Amanda, Epilouge - Sheinberg's edit, "Love Conquers All"

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.

Amanda (Not Her Real Name), Part 4

March 6, 2010

We make plans. They unravel. We try again. She backs off. She says even talking to me feels like cheating. Then she says that she's coming down for a friend's birthday but that we can't see each other. That its too much and too overwhelming. I tell her I understand but my words bite harder than hers. I do understand - but I wish to Hell I didn't.

A week later, some dreary Friday evening, I'm curled on the futon watching Minority Report and drinking crappy Merlot. Thats what its come down to: acting like a goddamned frenchman. She texts me to say shes sorry, to see if I want to have brunch tomorrow morning. With no one else. That we don't even have to eat, we can just wander around New Haven again. Time and location is forthcoming, but it would only be for two hours or so and I'd have to get her to the train on time.

Morning comes around. Quick breakfast, shower, shave and I'm out the door early. A couple text messages between us and she's running late going with her friend to drop someone else off. I get there an hour early (bad habit of mine: fear of driving somewhere unfamiliar. Makes me get places way ahead of time) and kill time at a parking lot. Notice a chip in my windshield from the drive down on 95; not especially bad but a good enough nick with a half circle nickle around it.

I get a call, saying she's just pulled in and that she'll be out in a minute. By the time I'm at her door, she's half way across the front yard and into the passenger seat.

"Hi."

Her voice is high and gentle, like someone sighing upwards an octave. Theres a certain tense expectation to how she talks, how shes turned her whole body to face me. Before I pull out from the sidewalk and into traffic, she says "Wait, are you dressed up? Why are you dressed up?"

"Because," I tell her with a stupid grin, "You can't be the only one who looks good." Though I didn't really dress up. Charcoal slacks and a new collared shirt. Well, okay, maybe I did dress up a little. And I meant to, because just seeing her was important enough to do something like that.

We drive around and get lost on the turns on and off the highway to get to the center of New Haven. She laughs as I feign frustration at our mutual inability to find any familiar roads. We end up right back to the same strip mall next to Yale where the movie theater use to be and Barnes And Noble takes up two thirds of that side of the street. We duck into the used CD store first, lamenting how they're slowly becoming a thing of the past. She walks up to the soundtrack section and stops, looking at me worriedly.

"What?"
"No, nothing. I just knew you were going to walk here."

We thumb through the stacks of CDs and duck briefly into the vinyl. We pull out some fun stuff but leave only so empty handed that she curiously puts her hand into mine and grips gently, as if testing. I look at her and she leans closer, shuffling her feet.

We walk into Barnes And Noble and we go right back to looking at the books we did last time. She pulled out some books on punk music, I flipped through a copy of Mencken's America. We traded quips and details and books. We have another 45 minutes before the train shows up. She grabs my arm and we race down to the bottom floor and go through the humor section. We giggle like school kids over Our Dumb World. She gets closer as we get midway through the book, her hair smells a little like shampoo and a lot like ... well, if you've ever walked through a wheat field, you know that smell of earth-fresh grain. (Otherwise, just imagine something really pleasant and earthy.)

The book goes back on the shelf. I gently take her arm and she puts her head against my chest. She's the perfect height for a dancing partner; the top of her head fits just under the bottom of my chin. She gets flustered but doesn't move.

"No, wait, stop... people will see us!"
"Like you're ever going to see these people again. Like they matter. Like they matter more than this."

I finally put my hands in her hair and she softly goes limp, saying nothing. I can hear the fabric in her shirt stretch, slide, wrinkle as she tries to curl closer. Imagine trying to hold in your hand the thing in the world that most wants to hold you. Its not something I'm use to at all, but its something I wish I had more of and more often.

"We should go."
"Yeah, we should."

Neither of us moves.

I pull out away but keep my hands on her arms, guiding her to walk next to me out the door. Back at the car, she takes out two dollars and forces it into my hand. To pay for the parking. I try more than once to stick it back into her hand and she refuses, I relent. My hand again ends up in hers and she traces the veins on the top of my hand. She says something under her breath and then dismisses it when I ask her what it was. I call her gorgeous, she wraps her arm around mine and clings as she puts her head to my shoulder. It was like Linus with a blanket: she felt completely safe with me and I felt completely happy that she understood that kind of physical affection. We probably looked like "that couple" to the woman at the parking booth.

The train station is ten minutes away with traffic. She points out the chip in the windshield and I tell her I got it today, on the way to pick her up. Her eyes widen and she apologizes profusely, saying she wished I never picked her up if it was going to crack my windshield. I tell her that I don't mind, that it'll just remind me of spending an afternoon with her. The corner of her mouth curls up but her eyes get more worried, more consoling.

