind.  

She shivered slightly in her two-piece, and untied the towel from around her hips, wrapping it about her shoulders.  Because she loved summer and summer fashion – sundresses and bikinis and sandals and draped in all manner of esoteric items that I never learned to name – she always waited too long to adjust her sartorial inclinations to a more tepid season.

What should be her name?  Erin?  Nina?  Becca?  Samantha?  Isla, the She-Wolf?  All sound equally right, and equally wrong.  They fill the necessary space imperfectly, like a child shrugging under the discomfort of appropriate but ill-fitting fashion.  I remember her proper name, of course, the one that she carried, that I held to, and yet it wouldn't fit even if I were willing to use it here.  It's not true, you see.  It doesn't describe her properly.

Ultimately, the truth of the matter is simple: 

she has no name, then.  neither of us do, because after enough time has passed and the world has swung around again and again, a name is merely a saddened reflection, a reflex mnemonic, an image that can be recollected, but will never be seen again, with all its infinite nuances and vagaries, in that exact form. 

My recollection of her murky eyes and the soft ridge of her cheekbones is stronger than any name could be.  Sounds that flutter and fade, the hand that twitches involuntarily as it reaches to caress the curve of her face – these are personal biometrics, like fingerprints or iris patterns.  Her eyes were dark, and no matter how many times I looked in them, I couldn’t quite describe their color.   But I remember them as perfectly as I recall the moment of the last breath I took, the last word I typed.

Besides, I know my name and yet it seems completely useless in this story.  I’m no longer the person associated with the name at that exact moment.  Her name?  A return address to a place that will never again house the sender.

There on that shore, the sand churned and streaked by off-road vehicles enjoying illegal romps on the beach, each step made precarious by the uneven array of stones and broken shells, we held hands and said very little.  Everything was still new, and yet somehow nothing was new.  The paths we walked had been walked a million times before, and will be walked endless until our race’s time draws to a close.  I imagined some nameless prehistoric hominid treading heavily on this beach, never dreaming of what would come to pass over the millennia between his time and mine, and then a thousand thousand more walking the same path over the uncounted years as all the world move twixt change and chaos. 

I wonder if a single one of those who wandered across the shore in all the years that passed before we were born had a name still remembered by anyone alive.  I doubt it.

Offering her my own towel, I wrapped it around her shoulders.  My cargo shorts, loafers and polo shirt provided far more protection than her attire, though they didn't provide much.  I, too, clung to the remnants of casual summer wear.  She accepted it with the grace I had not yet come to expect in the short time we’d been together, but would come to love as we grew close.  In the distance, as the land curved, we could see pier lights extending out into the ocean.   The sun was sinking quickly into the curve of the horizon, and it was difficult to make out exactly how far away the pier was.  Though we were headed there, we moved unhurriedly, knowing that we had no particular purpose at that place, so we could always turn back for our hotel and dinner at a nice seafood place across the street.  (They supposedly had great shrimp and grits.  This was back before TV food networks beat the entire idea of shrimp and grits to death).  Then a soak in the full-sized Jacuzzi bath in our room.  Somehow, that last goal seemed like the entire point of even coming to this place, at this hour, on this day, during this season.  We still knew little enough about each other that sharing a steaming bath in the dark on a cold shore seemed far more intimate than anything else we could imagine.

We walked on. 

There was nobody else out that at that hour, on that day, during that season.  They were at home, or at dinner, or enjoying an evening nightcap at some nautical-themed bar.  Some of them were likely on the ship we could make out near the pier, silhouetted by the last light slipping over the horizon.

In the dusk, she seemed somehow paler, as if darkness brought out all the contrast inherent in her form.  A day in the sun – albeit a cool sun whose bare warmth couldn’t pierce the ocean breezes – hadn’t darkened her skin to any meaningful degree, and I was struck by how ghostly she looked.  Beautiful but not entirely there.
          I'm not sure if that was prescience or just self-indulgent twaddle on my part.  I want to say both.

               

Months later, the ghosts came for her.  For me as well, I think, though only she could see or feel them.

One warm Sunday afternoon in late April, as the whole town scurried frantically about to find the most relaxing way to pass the day, I found her hiding behind a mighty roar.  

She was leaning against the wall of a building devoted to some science or another, hiding in the shadow of metal boxes encasing large fans to cool the building.  Thick condensation dripped from them, dark streams of water running down the pavement near her feet.  She appeared to be watching those trickles of water as they made their way down toward the gutter.  She held an unlit cigarette in her hand.  Though she rarely smoked except socially, she liked holding cigarettes, and would do so often when she had a few moments to herself.  The art of properly holding a cigarette allowed for a hundred different projections.  The insouciant downward tilt from a hand held crooked upwards at her side.  The angry spear of a cigarette held to snarling lips.  The blitheness of a cigarette dangling by the very tip of the filter from her carelessly swinging hand.  The profound cigarette in the V between forefinger and middle finger as she presses them sternly against her downtilted forehead.  The Yeah, what of it? of an unlit cigarette poking straight up from between her fingers as she laid her palm flat on a table in the non-smoking section.

