How To Burn Your Wings
Three years ago, three days before his wedding, he asked me “what happens when we cross paths again?” If/when we inevitably see each other.” I thought, and later said, “You are getting married in two days; the time for the answer to your question to be truly important could arguably be over,” among other things.
He got married two days after “Impact,” an essay I wrote about our story, was published publicly. The timing was totally random. Kiese Laymon knew nothing of the upcoming nuptials when he put it on the now-defunct Cold Drank blog. I shared the link with him and thanked him for the experience. Nothing more was said. The wedding went on without a hitch. I was 4,000 miles away, with no objections.
I stood in the kitchen of my West London walk-up scrolling through Instagram. I followed him, but seeing anything he posted in my feed was a rarity. This day was different. He shared a picture of the shoes he said his vows in. Somehow, I immediately felt a stabbing sensation in my chest. Regret? Lamentation of love lost? Love dreamed? Love deferred? A mild anxiety attack was more likely.
It passed.
I eventually found the wherewithal to congratulate him and wished him the best. For a while I thought we could be friends. We have been on speaking terms on and off for almost five years at this point. Each time we slide down the lust-slick slope back to the valley where we started. Last March he — still married — said he was surprised that we hadn’t run into each other since I’ve been back in the country. He described a moment “when you lock eyes and everyone else in the room disappears for a few seconds.” I was equal parts appalled and intrigued. He suggested that we see each other — to be specific, that he could “invite me out.” I’m not always the most prudent person but I know a terrible idea when I hear one. I asked him what he thought could be gained from that.
Most of the time I think closure is a figment of our collective Aaron Spelling-influenced imagination. Our various channels of theoretical access to each other further complicate things. Facebook, Instagram, What’s App, SnapChat, connections without connection — ad nauseum, ad infinitum. It is something I observe as a gift and curse of our hyper-linked time. After I rebuffed his invitation, he asked that I block him to diminish the temptation to reach out again. I did not. I’d like to believe that I hoped it would all go away on its own. Common sense should have told me that would not be the case. Ironically, at another time he intimated not having “access” to me “killed” him. I have wondered when the true death would come. When we could both get beyond the point of treating each other like a moth whose wings we enjoyed singeing, shearing from its body and, later, wondering why it couldn’t fly. This burning, this tearing could be a phone call, a message. The words always make it all — the feelings, passion, emotional violence we committed against each other — surge right back to the surface. It becomes: him regurgitating the trope that the ball had always been in my court; me hating both him and myself for winding up in this place with no bottom to longing or ambiguity. I know now that in saying this he absolved himself of responsibility. He always seemed baffled and hurt, casting me as a pseudo-villain. And maybe I was. Perhaps, he saw my declaring him fit enough to love as the one thing he needed to throw it all away. Conversely, is it possible that I didn’t love myself enough to ask it of him? I used to believe that I shouldn’t have had to ask him because it could make him resent me. I never allowed myself to demand that he love me as hard as I knew I deserved. I see now that failure to hold each other accountable for asking for the things we really needed was our fatal mistake. It was like Groundhog’s day because I died so many times.
Over the years, I have written hundreds of stanzas and couplets about this love, I once wrote:
We have become a white dwarf, collapsing and imploding into each other’s memories/And all we can do is watch it happen/And hope our hearts never betray us the same way again…
In a googol of galaxies in the universe, it seemed that we could only orbit each other’s. We could never fully integrate our worlds without cataclysm.
I’ve started and stopped writing this for the better part of the last year. I began because I knew it would be a catharsis for me. I stopped because I was not ready to exhume these delicate skeletons he and I left in our wake — any of whom could rise from the depths of our chaos and pull me back down with it. In a way, that is almost exactly what happened anyway.
In July I unblocked him on Facebook so that I could pour over the years’ worth of short missives in my inbox. In just over 24 hours he messaged me noting my reappearance on his timeline through comments on mutual friends’ posts. I steeled myself, ignored it and started writing this essay. In August, he sent a message via Google Chat. I ignored it. In November he tried again. The corner of my mind where I locked him started to give way a few days before. I answered. This was the moment to release everything I was holding. Somewhere along the way he shared that his marriage was on its way to being legally dissolved. The knowledge eased a little of the guilt that I felt talking to him. He, maybe for the first time, acknowledged his role in events that have transpired. The discussion turned to us having a face-to-face.
One Saturday in early December last year we agreed that I would come see him. As the bus rolled along Interstate 78, bringing me closer and closer to a moment of reckoning I never thought I’d have, I worried about what we’d say to each other, how it would feel to stand in front of each other after not being face-to-face in more than four years. I got off the bus and he was there waiting. When he stepped out of the car I remember noticing the hem of his pants, a little too short and wide for his slightly-larger-than-I-remember frame. As he drove, I noticed the change in his gait, the different way he held and carried his body. There was a subtle slumping in his shoulders. I was sure I would never learn for sure what caused it.
We settled in at the house as he started to prepare dinner. He sat on the couch next to me, cozying up to make middling conversation. I asked him to take me through how we ended up there — from the beginning, however long ago it was. I wanted him to look at me as he spoke. He said, he couldn’t look me in the eyes without getting lost in them. I should have asked in what he would be lost in. I have to wonder if he wasn’t hoping I would be like a ship passing in the night to rescue him from the crashing waves of loneliness threatening to sweep him away. To absolve him from the hurt he inflicted on my heart. I couldn’t do it. He went through the motions telling the story — how he met her, loved me (and maybe some others), married her, and, however inexplicably, is just a few yards shy of the place where she was his wife. “We grew apart,” he said. It seemed to me that he didn’t rightly know how it happened.
He kissed my forehead and held my hands. I remember feeling the weight of his lips as they touched my skin and marveling at the size of void that ate the sensations I would have had if this happened three or four years before. Eventually, we retired for the night. He beckoned me closer and clung to me as we both tried to sleep. I asked him what he wanted. He said “I don’t want you to disappear again, but I don’t want anything too serious.” I didn’t feel like I made a mistake in being there. Sometimes a belated autopsy is necessary before we can safely bury a corpse.
