Week 7/ 52 February 19, 2017

            I parked the car and stepped out into the damp, cool evening. The day had been spent in relative bliss, and I felt like dancing and singing, and being inside of myself, with no care for the world around me. This is a rare feeling. I better take advantage. And under the darkened drizzle, I walked with my light down jacket zipped up tightly. “If I close my eyes, this could be San Francisco and not Phoenix.” If I close my eyes and let the stillness hold me. The performance was transfixing, Rubén, Jorge’s friend, brought characters to life, through gestural suggestion, carefully crafted words, poetic punctuation. Light. Theater has always been a place where I felt safe, but tonight, I must admit, I was overwhelmed by the whiteness of the audience. I sat comfortably, easily enough, in my slightly inappropriate purple mini skirt and black tights, ankle boots, hair misted by the rain. But I felt somewhat oppressed by the polite tittering around me about vacations and shopping forays, where the woman who sat next to me asked me if this was, indeed, row k, and wasn’t it awfully close for row k. I replied, drily, that I wasn’t intimately familiar with what row k ought to feel like, being that I was not a frequent purchaser of orchestra seats, and therefore was totally useless as an informant for her inane validation-seeking. Of course I said none of that, just that I didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like. The rest I kept to myself. There was a well-intentioned young person who created a wall of speech to pre-interpret the play, Esquinita, USA, for an audience she assumed was not fully equipped to interpret black and brown characters from the ghetto, any ghetto, as the world crumbled around them. I tried to close my eyes, to ignore the yammering, to transport myself to other theaters, other times, when I used to walk to the CNA before it was the CENART and watch world-class acts, and student plays alike, for a nominal fee for students, and how I never feel lonely when I am held in suspense, in the suspension of disbelief, in the energetic field that emanates, pulsing and writhing, from the actors centers.

            I have always loved the theater (just not musical theater, sometimes). And Ruben was, simply sublime. But I am reminded too, of the magical sway that an actor can hold, how their embodied characters can touch us, and how, sometimes, we fall in love with the changing gels, illuminating nuance and power. I think about Brigadoon. I must have been in middle school, perhaps 7^th grade. We went to the high school, and settled into our seats, my mother next to me, my brother, perhaps too, though memory does not cast him as anything but an amorphous possibility. I fell in love. I remember it clearly, because it is a feeling that I have spent the greater part of my adult life chasing, that warm wash of emotion, the heightened touch, the gasping breathlessness, the hope. I’ll confess, it has been a while since I’ve felt that hope, but that is neither here nor there.

            For me the space and time of a play was as close to a religious transubstantiation as I was ever going to come, and I bit that metaphorical wafer hook, line and sinker. There is a calm that comes with this vicarious living, one that I later rediscovered in film, but there is something in the physical proximity, the sweating, breathing, smoking, bleeding humanity that makes live performances magical and often morally compelling. The Greeks, I suppose, had it right, and the longing for catharsis, the purging of excess emotional baggage, the orgasmic build up of tears that pull from your chest, behind your eyes, and then spill over in deep compassion for someone else’s plight, because, of course it is never your own. I am grateful for this certainty, that by making characters speak to one another, to watch the drama unfold in front of me, I will always have a way out of my own labyrinth, out of my own, chafing, binding disappointments. They melt away in the darkened theater, and then, as in a classroom, where the rest of the room falls away, and it is only me and the person who is telling me stories, they are speaking directly to ME, and I am held captive, breathless, and free.

Week 6/52 February 13, 2017

Atlas shrugged, and then let go…

Sometimes we learn something about our lovers, something so deep and dark and altogether unseemly that from it we cannot come back, cannot return to the innocent unknowing, or rather to the willful ignorance. And sometimes it is the fact that they hid from us who they truly are that is the most crushing, the most love-killing.

I think that this is how we spend our lives, desperately trying to protect our core from someone else, wanting keenly to be known, to be seen, to be safe, but at the same time terrified that if we are seen, what we are, what we need, what we want, will be ridiculed. It is a paradox really, because the people that we let close to us, they are the ones we may disappoint, their opinions matter, they know where our tender underbelly may be exposed, so we don’t divulge who we are, not fully, for fear that we might recognize our own shame in their eyes, reflected back upon us, and that would simply be too much.

Yet, there is still a way we rationalize, we mollify, we protect. Them or us? What happens when that boundary isn’t clear? Do we protect, instead, respectability? That word sticks in my craw, and yet… the sense of how we measure up at a societal level plays so much into our self-esteem, or ability to continue in the world, to agree to the contract of getting up in the morning and facing our days. And for what? It is hard to say. Maybe our natures are always being tamed, always being ushered into what we think others want from us. And I fear, we will always, always fail.

