One Year Ago This Night

A year ago tonight I lived in the place that was my home for the last time.

It was exactly one year ago--the Tuesday before New Year's Eve--when my then-husband walked in what had been my front door for 17 years, and asked the un-askable.

He asked, Are we over?

Not exactly in those words, but that's what he meant.

First, my mind started racing. How do I answer this? Is there any answer that will stop the world from collapsing?

Then, Maybe it's time for the world to collapse.

It turned out to be exactly that.

Later, when I could think, I thought: When he walked in, it was still my front door. By the time I walked out, it no longer was.

It took me less than an hour to pack what I needed, I remember. But we both kept stopping to cry, so it took much longer. I couldn't find anything that my pillow would fit into, so I ended up hailing a cab on the corner of Second Avenue, sobbing, clutching my pillow under my arm like a third grader leaving summer camp with a bad case of homesickness.

Really the homesickness had set in before I even made it to the corner.

The taxi sailed through the darkness to the apartment I was subletting. I let myself in and realized that even that entryway had changed. This wasn't my front door, either. Up until that evening it had been my great escape--the place I could go to figure out what was going to happen next, what I was going to be capable of. Now there was a clock ticking. My home was no longer my home, and this sublet was a home with an imminent expiration date.

It felt like I had gone from having so many things that felt like mine, to having almost none.

Except the pillow, of course.

A year ago this night I was not sure I would physically survive the pain of it. Ironically I was actually in quite a bit of physical pain, in fact surgery was imminent, though I didn't know it at the time. That pain had become the back-seat driver that kept me company every minute of my life--I wasn't conscious of its maneuverings, only its chronic annoyance.

It was the hollowed-out throbbing in my stomach and my throat that I feared had become a permanent fixture--that was the pain I didn't think I could survive.

The truth is that it has lasted much longer, and hurt much more, than I would have wanted to know on that night a year ago.

I can still call it back in its full force. Sometimes I want nothing more than to swim in it, this pain. I know there's no escape, so I might as well soak. And I do. It can be intoxicating. These are the times I reach for it voluntarily.

Another way to call it back is to become entangled with the wrong men--wrong meaning men who will not be careful with me, men who are not good for me. It's not that I have a particular skill for this, I've come to realize. It's that, when you have the sharp memory of losing your front door and hailing a taxi on Second Avenue with your pillow under your arm, you forget that you need more than someone who will weigh you down, prevent you from floating away.

You do need something to weigh you down when you've lost every anchor that once kept your soul tethered to the earth.

This is not the only thing you need, however.

And a man who will weigh you down may not weigh you down with love. He might weigh you down with meanness, or with the fear of his own smallness--and so many other things. None of this is good.

But the pillow, the front door, seventeen years...you don't, you can't see this.

You can't see that it's OK to be flying wildly about the universe with nothing holding you down. You can't see that it will hurt, and it's OK that it will hurt. You will bump into people and grab onto them and lose hold, and this will hurt. I remember reading first-hand accounts of the tsunami in Indonesia and when all of this came about last year, thinking: Yes. Exactly. You try to grab hold, you're holding on with all of your strength, but your strength has never met anything like this.

All of this started a year ago tonight.

The people who love me tell me that I should be proud of how much I've done, how much I've lived and how much I've survived; that I've loved and lost and loved and lost again. And again, even.

I don't think I will be proud until I've mastered it, however. It's like dance: The learning is challenging, engrossing, it can be grueling. But until your body understands the choreography without your brain interfering, there is no real, lasting beauty. You haven't really earned the right to learn the next series of steps.

So that is the way I will look at my memory of that night, I believe--of the whole year that followed up until right now, actually. It was just the beginning of cutting away from the anchors that kept me safely tied to my old life.

I haven't got this mastered. But I'm getting pretty good at the steps.

All of Our Hearts Are Broken

We all wish it had happened differently.

Every one of us can imagine a better ending.

It seems like it could have gone so many different ways, other ways than that.

But if it hadn't happened like that, who would we be now?

Would we be shaped differently?

I wonder about it in so many different ways, and always come back to the same thing: All of our hearts are already broken. We are going about it all with wounds that no one else can see.

So if all of our hearts are already broken, maybe that's why we're here.

To mend the broken places that only we can see.

?

What Is Inside My Soul?

Another man has left my life, a man that I don't actually know yet how exactly to characterize.

A very sexy man. A very funny, charismatic man. In many ways, such a very, very fun man.

In many ways when I am ruminating over the break-up, I want to tell myself that it didn't have to end the way it did. But I know that not only is the universe unraveling exactly the way it's supposed to, but that if any two people were heading for a crash, it was me and this particular man:

A week and a half before two final, painful, nervous break-up conversations--telephone conversations--we had gone on a fairly spontaneous road trip. Each packed a bag and drove deep into the rural mountains of Pennsylvania.

We drove for about six hours each way, did nothing but talk and listen to music and make out and pull over to buy road food. It was glorious. It felt like the end of summer in so many ways.

He said on the drive down that we were staying at a Hamptons Inn, and I believed him. But it turned out that he was joking; he'd rented a room in an old stone lodge overlooking a valley of changing October trees. It was unspeakably beautiful countryside--cows and barns and clouds and sky. When he carried our luggage up the stairs, he wouldn't let me carry my bag.

He won't let me carry my bag, I remember thinking. I actually just want to carry my own bag. This is weirdly honeymoon-y.

On the ride home after a night and a day, it hit me with a thud: There's a rebound coming. He will think about something to do with one of these conversations, and he will miss me. Or he will smell me on some piece of his clothing. The reflexive discomfit with attachment that rides on so many XY chromosomes will begin to pulse alive.

In our own way, don't we start to anticipate it? This makes us behave differently than we would otherwise, if our antennae weren't up. We're taught to sniff it out, right?? Doesn't it make sense, evolutionarily?? That we'd have some sense of panic at the prospect of the departure of a man?

