dear you,

If I close my eyes, I can imagine myself walking down the narrow sidewalk of Ada–down past the pink house on the corner, past the corner store to Federal.  I can smell Westwood lingering heavy in the air and the Marlboros.  I can remember waiting for her to catch up to us, the sun bright and glinting nearly every day of my young life.

He was the first man I ever loved, and perhaps, part of the reason I’ve loved every other man I’ve been drawn to in that way silly girls sink.

Memory is a funny thing.  I remember him towering above me.  I remember his strength and his wit.  But, like any good funhouse mirror, the mind can play its tricks.  My beloved hero walked with a cane and a healthy limp.  And he was five foot seven or something.

Still, it doesn’t quite matter.  Does it?  He’ll always be the man who was so tall, who could flip my world upside down just because he existed.

###

I most remember his laugh–how it took over his face when it rained hail the size of wayward donuts–how it filled his little red truck as we waited it out–how it appeared when his brother & I sang “I can take a little hint from you…I’d run away…I’d run away with you, baby” as we sped through Alamo Placita to some diner or movie theatre…some place where we could smile at each other while talking books or music or ideas.  We were best at the ideas.

We’d dance afterward…in darkened parks in my old neighborhood…in well-lit bedrooms in the suburbs.  No music required, just the push-pull rhythm of our elated hearts.

I wasn’t a happy person at the time.  It was something, rather, that I aspired to be.  I was, more than anything, scared.  I had been among the ranks of the feeling for only a short time by then, and I was afraid of losing it…of losing him…of losing everything.  So, I held on.  And I smiled, even when I didn’t mean it.  But he made me want to mean it.

###

I most remember his white knuckles.  And his corny laugh.  And his audaciousness.  He was the guy who’d take pictures of his freshly-showered, half-naked self and post them to the Internet.  He was the guy who Photoshopped his eyes so they were some manner of piercing azure.  He was good at holding on for dear life and pretend.  You either loved him or hated him.  At first, I was part of the latter–though oddly fascinated–until I joined the devoted former…and held on to him when I probably shouldn’t have.

What can I say?  I needed an anchor.  I was always good at the holding on…always good at seeing through people’s crap.  I saw through it to the person he “really was”–to the person I needed him to be.

I wasn’t a happy person at the time.  I was working hard to be whole–to make a difference–to reinvent wheels and plunging off cliffs at 360 miles an hour….at contolling the tailspin.  And it was good as long as I didn’t need him too much–as long as I was useful.  I failed miserably, on all counts, and found myself buried back down in the ashes of our collective ruins.  I needed him to extend his hand.  I needed him to be my bright, white light.  But, instead, he let me crawl through shit.

###

Somewhere between there and here, I got lost.  I gave myself away a few times too many to the wrong guy–the wrong dream–the wrong me.  You could say it was because I’ve always had a good heart.  I’ve always been uncompromising with myself, and for the longest time, I didn’t know who this person actually was.  You could say it was because I never had anything that I could depend on…except her.

The truth, though, is that I never had me.  That last boy who walked away from me…the last one who pulled the wool over my eyes so well I let him sully my bathroom…well…he was wrong for too many reasons, and I know I’m still angry…probably always will be.  I know his existence in my life makes it harder for you, most days.

I know I am more closed off, more suspicious, more defensive, and less–well–me.  Only I am exactly me.  The me I always had been until just before I met him.  The progress I made after that other boy left me…after he turned into something less than a stranger…well…one person does make a difference, and I know he made an impact in my journey to here.

But I want to thank him for that, actually.

I have this thing I do where I give myself away too easily.  Despite my independence, I often disappear in relationships.  I’m not a small person, but within relationships, I let people sit on me and hold me down…let them force me to do things I don’t mean.  And then, I hate them for it…for being an accomplice to my own subjugation.  But, as he often told me, “no one can make you small without your permission.”

I am quick now to see manipulation where maybe there’s just a pause for thought.  Perhaps, I just attract people who struggle with its siren’s song.  I don’t know, but I do know that — when I see it in you — I rail against it and stick that arm up for all I’m worth.  I will never be controlled again.  You will not take advantage of my good heart.  Sometimes, it makes me sad.  But I’d rather be the defensive girl than the one who drowned in his tantrums.