To say something like “It happened more or less at the time my marriage was failing” as an opening line, is fundamentally dishonest. Not dishonest because the marriage didn't, indeed, fail, or because it happened to be during a crisis point in the relationship, but because how can the demise of something built on a fundamental misrepresentation of who we are be considered a failure? Isn’t it rather a failure to endure, to persist, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the person we love, have loved, did love, does not, in fact, exist? There is another problem with that opening line and that is more about its narrative function. We are regularly assaulted with stories of triumph, stories of overcoming painful, psychic destitution or physical abjection… but those stories, the ones that get published, the ones that get made into movies, they share a common characteristic. The character, our character, us… wins in the end. The stories have a postscript, at the very least, telling us that so-and-so escaped domestic violence, or trafficking, or bankruptcy, or a life of gang violence, or simply being gas-lighted by the person they thought was on their side, to finally, in the end, find true love… or parenthood, or peace or purpose.

But what if we don’t?

So, the story, my story, any story, today, cannot begin under the premise that there is a happy ending, because, in the end, I don’t believe that there is any ending but a dreadfully painful one. Death. Painful to us, sometimes, painful to those we leave behind, always, without fail. It is funny, you know, how we never give ourselves credit for all the times we didn’t lose it, didn’t scream, didn’t cry, didn’t accidentally or purposefully violate the privacy of someone else’s psyche and trying in an act of love or terror to understand what makes them tick. So today is an unstory, monstrously repeated, as needed, to extricate one’s heart from love misplaced.

It happened, more or less, at the time my marriage was failing: (Note that there are no references, of course, to the thousands of times prior to that in which fears and feelings were squashed, rewritten and, simply bundled up and sent to the dead zone before the critical moment came.) I moved to California, we moved, and as the entirety of the country, along route 40 unfurled itself, I applied the silent treatment. There had been an accident, an emergency room visit, a series of unkind words exchanged. And yet, they were no more or less terrible than what had come before, or even than what would come after, but I didn’t know it at the time. I just sat, tight-lipped and seething and watched the landscape change, from a lush green, dripping and thick with sweat and mosquitoes through Appalachia, to the desert wasteland, scorched by the unrelenting sun, calcified bones and tumbleweeds in the petrified forest in Arizona. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I didn’t have words. The joy was gone. We hit the coast, and there was some need for words, there was some shared admiration of the majesty of the pacific ocean, the golden grass on mountain sides. There was a relenting. I thought.

We had been in our new home a week when I stumbled onto him. Sharp, angular, cut off by half, with the mountains as backdrop for his yet unknown life. I told myself it was justified, that if I was going to be constantly under attack, I could carve out a secret space for myself. I responded: “Have we met? Will we?” and that was enough. Something so simple detonated my life. I couldn’t have known that it would, of course, our carelessness abounds when we simply don’t care anymore... but nothing is clearer to me now than that decisive moment. I chose life. And life is messy and painful, and terrifying, but I chose that, and I wrote, and wrote and wrote to the one person who I dared to see me. Dangling my want and my need and my love in an ultimate act of submission, blinded and bound, but emboldened in the mutual knowing. Of course, in the end, it didn’t work. There were threats and careers held over the chopping block out of spite and vindictiveness, but in the end, it ended because that is the nature of these sorts of things. And I learned that I can be seen, and loved, and that maybe that’s not enough to “win,” but the winning is in the learning. And today, I’m reminded that the real triumph is dusting ourselves off, and trying again. Each time, with more transparency than the last. Each time with a better understanding of who we are, and why we want what we want, or at least a willingness to explore what it is that we really do want, and then ask for it without fear, not because we are guaranteeing that we will be granted this dearest of wishes, but because in the not asking and not demanding, we are guaranteeing that we won't. Because, in the end, what is “success” in a relationship? Is it bound up in reproductivity? In exhaustion of sexual appetites? In joint expenses and mutual support? In abating the loneliness that is part of the human condition? All of the things? None of the things? Perhaps somewhere in the middle, in which we can bear to look at ourselves in the mirror, and to look them in the eye. And they can look back at us, and be our mirror, and see us for who we are, frail, penetrable, and perverse. And we can laugh. Together.  Medusa laughed, and her gaze could still be deadly, Atlas shrugged, and decided to let the world fall to her feet.