Especially a sexy, good-smelling, funny man?

Could it be that?

Wouldn't it be nice if it were that?

So he ended it, we ended over the telephone because he found an opportunity, and I've cried for a week. Or actually have meant to cry but haven't had the time until right now. One night this week when I meant to cry I had to sit with a lawyer instead, who read to me, paragraph by paragraph, the details of my divorce. My divorce is 20 pages long. In case anyone is wondering, I will no longer be related to the man becoming my ex-husband. He will legally no longer be my family.

The lawyer was only doing his job.

I had a date tomorrow with one of the men I have very enjoyable sex with, and this afternoon he cancelled.

I feel very much alone.

So I sit here and write to you and I know that everything, eventually, will be much better. I know that it is OK to ache and to cry for this man who just left, who made me laugh so hard and blinded me with passion. I know that for all of the ache of feeling my marriage done away with, I am better off without it. All of this sits together inside me.

Here is what I wonder: What will feed my soul instead of these sweet, damaged men? When will I stop breaking up with myself? When will I stop dumping me?

What is there, really, inside my soul?




for margaret

What Makes Us So Crazy?

If sane is the new sexy, I am in need of a character overhaul.

I have become crazy, it seems.

Frighteningly, many of my friends and even women I only have glancing social acquaintences with have become crazy as well. What's weirder, it's the exact same kind of crazy. What happened to us? What is happening to us?

For me, currently, the insanity involves a man I'll call the Sixth Avenue Kisser--when he (and I, for that matter) last appeared on this site, I had just been kissing him on lower Sixth Avenue.

The kissing continued. It was very good kissing. And you know, we all know, what kissing leads to.

That was very good.

And that continued as well.

Then, out of nowhere, it began:

Craziness. Out of the nowhere of my soul, it crept up. One moment I was casually daydreaming about what to wear on our next date--sort of looking at the backs of my hands, wondering how many days it had been since I'd had a manicure. Then that moment passed and in the next moment, with sinking dread in my stomach, I was thinking:

Wait: Why hasn't he called?

When was the last time I saw him / spoke to him / got an email / text / telekinetic message from him?

How long has it been?

Finally: Does he not want me?

This is the savage animal that drives us to craziness. Each of us has one; she knows us by name. Sometimes she knows us by ugly names. And we know her. This is the bitch who looks us in the mirror on bad mornings and tells us our face looks weird. No matter what clothing we put on as we're dressing for work, she says, too tight. You must be putting on weight.

There are times when she doesn't shut up, this bitch. She rips it all apart; she is a ranting tornado of destruction.

And when she digs her nails into why hasn't he called, out pours a symphony of ugliness.

With my rational mind--perhaps with all of our rational minds--we know that he probably hasn't called because he is a man. Thus he was watching the game/working on something on his computer/imagining your naked breasts or looking at pictures of someone else's naked breasts (or both). But our rational minds get drowned out by this shrieking cacophany.

I don't remember when this behavior started in me, but I know that I have not always been this way. Maybe it's that with certain men I am not this way? This makes me wonder if there is something toxic and scary between me and the Sixth Avenue Kisser...and why shouldn't there be? I seem to have become a specialist in toxic and scary. Perhaps I suck it into myself like metal filings to a magnet.

This makes me worried. The more worried I get, the louder the bitch symphony sings.

Here is what I want to leave you with.

The problem is not that we will never be able to answer, "why hasn't he called?" The problem is that it's the wrong question.

Here are the right questions:

If I weren't focused on him calling, what in my life would be hurting the most? What is it that I'm drowning out by obsessing about what he is feeling for me?

Why wouldn't he want me? How many strong beautiful sexy talented funny achingly alive MEs are strolling around this planet?

And if he's not smart or sane or savvy enough to be asking himself the same thing, why would I want him to call?

What makes the nasty bitch slip into the driver's seat of our brains and our hearts? Why do we hand over the keys and slide so easily into riding shotgun?

What makes us so crazy?

The Psychiatrist, the Soul Mate and Me

This has been the most unusual, painful, and interesting summer. And it is almost over.

It started with the Psychiatrist. I loved him, briefly, intensely, in a desperate, chaotic way, from the end of winter until roughly Memorial Day weekend. He was not my psychiatrist, but rather a man, a very smart and intense and sad and lovely man. A man I want to say I was thrown upon, as we are each sometimes thrown upon the harsh rocks of life.

At the frightening end of our end, we went through several rounds of shredding at each other's fabric until each of us was in tattered ribbons. By the time the storm had calmed and I felt like I could breathe again, it was the end of June.

At exactly the same sad, weird time, I reconnected with a high school friend on Facebook. Beloved Z., or Thomas, as he is now known. I have already said too much about him in this space, and the less I can say, the better for my heart. If you want to know more about how it began, read http://thattimeofthelife.blogspot.com/2010_06_27_archive.html.

I've never told the story of how my affair with Thomas ended. It is too sad for telling. By which I mean, I can't tell it without remembering the depths of my grief at the very end. There is something about our connection with the past that is both spellbinding and beautiful and potentially deadly. Like a drug, it is hard to quit. Thomas was a powerful connection to my long-lost me.

The closest I want to come to describing our end is to say that this very dear old friend's departure from my life felt like learning you have terminal cancer at a dull weekday doctor's appointment. Speechless and heart-stopping and riveting in its quiet ordinariness. I had no idea it was going to end like this.

Grant that I never verify this comparison. I am even sorry for making it. But this is how it felt.

And my heart was already broken, recall. Broken heart upon broken heart was the straw that broke this camel's back. I found myself, one night after dance class, weeping as I walked along upper Broadway. I couldn't stop, and dance had become the only guaranteed--albeit brief--escape from my grieving. I walked home choking with tears, cooked myself dinner, still couldn't stop this painful leaking. The flood was unending. I became afraid that I would drown.