Sometimes, I struggle to see you because I struggle to see me.  I know it’s me because I’m the girl who hides.  My father taught me well.  And then, I get angry when you don’t know the interior of my heart.  Because I don’t have the vocabulary or the instinct to tell you.

For me…love is about teaching each other the language of our individual hearts.  It’s as much about deciphering hieroglyphics and hand gestures as it is about hearts and flowers.  When you finally speak the same language, you find inspiration.  Love wants to be inspired.  It wants to skedaddle off in fifty different directions like rogue sparklers in December.  It wants to learn your punctuation and wait for a pause.  It isn’t threatened by edges of tone or what isn’t said.

It isn’t about keeping score or getting our own way.

It breathes.  It moves.  It waits.

That’s what love is, and it’s why I’m in it–even when my body violently revolts against the tone of the voice you use.  Because you inspired me like no one has, and that is worth everything.

<3

alma

-~-

Dear Alma,

As a boy, I tried to tell myself I didn’t need romantic love. I buried myself in philosophical meanderings and semi-logical conclusions gathered from an incomplete education, all designed to deflect the pain of feeling too timid to love myself the way I’d need to love before I could reach out to anyone and ask them to love me. In a sense, that’s when my whole “monk” concept began, although for different reasons and with different ends in mind.

But all my thinking and protesting, all my self-imposed solitude, didn’t keep me from losing my heart here and there, and it didn’t keep me from feeling the sting of loss. I had a few crushes in high school, and a few attractions that actually led somewhere, but nothing of real consequence. So it wasn’t until college that I first fell for someone, and boy, did I! For 14 years, she haunted my subconscious, the one who got away. We had so much chemistry you could’ve based a major on us. But I was messed up, she was messed up, and we didn’t really talk again for over a decade.

###

I’m an intense person. And in those early days, my intensity scared me so much that I tried to hold it in, to use my body as a physical barrier to protect those I loved. Instead of lashing out, I stored my anger in the tightness of my shoulders. I buried my sadness in stiffness of my neck. I envisioned myself locked inside a cell of my own choosing, because I’d seen how powerful my unleashed emotion could be, and it scared me.

But all that only served to delay and focus the inevitable. And it actually got worse. Along the line, I actually did get married. We fell in love once upon a time because we helped each other grow, both from difficult pasts, to accept that people actually could love us. But in that growth came a lot of conflict, a lot of struggle, and years of pain storming out like tornadoes between us. Much of it was mine.

I’d become a man trying to control his entire life, living in constant fear of anything that threatened to topple my precarious house of cards. And as soon as things began to improve between us, as soon as I learned a little better how to handle my own intensity, our lives changed rapidly. We moved up the eastern seaboard to Boston. We knew someone on that first plane on September 11th. She panicked about anthrax in the envelopes she opened. Those were the days of Xanax and late night ambulance calls.

And still it improved. Just as suddenly, we were over. I packed everything I had into my car and moved into a little room on the other side of town, across the hall from a young gay bartender who belted Britney Spears at 10am. That was my next year – living as a celibate monk, trying to make sense of what went wrong.

###

With the next girl, I spent a year and a half on Maui studying yoga, deepening my Buddhist practice, learning how to live without a home. I lost her love, went crazy, lived in car, and won it back again.

And there were a succession of women whose hearts I captured with my words and deeds, who found me standing on top of one of my finest works, whom I wooed from miles afar. One fell in love with me, came to see me, and couldn’t decide what she wanted. I spent a few nights with another, but time and events in our lives kept us apart. With another I formed a flirtatious friendship that would take two years to catch fire.

And there was the doctoral student. The one who’d gotten away so long before. We travelled to California wine country together, to New York, to Maine, we photographed my best friend’s wedding. I think we thought we’d found each other again and that we’d make a life of it. She stood behind me when my grandmother died and when I lost the job where I’d done so much good. She made me smile. We talked of weddings.

But I was knocked off my path and she didn’t know how to tell me what she wanted. All I heard were the things she wanted me to hear. What does a person do when presented with options they want, that they know the other person does not, when tempted with a fatal choice: choose what we want and what is offered, or deny it because we know our partner too well?