A person could never be properly clothed without a cigarette to complete the ensemble.  She believed this fervently, even though she never actually expressed the sentiment out loud, and she lived by that code as much as possible.

I once had the temerity to suggest she just hold a pen instead of a cigarette rather than bum one of mine to accessorize her outfit.

The look she gave me suggested that I understood nothing about the ways of the world.

She somehow sensed me coming – I could never really surprise her any more than she could really surprise me – and looked up as I approached.  With a brief nod that could have been approval, grudging acceptance, or a spasming neck muscle, she waved for me to approach.  Normally, I wouldn’t have thought twice about the meaning of her nod, but by then the ghosts had already begun their relentless creep into her dreams.  Predicting her moods was no longer as simple as it had once been.

As if waiting for that exact moment, the fans suddenly shut down.

What’s going on? I asked after we shared a quick kiss.

She smiled.  Nothing much.

By then, I knew every smile she had in her.  This particular one – crooked and almost tentative, with her eye glancing momentarily up to the sky – meant she’d been inside herself, thinking happy thoughts, and wanted to share her contentment with someone without actually explaining it.

It was one of my favorite smiles.  I smiled back and she slipped her hand into mine, leading me out of the shadow of the metal boxes.

Though I’m pretty sure it’s in there somewhere, the metaphor of the scene escapes me.

But there are moments, and then there are momentae obscurum per obscurius, moments that call for badly declined Latin.

Just thinking, she said.

About?

She shook her head.  Nothing.

So…your usual?  Par for the course?

That earned a hard but somehow affectionate punch to the shoulder with her free hand.  Being punched affectionately stung a little.  I could live with that.

Want to do pizza tonight?  You, me, possibly *Angelita?

Subs?

If you want.  I was being magnanimous.  It felt like a pizza day.  I could live with subs, though. Subs sound good.

I don’t know.  She finally released my hand to draw a lighter out of her pocket.  She hesitated for a moment before lighting up her cigarette, examining the gold and silver lighter in her hand.  Why are we doing this?

What?

Thinking I hadn’t heard her clearly, she repeated herself.  This.

What this?

All of this.  It all.  Everything.

Sometimes, I fail to pick up on the nuances of mood because I am legally classified as a blithering idiot.  So anything that definitely isn’t nothing, is that what you’re asking?

Random…

We’re here to be here.  And drink and fornicate, seeing as we have nothing better to do.

That’s deep.  You should crochet that on a throw pillow.

I suspect she was being sarcastic.  I even suspected this at that exact time.

Just sayin’.

Random, she said again.  The way she said it made me pause.

What is it, sweetie?

Nothing.  And she smiled, just a bit.  It was painful to watch the effort.  

I knew this part of the conversation was finished.  Still:  Are you having a bad day?

Not particularly.  Let’s get pizza.

You mean subs.

I’m in the mood for pizza now.  I’ll call *Angelita.

Okay.

She took out her phone and pressed the necessary buttons.   Placing it to her ear, she glanced at me and offered another painful smile.  After a few seconds, she hung up.  No answer.  Bet she’s down in *Wilkins.

Silly girl.  What does *Wilkins have that she can’t find here?

Her boyfriend?

Well, there is that.  Though, between us, I rather think we could replace everything he has to offer  And then I stopped, realizing the way she spoke that word, boyfriend, sounded exactly like she’d said my name before.  

Sweetie? I asked.

She knew what I was thinking.  She always knew what I was thinking.  Except on rare occasions like this one, I always knew what she was thinking.  She took a drag off her cigarette.  Nothing.

Something.  Tell me.

It’s just…nothing.  Memories.  Ghosts, I guess, if that doesn't sound pretentious.  All the usual things that get to you when you’re alone.  Before you got here, I was accidentally thinking.

I left it at that, knowing that an explanation would come sooner or later and perhaps much later would be preferable.  Some things should only be shared at the end of things, and I half-suspected this was one of them.  I also declined to tease her about the ‘accidentally thinking’ part because I have always been, like, the mostest awesomest boyfriend ever.

That last spring we were together as a couple, we moved in unconscious, undeliberated sync with each other, as if in a long dream.  Nothing quite real but everything somehow meaningful even if we didn’t – and perhaps couldn’t – know what any one thing really meant.  Evening walks started taking us to strange places, parts of town we’d never lingered in before, houses belonging to friends we’d not yet decided to keep close, restaurants we’d never before been tempted to try.  As if settling into a whisper of a shared drowsing, our half-closed eyes looked slowly about and at each other.  And, far more so than earlier in our relationship, we shared brief unnecessary brushes of skin against skin as if to reassure each other that we were still tangible, that we weren’t somehow ghosts.

