Sunday, April 23, 2006
The phone call came as the clock read 6 a.m. The morning was bleak and smelled of rain; I can’t remember if this truth was real or only so in my imagination, but the promise of dreariness well suited my mood that day.
After a very long evening, we sat in his car and spoke. Neither of us had made it home that night, as drunkenness and sheer stubbornness had forbade. Together we watched the sun rise, and the first brave souls venture out along the streets, all dog walkers and joggers.
Don’t you see how special we could be, he asked. The words took shape inside my mouth, but my thoughts were interrupted by a phone call, one that would change my future, my self-perception and my outlook on love—the defining moment I had anticipated.
Hey, you said casually. What’s up? I knew what was coming, but I denied it to myself like a poor fool in love. Where are you, you asked. I told him that I was sitting in the parking garage, that I’d been there all night long with a friend. When you asked me his name, I told you without hesitation, not wanting to lie. Perhaps at some strange and subconscious level, I wanted you to know the gravity of our situation, so I could free myself of guilt. Maybe I wanted you to know how close he and I had become, how I was quickly losing control and will to be unyielding. Perhaps it was just the sense of ethics my mother raised me with—“Never tell a lie,” she said—or maybe it was pride that drove me to tell the truth that day.
I sincerely believed that you would understand, or try to out of love for me. And then you asked me if I was sleeping with him, in a solemn tone that never meant to pose a question. No amount of words or pages could adequately illustrate the emotions which rushed me at that instant. I was humiliated and insulted by you, by my Heart’s utterance, and the underlying qualities that screamed with unspoken accusations.
When you realized what you’d done, you wept freely with regret and pleaded with me to forget what you’d said, but I couldn’t then and cannot even now. I hung up the phone, regardless of the consolation you needed and deserved; two years of unexpressed frustration, two months of guilt, twenty minutes of hurt and one minute of anger were just the recipe for tears, and I could not control them even if I’d tried.
That night he called me, over and over again. I must have received at least a dozen calls, none of which I answered. Unable to vent or drown me in frantic apologies, he wrote to me.
This is the last message I’m writing you, and then I will leave you alone, he said. I can’t apologize enough for what I’ve done, and I know you won’t forgive me for it. You don’t deserve what I did to you. I’m very tired, depressed and I feel like giving up. I don’t know what to do anymore. If you want good advice, leave me. I would give my life to be with you, but I don’t deserve you. The only good in me is you, and I keep pushing you away.
I felt compelled to respond, if only to explain to him that it was not the accusation that turned me away; it was an experience that opened my eyes to a terrible but undeniable truth. No matter how hard we tried or willed it so, our love was never meant to last. Stacked against all sorts of odds and obstacles, we survived only because I could miss him in his absence and be revitalized when he came home. I was allowed to be myself in the intervals he was away, and the balance between authenticity and reproduction was enough to keep me disillusioned to the inevitability of our love’s demise.
In a crashing realization, I concluded that love was not enough to sustain this wild heart of mine, nor were my affections enough to slake him. And even though I was the world to him, his muse and treasure too, the world was never sufficient; he wanted more, but I could not afford the burden. As long as our hearts beat together in the same steady tattoo, he found motive to live and aspired to excellence, but I was not strong enough to carry him through life. And so I became as one dead to him.
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