I remember sitting in the near-dark, staring at my telephone. The only person I could imagine talking to was--can you possibly understand this?--the Psychiatrist. I wanted him to tell me it was going to be all right. That the flood dries and morning comes and you want to eat a banana. I knew that he knew the blackness of the place I was in. We had talked about it, his experience of it, and I wanted him to throw me a line.

I called him. He didn't, couldn't, wouldn't, throw me a line. He yelled at me for calling and hung up. I later came to understand this. At the time, it felt like having a hot match held to a new burn.

Here is the point of all this.

Gradually, I came to understand what both men had in common. What both relationships had in common. How closely--did you know this was coming?--they resembled my troubled, ended marriage.

What they had in common was this: These men suffered from a lack of empathy so deep that in a pinch, they were able to forget, or ignore, that I existed. My existence, the reality of me, was relevant only in its ability to extinguish their own needs, to brighten their own dark places.

The point, lovely people, is that the story of a man with a lack of empathy so deep that he can even temporarily forget or ignore your existence in the service of his needs is profound. This is not the story of a man who is an asshole. It is the story of a man who is sick.

The point is that being part of his story means that you are sick, too. It means you are a little bit crazy, I think. I see now that I spent the summer of 2010 more than a little bit crazy.

I have good hope, however. As one of my favorite writers said, eventually, you will realize you've come out of the craziness:
You will have been rescued, but won't remember precisely how or when. You will look up from what you are reading and notice that the wind has died down. You will notice that you don't feel quite so insane. You will already have changed. The moment of your rescue will have passed without much notice.

I do not know that I am rescued. I do know that the wind has died down. I don't feel so insane. The ache inside of me is a dull annoyance that sometimes doesn't gnaw at all.

I know that I stood on a busy sidewalk in midtown kissing a man with lovely eyes just a couple of nights ago, and that this is a man I happen to like quite a bit. I feel sweet and not urgent about this. This is a good, different feeling.

I also know that I am seeing another man whose body I enjoy just slightly more than his company. Both are absolutely perfect when taken in short, unexpected bursts. This is another new, good, very different feeling.

If this is rescue, I think I am getting there.

It's Expiration.

I made it (http://thattimeofthelife.blogspot.com/2010_05_23_archive.html).

I will be awash in thoughts of him today, no doubt. Swimming in a sea of thoughts. But it is warm now, this sea. No longer scalding. As for the deep freeze...well, it could be better and it could be worse.

That's not so bad. Right?

Cost/Benefit

On Friday night I had to drop off an envelope at the post office for Saturday morning pick-up.

I had a specific post office in mind because I know the Saturday pick-up schedule, and this was a piece of mail that required the 7:00 am postmark.

This is the story: Over two years ago, the man who was my husband came home from work one night, a night that seemed like any other night, and said, I have to tell you something, and I hope it's not going to be a big deal.

It turned out to be a pretty big deal.

It turned out to be an extremely different night, that night. I remember that it was October, and lovely. Not quite Indian summer, but close. Warm and cool at the same time. I want to say that this night was the beginning of the end of my marriage, but I don't know if that's true: I'm not sure it's so pinpoint-able. It was certainly the end of something, though, and it began in my kitchen on a beautiful, sunny October evening.

The story came out of my husband in small pieces, over the course of days, then weeks. It was a very long story; its tentacles stretched way back into our beginnings as a couple--back into our dynamic of man and woman. Years later, when we were in the process coming apart, he confessed that it had really all been my fault: I had wanted so badly for him to succeed that he'd had no choice but to fail. Perhaps this is true.

Anyway. There in our kitchen, the story began to unfold. It sounded fairly simple: an accounting error. Somewhere, somehow, there had been an accounting error; as a result, the government thought we owed it an enormous sum of money. In thinking so, they had frozen all of my husband's bank accounts.

I believed this. It seemed like something the government could easily get wrong--outdated systems, government employees, masses of paperwork. It seemed more like a glitch than a disaster.

It wasn't a glitch. The government wasn't wrong.

Like every woman scorned, as the full story unfolded would keep thinking, How could I not have known? How could I have been so stupid? This had taken years to grow into a disaster, and it had done its growing right under my own anxious gaze.

The world stopped gradually, for me. In stages. There were months of negotiation, months of lawyers and accountants -- and friends, friends who lent us money to pay for our mortgage, our electric bill, food. I stumbled through it like someone in a dream -- that is the closest I can come to describing my experience of those dark months. That voiceless, echoing horror you sense in nightmares, when you know that you are certainly about to die a monstrous death, yet you still have time to wave at a friend, admire her new haircut, straighten your skirt.

Somehow, finally, at the end of it, it became Spring. Spring really came, even that year. With Spring came an agreement with the government: In exchange for allowing us to live free lives, my husband and I would pay a monthy sum that was the rough equivalent of a jumbo mortgage on a Manhattan penthouse.

As if.

Only one of us was gainfully employed at this time. She had never heard of anything like the "innocent spouse rule", and even if I had, it wouldn't have mattered. We had gotten into this together -- albeit with one set of eyes closed -- we were going to get out of it together. It did not occur to me that this wasn't my boat. It only occurred to me to row, hard.

This is something I know how to do.

So I did. We were scheduled for over two years of monthly payments. If a payment was made late, the agreement would be nullified, and a new nightmare would begin.

In the beginning, I taped a calendar to the inside of our front door and put an "X" through every month, every payment made. Each month survived felt like an enormous accomplishment. I had no idea, from month to month, how we would survive one more.

We held together, my husband and I. We let the battle become us against the evil goverment. It was easier that way. Occasionally, when we fought, the truth was laid bare. We became experts at not fighting.

