An Artful Heart.

When it comes to matters of the heart, I used to be a diehard romantic.  There was absolutely a “forever” and I have lived many lifetimes through the men that I have loved.  When all is said and done, I would walk away sad but somehow un-embittered and I swear that I will either never love again, or it will be the “real thing” the next time.  I scold myself for mistakes made even if they were not my own and I make promises to my future love (real one this time), that I will have fixed all the badness and hurt inside me and be open hearted and ready when he and I finally find each other.  These reflections and promises (perhaps delusions in hindsight) will no doubt always accompany the quiet retelling of an epic and ultimately tragic love story, if only to myself; and every aspect will become amplified and warped in my need to make it make sense, by making it meaningful. 

Attempting to reawaken the senses after time has dulled them; this story becomes even more beautiful in its slight distortion and becomes a poetic tragedy more than an inevitability.  The days read longer as do the bouts of love making, the moments of laughter and even the arguments.  These arguments are either dulled or heightened by the context of the retelling and there has never been so great a fight as the ones that occur as the result of the most insignificant disagreement.  Of course it is the ridiculousness of the argument over something trivial that is worth the retelling, and is what should have been the indication that things were not going to work out and blah blah.  It was always thus.  Until it was not. 

It was not the case with this Englishman.  Our story needs no enhancements.  It needs no digital remastering of sound for everything rings loudly in my ears as if it is being said again, not replayed.  I do not need CGI enhancements nor special effects added.  I am not watching a scene of us, I am in that scene once more and my responses are exactly the same as they had been, only now, I know how it all ends and am powerless to stop it (not that I would have wanted to).  Maybe it is in this reliving vs. retelling that a beautiful thing remains.  Even the bad parts have a sweetness and poetry to them, as our reconciliations yielded genuine apologies, great tenderness and change in offending behaviors (albeit temporary).  

But it was not to be and our love story is equipped with all the characteristics of an epic tragedy.  Firstly, we both entered into the union with fatal flaws.  His was vanity and ego (read: prejudice) and mine, my pride.  Knowing this, however, does not allow me to change the now decrepit state of what was a strong and excellent thing.  If and when we meet again, it will be as it was the first time, as strangers.  Maybe the short retelling of our story will not read well to others.  I am not entirely sure I am convinced by my own sentiments in the retelling, but it is my lived truth at the moment and I will indulge myself in the licking of these now fresh wounds.  It will undoubtedly be a very long time before the pain abates, so these words will ring true for a good while yet. 

I blame the entire affair on my ex-roommates’ fascination with meeting people online.  That was how our worlds came to collide; a social forum for international travelers on the internet and my roommate’s desire to have cultural exchanges with strangers.  It was one of the coldest nights in January of 2012 when our paths collided.  He looked like a misshapen amoebic mass more than a man, huddled as he was in a chair in my living room.  He could not be real, for no one in their right mind would take to wandering the streets of the Montreal winter tundra in a thin jacket made for fashion versus function.  His shoes were well worn sneakers and I could only imagine how frozen hard his toes must have been after walking for hours through the many feet of snow outside.  

My pity was instantaneous.  I too, knew what it was like to be an accidental adventurer in the cold of the world, welcoming the unknown but never being able to fully foresee the darker details.  He was clearly out of his element in every way, and his utter cluelessness was endearing and I believe I loved him even then.  Maybe I simply projected all over him and he was perfectly fine and prepared for his new life there.  Maybe his blood was made of warmer stuff and he was not affected by the cold, but it seemed that he needed something warm, that warmth that we all crave.  I felt I could provide it and I ran to grab my cape and set out to be his hero.  I gave him warm things- a home, a heart and a hand to hold in life, love - and I would have given it to him in marriage as well.  

We were the fastest of friends and slow as lovers.  Everything was so deliberate and so infinite, as if the conclusive “we” was constantly running in the background even while unfolding ever so slowly in front of our eyes.  Perhaps it was because the slow anticipation for the inevitable was incredibly exciting.  We were going to be in love and we knew it.  We were trying to tell the story and live it at the same time.  Every shy glance and brief caress felt well placed and executed as if rehearsed.  Our periods of inseparability and trips away were divinely scheduled as there never seemed to be timing conflicts or responsibilities that were put on hold or neglected.  There were deep conversations that lasted days and some that have not concluded. When we were together, my hand was never without his, the touches incessant and our faces constantly met at the lips.  There was mutual admiration and affection.  Our bouts of separation (for hours or heaven forbid days) yielded many love letters written and posted to an address in cyberspace.  