Her train is late. We sit down on the furnished wood benches at the terminal and watch the arrival and departure sign. I say it reminds me of the end of Say Anything and she giggles to herself, apologizing for reasons she doesn't share. Her hand is glued to mine so hard someone's palm starts to sweat and I'm not sure if its mine.

She doesn't look at me, but instead shuffles as close as she can get without putting her legs across mine, and then she says "I love you so bad." And now I feel like that elderly couple you see sitting around at McDonalds during early mall hours or the kind who feed pigeons in the park and still look at each other with that odd glow of all-knowing youth still in their eyes.

On the station platform, she puts her bag down and my hands instinctively go through her hair again and she coos without making a sound. Like morning fog gently passing over water, she says "I love you so much - but I feel like such a bastard for saying it." and I squeeze her, hugging her harder than before. Her arms lock into my ribs, then my back. She digs in like she's holding on from drowning - or at least like she's in missionary position.

Details falter here. I ask to kiss her and she quietly looks away and says something I can't hear. I nudge her chin up and go for it all the same, with or without permission. Her hands leave me and I wait for her to push me away but instead she tries to frantically find a place to grab hold of me and she balls parts of my shirt up in her fist. I think about leaning back - the movie music should kick in soon or I should at least be Frederic Henry, ready to jump on that train - but realize she's so nervous and weak-kneed she'd probably stumble. She breaks it off and then puts her face into my shirt, muttering embarrassments about kissing in front of other people.

We kiss again. And a third and fourth time. Each one a little shorter and she becomes a little more desperate after each. She buries into me like a tick, she grips, grabs, pulls at me. I've never felt such an overwhelming physical want projected from another human being. Not even in the sexual way but in the sense that physical force alone could get me to never move. "Dear God stay," she said with her fingertips, dug into my back, "Don't go away again."

Details come back right around here. The train pulls up and she stutters "I...I... I have to go."

"I know." (Yes, I used a Han Solo line. No, I didn't mean to but its amusing in hindsight.)

She gets on the train slowly, looking back time after time. Waving the last time before she disappears into the passenger car. I watch the train pull out because it reminded me of when she said not to watch her go into her parent's house and I did anyway.

I get a text message two minutes later - "You've ruined me."

Amanda (Not Her Real Name), Part 3

For over a year, we trade emails and texts. Several times a day. Sometimes twice, some times fifteen times or more. She tells me about how scared she is in her relationship, that her boyfriend is passive-aggressive emotionally abusive. He would never raise a hand to her, but he'd shame her for not loading a dishwasher the way he likes it.

I help as best I can, but tell her theres nothing anyone can do unless she leaves him on her own.

We talk on Skype. Sometimes we talk on the phone. She's the first woman, the only woman to ever use the exact words I've wanted to hear without my goading or leading her to them. She says "I love you" with all the same intensity as a love struck teenager and all the wisdom of someone who has hurt their entire life.

She tells me secrets no one else knows. She tells me about how all her friends disapprove of her boyfriend and how she thinks it won't last. That all my advice is matching up with what everyone else has said already and that she should leave. She goes as far as trying to figure out how'd she move back down here or I up there, balancing out where to live and affordability and her dog.

I'm now carrying the weight and responsibility of a relationship I am not in, so some other asshole can tread water a little longer while the ship sinks. I see this and don't care, I just want her to call me again and again and again after that.

I pick up the phone to call her and she's on the other end without my dialing or the phone ringing. Or she's sitting at her computer at 2 am wondering what I'm doing and an email from me pops up right then, asking her what she's up to. A close friend dies and I call her for comfort; the cat she had since middle school died hours before. A billion tiny moments like this. Too many to count. All supernatural in feeling, all unexplainable to logic. It scares her but she's intrigued, I just revel in it as a sign that everything would work out.

And it did for a while.

Goodbye To All That

Goodbye to longer summer nights, cricket serenatas and long conversations in the dark. To tiki lamps and being the last people at a party, talking to the girl you'll never meet again.

Goodbye to the memories of the 1990s, when we lived in a brighter age. When Pearl Jam was still new, when sci-fi television wasn't pretentious garbage, to hearing Mark Snow's music on Friday night.

Goodbye to that weird, suburban alpenglow during afternoon trips to playgrounds. To laying in the grass with beautiful red haired girls in blue-and-white sundresses. That transition between high school and whatever path brought us here, now beaten to a thin cloud of passing dust.

Goodbye to cool morning sheets, the windows open, the maple leaves touching the screen window as they fall. To weekend morning breakfasts with pancakes and bacon. To long Sundays that dragged on until the dread of Monday crept up right before midnight.