Much of the rest you already know. The months rolled into years, and we finally did come unglued. The debt, the government, our tormentor, became mine and mine alone. Not because it was fair, but because I could. As I said, I know how to row, hard.

So it crept up on me, this visit to the post office. I realized last week that the 2+ year mark had to be approaching. I called the government, and they confirmed it: one final payment. August 2010.

I wrote out the check with what will be my ex-husband's Social Security number on it, as I have for over two years. I had the same slightly bitter taste in my mouth that I have for the past over-two years, signing the check, putting his address alongside mine at the top. We live in two different places, now.

When I got to the post office it finally struck me: This is over. I was shaking when I slid the envelope into the slot. It was the end of something so bad, but too complex to sum up with "bad".

In a way, I loved it. In a way, I loved jumping to the rescue. It helped define me. It reminded me, every month, of what I'm good at: I'm good at rowing upstream. I'm good at rowing hard. I know how to do this.

There is so much I don't know how to do.

The Ungraceful Exit

Good lord, it is my birthday eve.

I am turning 45.

Half of 90.

Good lord.

Here is what I can say. I'm not sure any of it is particularly wise.

For one thing, ending a relationship in your forties is very different from ending a relationship in your twenties or thirties. There are far fewer single people around when you're done, for one thing. For another, those who are single are usually carrying around some kind of uncomfortable baggage--yourself included. Bumping around, bumping into each other, reminding each other of things you keep trying to forget.

You miss people more at this age, too, I find. I think it's that by now you've learned more about how to love, so there's somehow more to miss. My former lover had this habit--not even a habit really, just a way--of hanging around the island in my kitchen. Just sort of alternating between pacing back and forth and standing still. There was nothing so notable about it, really; it was just him existing. Yet it was lovely, and the memory can move me to tears no matter where I am. I still ache from it. He held my hand one night, in a hospital, in a foreign land. But I've already told that story.

As I head into 45, I have learned that your friends are the people who simply show up. They scramble to schedule a dinner date when your heart is aching. They show up at your apartment for two hours on a Thursday night because it's the only time you can find and for once you need to cry in the presence of another human being, even though it's inconvenient. They walk in the park with you, listen to your stories and sit beside you with them.

Actually, I think that's it: If it's true that sometimes grief walks in your front door, plops down on your sofa in front of your TV and makes itself at home, your friends are the ones who sit down with you, next to it. They pick up the side pillow and set it on their laps to make a little extra room. These are your friends.

I've learned that it seems to get harder and harder to make a graceful exit from one another's lives as we get older. As a friend commented the other day, what's with the ungraceful exits? Maybe it's a function of knowing that we have less time. Maybe there's a valid argument: Why stumble around minefields of sadness when you can scream 'never contact me again!' and be finished with it? Maybe when there's less time, there can be less time spent on things like kindness and grace.

I wish there were more. I wish there were more time spent on kindness and grace. I wish particularly that the men I seem to hand my heart to spent more time, and had more facility with, kindness and grace.

Finally, and only because I'm getting tired and it's time to go to sleep and make it my birthday, I've reversed my opinion on this: For a long time I believed that time doesn't really change us fundamentally. It changes the details, sometimes all of them, but I believed that the core of who you are now is the core of who your were when you were 14 or 17 or 27.

I no longer believe this.

I think I lost faith in it. Mostly because a boy I knew at those ages turned out to be a man I would not have expected, in the worst possible way. That boy with the huge heart is nowhere to be found; he is someone I used to know. I believe that something happened, life handed him something, or an entire package of somethings, that altered his fundamentals.

My childhood heart could not have been so wrong.

This saddens me, on this birthday eve. The exit from my life of my husband and my marriage--the sweetness of that safe life, as unsafe as it was--saddens me. That I still long for a lover who walked an invisible plank along my kitchen island while my heart flooded with tenderness, over and over, and that this plays itself out repeatedly in a movie in my mind, saddens me.

I have hope, too.

Tonight I hope that I am walking gracefully out of my 44th year of life on this strange and beautiful planet. Last night I danced around my living room--my new favorite dance tune, some choreography I learned in a new dance class. My heart raced and sang. This is still possible on an everyday basis.

There is much to hope for.

Happy my birthday.

Bittul

Bittul is the stripping down of ourselves through suffering. Supposedly, it is only by going through this suffering--this stripping away of the self we once knew, the acknowledgment that the things we held so dear and so close no longer belong to us--that we find peace and even an actual new self.

But on the topic of old selves, I saw a ghost just now, in the gourmet market on my corner where I buy my dinner most nights of the week.

It was Thomas, or not Thomas but Z., my childhood and then teenagehood friend (see Tale of a Thirty-Year Crush, 7/2).

It wasn't him, of course. When I walked into this same gourmet market with Thomas several weeks ago, however, he sniffed the owners out right away. They're Persian, he said. I could start speaking Farsi to them and they would answer me.

Say something to me in Farsi I pleaded, half joking. The sounds he made in imitation doubled us over with laughter. But it was as if he wanted to say, This is a language so horrible to me it can not bear repeating.

When I walked into the market tonight, I saw him. It wasn't Z., but it was--it was an almost-teenaged Persian boy, very tall, gangly, with that one eyebrow that ran straight across his forehead. I probably see boys like this all the time--maybe even this very boy. Tonight he stopped my heart like a truck.

His beauty was startling. It made me remember wanting to say something clever enough to make Z. laugh. Then it made me remember him laughing. It is such a similar laugh now, yet very, very different. Not necessarily better with age; just more complex.

I stood on line with my watermelon and my eggs and my wild arugula and my eyes could not leave this child's face. He stood beside a cash register, being teased into helping his father or uncle or cousin--an older man who nods in polite recognition to me whenever I enter this establishment. The boy was so innocent. This was an innocent child.

