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.