Related Posts:

• HEAVY-HANDED: Sagmeister
• HEAVY-HANDED: Tired
• HEAVY-HANDED: Tall
• THE BINS:
  Spy Dad
• Maakies: Mulled

I untangle myself from the hefty mess of arms and legs and down comforter that is Taylor’s bed.  It takes some effort, but he rests peacefully through all of it. When I break free just long enough to roll over, I feel his solid arms fold in on me again. No matter how much I want to let myself be perfectly blissful and hope I could go on like this forever, I can’t, because John Lennon’s profile looms over my head. The lyrics to “Imagine” are the first thing the light shines on when it cuts through Taylor’s striped curtains, almost as if he’s planned the placement of this poster so Lennon’s is the face he wakes up to every morning, not mine.

I dig an elbow into Taylor’s side and he releases me from his grasp, but pulls on my shoulder so that I’m forced to roll back over and face him. He plants a kiss on my forehead and his beard tickles my nose.

“Good morning,” he sings. “Enjoy the morning breath while it lasts.”

I don’t even notice how disgusting it is that neither one of us has used a toothbrush in over twenty-four hours. I don’t taste the beer we drank last night or the cigar he’d smoked; I only know that when this kissing stops, the hangover starts.

As if he can sense it, Taylor’s on a mission to find me water and ibuprofen as soon as our lips part.  He leaves me alone with John.

Maybe it’s because he got shot by a lunatic, or maybe it’s because he advocated world peace more than any Miss America pageant contestant who ever lived, but John Lennon has somehow wormed his way into the hearts of millions of Beatles fans. A Beatles-lover myself, the sight of him shouldn’t make me this acutely uncomfortable, but it does; I don’t have the heart to tell Taylor why.

“Would you feel better if I let you hang up a picture of Paul next to him?” Taylor asks, handing me a glass of water and two tiny red pills.

“Not even Paul McCartney can change the fact that your role model was a raging hypocrite, an abusive husband, and a shit father.”

“He was a great father.”

“Not to Julian.” I hand the water back to Taylor. After a pause, he sets the glass down on his nightstand and falls onto his pillow.

“He made some mistakes. Is that what we have to remember him for?” he asks as he pulls me toward him.

“I’m just mad that no one cares enough to remember.”

“You just hate Yoko.”

“Everybody hates Yoko.”

In the time we spent together, Taylor and I never wasted a moment arguing unless it was about the Beatles. We didn’t have the time to waste. I was leaving for England soon, and we knew that the dreaded long-distance hardships would take their toll on us the minute I boarded the plane.  However, neither of us could resist a good-natured squabble over who the best Beatle was.

Taylor loved Lennon. To him, Lennon was God. He kept a copy of a Lennon bio on his bookshelf and used to stuff it in his bag right before he left his house for work (though I never actually saw him reading it). He quoted John and spat Lennon trivia at anyone who would listen.

His obsession with Lennon took over his entire lifestyle. Taylor grew out his hair and his beard and wore tinted hippie sunglasses at parties. He was a self-proclaimed musician, but he never produced any music on his beat up old acoustic because he only knew five chords. He picked up the banjo for a whole five hours after he found out John Lennon first played banjo chords when he learned to play guitar. He did whatever Lennon did and took interest in Lennon’s interest.

Taylor liked protests and demonstrations. Just like Lennon, he never actually did anything whatsoever of note in the political realm, other than sign a few petitions and manage to worm his way into the photograph of a rally as he was passing by the crowd. The extent of his political activism was quoting various radicals of the 1960s and posting marriage equality campaign posters on his own Facebook wall. He was a part of the Occupy Wall Street movement that staged sit-ins on our university’s campus, but couldn’t articulate why he was doing so. To my knowledge though, Taylor never did anything completely counteractive to his image, like Lennon did when he made generous donations to groups like the Black Panthers and the Provisional Irish Republican Army, neither of which seemed to be particularly interested in peace, love, or understanding.

