Break

Break

Once there was a man, tall and easy, with that skinny raw-boned charm that seems to come distinctly from out west. When he smiled, it was as if some distant western sun broke through the clouds and burned away the chilly eastern grayness. Without so much as a warning I found myself leaning towards him like a sunflower, petals unfurling against his unexpected warmth.

We played country music together, Patsy Cline, George Jones, Hank Williams, and such, was all I thought about him. I had barely noticed him, except his freakish tallness, which may have been caused by some childhood malady or the big sky I’d heard they had in Texas. He may have grown so tall just to punch out the clouds.

Soon, he started asking me to  the movies. We sat hushed in friendly darkness; strangers huddled together in the forced intimacy of undersized, conjoined chairs. I was astonished when he shifted his body even closer to mine, exhaled quietly, stunned as he adjusted his unfathomably long arm around me like I was his precious cargo, delicate as glass.

I felt my breathing shallow, time slow down. I became aware of every dust mote, each nuance of love and fear spinning silently around us. My heart beat in my ears. I was afraid to breathe, to speak, to break the spell with the awkwardness I felt beside his easy charm.

What I wouldn’t give now to feel that grace, to face his comforting alien-ness, his westernness.

There would be other men who would attempt to tip me into bed like so many potatoes out of a wheelbarrow. Some succeeded but as he would say, they didn’t amount to much.

He slid out of my life, and back in again, so quietly I almost missed his slippery, unheralded arrival.

Snow came and went. Thirty years up in smoke like kindling, sizzling moments before a bonfire begins, then burns itself out, a tiny conflagration fizzling before its time, yet scorching everything in its wake.

He'd always played the courtly gentleman, folding his perfectly creased chinos neatly on a hanger before bed. He called them slacks. In retrospect it seems he’d clung to this role like a debutante clutching her pearls.

Then one day, he asked me to tell him a secret; something only he could know. He smiled that lopsided grin of his just this side of ugly, and how could I refuse.

I don’t recall what I told him, but I sensed something had been broken then, some equilibrium, a delicate balance see-sawing in the air between us and I began to wonder about his secrets too.

Too late, I realized I'd mistaken his request for romantic flattery. But it was his need speaking. He wanted me to ask him something, anything, so he might unburden himself.

His mouth set in a tight white line, quivered at the corners. His brown eyes stormy, his voice, usually so steady and composed, grew anxious, strident. He choked on the words he’d not been involved with any woman in the twelve years before we met.

Suddenly, I felt the tension in him crackling between us like air before an electrical storm. How had I missed it? It had been there all along. How easy it is to overlook the obvious, to reconstruct clues to fit a narrative which pleases us.

In the small, ordinary, daily magic of our lives together, I believed we had not grasped each other too tightly. That we had left space between us for the mystery required to keep passion alive.

We visited a Japanese forest. Towering, elegant spires of Japanese black and white pines, their arcs of blue-green needles floating cloud-like, rested on hollows of upturned branches, beckoned us into a flawless simulacrum of nature. These graceful giants dusted the earth with their rusty red swathes of needles, painting soft, delicate pathways beneath our feet.

Hinoki cypress and the deathless plum yew, tree of metaphorical transformation, drifted their shaggy tufts and whorls of yellow green needles, as if the trees mimicked the dancing gestures of Sumi brush strokes with their swoops and dashes of art imitating life.

You don’t see it at first. The mind recognizes what the eye can’t register. The sense of something vaguely too perfect prickles at your spine, some subtlety hiding in plain sight.

Shibui, the understated elegance with which Japanese gardeners edit, prune, and manicure nature. Rearrange stones, even creeks and tiny waterways to make them appear more natural than nature itself.

As we passed through the shadowy loveliness of the Shinto Forest, I watched the corners of his mouth turn up slowly into a half smile at its perfection, its artifice. I didn’t realize then how guileless I had been, how artfully he had fooled me, perhaps even himself.

I spy on them behind the movie theater where I have followed him. I see his face in profile, his mouth pulled down in a grimace reminded me of how he lost himself playing his accordion. Lost inside the music, inside himself, out of his usual stiff old man pose, big feet planted squarely making a perfect box, immovable, rooted to the ground to normalcy.

His face contorted in ecstasy, agony; how I had imagined him in the grip of passion, but it had never quite happened that way between us.

Pants around his ankles in the freezing Cambridge cold, ass deep in some young man slamming hard against him, bucking like a colt, moaning, the urgency all over him. Their muffled cries making steam in the frigid air.

How I envied him, wished I could be inside them both, feeling what they felt, what I have only ever felt for him.

Sweat trickles down my ribs under my woolen anorak and layers of sweaters; under the muffler I have wound around myself like a hijab to remain hidden in the darkness.

Tears burn tracks down my cheeks, and pool in the hollow of my neck. I think I am on fire. That I will never stop burning from this scene I should not have witnessed. I will have to suffer this intrusion, burn with my guilt, my shame, my desire.

With what lies had we held each other in thrall, how many secrets had we kept hidden, inside our shame-filled bodies, in our attempts at kindness towards each other?

Men and women must have arrived here from separate planets, forced to share a space too crowded, without ever understanding a lick of each other’s language; of the other’s disparate longing to find their way back to something that felt like home; like distance.

That high lonesome sound he loved. Homesick for other planets. Jesus Christ, was there any hope for us at all here on earth?

In his haste, he’d left his keys in the ignition. I took his car and left them together behind the cinema. I no longer cared about what was his or what had been mine.

I buckled myself in before remembering he was heads taller than me. Hours before I had looked at him, at his giant's body folded next to mine in the driver’s seat like a Texas hill country camel, all awkward endearing angles. How I loved him, love him still.

I adjusted the seat, the mirrors, turned on the radio. Hank Williams whining, “Why don't you love me like you used to do, why do you treat me like a worn-out shoe?” jangled through the tubes. Here, in that old Junker where he had bent me so far back in the bucket seat, I thought my back had no bones, and kissed me till I swooned so, I almost fell out  the car.

I turned the key, the engine bucked and raced. I drove on out of there, pitched my phone out the window and slammed the wheels hard around the rotary. Cars careened madly towards me. I sped down Route 2 without a thought in my head, without a plan, propelled into the darkness, like him, into the oncoming night; to drive across the country, the continent would not be far enough.

I have stopped naming things, stopped trying to make sense of anything. It’s all just a story we tell ourselves, the difference between bad and good, love and desire; betrayal or benediction; only words. Perhaps we ask too much of each other for it not to end in disappointment.

Heartbreak is a gift. It can teach you something if you have lain down long enough with it. Once you have thrown your body onto the earth and sobbed until you are dried-out, empty as a milkweed husk, it took you somewhere, to more and wilder places than the disappointing lover ever could, to a place where you lived free of expectations, detached from all consequence.

Light as a wind-driven leaf, a heady outcome, one you could never have predicted or dreamt of in the limited vocabulary of your life before it.

An unintended gift, you could not have received in any other way. Although no need to thank the errant lover for this gift, he inadvertently bequeathed you.

Once there was a man...