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~