“I could totally be John Lennon,” he told me all to often.

“Would that make me Yoko?” I asked.

I didn’t want to be Yoko Ono, because nobody wants to be Yoko. But I knew what was even more unsettling to me than being comparable to the woman who the world blames for ripping apart the world’s greatest musical collaboration was being the woman John left for her.

Cynthia Powell: she was John’s first wife. Of what I’ve read about her marriage to John, I gather that she suffered through countless nights of emotional and physical abuse. John left permanent marks on the same body that nurtured and carried his first son, Julian. He rewarded her further with infidelity and eventual abandonment.

Imagine my concern, then, when my boyfriend told me he wanted to be John Lennon.

I suppose, on some level, he ended up getting what he wanted. I went to England and by the time I returned, he’d found someone else. Her name was Anna.

I call her Yoko Anna.

When Taylor and I broke up, no one but me was all that shocked to find out he’d been unfaithful. Nor was anyone but me surprised to see he had no interest in working things out. No one denied that, after he never responded to a single letter or postcard I sent him, constantly stood me up on Skype dates, and then forgot my twentieth birthday, he’d been a shithead and I had every right to be hurt. Yet, even though he was guilty of betrayal and deceit, no one seemed particularly interested in blaming him for our split.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been told that I should have seen it coming—that I was too good for him and we were headed down separate paths. I was told not to cry over the inevitable.

“Did you honestly think you’d last forever?” friends would ask me. I was chided for pining for him after he cut me so deeply. I was told not to give him a second thought.

I suppose they were trying to help, but after enough times hearing that Taylor and I were never right for each other, I began to see a deficiency within myself—the inability to detect when someone wasn’t good for me. My trust had already been broken in a huge way, but I took it a step further when I stopped trusting myself. Whatever faults I’d overlooked in Taylor, everyone else had seen so plainly.

It’s been two years now since Taylor and I broke things off, and I still haven’t heard the end of it from my friends and sometimes, even strangers. They say things like, “How could you stand to sleep next to that?” and, “What did you ever see in him?” A friend is still upset with me for scrawling Taylor’s name onto the wall of The Cavern Club in Liverpool (where The Beatles got their start) and not hers.

“I like The Beatles, too,” she says. “Maybe you should have thought of me instead of your cheating ex-boyfriend when you decided to add some graffiti to that wall.”

More than wonder how I could have been so blind about Taylor, I wonder why my friends continue to berate me for how in love with Taylor I’d been, and maybe still am. Love is messy—especially a first love—and though I’m perfectly rational about my feelings for him when he’s not around, my chest still stings a little every time I see his face.

I think of Cynthia Powell. I ache when I think what it must have been like for her, watching everyone adore the man who caused her years of physical and emotional pain, how she must have felt when John’s adulterous relationship with Yoko was all anyone could talk about. I wonder how she made it through the day when Rolling Stone released that photo of a naked John Lennon embracing Ono, or for that matter, any day that John and Yoko were front-page news, spreading their love for all the world to see. I think about how many newsstands she had to walk by with her hands over her son’s eyes, or if she made the decision to tell him that he and his father would never share the kind of love it took to get your picture featured on the cover of a magazine. I think about these things because I know how it feels to watch someone else receive the love you never got but thought you deserved. Cynthia Powell should hate us all for the kind of love and support we’ve shown her.

Most people forget Cynthia. Of those who remember her and what happened to her, many can forgive John for eventually realizing the error in his ways and dedicating the rest of his life to promoting peace, love, and understanding.

Some even place blame on Cynthia for being unfaithful herself, and others point out that John never wanted to marry her in the first place.

“He was a rock star; what was he supposed to do—stay monogamous?” they say. “She should have known better.”

Where’s the peace in that?

