Long-Lost

I met a woman a very, very long time ago while working at a ridiculous restaurant in a meaningless strip mall suburb just outside of Chicago.  She made an impression on me because she was outspoken; to the point that one evening she had the tenacity to follow a group of people out to the parking lot of the restaurant and throw the handful of change they had left as a tip at their feet.  Through the magic of Facebook, we became reacquainted and realized through our interactions that we have quite a bit in common.  Recently, she and a friend of hers, who I am proud to now call mine, visited, and I gave them each a ball and told them to write me a story about fear and desire.  This is her story, I have not edited much, it is all her.

I often wonder if there are people out there who just act on their desires without any fear at all…..just jump headlong into things without the slightest thought.  Without this certain paralyzing feeling that takes me by the throat anytime I need or want to pursue anything of value.  I am sure this is your question as well.  I know that they are both necessary in life, just as you can’t have light without darkness, beauty without ugliness, filth without wisdom…still, it is a nuisance and it just seems like it should be easier.  And I just know it is easier for some than others.  Maybe that’s what I fear most, not living up to those who it is easier for.

I have many stories of fear and desire dating back to when I was just a little one, but there is one that I know lives and breathes in me far stronger than all the rest.  One that puts a stronghold on something I desire the most….love.  Now, I’m not going to pretend that I was not already skittish and afraid of real love before this for, oh, so many reasons, but it really has surpassed and reinforced any experience to a point where I’m sure it is growing its own limbs deep in the bowels of my being.

As I said before, I’ve always been skittish and afraid of love.  I was taught this at a very young age.  I was taught that men were evil and that any time you give your heart to anyone, they are sure to rip it out, smear it in your face, eat it, and then leave you abandoned and hollow.  This person even proved it to me by getting sick and doing that very thing to me.  Of course, this made me a cautious and guarded person.  I didn’t really date in high school until my sophomore year, and then I ended it because I got too “scared”…uh, surprise.  I finally gave in and surrendered in my senior year to probably the worst and best guy for me at the time.  The worst because he added things to my fear list that I hadn’t been taught yet, and the best because I really do think we fell in love and I’m sure that if he didn’t break down the door, no one would have for a very long time.  I wouldn’t have let them.

When it finally ended after years of me trying to throw him off a cliff, my love life became more or less a string of meeting guys and throwing them away.  No one interested me, no one that is, except for completely emotionally unavailable ones, and they were the ones I wanted to unload my whole bag of desire on.  It makes sense now. It was safer for me to mourn and yearn for someone I couldn’t really have rather than someone I could really have and then possibly lose later.  That would make me far more vulnerable, far more powerless.  During the time of a particularly one-sided love affair, (so significant it lasted eight years), a pretty awesome available type shyly made it known that he was into me.  I was too scared.  I needed someone to break down the door again.  I kept him at a safe distance and continued my pathetic and futile attempts at “Unavailable”.

“Unavailable” threw me bones, made out with me and even cheated on his girlfriend with me, but of course never really wanted me (until I was unavailable- that’s another story).  “Available” became my friend over the years….I saw him often because he worked at an establishment I frequented.  He became involved with an abusive and evil girl, (the worst girl for him?).  After some time of really realizing how much I cared for him and regretting letting him go, they broke up.  One impossible night, I happened to be working at said establishment, and after deliberately pouting in front of him because he was flirting with another girl, was taken by surprise and got my door broken down.  I remember it like it was yesterday; it was like magic.  I was standing a few feet away from him, and we began walking toward each other like some magnetic force was between us.  We held an unbreakable gaze, he reached his arms out for me, and I fell into them.  Instead of just a usual hug, (he gave the best), he met my lips.  It was the perfect kiss.  The kind in movies, the kind you feel in your knees…and through every cell of your body.  We kissed like that all night, and it never got old or lost that magic.  We told each other how we both had feelings for each other for a long time.  He told me in an accusing voice that he tried to get me to be with him 4 years ago.  I told him I was stupid.  The night ended.  I went home…as happy as I have ever been.  I was finally going to let the right person in and it felt like it was the most right thing in the world.  On top of a mountain, giddy with delight, I slept with many happy dreams of him.  When I woke to call my best friend and talk to her about it…she told me that…he had killed himself a couple of hours before.  There are no more words.  Just fear.