He was not at all my type, I told myself at the start.  It would not be long before that statement held doubt and I say it now resentful of my decision to have fallen in love with him in the first place.  He may not have been my type or particularly attractive to me at the start, but he became the most beautiful boy I had ever had the misfortune to love; and I had never wanted anything so badly in my life than to be right next to the warmth and smoothness of his skin.  He had a shock of disobedient hair like a poorly mowed lawn.  His eyes were green, sometimes brown and he was riddled with moles, like little brown buttons - “love buttons” I called them.  He had “honest” hands, I told him once.  They were long, lean and clean (which I would soon learn was due to much manicuring and meticulous care).  It would be two years before I realized that the hands may have been honest, but there were other more important appendages that were not so honest.

For the life of me, I will never quite understand why he chose Montreal.  Of all the apartments in all the cities in all the world, he had to come into mine-dropped like an orphan on church steps and swaddled in that useless black jacket.  We were both fresh out of relationships, of which we spoke about at great length.  I told him how I was tired of being a “starter girlfriend” for guys that did not have their shit together in love matters.  The Englishman knew all of my relationship pitfalls, misgivings and fears before they became necessary to our own circumstance.  In fact, he knew all my secrets for he was my very best friend.  It is for this reason that he should have known better, and for this reason, to me, he died when Dad did. 

He was notoriously selfish.  On our long walks I would often gather the old change from the bottom of my purse; covered in a sticky layer of spilled cosmetics and studded with tobacco from old cigarettes and other debris.  I would stop occasionally and present these gooey gifts to homeless panhandlers on the streets.  On one of our initial walks, the Englishman frowned upon my charity and explained why he was not taken with pity by the plight of others.  I do not recall his full reasoning, but the reproduction reads as an elaborate lecture on how the world needs the delicate balance of both the altruistic and the capitalist mindset  (conveniently avoiding the term ‘selfish‘). 

Those who support only themselves are the true heroes in the subversive world of do-goodery deception.  Charitibility is not treating the problem, only negatively rewarding those who are not actively seeking help for their situation.  In actuality, by not donating his dimes, he was doing the most noble and altruistic of acts.  In the end, I think he became the hero for keeping his pennies pocketed.  It’s a wonder he did not convince me to go back and apologized to the bum for my ignorant charity, smash his cup of coins and call the cops on him.  

He was also very selfish in our couple; or maybe it was self preservation.  I slowly began to think of things as “ours” and what belonged to me, belonged to “we”.  I realized early on that what was happening was that The Englishman would take what was “me”/”we” and simply claim it as his, thereby drawing a line down our couple, him on his side and me AND him on the other side.  It was the equivalent of getting “fleeced twice” and I found myself buying twice as much of something, only to get a quarter of it in the end.  The math was already bad, but got worse and worse as time went on.  It irked me, but in no way did I see it as a “deal breaker”, I assumed that by continuing to give, or even give more; he would eventually return some little bit of the kindness and generosity. 

However, he did not become the person I hoped he would be and attributing potentially good future qualities did not trick him into manifesting them.  His emotions too were well guarded save for short spurts of anger, laughter or passion.  He took to expressing himself through song and would quietly hum or sing a song whose lyrics I believed closely resembled his own sentiments.  I learned his many ways of communication and felt accomplished at having acquired this interpersonal education.  I was content under love’s false security and believed it was simply enough to overlook his flaws and mistakes, as long as I was not committing any of my own.

The breakup was agonizingly slow in some ways.  We parted ways during the first year of our being together with him biking across Canada and me hitchhiking to meet him in Vancouver.  We had a glorious trip hitchhiking back to the east coast where we spent Thanksgiving holiday on Cape Cod with my family before heading back north to Montreal.  After the first year and a half he went to Brazil and I to North Carolina, hoping to thin some of Dad’s hoarded “interests” and make the house livable and navigable once more.  We stayed together for these three months and wrote endless emails and skyped and made plans for the future.  He was teaching English and fulfilling his dream of learning Portuguese.  

I moved to Colorado during his time in Brazil and we met once more in Montreal when he was done and together we flew to see his family on Grand Cayman.  It had all the ceremony of a serious long term relationship.  It would be four months after Cayman until I saw him again.  He came to Denver to spend three months with me in a little pink house with a fenced in backyard.  We had a blissful fall with long walks and snuggles and even a few long roadtrips.  When he rode away on the bus to the airport we could not have been more in love, or so I had been led to believe.  We talked about seeing each other “imminently”.  He would go home for Christmas and directly after we would find each other; either in the States or in the UK, but always together.  

In love there are no foregone conclusions.  Nothing is owed to it and nothing can be demanded of it.  What began as a complete certainty for him turned seamlessly into doubt and then hesitation, leaving me to wonder if it had always been there waiting to usurp the love we built.  His explanation was that he was applying for jobs and unsure that he wanted to live in the States.  I offered to move there, but he was living with his mother at the time and that was something I was unwilling to do, not to mention the lack of formal invitation.  We had spoken of breaking up due to distance and uncertainty, but we were not committed to the idea and spoke and emailed constantly, always ending with “I love you” and  “I love you, too.”  We were both saving money for what I thought was a shared future, and then one day, during our usual skype conversation I told him that Dad’s surgery was unsuccessful and that he was on life support and would die, and he told me that he was moving back to Brazil.  