Where’s the peace in telling a woman who’s been battered and bloodied by the hands of a man she loves that she should have seen it coming? If love is blind, how the hell would she have ever noticed? Where’s the peace in pardoning the behavior of such a man simply because he’s somehow convinced everyone he’s talented? Where’s the peace in forcing a woman to take on the guilt of her own heartache because as long as that man smiles for the right cameras and acts like a half-decent human being the rest of his life, no one will ever make him feel it?

I can’t forgive John Lennon, and I’m done letting everyone believe that what he did—what the world lets some men get away with every single day—is okay.

I’m not going to abandon Cynthia Powell.

Related Posts:

• “If You Ever Write About Me…”
• Lester Bangs on John Lennon
• HEAVY-HANDED: Cat Ladies
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• Multiplicity

I had never listened to Bob Dylan before except in the way that it’s impossible not to have listened to Bob Dylan. His unfriendly, indecipherable whine and mumble is ubiquitous to American culture, to the air and sky and car radio and malls and Starbucks of the nation and probably the world. But if I’d listened before, I’d never noticed. I took the Counting Crows out of my portable CD player, and put in Blonde on Blonde. My Dad had also bought me Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home, and Desire, and I’d get to all of them, eventually, each one its own singular obsession and backdrop to a particular section of my life. But during that train ride, the rest of that year, and in a way the rest of my life, I never really got past Blonde on Blonde.

Blonde on Blonde is, admittedly, kind of a weird album to give to your teenage kid. Although I know I’m not the only child of the I-Had-Tickets-to-Woodstock-But-Didn’t-Go generation whose parents put Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and the Stones on the You Need To Know This list along with great literature and Carl Sagan and geometry and how to drive.

But my main memory of that first listen is of being plunged into the depiction of experiences I had never had. As the album begins, the harmonica and the guitar and the rest of the band, exhausted, high out of their mind and fed up with this byzantine ritual of a recording session, assaults you with the opening of “Rainy Day Women Nos 12 & 35.” Dylan, according to legend, wrote the songs on Blonde on Blonde in a minute-beyond-the-last-minute speed-fueled race, locked in the studio after the time they were supposed to start recording had come and gone. He didn’t emerge until around 4am, and the session men chain-smoking and playing cards while they waited for him had never seen the songs before playing them. They had no idea how long these tracks would be, no idea Dylan would, in the era of the three-minute radio barrier, ask them to record five and eight and ten and twelve minute songs. Much of the energy and noise of this first track on the album, the giddy, drunk-parade build of it is the sound of a bunch of the best and most famous session-men in Nashville growing more and more confused as yet another verse comes after the last verse they played, as one more time the song, for some reason they can’t understand, doesn’t end but insists on repeating its nonsense. The album is the sound of a bunch of people trying to learn how to do something while doing it for the first time, baffled at what it asks of them.

The first words Dylan utters are about getting stoned. So is the rest of the four minutes and thirty seconds of the opening track. Everyone was getting stoned — Dylan, Dylan’s band, the people they were singing about and the audience they were singing to. I was a very sheltered teenager and had never done any drugs at all. If everybody was getting stoned, I wasn’t everybody. The album reminded me that I was waiting to enter the experiences everyone else in the world was already having.

In the thirteen other tracks that follow, Blonde on Blonde moves through lust, regret, adultery, love, marriage, divorce, and why it’s a bad idea to mix whiskey and gin. I had never done any of these things. I wanted to be the person singing, and I wanted to be all the people Dylan sang about, all the begging and heartbreaking and abject and unfaithful women. I wanted to be all the train-jumping cowboys and drunks and liars and poets passed out in alleyways as whom Dylan disguises himself. I wanted to be Joanna and Louise and Marie and the debutantes and chambermaids who betrayed him and lied to him and bummed cigarettes from him, and were such crazy bitches that he had to write a song about them. I wanted in. The album was the warm yellow window of someone else’s house as you walk by on a cold night. Listening to it was the feeling you get when you look into this stranger’s window and wish you lived there.