I even said that once, the evening after I found her in the shadows of the AC units.  She reached out to touch my arm as we navigated a darkened grove of trees near a lake a half-mile from her house the evening after we left the beach. 

Trying to make sure we’re not ghosts? I asked,  remembering what she'd said the day before.  I smiled in what I hoped was a reassuring manner as we stepped into a patch of moonlight between the branches.  Without thinking, I echoed that word from our earlier conversation.  Ghost couples are an underexplored area of horror fiction.

And she didn’t smile as she replied, If we were, how could we tell? I’d think a ghost would feel real to another ghost. Maybe the whole world is dead and we just never noticed.  Would be the perfect metaphor for the human condition, you think?

She had to repeat the last part of the statement before I quite understood.  For once, she seemed vaguely annoyed at having to do so.

Was the statement profound?  I wanted to say so at the time.  It sounded as though it should have been.  Now, with years between me and her, I’m certain it is not.  Profane, perhaps, to a certain way of thinking, the nihilism trampling amongst the simple pleasures.  But profundity is incidental.  Timeless truths are constantly being rediscovered simply because nothing is really timeless.  Things need to die and to be reborn and die again. 

Every love is a new love, after all. 

This isn’t Buddhism.  This is an inevitability of physics.  Doubt understands, remembrance implies nothing. 

After all this time, our love still felt new.  But from the very beginning, it had also felt old and stubborn as rock, set in cycles we couldn’t change.  Perhaps couldn’t even imagine wanting to change.

Still, profound or not, her grappling gaze refused to leave mine.  For once, she wanted an answer to one of her flirtations with profundity.  I didn’t know what to say. 

Actually, I knew exactly what to say, but refused to reply, Til life do us part? because it was silly and in no way profound, just a juxtaposition that made no sense.  It would have been cheap and we both would have regretting learning that I was capable of thinking it clever.

She smiled, just a little, when I looked at her without responding.  How she interpreted my silence – as wise, or as dumbfounded, or as simple dread – I don’t know.  I’m pretty certain, with the assurance that comes from sincerely not wanting answers, that no matter how she choose to perceive my silence, it would make no actual difference.  Not really.  Not when it mattered.

As we emerged next to the lake, the wind picked up, as it does across bodies of water over a certain size.  A pale translucent layer of clouds flowed across the moon.  The lights of the nearby city seemed muted by the moonlight, though the lamps over the apartment parking lots nearby glowed over the top of the trees across the lake.  A perfect evening idyll, everybody either asleep in their beds or out at their night jobs; the world ending in a slow dream of sleep, the lights fading out one by one.

Or not ending at all.  Since I’m writing this at a much later date and the world has clearly chosen to stick around a bit longer, I’ll have to concede that the latter is more likely.

She huddled closer to me than the relatively mild temperate made necessary.  You know, earlier…?

Yes?

Sorry I was being weird.

Why, though?

For some reason, this was the why  that finally got something vaguely resembling a straight answer.  You know the story about my step-daddy, right?

I did, and nodded.  Yes.  There was nothing else to be said about such a terrible, brutal topic.

My momma called on Thursday and said he died two weeks ago.  Prison hospital.  Liver disease.

Cirrhosis?

She didn’t say.  Probably.

How do you feel?

She pulled away from my side a bit.  I don’t know.

Understandable.

Is it?

Being honest, I shrugged.  Dunno.  Just seems like the sort of sympathetic thing people say when they don’t know what to say.  Or when they don’t want to say something that accidentally changes the direction the other person wants to go.

Which one?

Both, I guess.  Why…and I stopped quickly.  How does your mom feel?

She’s okay.  And that wasn’t what you were going to ask.  You wanted to know why I waited until now to tell you.

Yeah.  But it’s not my place.  Seems kind of accusatory.

It is.  Your place, I mean.  I’d expect you to tell me.

It’s all good.  I’m sorry, sweetie.  Been a rough few days, I imagine.

Not as rough as I thought.  It feels like I already knew.  Like everything has already happened a long time ago and I’m just now hearing about it.

I caught what she was saying.  Like we’re dead and currently haunting the world.  Like ghosts are….

…just memories of people.  Yeah.  She actually smiled a little, a genuine little grin.  I want to write about that idea.  Pretty sure it’s been done before.  Or it’s a current theory for ghost-hunters or something.

Maybe, but you can write about it anyway.  It’s the style and substance, not the premise, that matter.

And the mood passed like clouds over the moon.  When I walked her home, she held my hand but didn’t move in to snuggle too close; strangely, that was a good thing.  She felt better, less in need.  She felt like she had felt before all of this, at least to a degree.

I couldn’t quite escape the sense we were living out a Hemingway story, all brief exchanges and staccato breathing and the occasional pissed-off bull.

She could never really surprise me, though, nor I her.  Even then, she was right – it felt like I also knew that revelation was coming and she’d just reminded me.