I needed him then like I had never needed anyone in all my life, for any reason. Dad was dying and The Englishman was dancing, drinking and courting women far away.  Yes, we spoke from time to time when he was around and not busy, but it was short and unrewarding.  It felt like more of a favor he was doing to me than a genuine interest in my wellbeing, and the excuse of “I’m tired” was used more than once to make short work of our conversations.  I believed in his exhaustion and his desire to remain connected somehow.  Perhaps it was just that focusing on concluding our relationship indefinitely was the last thing on my mind as Dad was dying.  Maybe I just was not ready.  And when Dad died, the Englishman  promised to come spend a month with me scattering his ashes.  I told myself that it was “better late than never” and with my best friend once again at my side, there was no better way to grieve and let go.  But I was to grieve twice.  Once for him and once for Dad.  

We were to drive from Denver to North Carolina’s Outer Banks where we would bike the 150 miles of coastline.  I envisioned giving a toast of wine and setting Dad’s remains adrift to sea in a vessel handmade of drift wood and bits and bobs found along the beach.  We would say some prayers, recite some poetry about the life and worth of a man, and I would tell stories of my youth and cry and he would hug me and I would fall asleep with his hand in mine and feel that my world might still continue to turn to reveal another day.  When the trip was over, he and I would share the proper goodbye that should have been when he left Denver many months before, and we would remain the best of friends with love still in our hearts incubating in case the timing should ever be perfect for us again.  It would not have mattered the other women and leaving when Dad was on his deathbed.  That trip would have made me believe that our love had been real, and that it mattered to him that my beloved father was gone from this life- the man who taught him to make bread during our Thanksgiving vacation. 

I do believe that if he had made good on his promise, I would not be on this current journey, even if we still would not be together.  He made no excuses for why he would not come, just a text saying ‘I can’t go. ☹’.  I do not know if it was the words stripped of explanation, or the frowny face emoji tacked on at the end in an attempt to express (false) sincerity, but something inside me broke.  ‘We are adults!" I wanted to scream at him.  'There is no reason you cannot do anything that you want to do; if you truly wanted to do it’, I told him.  "I can’t go, ☹” made no sense to me.  It was not as if I was a school friend asking him to spend the night on a weekday or a neighborhood street kid asking him to come out and play after dark.  I was…me.  The “me” of the “we” that had been so strong and beautiful.  And that suddenly, was so evidently, not.  I could not and still do not understand what happened.  

It was as if he had been body snatched by alien assholes from another dimension.  Not even alien assholes in our own dimension would have done something so callous because they would no doubt have heard about what a “good man” my father was and would have been in support of our journey together to scatter his ashes.  He admitted that he had been seeing other people and he never saw us working out and was too afraid to tell me.  I expressed my disappointment and that I did not think we could ever be the friends we once were, and he disappeared.  I wanted him to make me understand.  I thought that if I explained every facet of my pain, he would have an explanation ready as to why that pain had been an unfortunate bi-product of a necessity.  I would be reconciled to the idea that the way it was, was the way it had to be.  I would let go.  But he was gone, hidden somewhere.  Or rather, he moved on and would not indulge my endless inquisitions.  

I felt like a crazy person in my confusion and at the hurt and fear of losing someone else I loved.  But hurt and fear make for angry bedfellows, and being drawn into such a destructive menage a trois showed me a depth of dark despair that made me unrecognizable to myself. In some ways, perhaps it was the kindest thing he could do.  If he was always capable of such abandonment and deceit, it was better to know sooner before more sand poured through the hourglass.  I will still never understand what happened nor why, and more importantly why then.  It seems to me that the absolute best way to ensure that a breakup sticks, is to leave someone alone in Hell, such as the one I was living in at the time.  

Maybe he knew my love for him was much too strong, and nothing short of death would make me give up.  I just wish he had not killed my father to get his point across, for in my moments of mad irrationality, it felt as if it were he who put the nail in the coffin -in every way.  With this utter devastation running in the background, I knew there were more than ashes that would be buried on the journey, not just Dad’s remains.  It is a difficult task and short of cutting off my arm to spite the heart on its sleeve, I can only hope that when I let go of Dad in a manner deserving of his life as a man, I can let go of the other man undeserving of his life with me.  I will let the beauty and significance of Dad’s burial be my last act of reverence and devotion to a love that rivaled art and literature.  For now I will speak no more ill of the dead; or in this case, the dead to me.  It is with dogged determination that I move on. #nofilter