I liked the complexity of the songs. I liked that I didn’t get it. I liked that it didn’t seem to want me to get it. I liked that Bob Dylan didn’t seem to like me and seemed annoyed that I liked him so much. I listened to that album every night as I fell asleep the entire year before I left for college, not to mention in my car and in my room and on my headphones walking around while awake. It became the language for the new world of adulthood that was approaching,that as far as I was concerned couldn’t come fast enough.

Arguably, the defining experience of adulthood is falling in love. Dylan is disdainful of or resigned about or angry at all the Louises and Joannas and Maries and women-who-are-probably-Joan-Baez in the first thirteen songs on the album. He launches a whole host of emotion at women, in general and in specific, but it’s not until the final track that he deals with the central experience of maturation: Falling in love. Knocked on your ass, whole life given up to another person. Gone, surrendered, fucked, whatever you want to call it. Falling in love.

“Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is eleven minutes and twenty seconds of infuriating, boring, indecipherable music that has been accurately described as the greatest love song of the 20th century. For the length of an entire side of a record (as it was originally released), Dylan does nothing but list nonsensical attributes of the woman to whom he’s singing.  The lyrics are even more opaque than most of his songs. The music has no variation, dragging around and around in a circle. It feels like the end of the night, after the party’s been dismantled and the bar’s been closed and everyone’s gone home except one last drunk couple, half-asleep and slow-dancing to music only they can hear. The song is a closed experience, and feels the way it does when, in loving one person, you are happy to shut down and ignore the rest of the vivid, pointless, crowded world that isn’t them. It’s not for the people listening, the people buying the album, playing it in their homes, playing it at parties and on the radio. It’s for one woman. The list is an accounting; in love we want to gather the object of our feeling to us, as though if we could know them well enough, could list them comprehensively, we could finally fully possess them. The repetition, starting over again and again, shows how we never quite do, how we always fail.

I grew up, got into college, left home, moved to New York, got laid, got stoned, fell in love, betrayed people, left people and was left, hurt people and was hurt. Eventually I did all the things Dylan whines about on Blonde on Blonde. I never stopped listening to the album. When I finally did get stoned, it never felt enough like “Rainy Day Woman No.s 12 & 35.” Every time I take any kind of drug, I hope this time it will. But it never has, and being in love has never felt quite like “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” either. Not that the songs were incorrect about the experiences, and not that the experiences have been unspectacular or lacking. But that, spectacular as they may have been, they never lived up to the Dylan songs that had first imagined them for me.

I tend to share albums and songs with the people I date, and therefore tend to lose a lot of music in breakups. I have ruined every single song and album and band and artist I have ever loved by associating it with a relationship. Every single one except Blonde on Blonde.  Perhaps that’s happy accident, but I don’t think so. My relationship to the album is already a complete relationship, in and of itself. Not only does it not need a flesh-and-blood relationship to link itself to, I don’t think it has space for one. I think the things we love most, we don’t want anyone else to understand. We are selfish with them as with the people we love, feeling that we will dilute their importance through sharing.

The way Blonde on Blonde sounds is what we miss about the people we love but choose to leave anyway, what we never get over about them. A friend of mine would say, much later, Bob Dylan made her feel like she’d known her Dad when he was young. When she told me this, I’d realize, perhaps just a little, why my Dad had bought six CDs on a train ride from Boston to New Haven and told me not to talk to him until I had an opinion about them. This is literally the music of my parents’ past, but it’s also the music of the things we can’t quite share with people, the attempt to make someone part of your past despite the fact that they can’t ever quite understand your past because they weren’t there. This album makes me feel like I knew my parents when they were young, and at the same time reminds me how much I didn’t, how much I can’t ever know what their life was like before me. When you love someone, it becomes painful that you weren’t part of their past, that they weren’t part of yours. This album is the attempt to make someone part of a past experience by telling them about it, the attempt to enter someone’s past by listening closely enough to the stories about it. We build our expectations of love, of getting stoned, of any life experience, from someone else’s stories. Those stories are always fictions. When we encounter the actual experience in our own life, the distance between it and the expectation is always present. This album manages to be an expression of that omnipresent distance, the ache and comfort at the center of it, raucous and elegiac, passed down imperfectly through generations.