What child isn't?

The thought struck, hard: I want everything back to the way it was.

I want everything back to the way it was.

Everything.

I want my husband at home, hungry and restless and waiting for me to walk in the door and ask him why he hasn't ordered dinner. I want to have the same old arguments about whose turn it is to do what and whose failures matter more. I want no more time spent wondering about calls or emails that go unanswered, or take too long to be answered. I want to be on the inside of a couple again, instead of on the outside looking in.

I want everything back to the way it was.

I want my grandfather back. I want him on the other end of the telephone, his beautiful spotted ancient hands shakily holding his end of the receiver, calling me Sweetie, telling me that life is a game to be played but never for stakes higher than what I can afford to lose.

I want my mother up and about and bitter and rageful, twisting the world with her chaos and horror, not lying stilled and finally one-upped by life in a hospital bed.

I want no more ghosts stopping my heart at my corner market.

At least that is what I told myself in this moment. Give it all back to me, I pleaded. Please let me undo it all, let me hit the celestial control + z, let me make this have been a long, sick, frightening, feverish dream.

Even if it means feeling mostly empty most of the time.

This is when I begin to understand bittul.

There is no longer any way forward that does not include diving deeply into great pain.

This is when I rush home quickly, because I am certain that the sound of what is inside of me coming out will easily terrify the whole world.

Tale of a Thirty-Year Crush

There is memory and there is what actually happened, a friend used to tell me.

There is what we remember to be true, and what really took place. I think that sometimes in our quest for evidence that there will be joy available at all times in our lives, we paint history with a certain sweetness that it may or may not have had. Sugar and tangerines.

This could be a made-up story, or it might have really happened this way. Or it might have happened slightly differently. Imagine that it happened like this.

Many years ago, so so many years ago, when I was a post-adolescent teenager, I had a circle of friends who became my broader circle of friends, who became the people who knew me during the most reckless pain and choas of my growing up. This is probably the case for many of us.

Among them was my friend Z. Z. was Iranian. He played the saxophone. He was tall and dark and hairy and smart and skinny. He ran track and we talked--we talked and talked and talked through too many beer-soaked high school Saturday nights to count, side-by-side on someone's sofa. The air was always, just always, turned to on between us. He was just one of those people who makes you feel plugged in.

This particular moment in time was about three years into the U.S./Iranian hostage crisis, when radical Islamic fundamentalists in Tehran seized the U.S. embassy. Sixty-six American hostages were held for varying lengths of time, the longest for almost two years. The media, only just becoming the powerful hungry machine it is today, kept every American living room tuned daily to the hostage crisis.

As far as I know, Z. was the only Iranian kid at school.

My family was in chaos for other reasons. Now I see that Z. and I were clinging to each other, to the promise of each other, to the promise that there was promise out of these dark scary days. Both strangers in a strange land, we didn't know that everyone around us felt the same way. And it mattered less, knowing the other was there. Somehow, in Z.'s presence, I could feel both frightened and powerful--because I was fourteen, and fifteen, and seventeen, and anything seemed possible.

Not that I don't still think anything is possible. It's just that the universe has narrowed slightly.

We all grew up and went away and Z. and I only saw each other once more, as almost-adults. Right after college graduation we met for a drink--Z. was driving his own car. I remember exactly what I wore. We were grown-ups.

The night led, for the first time, to passionate kisses in the front seat of his tiny car. Such long legs for a man not terribly tall; I remember that clearly. I was actually heartbroken at the time, having ended my first real love affair with my college sweetheart, and I remember that my date with Z. took place during that very black period when you are certain you will never want to be touched by another man again. I remember thinking, through the beery sloppy kisses, it could only be him. He is the only person I could be touched by at a time like this.

The night ended, life took us.

I thought about Z. intensely after September 11th, wondering where he was and who he'd become. I pictured him living in Paris, playing the saxophone and working a meaningless job, searching for anonymity from his heritage, his culture. I pictured him practicing law in California, driving around in an expensive convertible. When the world came alive online, I looked here. I never found him.

And finally: Facebook.

I was friended by a man named Larry who had been a skinny quiet kid, also a runner from our small circle. My second question to Larry was, Where is Z.??!

Larry connected us. Z. had changed his name--I would never have found him. Now he is Thomas.

I emailed Thomas three words: Is it you???

There was silence for a couple of weeks, and then a return email: Is it you???

We exchanged more emails, made a vow to have a drink. Coincidentally, in a city the size of a small country, we live four blocks from each other. He has a 13-year old daughter and a nearly always-absent wife with an important job. He spoke adoringly of the child. Thomas had incredibly detailed memories of things we did during those years, memories that to me are like a faraway bell chiiming--something you can almost place, but not quite. They feel more like stories I heard about things that hapened to other people, rather than the experiences pulled from the pages of my own history.

We met for a drink on a hot June evening that had swelled from a humid day into a booming thunderstorm at precisely the time Thomas and I were to meet. I arrived soaked, late. He was sitting at a table, scanning the doorway anxiously. He looked exactly the same, only now a man. The skinny, gangly, running boy I knew was still there, but living now inside the body of a man. We saw each other at the same moment with a look of mutual shock and joy. Is it you?? This, one of my oldest friends.

We talked nonstop babble for almost an hour, a martini and a Shiraz and every single person we remembered and everything we knew about them now. We laughed and laughed, and when Thomas laughed he was 16 again. Beautiful.

Then somehow, for some reason, I found us pressing our flattened hands up against each other's, across a table littered with glasses. He was remarking on the smallness of my hands. There we sat, across each other for the first time in precisely twenty-two years, at a candlelit table with a rainstorm in the open windows behind me, reaching across a table pressing, pressing, pressing our hands together.

I think we should kiss, he said.

The rest took almost no time at all. Or approximately thirty years.