The periodicals constantly harp on the proposition that relationships survive through mystery, intrigue, discovery.  And perhaps they’re right. 

Mostly right, I mean.  Or mostly wrong.  It seems unwise to live one’s life by the expectation that a magazine writer has a firmer grasp on your situation than you do.

When I say we could never surprise each other, that didn’t mean we never learned anything new from each other.  After months, I still barely knew her, and she barely knew me, and that was how we wanted it, I think.  Each new piece of information was a delight, or sometimes a suddenly shared sadness.  We learned in fits and starts.  We made, however subconsciously, an effort to delve into each other.

We never stopped learning; yet, somehow, we never really started being surprised.

When she would slowly unfold some beauty within her that I had not yet learned to appreciate, I was always pleased, like opening a present wrapped in the exact shape of the present itself.  I always had this sensation…Oh, of course, that’s exactly what I would have thought about her had it occurred to me to think about it.  It was never an astonishment.  It was rarely even a moment that made me go Hmmm. Still, it didn’t nag at me the way routine and clockwork familiarity have always discomfited me to some degree.

The first time she talked about her stepfather, about the monstrous and malicious, about the damage that mere eyes and hands can do, I knew that story, that ancien régime of power and abuse, I could almost recite the words along with her.  Not from experience, mind you.  I never experienced it, and am far past the age where I even have to worry about it.  I just recognized it in the mirror of an instinctive understanding of the sad, sad history of our species.  And no matter how much I learned from that tentative stuttering discussion under an orange neon sign out back a packed bar, I didn’t feel like I knew her any better than I already had.  It was the mythos of our species, a vague replotting of stories we could have shared in a multitude of different ways and degrees from then until the ends of time.

Perhaps I loved her a bit more for her vulnerability, her willingness to share.  Perhaps.  And perhaps she loved me a little less for the same reason.  It can be hard to forgive people who know you the best, who could devastate you with a gesture if they chose.

Or perhaps we neither loved each other more or less, just differently.  I learned to hate her stepfather.  She learned that she was right – at least in one other person’s opinion – to do so as well.

What was her last name?  As I said, I recall her first, but I go back and forth and in mental wheeling gyres deciding on her surname.  I’m not certain how I forgot it.  I have a rough idea; I’m just missing a letter or two.  And this may sound odd, and possibly pretentious, but I’m starting to think I let it grow fuzzy in my memory because she doesn’t deserve to be remembered like this, a slightly-damaged woman still clutching for some reason for it all.  She was smart and kind and beautiful in ways that escape the fatuity of purple prose.  She isn’t the same person anymore, and she deserves better than what childhood did to her.

~Part II to come when I feel up to writing it~

Vignettes of Ordinary Love: Part II

~Unhinged Melody~

**[Warning:  This narrative will reveal no great ideas or profound revelations.  If you're bored, don't say you weren't warned.]**

We had a very modern sort of love, with slippery condoms in the medicine cabinet and relationship manuals in the nightstand drawers like Gideon bibles.  We always used the former with a meticulousness that reflected a very real, if subdued, terror of the future.  We browsed the latter with a deft disinterest that bordered on ironic detachment that reflected a very real, if subdued, ambivalence toward that same future.  We agreed (in that way so many couples agree, with rolled eyes and casual smirks) that we would sooner see our relationship plane go down in flames than obsess neurotically over the details such as whether the engines were running properly.

                Yes, the airplane metaphor was the exact one we used, and the conclusion of that sentence is an almost verbatim recitation of how we expressed our thoughts on the matter.  I cannot recall which of us came up with it.  Not that it matters.  We agreed, and agreed with a fervor that seems slightly unnerving in retrospect.

                I honestly have no idea where the books came from, or why.  She didn't hold with that sort of thing, and I sure as hell didn't.  Thinking about it, I wonder if they were part of some forgotten practical joke I was making.  That seems incredibly likely, me being who I am and having the sense of humor I do, though I'm puzzled at my inability to remember having performed it.

                Knowing what I know now, resisting or ignoring the calls for analysis still seems like the right approach.  Nights never seemed colder, or days more dullen, when we worked too hard to maintain.  Neurotic was our favorite profanity, the shibboleth of shame.  We refused to consider ourselves neurotic people, and our refusal was adamant to the end.  When things went awry, and we confessed to doubts that had no name or clarity, we would say neurotic to each other, and leave the doubts behind as if they never actually existed.

As final months piled on final months, we both worried why the other had become occasionally distant and neither of us would admit so such neurotic thoughts. 

Come hell or high water or endless Housmanian rue, we would maintain our dignity.

But…regret? some idle reader might ask in frustration.  What of regret? What of subtle misery and long lonely hours at a grave of one who has passed irretrievably from this world?  What of that horrible moment when you learn the passing of one you haven’t seen on many years?

My answer is simple:  Don’t be a damned drama queen.  And stop talking like a soap opera character.      

