SL called. We spoke for about an hour. She was slightly tipsy, a factor that generally leads to her calling me. Our conversations have a well-worn trajectory. We talk. I ask how she is. She tells me how unsatisfied she is with her partner. One of us makes an off color joke. We recall how passionate our intimate life was and we make an arrangement for a tryst. Tonight was different: I told her I was moving in with CN.
The Heart Has Always Eluded Me
SL and I had taken a break from our moments of desperately trying to cling to a relationship that was unsustainable. She was involved with another guy and wanted to see if it could work with him. I had been with MM and wanted that to work. There had been interim moments, but they had tapered off since I became serious and then when she did as well. But there was so much more than mere sex with familiar flesh: there was fire, hot and totally consuming fire. We made love when we following the filing of our divorce decree. We made love that made the gods envy our flesh. Our coupling was the stuff of which primal myths were spoken in tones of reverence and longing.
We could not, however, sustain the relationship. Like Chronos and his offspring, our passion, and the chaos it created, consumed our future.
I have thought much of SL of late. She sometimes haunts my dreams. I know that on my deathbed that I can say, “I was once adored…” But like so much that we adore, desire becomes an unrequited longing that becomes a dull ache in the heart. SL and I were not able to make it work. She was often dishonest with me; I was often unkind to her. We both share the blame for our demise and both have, in her words, “our fingerprints on each others’ hearts.” We loved deeply. We were also fatally flawed.
She made the comment that this is the bar that has been set for any other relationship. I know better. I never want for that to happen again. There was too much that happened that was hurtful. Too much pain. Too much grief. Too much fire, not enough water. God knows that I tried to bring us back together. She never intended to return. But she did, and as quickly left.
Loving and Loss
I know that I have written somewhere in these entries that whomever said that it is better to have loved and lost never lost at love. I am beginning to think that all love is loss. We lose ourselves in love and call it passion and wonderment. We lose ourselves again when it dies and we call it grief and pain. We lose ourselves with the hope of finding ourselves and in this endanger our souls. We play the game, gambling with our very hearts and spirits hoping that, against all odds, we might find that person who is the mirror to our souls. I thought MM was. I thought SL was. I thought KJS was. Indeed, I am learning that there is no “other self.” There is only the hope that we can love and be loved.
There was a time when I would have said that I have a talent for loving women that cannot or will not be with me. Readers of this blog have only to run a quick search of this blog, reading what I wrote about MM to see how true this is.
I have always longed to be loved. I can become Freudian and postulate that it is an extension of my inner child not having been loved. I can talk about the strange life that my mother and father created for me; seeing a marriage that was dysfunctional on a good day and dangerous on a bad one, having that as my pattern for intimacy. No, I think that gives too much power to my family of birth. I am a romantic. I long to care for somebody and to be cared for. Mutuality: Ah, there’s a word full of historical significance in this Fool’s autobiography.
Mutually Yours
LAP, early in our relationship, signed a Christmas card “Mutually Yours.” She was nineteen, I was twenty-two. We had dated for such a short time and wanted to be in love. We paired off and built a marriage on a chimera of a foundation: the irony is that there was no mutuality in our relationship. I was the air; she was the earth. I was a butterfly; she was a creature of the earth, seeking safety in its dark caress. There was noting mutual. We remained together for 11 years and several months when it came crashing to the earth. She accused me of an infidelity that never happened. That was her escape. No matter: Neither of us was faithful. We were monogamous, but we did not keep faith with one another. For the record, I was not intimate with KR until after our marriage failed, and that was following a drunken evening that began by our bemoaning how our marriages had failed and ended with each other awkwardly in the other’s arms. Mutually yours? What a laugh.
Sex, Drugs, and Rock’n’roll
“Wine, women, and song…” Just a classy way of saying, “Drugs, sex, rock,’n’roll.” I tried that, too. I broke my twenty-five year hiatus from grass a few years ago. I rarely smoke now, though on occasion I spark up. I used sex as my favorite drug, but it did little to mask the pain. Music… there is a balm for my soul. I rediscovered music. I was never a great player, but I love what music does for my spirit. It is my best medicine, by voice, and the language of my heart. CN “gets” music. More than just being a player, she “gets” it. She knows jazz. She knows classical music. She plays bluegrass and loves blues.
It is time to move beyond the hot fire of all-consuming passion. It is time to build a life. It is time to do something new, to find a new song and learn to sing it well.
Ah, but I am only a fool…