Three Graces

I sat in my office and listened as a young woman told me a story.  As she spoke, her husband sat next to her chuckling.  She had arrived at a new house her family had just purchased when she was very young and recognized the house as a place she had lived before with her dog, "puppy".  This of course was impossible, as her family had never before lived in the house, and she had never had a dog.  It turned out that the family who had originally lived in the house had a daughter who had fallen into a well and died when she was four, exactly a year before the young woman was born, and had a dog named "puppy".  Though the event had occurred over twenty years ago, she was clearly still moved by it.  After she finished, her husband told her that the story did not address the point of my question, and her exact response was, "It's a good story, douche."

She told a second story.  He sat and chuckled as she relayed her horror of watching her father's skin burn off of his body after he had thoughtlessly unscrewed the radiator cap immediately after having driven his car.   Again came the inevitable, "douche."

And then, finally, a third.  As a teenager, she had been a life guard at a theme park and somehow the management had gotten a hold of a tape of a real life drowning and decided to show it to the lifeguard trainees in order to motivate them to take the job seriously.  Part of the motivation was telling them to imagine the individual who had drowned as a relative.  This had clearly be traumatic for her, but again, did not seem to satisfy her husband's idea of what my question was addressing.

After she had finished, I asked her husband if he wanted to take a ball in exchange for a story.  He replied that he did not.

When I set out to do this project, I had very specific, some might even say rigid, goals in mind, and I too might have thought that these stories were not fear/desire applicable.  But in this interaction I witnessed a woman intent on telling her story, even as her husband sat and laughed, maybe even knowing he would laugh, but being brave enough to reveal herself anyway.  I then witnessed her husband's fear of telling the story he might want to share but could not bring himself to tell.

Maybe it comes down to what we have the courage to reveal about ourselves, who we are able to be in front of the people we love, and whether or not we choose to contort ourselves in order to be comfortable with the skin we wear in the world.

My Fear and Desire

My parents divorced when I was eight.  Three years later, they were both busy pleasing their new partners, often at the expense of their children; my brother Josh and I.  My mother, for her part, had seen to it that we could only see our father for two hours on Tuesday nights, when we would play games and hurriedly eat dinner in the large, warehouse-like apartment above his antique store.  His new wife, Gloria, had at one time been a patient of our mom’s, and had also been a family friend, eating dinner at our house occasionally and even going camping with our family a few times.  At home, our mom was never around, which was a relief as she was quite unpredictable in terms of the things she would randomly fly into a rage about.  She had a private practice as a Social Worker and worked most nights, leaving us to be cared for by our older step brother or the neighbors on various weekends so she could spend the time with her partner, Marg, a woman who had also been her patient at one time.  I would not know it until later, but it was at this time that Marg had told my mom that she wanted to adopt a child.  The way my mother tells it, she agreed to adopt so that Marg would not leave her.

Josh and I were told we would be getting a new brother when we got home from a trip to summer camp our mother had forced upon us.  We both felt it futile to express our thoughts or feelings on the matter, because, as recent events had demonstrated, we were not in a position to affect the outcome of anything going on in or around our lives.  We both knew we would be the cheap labor; babysitting the new kid whenever Marg and Mom needed, which would most probably be every day after school and some weekends.

When the baby, Nathan, arrived it dawned on me that this was a person whom I could love and who would love me back.  As this was something I had been longing for ever since my parents’ divorce, I poured a lot of time and energy into him, playing with him, feeding him, reading to him, bathing him, and often protecting him from mom’s anger.  If he walked into a room and I was one of many in it, including his mothers, he would come to me.  At one point, my brother Josh asked me why I spent so much time with him, and I told him that I thought that he needed us to love him, that it was up to us to provide him with a real and dependable source of love, as I saw my mother and Marg as incapable.  Of course, they eventually split, and as Marg had adopted Nathan alone, and the state would give no rights to gay parents at that time, I saw him much less, except, of course, when Marg needed me to babysit a couple days a week.  It was still nice, I got to see him and spend time with him, but Marg would occasionally use him to manipulate me into doing things I did not want to do and sporadicly threatened to not let us see Nathan at all in order to force my mother to go back to her, (ironically, she had left my mom for one of her patients; Marg, too, was a Social Worker).  Eventually, my mom made it clear that she would not be going back to Marg, so she stopped letting Nathan see us, and I felt as though my heart had been ripped out of my chest.

Though I did not know it then, this would be the event which would lead me to the decision to never have children. I felt at the time as though I had lost my own child, and I was heartbroken.  Of course, as I see it now, I understand very well that it might be the best thing for me to have a child, to face the fear that this loss created, but unfortunately, at this point, I have no awareness of that desire in me, and I feel that this heartbreak, born out of a need for love, will also keep me from opening myself up to it ever again.