Related Posts:

• Albums of Our Lives: Songs: Ohia’s Magnolia Electric Co.
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: RUN DMC’S RAISING HELL
• SONGS OF OUR LIVES: JOY DIVISION’S “LOVE WILL TEAR US APART”
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: NEKO CASE’S MIDDLE CYCLONE
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: PETER GABRIEL’S SO

In the fall of 2002, I was a graduate student laboring over translations of the Hebrew Bible. (Sometimes I paused to ask myself why I was bothering to translate into English a book that existed in a perfectly good English translation in the majority of American households. Mostly, I didn’t pause. Or ask.) I had, at that point, been living as a guy since my seventeenth birthday, a little over seven years before. So I was comfortable, or at least relatively established, in my identity as a man.

But I was technically female. By “technically,” I mean “by some alchemical mixture of biology, law, and social understanding.” In a more precise manner, I mean that though I looked like a guy and had changed my name (from Alice to Alex), I hadn’t had surgery and I took no hormones. I had XX chromosomes. I had a uterus. I had breasts. Under normal conditions, none of these things were ever evident.

Owing to a fluke, my driver’s license said I was male. The day I’d gone to obtain the license, the clerk at the DMV had simply gone on the basis of what she saw in front of her (I’d left both sex boxes on the form blank) and put M.

I was dating a woman. We’d been together for about two years (though we had known each other much longer), and we were engaged. We weren’t quite sure what this meant. Or we were, but only in one way: we knew we were committed to each other and wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. Hence, we would get married.

But how? The state we lived in didn’t offer any form of same sex marriage (union, conjoining, partnership, etc.), and to get married as an opposite-sex couple required birth certificates. Both of ours said female, so that wouldn’t work. That left two options.

1. Go to another state and get a same-sex marriage. This would be purely ceremonial and not recognized by any other nation, state, shoe store, etc.
2. Go to Vegas and get an opposite-sex marriage. I’d looked online: Vegas only required that both members of the couple produce driver’s licenses. Mine said M. Hers said F. It might work. But I suspected it might be illegal, or at least not fully legit. And I get nervous about things like that. (The very existence of my not-quite-correct license made me nervous.)

In the end, we opted for the ceremonial over the illegal and drove up to Vermont in December, eloping at a bed and breakfast with the dishwasher (the person, not the machine) as our witness. We signed the certificate for our same-sex Vermont civil union, went for a lovely snowshoe afterward, and drove home with a mix of feelings. On the one hand, I knew, internally, that I’d gotten married. Vowed to be with this person. On the other hand, externally, I didn’t know what that piece of paper meant at all.

***

Things change, sometimes, and sometimes not. I turned twenty-five. I still looked like I was fifteen. It got tougher to pass as a man. So I started taking shots of testosterone and soon enough looked, if not twenty-five, then at least not fifteen. We moved to another state. We told people we were married. We were. We weren’t. The state we’d moved to didn’t recognize Vermont civil unions as anything, but we did. And to whom does marriage matter anyway?

The state we moved to also had tougher laws for providing documentation in order to be issued an identity card, and I feared the days of my flukily obtained driver’s license M were numbered. So I asked my doctor to write a letter explaining that I had undergone medical gender reassignment because I took testosterone and that I should be considered male. I sent this letter to the Department of Human Services in the state where I was born, and a few weeks later, they sent back a new birth certificate: Alex Myers, male.

This felt odd. I was and I wasn’t. I was now, at this moment, male. Well, mostly, though I still hadn’t had surgery. But I hadn’t been born the way I was now. And so, though grateful for the ease that the document provided (it’s just smoother when the paper matches the appearance), staring at it—Record of Live Birth, Alex Myers, Male—it seemed to belong to someone else.

