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?