Ah, those wacky hypothetical idle readers with their words that I put into their mouths.

In any event, though I cannot claim to be a sentimentalist in the strictest sense, I’m not unsentimental.  Memory exerts a hold on us all, of course.  Even me, and I can’t even properly remember the last names of half the people I’ve held near and dear.  While nostalgia itself might be something akin to my personal bête noire, I comprehend it on an intellectual level.  Sort of.

So we meandered, quite meaninglessly, and slept lightly, and shared thoughts in the dark that we silently agreed we’d never speak of again after the light returned in the morning.

Some days, or even the occasional week, we wouldn’t see each other at all.  This was a few sparse years before smartphones that could fit easily in the pockets became more commonly carried.  Or at least less uncommon.  We would play phone tag with each other’s home phones, and once in a while, we’d remember the invention of the Internet and e-mail just long enough to fire off a well-intended but ultimately useless written message. Though we both had cell phones, neither of us ever really thought of them as our first lines of communication.

We accepted this state of affairs, this sort of willful forgetting for a day or three, because we were not neurotic people and refused to admit we could be.

Always, after such a separation, we’d meet for dinner or lunch or just a walk through the park, and never ask the other what they’d been up to.  We always told, but never asked; asking was something we knew we shouldn’t do.

Because of this, when she was finally gone for good, it took me almost two weeks before I realized that I actually missed her, and that I had no more need for all those questions that I would refuse to actually ask.

If that sounds like an odd way to put it, imagine how odd it was to actually feel it.

But some people never quite leave you, you see, and she was one of them.  No matter how much life accumulates in the intervening years, their presence still lingers (or malingers) in the corners you see out of the edge of your vision, or at distant tables you swear all your old friends are still gathered.

 For me, her pain, the interrogatives of sharing things that ought never have happened – those stick with me even when I wish they didn’t.  I don’t do self-flagellation for self-flagellation’s sake.

When she finally told me the entire story – her family, her step-family, those bitterpoisongraspingnettles that had been forcibly grafted onto her psyche, I thought I was prepared.  The details that arrived in fits and starts over the space of months formed a framework as I meticulously connected each tiny datum to its proper place in the whole.  Because I was arrogant, I thought I could respond with the sympathy of someone who had long ago worked out the entire story and formulated the perfect response.  Because we weren’t one of those neurotic people, I assumed the fix would be agonizing but quick, pulling out the arrow and stanching the bleeding.  And because I’m so often wrong, I was wrong about both.

When she finished her story, she admitted that, for once, she was one of those neurotic people, and, I replied, for as long as she needed me to be, so was I.

I couldn't master being actually neurotic, but I could damned well fake it for her sake.

It’s perfectly okay, I told her.  Man, I’d be worried if you weren’t one under such circumstances.

So, how does it feel to be with someone super-damaged, she asked.

I considered my reply.  Not really, though, because I had already envisioned this scenario when I thought I had worked the entire thing out.  Finally, I looked straight into her eyes, laid my hand on top of hers as it rested on my knee, and said, with as much wisdom and unabated love I could muster, It's okay, actually.  Everyone's a little damaged.

Since I’m a blithering idiot, I thought that would reassure her that she wasn't a freak, that I understood what she’d suffered at the hands of horrible people.

But she wasn't stupid, and wasn't going to let me get away with being facile.  
         You’re not, she said.

Sure I am.

She almost smiled, just to let me know she wasn’t angry at my pretense.  How are you damaged?

My mouth opened.  I had no answer, and she knew that as well as I did.  I understand that now, so many years later.  Now that I do have a little damage, if nothing so horrific as the hurt she’d suffered, I know she was right.  My well-intentioned attempts at empathy were worthless.  Hollow.  She didn't hold them against me, but she also knew that, at some level, I would never understand her damage until I had some of my own.

It’s taken many years, but I understand now.

I think.

~***~

But there’s one more story on a grey and sundering shore in the midst of a wintry season.  I’ve held off discussing until now for a very simple, yet somehow astonishing, reason.  It’s a reason that would make a narrator intellectually incomprehensible, perhaps even morally reprehensible, if written in a work of fiction.

The reason is this:  I honestly cannot remember whether it happened near the beginning of our relationship, in late October, or near the end, in early April.  We were there for both, though the shores were not the same ones.  Or, rather, we were on the same one for different reasons, for different experiences.

Does this problem make me morally reprehensible, or merely intellectually incomprehensible? 

I couldn’t say.  

And even if I could, I wouldn’t.  I mean, seriously, why beat myself up over such a tiny thing?

The dark outlines of the distant pier had started to flutter with colored lights that seemed far icier than they had before.  When the weather was warm, the lights were festive, inviting.  When a cold snap blasted across the sands, the fiery reds banked, the lightning blues cracked like ice cubes, and the greens turned frosty.  We huddled together like two people trying to stay warm rather than lovers.   Whether this was because of long and assured comfort with each other or because being lovers was still so new, I couldn’t say, which is why I’m uncertain as to whether we were close to the beginning, or to the end.

