The Listening Eye

The floor is always strewn with darlings, murdered

at night, mostly,

after a day’s bloody arrangement of twenty-six characters.  You

I have the feeling it’s a good time to invest in surgical masks.  They will be worn in public more and more as facial recognition takes hold.

Love is fascinating. It’s less of an emotion and more of an ability.  A skill set emerges after lots of practice.  One of those skills is discretion.  For example, when she told me she had divorced her husband of ten years after he had an affair with another woman, I did not say “Did he come home with gonorrhea and crabs?”

No, the mission now was the less known about her the better.  Which is sad.  But I haven’t spoken yet of the small hurts over the years that accumulated.  And they did, and weren’t dealt with immediately.  Small but painful digs in letters: me becoming secondary, vestigial.  It’s those things we don’t talk about when we think if we try just a little harder we might be able to make it better.

It was wrong not to fix it back then, but we were twenty-year-olds.  With fewer skills and lots of pride.  And ambition.  Her would-be profession, you see.  There could be no distraction or deviation.

So at this reunion, after a few small acts of kindness toward her which went unnoticed, I needed to withdraw for sanity’s sake so I interacted with her as little as possible throughout the several days of the reunion.  I wasn’t about to be re-decapitated.

She was blithe and dismissive of the past, as if that were a virtue.  I felt I’d been compartmentalized.  Her curiosity about me as a footnote was a little painful.  After grieving for years over this I’m down to the last three elements: anger, depression, and acceptance in heavy rotation.

So much is lost on her.  Lost.

And now she was gone — this was one true thing.

It is difficult to accept “gone.”  I’m not Catholic but it may be wise to cozy up to the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.

The burden is the weight of memory.  Indelible.  Undeniable.  Disremembered?  Did she make a choice or simply fade?  When was that choice made, when and why was the fade begun?  I don’t know.  And I won’t know.  EVER.

It’s hard knowing that I won’t know something.

Over the years I’ve made several efforts at re-engagement as a friend, but I’ve been kept at a distance.  She hasn’t told me where she lives — even after asking for her address and phone number what I received was the location of her business.  There can be only guessing at what remains.

One true thing — I loved her with all I had.

And that’s all I need to know.

It’s done.

Mayan ruins indeed.  And only the tip of the pyramid.

Well, I went all-in.  For a while there was that domestic bliss that happens with a new household — the new stuff, the being more like other people, the loving routine.  But things change.

I was beginning to think maybe we each had a different understanding about the nature of our relationship.  Now she seemed to be taking the long view, planning for herself and focusing on school.  And ointment.  And fine-toothed combs.  She’d become, literally, a lousy lay.

I felt like I was becoming a hobby of hers.  It never got better after that.  Years later I realized what a burden of memory she’s been.  We split in a fog of miscommunication and pride.  Through occasional letters she became more and more distant.  During my efforts to keep contact, she had become a thief of my joy, an emotional vampire.  Relief from that is to reconcile one’s self to the dustbin of Love History.

I Googled her of course, before the reunion. What came up was a review of her professional ethics which contained some personal characteristics as well, and they were evidence of the same traits that pervaded our relationship.  I gasped and said it out loud when I read it — “Sweet corroboration!”

It was like coming up for air after a long long time underwater.  Even though such things are to be taken with a grain of salt, this critique of her was done with precision.

But she remained in my heart as the first big love, as she does to this day.  That never goes away.  I’ve ended up carrying my own version of the relationship, as so many people do, while knowing the truth of a love affair can be experienced only by the two in it.  But I clung to my own account of the thing.  Was I keeping tabs?  Isn’t that part of accountability?  Had she ruined the relationship on purpose?  She once nearly decapitated me verbally when complaining that I’d talked about how I felt about our relationship with a friend.  Not what I’d said, but that I’d done it.

So at this reunion I was faced with a choice — I could tell her of the role she has played in my life, the importance of it.  But I couldn’t do that without presenting the negative impact she’s had on my life.  Or could I?

Here’s a common story, experienced by so many, enjoyed by so few.  I tell my version not only as a balm upon getting burned, but also as a way of getting as close as I ever will to a kind of hurt — you know the hurt, that luuurve hurt of youth that’s more than a crush.  It’s an endeavor, a project, an exciting mutual journey.  And the other person is beautiful and their jokes are funny and her laugh, oh her laugh.  Right?  Feel me?

I’ve never been to a school reunion, but this past summer I was at a gathering of old friends (really old friends - we’re talking pals of 50 years plus).  We went through school together, hadn’t seen each other in decades; we are all in our sixties, our necks creaking as we now turn from our vanity mirrors toward the vague image of death.  It’s out there.  But this isn’t about death -- it’s about life.

We rented an air/bnb in Mendocino County in California, the seven of us.  Among us was an old lover of mine, the first big major love from the past.  We’d planned to marry and have kids forty years ago.  We lived together off and on for a few years back in the 70s and it mostly sucked, in retrospect.  

When I knew her she could be psychologically litigious.  

But there was one true thing — I loved her.  Large.  Plain and simple.  And it was real.

So I was a bit annoyed when at the reunion she said “That was so many lifetimes ago.”  I got the metaphor.  But I had been prominent in at least one or two of those lifetimes and I suppose my annoyance had something to do with me not being invited to any of the funerals or subsequent resurrections.  I sensed an ebbing of her accountability.

So now, where the turf meets the surf, I had to make a choice as to how to behave.

Let’s digress.  Here’s a part of the story I’m not telling.  Ancient history.  Many moons ago, back when we were a couple, she made a collegiate excursion to the Mayan ruins of Tikal in Guatemala.  She returned with some souvenirs — namely gonorrhea and a fresh load of crab lice courtesy of a local tour guide.  Paisan!  Soon I got a tour of the County Health Dept. where a doctor had the happy task of ramming a long wooden Q-tip up my penis.  One does not forget the ramming of a stick up one’s cock.

We moved in together soon after that.  What was hers was mine and vice versa.  Are you smiling?  Can you see the looming doom?

Here are some things to explore...

The difference between love and affection for one’s own memory.

Signal-to-noise ratio in relationships.

Adult Children of Used Car Salesmen.

How do you know what you’ve forgotten?

What is forgiveness?

The Five Pillars of Aristocracy (sounds dull but it ain’t).

Kissing.

Sounds like a good start.  In which direction shall we go?

This I’ve learned - character is destiny, past is prologue, and never fall in love during a total eclipse.

So hi.