Inspiration needs a shared language, a lingua franca so finely-tuned between two hearts that it allows us live and grow as sculptors of our own lives, not lose ourselves in the push-and-shove of who loves more than who, of who knows best, of who wins this time.

And that’s what I missed in most of my relationships: I spent too much time taking care of the former few to find myself, because I found safety knowing that someone needed me. And then I spent time deciphering mixed messages from those who didn’t need me, who wanted to be with me, didn’t want to be with me, didn’t know what they wanted half the time. I can’t blame them, really, for not being perfect. Neither of course, was I. And thus the end always came.

###

So we come to the last one. The one who flipped my life inside out. We never had stability. One moment she loved me, the next moment we fought world wars inside my home. It was the same old problem: she didn’t know what she wanted. But she inspired me. All that passion, all that intensity – fire and ice and lightning – I published that book. I lived on the third rail. I found the me I’d been seeking for so many years.

I gave up the desire to control my life one day in Maui. But between the calmness that came out of letting go that need and the work I’d done for so long to control my emotions, I lived for five years in some in-between state. Oddly calm, oddly easy-going. Too willing to accept the mistreatment of others. And so I’d started to slip. I’d started to lose sight of me.

So when she came along, I’d had enough. Nobody would walk over me. Nobody would tell me what I wanted to hear. I wanted the truth in my lovers’ hearts, no matter how much it hurt or thrilled me. And I demanded respect — not obedience, not control — but to be respected for the person I’d become. And no more would I let myself fall for someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t love me for who I was or accept the love I gave them.

So we fought. We raged. So much that I woke one late night in August blind and alone on the streets of Boulder. She was gone. But like my transformative dark night of the soul in Maui, I felt peaceful: she’d gone, alright. But I was there, all of me. Whole again.

###

That’s the me you got to know. I’ve played the games. I’ve been the manipulator and the manipulated. I’ve struggled for control in the healthiest of ways and some ways so unhealthy I hate to even remember them. But the me you found this past August you might have to thank that last girl for helping to appear.

I feel again. And not only do I feel, but I express what I feel. Without the fear that I’ll run you over, tear you up, or make you lose sight of yourself. Part of that is seeing into you. I see the strength you’ve learned, the lessons from your past loves. You’ll fight tooth-and-nail to keep me from doing what he did to you, what you let him do to you. And isn’t that what I do too? Isn’t that what you see when you look at me?

I will listen. I will remember how brightly your heart shines even when miscues and errant tones of voice render the simplicity of our bond asunder. I will hear the language of your heart; and I will soon learn the meaning of those sounds that I don’t yet know. And I will teach you, letter by letter, sound by sound, word by word, the grammar of my soul.

Because it’s funny, when we need not fear the loss of our selves into each other, when we speak that tongue of whispers and smiles and light touches (and jabs and cross words and shouts), when we find the other person whole and without a need for us to fill their missing spaces, suddenly love lets itself loose. We can lose ourselves in one another, tangled up, wrapped around, because neither repairs the other. In this abandon, in this rush toward each other, in this coming together and co-mingling we are not lost, we are found, we become bigger and brighter.

“Good relationships inspire each partner to the best of themselves; the best inspire both partners to create — together — something of special significance, a greater good, a union of two individuals that bears the fruit of something even more sublime than possible on their own.” (Me, in the post announcing Kryptonite Cupcake Theory)

I come to you with the fears and filters of my past. But I also come to you – as you come to me – with the benefit of experience, of the wisdom we’ve learned through both good and bad. And you and I, we found each other, so much of what we wanted, and tried to deny this. We tried to look away because we needed time, we needed to trust ourselves, to trust our judgment in love. But we kept sneaking glances at each other, and they grew longer and longer.

I think we knew. We knew we could handle each other as nobody could before. We knew we could teach each other. We have such power to inspire each other now, even before we’ve learned all the intricacies of each others’ secret languages, that we begin each day a little more than we were the day before.

I choose you too, and what’s more – sometimes I know I couldn’t have not chosen you. And that’s the most amazing thing of all… You fit me. we’re becoming a beautiful trinity: you AND me AND us.

Many hearts,

Me (la)

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