He has done this before, I can tell, though he says otherwise. I understand what he is hoping to achieve by denying previous affairs: Somehow I know that I am the only woman he has every felt strongly about before becoming intimately involved. I don't know where the others ended. I only know they didn't start here. I believe he was saying, there is a difference.

I get the difference.

His daughter's mother, as Thomas calls his wife, is out of town about half of the time--literally half of each month. He proposes that we try to exist in each other's lives somehow, part-time. Unspoken is, and remain invisible to each other for the other half.

Is this really possible for some people? For me? Why am I even considering it?

The answer I find is that I already love this man. Of course you ask: Do I love this man, or do I love the memory of the boy he was?

This is the best I have: Z., Thomas, has always been a conflicted, frightened soul. I have, too. For some reason, when we are together, we recognize this without necessarily giving it voice. From this vantage point, we are able to be with each other with great ease. There are not many people you can fall into like this, I find, who really do break the fall.

Perhaps we become less of the adults we are and more the unguarded children we were in the days when we would meet each other after his band practice and my choir rehearsal. We would walk through the breezeway, Thomas lugging his sax, down the corridor that led to the cafeteria and out onto the loading dock where the rebellious kids went to smoke cigarettes. And beyond it, to the rest of our lives--to now, to growing up and growing what we thought was wiser, to seeing the the world and then coming back to this city, this predicament. Arriving at loving him and knowing it is very, very wrong. Knowing it is surely creating only more chaos and suffering in the world.

In many ways, by writing this, I am asking you for your forgiveness. I am asking you to read, consider, and not condemn. Somehow. I am asking myself for my own forgiveness. I do not know if this can be achieved.

There is what really happens, and there is what we remember. In twenty years, if I am lucky enough to be in this world in twenty years, the question is, what will I remember about Thomas?

Then: What really will have happened?

How To Spot a Relationship Glitch

There is so much, so much, too much, that has happened (to me and in me and around me) in just the past seven days that I am barely awake.

It feels like it doesn't matter what I put into my body to fuel it: This body does not want fuel. Finally it just wants rest.

Rest is on the way. Before rest, though, I have to talk to you. All of you. In particular I am thinking of the golden-haired beauty who is leaving this coast for the other. She will be sunnier and happier and lighter by several layers, there. I will miss her terribly. I will also have a new place to call home away from home. This is what I am telling myself.

This is what cannot wait to be told. These are the things that I have most recently learned about being in a relationship; they are freshly learned. It's my hope that my learning them might mean that you won't have to, at least not first-hand.

So. Not necessarily in order of importance:

It is fine, and can be beautiful, to enjoy being treated like a little girl by a man. Especially for those of us who never really had a chance to be anyone's little girl--the feeling is precious. But. Also feel free to insist upon being treated like a lady. Do not give this up if it is what feels good to you.

After repeated experimentation, this is what feels good to me. The balance is not all that delicate. The man who is worth staying beside is the man who understands this, intuitively.

The grace with which you move out of a relationship is the memory that will stay with you the longest, and a yardstick by which you can measure your own growth. The question is not whether you will experience pain; the question is what you do with the pain. Who it makes you, or doesn't.

Actually this isn't something I just learned, but it's been recently re-confirmed. Hopefully I've got it now. Hopefully you already have it, too.

Acknowledge your rage, if you have rage. Do not, please if you can help it, do not be ashamed of your rage. Try not to let anyone else's crazy stuff make you ashamed of it. It exists. It serves a purpose. You can control it and will learn things from it--what gets you ignited, what ignites others. Here's where to really listen up: Someone who genuinely loves you will bear this. Being rageful is not your most beautiful behavior. It may, however, be part of you. Along with your humor and your smile and your deep, deep ability to love. You are a package deal, not an a la carte menu.

If you can, if you're able to choose with whom you fall in love, try to fall in love with a man who has friends. Friendships formed in different ways. New friends and old friends. You will treasure the time alone, and he will recharge.

By recharging, you will not become his emotional fuel.

Finally: This, I think, is the real glitch to look for, the one underlying all of the other glitches.

Your soul, your hunger, your bigness, your brain are not shrink-to-fit. Do not try to push yourself into a suitcase smaller than what your life wants and needs to spill into. Do not start lopping off chunks of emotional limbs to appease another person's frailty, or fears, or failures.

If you do find that you are pushing yourself in this way, there is almost certainly someone exerting an equal or even stronger pull in the same direction--pulling for your smallness, your recoil, your less.

This is a good time to run like hell in the opposite direction.

Closer

As soon as I sat down to write this my phone rang. It was my soon-to-be-ex-husband. He sounded sad.

I'd hesitated to even pick up the phone when I saw the phone number calling. I am told that I am boundaryless, and I am. This particular man's problems, and there are many, are not mine any longer. Some of them never were. I left him so they no longer would be. Yet when the phone rings, and I know what's coming, what runs through my head is, I can deal with it now or I can deal with it later. Not, just don't deal with it.

Maybe just not yet.

We talk for awhile, and it's true: He is sad. He needs some love.

Sometimes it happens this way and sometimes it doesn't: I stepped up to the plate and supported him, gave him a pep talk for half an hour and listened and coached. Just before we said goodbye he was smiling, I could hear it. I hung up and cried. He is having very hard times.

The truth is, I had enough love to share. I felt extra love today, and lately I know I have been running very low. Today I was able.

Yesterday I sat nose to nose, leg-over-leg, with a man I used to call mine. With a man I so wanted, want, wanted, to be mine. It is still with me.

So I took my still-warm glow and shared it with that other man I used to call mine. What on earth is my therapist going to do with this?

So even though this man who I sat with yesterday isn't mine, and will not be mine, yesterday he was here and tonight I feel fed.

I feel closer.

Best If Lost By September 1

So as you know, I had the sweetest love affair.