Goodbye to falling in love heedlessly. To that girl who knew that way to look at you and smiled shyly as she put a lock of her hair behind her ear and the warm smell of youth as she put her chin on your shoulder. To not knowing any better and not caring. To being broken hearted and still have the time or the willpower to pull yourself together.

Goodbye to Sousa marching bands at gazebos and comic books for a dollar twenty-five. Goodbye to that sick-sweet smell of hiking trails and tree lines now long gone. To sawdust, asphalt and gravel; grass, tall weeds and blackberry bushes. Classic car shows. Baseball cards. The cat or dog you grew up with. Old suburban legends. Friends you've never seen again.

Goodbye to all that. We were right when we were 16. And nothing here is important anymore.

Amanda (Not Her Real Name), Part 2

Christmas Eve, 2009

I go to pick up someone I haven't seen in ages. Someone whom I've kept secret from everyone, because I don't know how to explain a lifelong relationship with someone I've only met a few times more than twice and reads me like her favorite book. She comes out of the train station and her overnight bag follows behind her like a dog. She weaves through people while walking next to me, we say nearly nothing. Shes a head shorter, with big brown eyes and the kind of pleading look photographers wish they could get for those ads for starving orphans in forgotten countries. She has small features like people have when you're 15 but she was a couple years short of thirty. Beautiful. Slight. Just enough curves to make most other women check themselves in the mirror.

She tells me about her new life with her boyfriend and her dog and how she doesn't want to see her family on Christmas and her job and how everything has been in the last couple of years. I sit in my car, intimidated as I have nothing to say. I live by myself, I work, I have a couple friends and one or two closer ones. There is no way to talk about anything when days pass one into the next, the details lost to boredom and not caring what day of the week it is. Details die quickly if not looked after.

I take one hand off the steering wheel and go to touch her on the nose. Stupid, strange habit I have with women I'm affectionate towards. She backs away quickly, like a dog who's tail had been stepped on and her eyes huge behind the black rimmed glasses. The look is somehow a mix of fear and wonder.

"No, don't."

I put my hand back on the wheel and my attention back on the street. The people pay no attention to me, but for some reason I have to be aware of them all as they move from place to place even if I will never see this faceless mass ever again, "Why not?"

"Because!" using a conjunction like a child would. She curls forward, her hair bouncing off the purple-blue sweater and she relaxes for the first time though she doesn't take her eyes off me. Her eyebrows are arched now, overemphasized like showing a complete stranger as much earnest sympathy she can muster. She told me things she said she never told anyone else. I've known her for four years, she still treats me like a stranger.

Shoppers move in waves from store to storefront to sidewalk kiosk for last minute gifts. The cars lining the street are choked with the shit-brown snow. Traffic spits dirty water at the passersby. Its as if the city hates the people that live in it. It gives them ugly colors and bad weather and rude people as if to tell people to get out. I feel very welcome in this, I am only lonely around other people.

She makes an odd movement, and she tries to cover up her reaching out for my arm by playing with the fabric on her sleeve. She fidgets and twists and squirms in the seat next to me. When we walk around town, she takes the crook my arm as we cross the street and keeps up half a pace behind me. She becomes warmer, laughing, less like a stranger and more like a gentle shadow of misspent age.

I think about running my hands through her hair and stop myself because of those brown eyes. She accepts a hug willingly but doesn't put her arms out, its all in her eyes. And She gets nervous when she walks up next to me in the college bookstore. She smells like a warm fireplace.

I pull into her parent's house later and she excuses herself for not inviting me in. It would be confusing and they're old world strict despite her personal liberal ways. She doesn't get out. She finds six minutes of excuses to stay, wringing her hands, explaining little random details excitedly - her family's Christmas habits, the music CD she burned for me, where she got the sweater, a story about her dog. She eventually stops herself, takes her bag and tells me not to look at her walk in as I drive off.

I do anyway. She's standing at the front door, looking back into my rear view mirror. The text messages on Christmas start off around five o'clock with "I miss you" and continue on well into the night.

Amanda (Not Her Real Name), Part 1

It's been so long that the details are fuzzy. It's also been so long, I can't remember a time when the details were sharp or when I didn't know her.

I was in the midst of my early 20s asshole phase in 2003. The one all guys go through in college where they sleep with naive girls from parties who got drunk on cheap beer. I was hooking and catching and releasing women all the time; one point I had a woman for every different day of the week. Most of them were just sex, the others were just to make out with, others still were sisters of old girlfriends and I... still feel awful about that.

I was using OkCupid after being introduced to it by a friend. It was as useful as a sledgehammer while swimming: a lot of emails, no real life connections though. I think in ten years I only met three girls through it: two would be important friends for many years and the third was Amanda.