In either case, being lovers would come later, in the safety of a dim hotel room.  We had long since learned, before we ever even met each other, that love may not be conditional, but it can be very situational.  The practicalities of life rend at any attachment, however devoted, and sometimes the true metrics of a relationship aren’t in the intimate moments behind the screens of night, or the breathless meetings between the nows and thens, or in imagined futures growing old and comfortable.  What really binds us exists those isolated days and hours when love can’t be shown in caresses, when proofs of relationships seems a distant and hectic.   That’s where we find the measure of what we mean to each other, or don’t mean.

The tide would come in sooner than either of us expected.  I pointed that out to her.  She looked at the surf and asked, You check the almanac, then?

I chuckled.  Just inevitable.

What isn’t, really?  She glanced down at her feet.  I want some hot water.

For tea?

For soaking in.  With you, preferably.

Ready to head back?

Might as well.  Sure as hell not going to reach the pier in time to enjoy it.  Must be five miles.  We’ll go tomorrow.  Let’s get warm tonight.

So we headed back.  When we filled the Jacuzzi bath and climbed in, we snuggled up close, kicking our feet about and laughing at stupid things.  We stayed in there for at least two hours, adding more hot water as necessary.   We talked about all manner of things, none of them very important, because it was necessary to keep talking, even about unimportant things.  All the experts said so.  We talked and talked and absolutely did not remember anything we’d discussed earlier.  We ferociously avoid remembering.

Afterwards, we made love because she insisted we make love rather than have sex or sleep together or any of the many ways to describe the act.  Even at the beginning, before we even dared use the word ‘love’ in any other context, we always made love.  It was deeply important, you see, for some reason she never really articulated.  Something she’d promised herself, long ago, for reasons I could guess at.  Only guess at.

In an attack of good sense that I’m proud of to this day, I never teased her about it.

Later, when she slept, she slept alone.  As always.  Even when I lay next to her, with her arm resting on my chest or her hand on my shoulder or her leg crossed with mine as she changed and shifted through the night, she measured a distance in sharp tics and restless sighs that sounded very much like whimpers in my ears.  I soon learned not to react to them; she was not unaware of these symptoms.    She certainly didn't need me to remind her.

That’s the word she used:  symptoms.  The disease had a name, of course.  It was a name I’d learned early, the night of our first kiss.  Our first real kiss, anyway, the first kiss that didn’t land on some artful portion of the face between meaning and frivolity, twixt temple and jaw.  The kiss came first, then the murmured memories that touched on every name but the proper one.

Because of what came next, that was literally the only first kiss I remember as such.  Now, I’m not certain if it’s a happy memory or a sad one.

She explained it all, though not in words that can be properly dissected, properly conveyed.

(Nor would I do so.  She trusted me.  I will never repeat what she said.)

And when she was done, we kissed again, and drowsed on my couch until morning.  Before she left, we ate cups of dry cereal because I had no milk or alternate breakfast foods.   We pretended last night hadn’t happened, at least out loud.  Instead, we discussed getting out of town, somewhere our friends couldn’t find us.  She went home to shower and change for classes; I called a friend and asked him if his parents’ beach house was available.  It was not – they had shut it down completely for the off-season – but he could certainly recommend a good hotel right on the water.  Beach access directly from the patio if you were on the first floor, and it being the off-season, we would definitely be able to secure a first floor suite.  In-room Jacuzzis.  Smoking rooms, since we both smoked.  No annoying room-service.  And that’s how we ended up on that beach twice during our relationship.

As I said, I don’t remember which time this was, the first or the last, but it doesn’t really matter.

There at the beach, we almost talked about it again.  I think.  When something so large lurks, you always wonder whether you should bring it up, or let it be brought up.  We lived in the moment as much as possible, though not by conscious choice.  When something lurks, you keep going, and stuff down any guilt you might have over not acknowledging it.

She was crying in the half-light of dusk.  She so rarely cried.

What’s the matter? I asked.

Nothing.

Doesn’t look like nothing.

Nothing you can help with right now.

Can I try?

Yes, but I don’t feel like talking about it.  Some things, you can’t fix specifically.  You -- and this was a very specific you, meaning me -- think things can be fixed. She paused and actually smiled up at me, just a little.  It’s really annoying sometimes.  Can’t fix everything, right?

Can’t fix everything, right? She would tell me that during a discussion of an ex-boyfriend of hers, a man – just a boy, actually, even at 18 years of age – who became hopelessly addicted to drugs.  Meth and black tar.  His family took him out west, and she lost contact.  Or she wasn’t allowed contact.  One of those.  If she knew which, she never told me.