Maybe you didn't know. OK: now you do. With a man who liked to slow-dance in the dark in my apartment. To the tune of his humming. (True story--this exists.)

I realize that I'm recently out of a marriage. Very recently. I think sometimes real relationships happen this way. I once said to my lover, I don't think you always get to decide when in life the most important people are going to come along. Sometimes they come at the worst possible times. You are meant to know them, however. They are not just passing through.

I was meant to know this man. Or somehow I already did. Somehow as soon as I met him I connected to him. Pure instinct. I know of no better way to explain.

But for reasons, so many reasons, so many biblical and ethical and primal and big, big hard reasons, it wouldn't work. We couldn't, it wouldn't, the damned thing just wouldn't work. He called it a car with no brakes. It was: It was relationship bulimia. We sucked each other in with starving abandon and spat each other out with rage and shame. Over, over and over.

Until one day, we came up with a solution.

No: I came up with a solution. I get to own this brainchild.

Because we couldn't live serenely with each other, but could not seem to consider living without each other, why not agree to an expiration date?

An expiration date is similar to another notion I've had: the 3-year contract. [It wouldn't have to be 3-year; it could be 6-month, 1-year, etc.] It's exactly as it sounds: A couple would agree to be together for a set amount of time, and would agree ahead of time when they will expire as a couple.

It seems like it would take so much pressure off, doesn't it? The big what-are-we-going-to-do-about problems go away. It's becomes about time together, you two, right now.

If either of these notions instinctively repels you, you might as well keep reading because you've come this far but the rest of this isn't going to make much sense: He agreed.

He chose September 1. I agreed. We hugged. We loved. We had us back.

And we did--I suppose I will never know what he experienced in the short time that ensued, but I felt ridiculousy alive. My joy was overwhelming. I found myself on many sunny afternoons walking along Upper Broadway thinking, this is why I got divorced. I am happy in the deepest possible place.

But it turned out not to be enough. It turned out we couldn't even make it for three more weeks.

We blew up again, unexpectedly, suddenly, on a dazed hot Sunday in May, and we couldn't reel it back. It had, I had, it had, gotten too ugly, too screwed up. Somewhere we had gotten too far gone. We were so on fire that nothing could put out the flames. I personally was an inferno. More about that another time, when I dare to look more closely.

The truth is that the expiration date was bound for failure for the most fundamental reason: It was a lie. I never meant it to work. I didn't believe he would be able to leave me on September 1. True story? I didn't believe he would leave me, ever. I thought we were like that.

So all of the good stuff, all of the living room dancing, was gone again and hard in a big dead instant: a telephone hung up, a small sob in an empty little room. A moment so loud and so silent at the same time that it will take the rest of your life to get the sound out of your ears.

Here's my bottom line: While the expiration date is probably only a great idea in very select situations, absolutely do not consider it with a man you love.

Oh, how you will ache.

Ask Me If I Care

I just wrote a very heartfelt post, a very raw, honest, heartfelt post. I hit publish, and it all disappeared.

Went to some chat rooms, and apparently this is fairly common. So I will take it as prophetic, and try to think about what counted most about what I wrote. What was the meta-message.

Perhaps it is this.

Sometimes (if not always) in the process of loving someone, we draw upon the things inside of us that we most wish to rid ourselves of. Maybe not everyone does this--maybe some level of maturity or ambivalence steers some of us clear. I am not one of those people. I don my flaws like a pair of new wings and soar around on them. It would be more spectacular if it were not self-destructive.

So, this is part of my work. My work, the work I am here to do in this outfit, this skin, this life, this go-around, this however-long-it-takes-to-get-it-right. And here is today's lesson, lovely friends:

When your doing YOUR work becomes a full-time and not enjoyable job for someone else, you are probably not on a path to something good.

When you become work for someone else, it might be time to leave.

I could be wrong about this. Maybe there is love so big and forgiving that it holds you aloft, even when you are each really difficult work for the other.

I would like to meet this love so big.

I care that I became work for another person. Work. Instead of being their best time. Their best, sweetest, swaying-to-the-music, kissing-my-neck-from-behind, in our own little cave in our own little time best time.

I care. I want to be someone's best time.

OK?

My Soul is Drenched and My Arms Are Warm

I am happy.

Let's see if I can write.

He came home to me, my man. Deliciously so. I couldn't really convince myself that it was over and it wasn't. Isn't. We continue.

It made me think of something I wanted to tell you.

My big sister is not the gentlest person on one's soul. She has been known to suck the air out of a room. But she can occasionally be delightfully eloquent. Once, when I was fully entangled in a breaking love, a great big affair that had knocked the wind out of me, said something that was unimagineable to me at the time, yet I've experienced repeatedly ever since.

I remember it was a cold, winter Friday night during a blackened, grieving time. My sister stopped by on her way somewhere, a duty call; we had a glass of wine. I was nursing this awful broken heart. Finally, after the last anecdote she could hear for the evening, my sister said: Anything that happens between two people can be un-done, re-done, or re-thought in an hour or a weekend or a conversation. Nothing between two people is ever set in stone.

I don't know what core element of truth this points to within us, or whether it does at all.

I do know that I have experienced this personally and seen it happen from a distance, over and over.

I also know that I slept curled like a ball next to my lover, my love, last night, and my soul is drenched and yes my arms are still warm.

For now this is more than enough.

Vermints

First thing this morning I cleaned out the leftovers of a love affair. A shirt that once smelled deliciously of him, but now smelled 100% me; a bottle of unopened champagne; a ceramic-potted cactus that, while tiny, was vibrant in color and invitingly thorny. Some stuff from the kitchen that was too sharply, recognizably his--apple cider, pickles. Things I might eat at someone else's house but not keep at my own.