The only thing I remember about talking to her on there was that while I was checking her profile regularly, she was also checking mine. She was too crushingly shy to make the first move and I was interested but not sure how this stuff worked. I eventually bit the bullet and we sent some small, awkward messages back and forth (now forever lost to time).

After, I kid you not, *months* of this, we decide to meet at a bar a couple of towns over near Yale. I'm dressed more blue collar than anyone else in town but she introduces herself at the bar and she's a tiny, tiny girl. Like five foot one. Curly dark hair. Eyes as big as saucers behind Lisa Loeb glasses. Something about her physically defined "sexy nerd" in the way only Internet ads do. Like a super-cute librarian girl. Unrealistically too, given the job she was working in college was stacking books in a law library.

Awkwardly, she brought four of her friends (who does that?) and they immediately thought I was gay. I'm assuming it was my very stand-offish attitude but then again, I was on a blind date only to be surrounded and judged by this girl's circle of close friends. It was very off putting and though I sat next to Amanda, I didn't talk to her. I was quiet, but I also found the hairs on my arms standing up when I made eye contact with her. She fumbled for words, she was scared and her words were coming out in rat-a-tat-tats. Flustered would be the word another generation used.

After being dragged to the dance floor (always good for a laugh, as I do a mean impression of a fish out of water) and grinding against her while she looks at me with pleading eyes, we're back at the booth and I'm talking to her friend across from me since we both worked in liquor stores. Its the only thing I can talk to in this group and I'm trying to force myself into, you know, being a human fucking being for once. Trying to interact and reach out.

Amanda looks at me and talks into her chest "Do you... like her more? You're not talking to me."

From anyone else, I'd roll my eyes at that and brush it off as just a woman trying to play coy. But her voice dripped with unnatural earnest, a kind I've never come across before or since, and she was so gentle to the point of being sullen, I didn't think she wanted to talk to me. When I told her such, she shook her head and denied it and very much wanted to talk with me. She carefully eagle-clawed (as in hand position, not as in grip strength) my hand under the table and said she was slightly, no, very intimidated by me and how could I ever like her and so on and so forth.

Crammed into that sweaty booth in that crowded Irish bar during finals week of some November, a small, gentle woman wrapped her arm around my back and put her head on my shoulder.

Her friends were all assholes, but this one was okay.

When we go our separate ways she asks why I'm going back toward the city and I tell her I had to park about three blocks down. She emphatically demands her friends drop me off - any excuse to stay near me for a few more minutes - and once we're in the backseat, she's on me. She's drunk, a little bolder perhaps and makes the first move but let's me lead the dance. She kisses remarkably well, in hindsight one of the best in my life, and when we get to my car, she leaps out of the other door and stops traffic to kiss me again and again. Her tongue is full-on in my mouth now and there are cars five or six deep that are honking at us. For two minutes.

I tell her to text me and I'll likely see her tomorrow. We text most of the night.

Tomorrow morning at ten, she's at my door and maybe thirty minutes later, we're having sex on the couch. Good sex too. Not just screwing but passionate, thoughtful "this is fun and really connected" sort of sex. We're making jokes and smiling as one of us gyrates and the other moans. It was a very giving hour for both of us.

We're interrupted by a phone call from her mother. She takes it and immediately goes into a fetal position, naked, on the couch. The conversation is one-sided and full of accusations. Amanda's voice goes quieter as her mother gets louder: WHERE ARE YOU and WHO ARE YOU WITH and suddenly I realize why we're hitting it off. Our home life sucks and our mothers are insane and its ingrained on our personalities.

Two victims of the exact same suburban crime.

After she hangs up with the interrogator, we fool around more before I notice I have to be in work soon for my afternoon job at the liquor store. She asks to see me again, soon... because she's leaving for a job in Boston. She already paid her lease and security.

Fuck.

Well, actually, I wasn't truly attached to her despite the fact she was cute and humble and smart and the sex was unusually good. So it was more of an "aw shucks" than a real curse.

Despite talking on instant messenger and some phone sex, I don't see her again. Years later, she tells me that the night after we had sex, she tried to call me and all her friends - who disapproved of me - physically dog piled on her and tore the phone out of her hand when she was dialing my number.

We talk about my visiting her and it doesn't happen. Neither do plans of her coming down to here and us even just getting coffee. The phone calls thin out. I email her once in a blue moon and she smiles politely and says she doesn't believe I still try to talk. It's been two years now and she's had a couple of bad relationships. She thinks about me a lot, she says, but talking to me feels like "emotional cheating".

Eventually, we stop talking. I don't stop thinking about her though. No matter how good anything is I keep thinking it would've been better with her being part of it.

I'm thinking that as I type this, in fact.