the switch

romantic love, is it for-real possible without devolving into George and Martha, into the black rain of the operatic? each of us has our own Blue Valentine to lament or extoll. our thumbs are up for the heart-wide-open, plug-into-socket split-second when ego takes a back seat and the heart is the driver. it's thumbs down when Mr. thrill-is-gone sticks his tongue out and the ego re-takes the tiller. in my case the twist in the wind begins as soon as i microscope the cold distance infecting myself and the one i wake up thinking about. when we start not saying the unsaid. when we resist the homework required to love the one you're with. romance is a snap when the connection can't wear thin from overuse. when a one-night-only-pair of eyes peers over a pint in me-too commiseration. or when a boy on a bus is a winner for the short ride. i sat next to a kid on the way to New York City. i hung back in the boarding line to snag someone who wouldn't stink me out. my not-so-innocent 'would it be ok, ya know, if i sat here with you?' worked. he was cool with it. a Brit, a musician, handsome and a talker. the time flew. we were castaways for the afternoon. we never saw each other again, although he looked me up on line and we write. on the sad side lurks the decaying relationship. the lying, the cover-up, the flayed flounder that rots in the gut entombing intimacy, spoiling the spark that jump-started two lovers when both felt 'new'. a friend suggested that in those first minutes we define the scope and rules of the 'contract' to follow. for good or ill. eyes wander over a hugged shoulder and lust for another. our ears pretend to listen as we rehearse our next monlogue. judgement looks over a book at a phony laugh. these are the petty annoyances that sprout like scabies after a one night stand. i'm guilty on all counts. i've cheated in one way or another with just about every person i've spent a decent number of days with. i've pretended my beloved was a fascinating conversationalist when all i was thinking about was what i wasn't getting done while i was stuck there listening to him. i've choked back comments about a body part that weirded me out. (all are petty crimes on the emotional docket.) there are exceptions. there always are. the primary love in my life grew like a pot plant in the manure of my longest term relationship. he was young, 20 years less than i, who magically, immediately, knew my heart, my brain, my paranoid imaginings like a gypsy reading a palm. he knew when i was falling backwards into doubt. he would catch and pull me back with a single look. he knew who i was in all those places i feared uncovering after our best-foot-forward honeymoon. the ones i'd eek out like mustard gas to warn him off, to prove my unworthiness, to be forgiven. you like me this much? ok, see if you can cope with these worms in this head. it was a psycho test i could not help running. we both did it, daring the other to challenge the truth about how we were, of who we became and how we created each other, wanting to earn our romantic diploma. we wanted to be ever safe on the high bed of the heart, to rock the universe, to carry the gleaming sword-in-stone' (the show-off vanity of having scored a 10 in loveland.) i quit my job as a cabbie and worked where he worked, where i'd met him and where we happened, evolving a language of you-had-to-be-there rituals that turned up the heat on a daily basis. he'd climb up to my third-floor porch when my boyfriend was out, heart like a cap-in-hand. we'd buy 40's and walk the Arboretum, laughing, lost in the autumn light. we'd lie under trees on damp leaves and do things he'd never thought of doing but did for the love of me, urgently, awkwardly. the pop song wonders, we did not. we had it all. and he was beautiful to look at. all of him. i could watch his face for hours, the shades of feeling as they moved over him like a dervish spinning across a still pond. it was the luckiest time in my life. i wrote a song about us, Over the Hill. WBCN played it for weeks in summer drive time. he'd listen incognito, in a car with friends who hadn't a clue. no one did. we were cloaked, safe, in Neverland and now, because of him i no longer binocular the horizon for The One. i have no need, no desire to find someone like him again even though all interactions vary and who knows what lies ahead in our memory of the future*. still, after all this, we ended badly. he was leaving for college. long distance would make it difficult. we got stinking drunk on what would be his last night home. we wept the hard, ugly sobbing that accompanies loss. we walked around the block and stopped, facing each other, wet with slobber and tears and that's when it happened. that's when the switch moved from on to off, the switch in my heart. i can't give a reason. i still don't understand it. i'm not proud of it. a vortex of light, of energy shot up, out of the top of my being into the starry night. i became in that instant, neutral, emotionally flat-lined. i didn't love him anymore. not in that way. not in the way we'd been. it was so sad. i didn't say a word to him about it. i couldn't. in the next several years he sacrificed a lot to re-connect with me, a selfless boy, a generous man. but i was not there for him in my heart and i hurt him i'm sure, because he knew, of course he knew and forgave me as he always did, silently, spiritually. he's married now. he has two beautiful kids. he lives far from here. but i'd say, after all this time, that i can, in a blink, re-enter that Eden of the heart and see his eyes upon me, filled to the brim.

*courtesy of Susie