July 4, 2022
This city is largely uninspiring for me. Like the mountains, it feels confining. Its fast pace exhausts me and Blanche bakes on its concrete all day. Still, it allows much-needed socialization with loved ones and friends and some light shopping I can’t otherwise do in isolated Army or Conservation Corp of Engineers parks or State parks.
A conversation with a loved one over dinner in East Dallas turns to a television show I found objectionable for its overly-dramatic, repetitive content. The least of my objections, its lead characters’ unshakeable love, shifts the topic to thoughts I don’t dare expand upon in the moment.
My loved one says she can’t imagine a romantic love that intense, that far-reaching.
I want to say, “Ask your uncle,” who grieves the loss of his wife every minute of every day.
I want to say, “I thought I had that.”
Or, “I don’t believe you. I know better.”
I know such intense and far-reaching love exists because it existed for me.
I know it exists because they must kill that love; it doesn’t just die—not on its own.
Love like that doesn’t end because someone leaves or the two of you are separated.
Love like that doesn’t dwindle because you are bored with your partner.
Love like that doesn’t end because someone new turns your head or you suddenly wake up one day wanting something different.
Love like that ends as the slow death of a bloated, red giant star; burning off all its fuel, burst by burst until it is a fusion-less, faint dwarf, nearly invisible to observers and unable to sustain its own heat.
It is the long, painful bleeding out of a nick in an artery through which flowed all your effort and need.
If the fuel is replenished with joy, forgiveness, and emotional honesty, the love survives.
If the injury is salved with humility, tenderness, and cooperation, the love can be healed.
If egos hold sway, death is inevitable.
Sometimes, the spent fuel is trauma and sadness that neither partner anticipated nor caused, but one or both failed to acknowledge. Long days of silence and distance passed as one or both thought, “I won’t burden them with my pain,” until their own burdens became too great.
Sometimes, the injury is so subtle and long-standing that one or both suffer until the blood runs dry and they don’t see value in healing the wound.
It doesn’t mean there was never love there or that, with the will of both partners, the love couldn’t have survived and thrived for a lifetime. It means one or both didn’t have that will.
Both of my parents cheated (physically or emotionally). Both came back to the marriage and fixed things as best they could because, until their dying day, they loved each other above all else and had the will to preserve that love. They were apart for weeks on end many times in their marriage and their love never died. It was injured. It got sick. It was healed.
That is the kind of love I thought I had. It is certainly the kind of love I felt.
It is the kind of love I know is lost to me now because it only exists where two wish to create and maintain it. I not only bled out everything from that marriage but now have only enough fuel to devote a kind of part-time love to someone for fear they, too, have no desire to make a real effort to be a partner.
Reflecting on TWM*, I know our interactions were of no significant fuel expenditure or injury to me. Our connection was powerful but, love?
It was easy to let the relationship swim in a sort of friendship broth after I left Surfside; to sustain it like a cell line that was useful now and then for research. It was easy to hold onto the safety of that give-and-take and expect nothing else.
It is easy to believe I am not capable of more. If the seemingly “perfect man” were to enter my life and demand obedience and the sacrifice of my space/autonomy,** well, he wouldn’t be perfect, and I would be deeply saddened as I walked away.
In some respects, my not-lover, my ethereal soft place, my friend, was perfect. Intelligent, funny, and kind, he remained geographically and relationally far away. He made no demands.
And yet, in a strange way, that could have been transcendent if we had allowed; a perpetual and loving, if distant, friendship.
Nonetheless, I believe real partnership, passion, and unwavering promise are possible and some small piece of me still wants that far-reaching, forever love. That small piece has occasional brief glimpses of a partner riding in the truck with me, watching tv with me, or walking through the woods with me, our fingers laced. I quickly dismiss those glimpses.
For my somewhat cynical loved one, kindness, youth, and beauty hold promise for such love—if she allows.
Me? I will leave the city tomorrow and head north into the heat and odd emptiness of Oklahoma. The looming distance from her, from TWM, from my Texas, from any connection with the familiar, feels like leaving home for the first time and my heart is exceedingly heavy.
*The Wrong Man
**my space being as much an emotional boundary as a physical boundary
Last Updated on March 29, 2023 by Lee Ellis
