Throw your hat over the wall

I woke up in the pitch dark last night feeling the kind of fear that’s rooted in your stomach, like your insides know there’s a threat and they’re trying to get out. I was crying before I even sat up straight. The first two weeks after the breakup I’d been sad but I was letting my heart start to heal. Then she and I exchanged a couple letters and she intimated we might have a path to get back together. The healing stopped and the only sensation I had was constant unease in my gut.

I met her just after my divorce. In fact, the day I took a car to the lawyer’s office to finalize my divorce she rode with me and held my hand. “You’re going to have a good life, Jack Danger,” she told me as I grimaced with worry. It was too early for me to start a relationship and she and I both knew that. But what we had was impossible to refuse. I made a plan to engage the grief and the healing and the growing that I needed while inside the relationship; I didn’t need to break things off. My plan involved plenty of personal time and even staying home at Christmas while she went to see family so I could work through the inside things a person can only do when they face the world alone.

She had to teach me about dating. “We’ll take turns paying for counter service meals,” she told me. How novel — I don’t have to pay for everything anymore. “And we’ll split dinners out. And you can pay for coffee on odd numbered days and I on the others.” I knew how to love, but I didn’t know how to date or how to talk about dating. And I didn’t know whether to tell her about previous dates I’d been on with other people. I’d tried once but she said it wasn’t classy so I stopped. This turned out to be our downfall — she filled in the blanks with her own ideas and I let her.

It took us a year for the miscommunication to show itself and now I’m in a hot sweat alone in bed wondering how to fix things. Do I reach out to her? Do I apologize for the thousandth time that I didn’t work harder to disabuse her of her assumptions and push us to clarify things? Or do I accept that we were terrible at communicating and move on? Or maybe just curl up and cry for another week and see if I can give myself a stomach ulcer so bad that I’ll die and this problem will just go away?

A dear old friend of mine told me that my relational style matches a story by the Irish writer Frank O’Connor. In his memoir O’Connor says that:

[…] as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall — and then they had no choice but to follow them.

Our relationship didn’t work out partly for reasons I understand and partly for ones I never will. But I threw my hat over the fence when we started — I committed to give it my best shot and to fully engage with her and be the best partner I could be. It only lasted a year and the end was very painful but I don’t think I’d do it any other way. Despite the pain I discovered a beautiful, wonderful woman and I discovered beautiful, wonderful parts of myself. I learned to cry and lower my defenses and open myself up completely, without reservation to my partner. What she saw in the end didn’t match who she thought I was and she didn’t want me. And that hurt, but not as bad as these midnight tears with my torso heaving and adrenaline commanding my arms to shake. Having someone see me completely and reject me doesn’t hurt as much as being stuck half-in and half-out of a relationship.

So I’m throwing my hat again. This time it’s over the fence on the other side of the orchard — the one that leads out of the relationship and onward. Just as I said goodbye to my invulnerability in order to be with her I’m saying goodbye to an amazing woman in order to let myself be open to whatever’s next for me.

Each time I throw my hat I’m scared to pieces. No matter what’s on this side of the fence it’s at least measurable and known. And on the other side things could be worse. But my stomach tells me when it’s time to go and I’m learning to trust my gut.