A bad influence, she said, laughing.  She only did pot and booze, and only socially.  She never touched needles or pills.  She drank herbal tea and never so much as spent a moment looking at a soft drink.  She ate fast food only on the very rarest of occasions.  But somehow I was the bad influence.

Makes you wonder what he told them.

She shrugged.  I know what he told them.  Anything he could to take the blame away from him.  It’s fine.  Never liked his family anyway.  Half of them were as messed up as him.  Alkies, mostly.

Harsh.

Yeah.  Sad stuff.  As I said, can’t fix everything, and that’s okay.

What she was really saying was, Can’t fix me, and that’s okay.

But this conversation was another time, another place, another mood.   Now, we stood at the edge of the Atlantic, which felt like the very edge of the world, cold hands clasped in cold hands, both slick with the saltwater air, neither warming the other.  It didn’t matter – we couldn’t let go.  After all, Can’t fix everything, right? doesn’t mean you give up.  We held hands.  Just in case.

She stopped crying, using the edge of her towel to dry her face.

Anyway…. she said so I’d know the topic had changed to, well, anything else.

Anyway indeed.  I almost added, Can’t fix everything, right?

But most of our memories were happy ones.  That’s how life goes –  from big moment to big moment, drifting through the vast stretches of little moments in-between.  Life can’t be filled only with big moments.  You’d go insane trying to wrap your mind around them all.  

So we enjoyed ourselves, each other, everything, and when we couldn’t ignore the lurking horrors, the ghosts of her past, we dealt with them as best we could before moving on again.

I couldn't fix her.  She didn't want me to.  The hard part here is admitting that she wanted me for something else, something other than saving her from her past.

Perhaps she wanted someone to.  Just not me.

Perhaps she wanted me to, but knew I couldn’t,  not yet, and she couldn’t just wait anxiously to discover when.  So she chose not to expect it, just take what I could give her in the moments we actually had.

It was love.  That much I allow.  She loved me, I know, and though I’m not sure I recognized it at the time, I think I loved her very much, in ways that perhaps I still couldn't properly describe.  Intuitive ways, silent ways, inexplicable ways.  Sometimes it's not biochemistry or psychology, but the faint turnings of our sense of comfort in a person's company.  

But it was an ordinary love, a love without purpose, without reason, without a grand eloquence or heartfelt truth.  It was companionship and the temporary illusion that the world will not go away, but it can wait a little longer.  It sounds mundane, and it really is.  So many things are ordinary; so few ordinary things are appreciated for what they are.  We appreciated the ordinary, and that’s how we managed to stay together.

~***~

So there’s this girl.  Something brutal hides behind those knowing grins, something broken and roughly rebuilt informs the self-assurance in her expression as the wind whips her shoulder-length dark green hair mightily about.  She laughs at the guy trying to avoid a questionable bit of seaweed because he thinks he sees the sheen of a jellyfish in the tangle of green-brown.  She laughs and then helps him up from the sand he fell on as his legs got tangled during his last second jump to the side.  The happiness is genuine, the amusement is light and lacking in malice.  But there’s still something wrong, so deep he has trouble understanding it, let alone drawing it out of her.

He wonders what she was thinking. 

She shivers as she turns her head to glance in the direction of the pier.  We’re not going to make it, she says.  He nods.  It doesn’t occur to him then that she means anything else by that, because she doesn’t.  It’s only in retrospect that people pretend these things had greater meaning.  The walk to the pier would be too long.  They wouldn't make it to the spot by a reasonable hour.  That’s all either of them think at the time.

Somehow, though, he still felt a little lost.

So there’s this girl and this story that was a punctuation in a long line of sad stories.  This girl, she has trouble sleeping, and sometimes forgets to eat for a couple days.  When she left home at 18, she never went back.  Now she looks at other people, and other peoples’ families, and wonders what secrets they’re all hiding.  It doesn’t occur to her that any family could be relatively harmonious.

So the waters break on the beach around her feet and she hardly realizes because she is leaning against her boyfriend, who wouldn’t make it and wouldn't last but would be there long enough to matter, eyes closed and breathing deep as they murmur between the rumblings of the ocean.

She’s not unhappy.  That always confuses her, the sense that she should be miserable about the lot she’d been dealt in life; instead, she finds happiness in all the moments that distract her from the past.

Damage cuts dully even after years of trying to resist it, blunt it.  One of her favorite songs is “Running On Empty,” and she quoted it under her picture in her senior high school yearbook:  “I don't know where I'm running now, I'm just running on.”

Or so she tells him.  She never had a copy of it.  At least not that she remembers.

There’s this girl, you see, and that means she was a baby once, and a child, and a juvenile and a teen.  So, really, there’s this baby-child-juvenile-teen-girl, but we pretend the past doesn’t exist in these cases, for simplicity’s sake.  Nobody wants a life story as an introduction.