More to the point, the new birth certificate meant that my wife and I were no longer married. Our same-sex civil union was rendered void: we were no longer a same-sex couple, and Vermont did not validate opposite-sex civil unions. However, we happened to be living in one of only nine states that recognized common-law marriage. To have a common-law marriage, a couple had to meet the following criteria: live together (we did), have a joint bank account (we did), present to others as married (of course), and file taxes jointly (would happily give it a try). We went to a lawyer, just to be certain. “Sure,” we were told. “It’ll work fine, until you move to another state.” We were married again.

***

Years went by, and eventually, my passport expired. I’d gotten it before receiving my new birth certificate, so it still said F. I sent off an application together with my new birth certificate and asked them to adjust the sex on my passport accordingly. They replied, “We need a letter from a medical doctor.”

I replied, “My birth certificate says I’m male.”

They replied, “Your citizenship gender record says you are female. Only a letter from a doctor can change your citizenship gender.”

I had no idea that there was such a thing as a citizenship gender, but apparently we all have one, and it may or may not match the gender on one’s birth certificate. I sent off a new doctor’s letter. As I waited for the passport, I wondered if, like a birth certificate, a common-law marriage wasn’t good enough. (When I told this story to a friend, complaining of having to secure another letter, she told me I should be glad I’d changed my birth certificate when I had. Since that time, my birth state had altered its laws and it now required proof of surgery to change gender. How odd, how arbitrary. How could someone decide this is gender, this is sex, here’s the defining line?)

When the new passport did arrive, with its M, I realized that, until the blip of this passport on my life’s radar screen, I hadn’t given much thought to gender lately. Gender’s like that. I lived as a man, I remembered to give myself my shots of testosterone, it wasn’t an issue. And I hadn’t thought of marriage much lately either. Marriage is like that. I was married, I lived happily with my wife. Both entities simply were, no fancy verb needed.

But that simple existence occurred only in my own life. As I held the passport in my hand, I realized that both marriage and gender have a life beyond my own. Somewhere, my citizenship gender had been on file. Somewhere, a record of me existed that over-ruled my daily existence. Here, I was a man. There, I had been female.

I asked my wife if she would marry me again.

***

We decided to return to Vermont. Another elopement, I guess. Just the two of us, in the summer this time.

Everything’s different when you’re an opposite-sex couple. We went to the town clerk for our license (before, it was done in advance by mail). We each filled in identical forms at the counter. Midway down, our pens paused.

Question: Have you ever had a civil union before?

We both wrote yes. The clerk, a classic Vermonter with a home perm and tint, took our birth certificates and our licenses, examined them, handed them back. The she read over our forms. “Who was your civil union with?” she asked my wife.

“Him,” my wife responded, pointing at me.

She looked at me, and at my form. “A Vermont civil union?”

“Yes,” I said. “We used to be a same-sex couple. Now I’m male.”

“Oh.” She read through the rest of the form. “Can I see that birth certificate one more time?”

I passed it over, and she found the line she wanted. Male. Then she took a blank license form, cranked it into her typewriter, and began to clack at the keys.

For some reason, no witness is required for opposite-sex marriages, just an officiant. We held hands and vowed once more to become, to remain, to always be, married.

***

Maybe the day will come when my wife and I will need to get married again. Maybe there will be genderless birth certificates. Genderless marriages. Some category that doesn’t mention sex at all. Because, even with all my current identification, a perfectly matched set, I still feel that I am… and I am not…and I will be… and I have been… There’s just no noun and no verb tense. There is, however, one thing of which I am certain, regardless of what my sex might be today or have been yesterday or be regarded as tomorrow. We are, have been, will be, married, joined together in union—always.

