When I told you about moving to Texas, you told me you wanted to see me one last time before it happened. We make plans quietly - another day or short weekend in New Haven. No presumptions, no plans, just idle wandering. It gets compared to the movie Before Sunrise, where those two people just wander around a strange city and ignore everything but each other.
The Saturday morning rolls around and I'm standing in the train station again, my flat-cap in one shaking hand and the other in my pocket. And as you step up, you're wearing a purple scarf, or a purple beret, a purple something. You smile out of the corner of your mouth and we walk out into the street, holding hands. New Haven is busy and loud and we don't notice any of it. The pull of you has nothing to do with how you're leading me.
You talk about your life and your job and your marriage and your dog and how broken your car is and where you got your boots and how tired you are of your mother; with every new subject you creep closer and grip my hand harder until your fingers are pressing white between my knuckles. You coo quietly and say to tell me about my life instead. My job, my apartment (I want to see it! she says with enthusiasm), my cat Greta, my car that is always falling apart, movies, music, close-calls that somehow never turn into girlfriends. An existence of near-misses that somehow culminate into the misery of lost chances, bodies of dreams strewn about.
We duck into alleys and corners and the windows of book stores.You go to kiss me and miss my mouth and get me right under the eye. I ask how long I have with you and you pull away to an arms length before saying "Tomorrow, noon." The last word curves up to the corners of your voice, almost like a question, easily confused with hope.
I take you home and put on the television and we get to cooking. I'm a terrible in front of a stove but between the two of us we make something passable before deciding on throwing it out for Chinese take-out. Between the phone call and picking up the order, we become a mess of limbs on the living room floor, grinding like machines. I can hear the fabric stretch along your back, under your hair. You guide me once or twice - a hand here, no, move your knee - before we start laughing.
I stand up to get my keys - the Chinese is surely ready and probably cold by now - and you hold me before we walk out. My hands find your elbows and I wonder aloud how small they are in my hands. Weird detail.
The takeout is bland, the movie we watch is half ignored. The lights stay off after the plates are in the sink and the DVD player is still. Your glasses come off, the hair is down, we both know this is the one last time we have in a relationship of one last times. Your legs meet around my back and so it goes, on and on, for an hour and then two. You shake so hard that it might actually be me shaking. You curse loudly. It sounds weird coming from you.
===
Now - none of this happened. This epilogue just above. Its what I thought should happen and likely never will. Because, as life is always ready to prove, love does not conquer all. Love is a building block of life, like water, like carbon. It is a thing that is necessary to exist but it is also an inert element when left to its own devices. It is a thing that does not move on its own, does not change without outside forces, does not have any greater meaning without more placed on it.
And thats the cusp of our relationship I guess. And its inert because of you.
I'll allow myself a little bit of anger and a whole lot of self-loathing over that anger because, well, this is all unresolved. What I wrote above was what I would need to end or continue everything we had instead of the basic building block you and I started so long ago. We never finished what we barely even started.
What drives me nuts isn't that I lost to the lesser man. Its that I lost to you. I never tried harder with anyone in my life, never wrote more, never expressed more, never more more'd - and here I am writing fantasy-fiction as I hold a glass of vodka in the other hand. I am drunk enough to know I am right and sober enough to know I still love you; tomorrow morning, I will be sober enough to know its your own decision to make and I'll still be drunk on my affections. (Ah the curse of the Irish holds strong in my genes.)
I don't like letting go. Ive never abandoned a friend in my life and have gladly welcomed back any who have wandered away. That is just who I am. And maybe you need to wander away for a bit too. And like the rest, you're always welcomed back - but I also have the gnawing feeling you never will. That you shut the door so quietly as you left, neither of us heard it click.
So, you are now a song from a summer too far away. A vibe from a passed era, the watermark from a flood forgotten. I loved you like all men would want to love a woman and you found it best served to be cast aside.
Maybe one day you'll find this blog, this entry, read it in full. Maybe you'll take my old suggestion and look up "When You Are Old" by W.B. Yates and know that that is where we've been shoehorned: part my fault, part your decision. And part of me will be waiting for that reply; though instinctively that part of me waits knowing that the reply will never come, or even if it did, it would be much colder than desired.
So this is it then. This is us in our thirties. The bond you and I had under so many dark nights, awake hundreds of miles away and wondering about the other is now tethered to a still lake, all life and living gone from it now.
My God, how I loved you like no one else in my life.
And how I wish that part of me would stop holding on.
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