So there’s this girl.  She’s lovely in all the ways she could become lovely, and in many ways she never meant to.  She has a past (Don’t we all? the guy asks, and he's unsure whether or not it's rhetorical) and a deep uncertainty how that past became this present.  She has green hair and bitter-dark eyes that have trouble focusing sometimes.  On sunny days, she moves slowly toward the light, watching it through the blinds at first.  Then sitting in the chair next to the window, a cup of coffee in her hand as she reaches to turn the rod until the blinds are open and the sunlight falls over her.  On rainy days, she calls her boyfriend, who loves the rain, and asks him to tell her about his day to come.  He does so, sleepily, because he normally wakes up a half-hour or so after her.  He almost never know more than she does about his schedule at that point in the day, but she likes to hear him say it anyway.  For some reason, it comforts her.  She never understood why he likes rainy days so much; perhaps she’s hoping to hear something between the words, around the pattern of what happens when, that will reveal his feelings more clearly.

But she’s just this girl, like any other girl, and he’s just this guy, like any other guy, and their love is like any other love.  They never really stop to think about what any of this means.  She isn’t ready to be fixed, you see, no matter how much she wants to be, and he isn’t able to fix her, no matter how much he wishes he could.  They’re just ordinary people leading ordinary lives.  For a few months, they forget everything else as best they can.

When it finally ends, this girl regrets nothing of what they shared, or so the guy likes to think.

And then there’s this guy, this self-assured and constantly puzzled person wandering twixt and tween the assurance of understanding and the pang of knowing he’ll never really understand.  He looks at her and winks.  She smiles back with that perfect half-smile of hers, a slanting trembling quiver at the corner of her mouth that puts the slightest of dimples in just one cheek.  A sharp breeze over the water blows her hair over her face. 

His hair, tied up in a ponytail, whips about a bit.  Later that night, she would put it into a French braid after he tells her about a pair of young girls who did the same for him years ago.  She would laugh and tease him about it, and he would look stern with fake outrage at his offended dignity.

This guy wants to fix everything.  He understands almost nothing.  Her smile and laughter and the enchantingly sly look she gives him as she contemplates how best to get past his defenses and give him a good pinch under his jacket – those things he understands.  They wrap themselves in the moment, make love easy.  That’s what he wants out of life then.  Easy love, easy moments, the freedom to float along and ride out any consequence.
Everyone is entitled to be foolish sometimes, he reasons.  Else, what's the point?

Their shoes are soaked by the cold foam.  Later that night, she will braid his hair and they will laugh as they realize that neither of them noticed the icy squishy foamy sensation about their feet.  And perhaps that meant something too.  

This is love, being so caught up in each other that you don’t notice the world’s flailing attempts to distract you.  They don’t say this, at least not in so many words; nevertheless, they share this sentiment.

As far as love goes, the guy doesn’t really care one way or the other how it’s defined in this place, at this time, by these people.  He’s young.  She’s young.  They have time enough, because, when you're young, there is always time enough to figure out the little things.  

He’s seen her yearbook picture.  She kept it despite not having the yearbook itself.   Though it had been taken five years prior, she looked so much older then than she does now.  Her smile hurts to look at.   Her eyes look so heavy that it seems like a miracle she can even lift her gaze up for the camera.  He didn’t recognize the quote she told him about until she played the song for him.  Now he listens to it sometimes when driving long distances without her, just for a sense of connection.   It’s sentimental, but he lies to himself and just pretends he’s just passing the time.

Sometimes, he wonders how deeply the lyrics describe her.  Do they explain everything, in their own way?

He’s not that deep.  Or, rather, tries not to be that deep.  He cannot say why, except in mealy-mouthed platitudes about iconoclasm and absurdist heroes.

He believes in both wisdom and love; he struggles not to reject them as artifices, self-conscious creations, false platitudes for a credulous world.

 This is love.  Neither of them say this.  Nor do they say, This is not love.   That is where they found their center, in the moments where they made no decisions of real consequence.   Love, not love, it seems pointless to agonize over the question.  They are not, after all, neurotic people.  To consider the question would be a lobotomization of their attitudes and their professed values. 

To insist this isn’t shallow seems defensive.  Certainly it contains unmistakable elements of vacillation, of unwillingness to take the time together too seriously.  That’s fairly shallow.  They risk little, enjoy much.  Still waters run deep, swift waters run shallow.  Both have their charms.

This is both love and not love. It doesn’t matter which because it never did.  Love was never the end, just the means.  When we are born, we are allotted a certain amount of love.  If those who should love us betray us when we’re young, we will have a chance to make up for it later.

Who knows who said this, or whether this has yet to be said, so many years after the guy and the girl last spoke with each other.

And:

Love is who we are with each other, not what we do with each other.

Perhaps these words, or their equivalent in whatever ever language exists in that far-flung place, will be the last words spoken at the social end of our species, the answer to our eternal why.  Because I'm a sentimentalist, even though I'm not, I like to think we will deserve to understand at the last.

~Fin~