***

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

Related Posts:

• “The Phlebotomist”
• Tender Speech
• What If George Eliot Were Mary Ann Evans Instead?
• What Women Really Want
• HEAVY-HANDED: Cat Ladies

We were at a waterpark in Orlando. I was five, or six maybe, and my brothers were I don’t know where, sliding down things that would only ever give me a rash. So, my mother and I walked to the tidal pool at the other end of the park, or, rather, we sat beside it, because it was summer and it was hot and there were many soggy toddlers. We can be honest about this much: superabsorbent polymers are only going to keep in so much pee. Still, this was our moment of relaxation, and we took it in together—the real palm trees, the fake waves, all those tiny bodies rising and falling inside their shape.

And that’s when it happened: a man walked towards us—nearly brushing into my mother—clad in nothing but a Speedo: the skinniest piece of thin, black fabric. And he was covered—no, I mean, covered—in tiny, crescent-shaped, wiry hairs. Even ‘covered’ isn’t right, because that is to put it mildly. Too mildly, I believe. To say this man was, in fact, closer to our evolutionary origin is perhaps scientifically invalid—I can hear my scientist friends now, saying, “Amy, that’s impossssible,” saying, “Amy, you can’t be serious,” as they do when I suggest that aliens are A Thing or we’re on the cusp of discovering time travel or gravity cannot be real because what do we make of hot air balloons?—but it does the work I want it to. So picture him primate-like.

Do you see him on his knees, scrounging around as he picks up berries?

It was grotesque, is all I mean—a gratuitous amount of hair that any other human being would simply shave off, or wax to oblivion, or attempt to remove by ingesting one of those Japanese medicines advertised on late-night infomercials that make your skin red and flaky but the hair disintegrate. Perhaps I’m being cruel. But the point is simply this: he was a gross, gross man, and my mother—an otherwise perfectly grounded, reasonable, polite and affable woman I have always admired—looked at me and said, “Amy, whatever you do: when finally of that age, marry a man and not a monkey.”

I think about this memory now and find it startlingly out-of-character. It is the only memory I have of my mother, in fact, where she’s being judgmental, perhaps even cruel, looking down on this strange and shaggy man as if a pion from her throne of perfectly kempt hair hygiene. But even now, I’ll admit: my mother was fucking right. A monkey is not a thing I want. Really, it is the very last thing I desire when I roll over in the night, moonlight pouring in like liquid and casting glows across an afghan in what I’ll admit is my Romantic Vision—this image that I go to when I admit that I am lonely. My Romantic Vision is the reason I do everything: why I loofah, why I buy expensive soaps that contain hand-picked Provencal lavender, why I still dabble with OkCupid despite the many “hey wut up”s. And what I do not want, more than anything, is a handful of thick, brown hair mucking up my Romantic Vision.

I do not want to have an ‘extraction process.’

There should be no work involved.

My future mate does not have to be strong, exactly, and he can have some jiggly bits, because what I care about most of all is his soft, warm, doughy flesh that I can run my fingers across and press my lips against and whisper into, very softly, “This is a space meant just for me, and you’ve shaved it because you care.”

Of course I know that for many, hair’s a problem. I’m not naïve enough not to know that. As human beings, we are inherently flawed, bound by the biological container we arrived in, and I know a great many folks who go to great lengths to shave their hair, or they wax it, or they sit there on a blind date, embarrassed about their forearms. And perhaps if I were a better woman—less judgmental, more accommodating—what I would be saying is not, Ew, but, It’s okay to be who you are, or, Some of us have hair. But my mother’s advice was specific and it was meant for me and only me—as if she knew who I’d become—and I find myself grateful for it even now.

But what of you? And what, again, of me? Last week I turned another year older, and I find my Romantic Vision is fulfilled now only by the great many pillows I press against, as if a body. But sequins and paisley prints can only do so much. Her advice, I’m beginning to realize, is simply not enough. I want more: a whole inventory from that tidal pool memory—a guidebook, if you will—for the men I should and should not date. It would save me so much time. Dating, as it turns out, is so much more complicated than a man’s hair-to-no-hair ratio. Hair, lo and behold, is likely the least of my concerns.