The only hold-out is this small box of mints. Vermints, peppermint flavor. They look like altoids but they're Vermont's all-natural, and glucose-free. This, or some other memory they evoke, makes them unbearably delicious. These I will eat, one after another, until I have finished writing, and then the Vermints will leave the apartment with me on my walk to the park. The Vermints won't return. They are the item of his that has been here the longest, and they will be the last to go.

It seems, readers, my friends, girls, that I can really only dig in to writing when I am FRESH with pain, dripping with it or the musings on it. When happiness or contentment starts to seep in, I seem to have less to say. If kindness drifts in, I'm mute.

He, this man I just excavated, was very unbelievably kind for a very brief (in retrospect), intense spell. Less than six weeks, but the spell made it feel much longer. I can't explain it better than to say I felt wrapped in a swath of this man's abundant warmth and love, almost immediately. At the same time, his dominance frightened me and seduced me, simultaneously. I have always been a very dominant woman. I actually survived my life because of it. And here was the most dominant man I have ever met. It was heady. And terrifying. The most frightening thing I've ever done, I'd say, so far. It felt unbearably good.

I had surgery during the period we were togther, a major surgery requiring several nights in the hospital, about three weeks after we'd met. This man showed up at my apartment, pure surprise, on the night before my surgery. He knew I was alone and would probably be freaking out. On the day they cut me open and sewed me back together with a new part, he appeared, again, unexpectedly, at my bedside. He held my hand while my other hand held a morphine pump. This is, was, incredible to me. What had I done to earn this hand? I still can not make sense of it. I was giddy that night, surrounded by machines and blips and nurses. I was not actually in a hospital, I was in a room with this man. We might have been sitting in a park.

The way he left feels unkind, but maybe it is my still-much-too-close perspective. I don't actually understand the way that we ended. Maybe in time I fully will, and then I will see that his kindness lasted to the end. This is too hard to think about just yet.

But this man's kindness is not what I really came here to tell you about. It is his indescribable smell. And his very unusually colored eyes that were PERFECT windows, really perfect, into his wavelength--not what he was thinking or feeling, but a perfect read of his brain's temperature. I don't know how else to explain it. And his leg: He was a leg-shaker. Do you understand? He is that kind of man, very wrapped up, very going on with things, always somewhere, always looking deeper.

Sometimes this quest for the light of deeper shined on me. Sometimes he shined it on me. It felt like glory.

When something like this kind of light from a man with eyes and a heart like this shines on you, friends, I advise you to do one of two things: Either run for cover. [PLEASE NOTE: This is a very wise choice! There is nothing wrong with running for cover! Do not confuse my own refusal to choose this choice with my sole endorsement of the other choice.]

Or: Breathe it in. Take big gulping breaths. Gasp for, grasp for, cling to, as much as you can and CRAVE for the rest. Invite it all in, and give it all up. Know that it might be ten years or never before another light like this shines on you. Hope that you have soaked in enough of it to remember its taste when your soul is dry and your arms are cold.

This will hurt like hell when you are packing up his cactus and jar of pickles.

Then go leave the damned Vermints in the park.

This is the best I can do, today. Tomorrow I will try to do better.

Truing It Up

At coffee with a friend this afternoon, we spoke in detail, finally (it had been a long time since we'd been face-to-face), about what I'm starting to think of as my imminent divorce.

After talking through the details of what's happening, when is it happening and how, she asked me a question I hadn't considered until I heard it fall out of her mouth. What about you, she said, long-term? What do you want?

She meant, do you want to remarry? Stay single? Start dating right away? Wait a while, then date?

My gut reaction was the blind panic I have come to recognize as the body's instinctive reaction to the crossing paths of the concepts divorce/change and me/my world. I let it pass. As soon as I was breathing normally again, I thought: what is she talking about?

What do I want?

What an enormous question this is. What a gigantically relevant and shockingly unaddressed question for someone who has just agreed to an ending of her marriage and has moved out of her home.

What do I want?

Excellent.

The answer that I gave just fell out of my mouth--it was so smooth it felt well-rehearsed, though I've never uttered it before. I said: I don't think I want to get married again, but I could see myself in a series of long-term, monogamous relationships--it's what I've always done. She nodded, understanding. We didn't talk about each of our views on what is or isn't realistic or attainable over the spans of years, a life spent bearing witness to another flawed human being's wrangling with life. We've had that conversation before.

After we left the coffee shop and each other, each walking our own way into the freezing, urban January dusk, I thought about it again. What do I want.

I got home to the apartment I'm subletting. I called my going-to-be-ex-husband. We both cried a little. Questioned the decision we've questioned and re-made eight million times. Hung up the phone. Again I thought it. What do I want?

I thought about the response I had given my friend: Probably not marriage again. Love in whatever form it arrives, yes; companionship; yes. Sex with available men (maintaining certain standards of pickiness), absolutely yes. Commit to one person again forever? Probably not.

And STILL I kept thinking, but what do I WANT? Specifically, clearly, what do I want?

And then I found the answer, or it found me.

I want HUGE love. I want big, huge love. I want love that makes your heart feel so safe and so challenged at the same time, your soul takes root in another human being. I am describing something that I am guessing that I have never felt, or possibly only felt as a very young woman during my first, all-consuming love affair (before I learned that there was any other way).

I want a love whose eyes can't help but pay attention when you walk into a room. I want a love that calls you pretty and kisses you until your mouth gets chapped. I want a love that remembers how to laugh, and that you can laugh easily with.

And the truth is, I don't really care so much about marriage. I could skip it. I could also do what I passed on my first time around if it mattered to the person I loved: the whole public ceremony situation. Get all decked out and invite your friends. I could see myself being happy doing anything in between. It's not what interests me primarily.

What interests me primarily, what I want, is the big love. Passion + acceptance + room for growth.

I don't know if this exists.

But I know that this is what I want.

Hopefully this is a good start.