Being in Love
Remember being in love? We loved each other so much that first spring the birds went crazy. They swooped and darted, nearly colliding with each other and our cars. Drunk with our love, the birds pulled at my hair and flapped in our faces as we drove with our windows open, tipsy from the chaos and ecstasy.
Remember we both had $600 cell phone bills, back before the days of unlimited calling plans, and we didn’t care? We laughed and kept calling, drinking each other in. I loved you more than I could comprehend. I can still hear your voice, but only saying certain words. I hear you saying your name, on the phone, or introducing yourself to someone. Your voice — its perfect timbre. But my name, I have no memory of you saying.
Your name — it still resonates in my belly. And your breath — I can still hear you breathe, my ear against your back, you in deep slumber. I couldn’t reach my arms around your massive chest. So much breath in you. You breathed life into me.
You said I stretched you considerably, but I never understood what you were trying to convey. I thought at first you meant it in a good way, because we are here to grow and learn and change and adapt. We were such an unlikely pair, but such an incredible match. It was hard for me too — your sons and their judgment, your peers, your inability to problem solve. The years between us. I liked those hard parts.
I was in it full throttle, knew we would work it all out. I thought — I still think — that’s what relationships are about, but I followed your lead since you had 25 years of relationships under your belt. How could I have forgotten, or failed to account for the fact that you were single because you had cheated on your second wife, and she’d left you after three children together and 14 years of marriage? It didn’t matter at the time — I trusted you completely. It didn’t occur to me that maybe you weren’t a relationship expert just because you had so much time in, that maybe I had some insights despite my inexperience.
Later I realized that my being me was what was so hard for you, and that maybe you felt enough was enough, that I should just straighten up and fly right. Like maybe your affair and dishonesty with your wife should have mattered more to me. But how could I be sorry for trusting you? For giving you the forgiveness you didn’t want?
We were huge ships passing, and our affair lasted as long as it took to move past one another, in the narrow channel of our moment. You calmed the raging sea within me. It wasn’t until later, ’til that repulsive and unnecessary end, that I realized you were wearing a wet suit the whole time — your whole life — keeping you insulated, peering out through your diver’s mask, everything well-framed. I felt you touch me because I wore sometimes only a thin lacey veil of alcohol and nothing else. Walking through life completely naked. How could I have penetrated your neoprene armor? How could I have protected myself when I didn’t even want to?
One night. One fight. One time. That’s all it took for you to pull anchor. I just didn’t know how to tell you the things I was afraid of. I didn’t know how to tell you the things that I needed to be changed in our relationship, because you said just by being with me you were already stretched so much. How could I ask for more? I thought. And your ugly, ugly end to us, though our hour was not yet nigh. You seized my world, hijacking my heart, leaving me adrift and barely hanging on. I saw you take my world with you, and then I watched from my makeshift raft as you just…let go. My world, discarded, floating away from you and floating away from me.
You let go of our love, turning me in your mind into something vicious and wicked. I watched as you let our love slip from your fingers, let it sink into the vast barren sea spreading between us. I know that I was just too much for you, but you turned slimy and filthy by what you did to me. I never meant any harm and yet you took my one mistake, my one poor judgment, like a pea, or a nipple, you took it and held it between your thumb and forefinger, and you pinched until it bled, pulling until I howled, for months and months you paid me back for the words I spit at you in anger, the words I tried to take back with a thousand apologies strung together like cranes. How many sorrys are enough?
Six years now and still, I hear your voice. I can see the back of your neck, the hairline. I feel your shoulders beneath my hands, and I know exactly what your feet look like. Your eyes were so clear, like an ocean, like the sky. Until the end. They got so dark I couldn’t even see you in there, beneath that storm within you, that storm you said was me.
Six years now, and I have built a new world on my raft. It is a good, solid place, warm and mostly full. The birds dart above me, close, my hair brushing my face with their silent movement. I am still naked, even more so as there is no longer a veil of any kind. I know you were my truest love, my heart, and I miss, oh how I miss how you filled me. But now the birds whisper sweet nothings, and my friend, I must tell you, my ship is sailing, far and away, upon a deep and shining sea.
© Lisa Thorne 2011.
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