Because I’m all about justifying my behavior, I’ve read lots of studies lately that assert that 30 is the new 20 for men. The economy, the oversaturation of college graduates, the kick-assery of females everywhere—whatever the cause, men are increasingly delayed in terms of financial success and maturity. I’m not saying all of them, of course, but certainly many of them. Things are taking longer, and so things are taking longer to acquire. Mature relationships, for example.

I cannot tell you how many relationships I’ve already endured at my young age—some for an embarrassingly long amount of time—where I’ve found myself putting in nearly everything while my partner puts in nearly nothing. Look, I want to say, I’ve been up all night reading your short stories and I made you this home-cooked dinner and, later, I’ll make us brownie sundaes and we can watch this old film I rented because I love you and I care.

But they have beers to drink. They have rambling alleyways to walk. They are pensive and they are moody and they have so many things to do.

This is not to say that I am perfect. I am often consumed by want and I can get obsessed with my aloneness and I am deathly afraid of spiders and I will judge you if you voted for Romney. Nor am I saying that I have given up on men entirely; I’ve simply begun to look for them in other places. I have a very good feeling, for example, that my next boyfriend will be a good 10 years older than me, likely more, and this suits me even now. I am very into the idea of responsibility and maturity and perhaps the wisdom that comes with age. I am into you not drinking. I am into you admiring me for my clean and nicely-scented home, and how you realize it’s not my duty but a thing I choose to do. Is your house lined with vintage bookshelves? Do you maybe own a car? These things get me hot and bothered. For whatever reason, my deepest and most private fantasies now involve making a man a roast chicken and then sitting beside him on a couch as we watch documentaries about deep space, or black holes, or old black-and-white movies while he doesn’t drink a million beers but instead asks if I’ll share my blanket.

“God damn,” I’ll say, “of course,” and the sweetness I’ll find within that moment will seem so gratifying I might explode.

“Like a death star,” I’ll joke gently. “Like I’m evaporating into the fucking cosmos because of how satisfied you’ve made me.”

What I’m getting at, I guess, is that wouldn’t it be great is if we could somehow bypass all of the nonsense that comes before we meet the person we’re actually meant to be with? If—in that waterpark that afternoon—my mother could have told me everything? 

So here’s an addendum—a list of the many things my mother didn’t think to list, likely because they’d be inappropriate and anyway, I had no notebook. Here, instead, are the things I’ve learned only by going on dates with men who ‘dip,’ men who refuse to take off their bicycle helmet—first in the restaurant and then the bar—men who tell me I should “just let it happen,” men who tell me sexy stories they’ve repressed about babysitters. I’ve dated men who eat only sausage and others who pry bread from toasters with metal forks, and men who treat me as if I’m a book—bend my spine a little bit, then shortly thereafter, put me back, and later tell everyone I was your favorite and that you learned an awful lot from me.

“She was the best,” they always say, as if it’s some weird, strange, sad sort of pride: how they treated me like garbage.

Once, I dated a man who donned a ski mask and let himself into my apartment in the middle of the night, and what the fuck is that? Isn’t he supposed to love my face? Isn’t he supposed to be kind and big-hearted with weathered hands and framed artwork?

So, a supplement to my waterpark memory—a list of Dos and Don’ts. These, dear readers, are what my friend Rachel calls “non-negotiables.”

1. Do not date the man who only ever wears Christmas-themed boxer shorts. It is not a “passing phase.” He is not “asserting” anything. It may seem cute to you at first—how you’ll stock up at Gap at Christmas so you can gift him with a reindeer print in June—but it’ll grow tiresome with age.

2. For reasons I cannot explain, walk away from the man who mentions Bob Dylan on your first date. I will defend this only by saying that I, too, think he’s great. But for whatever reason, this is a sign. “He’s, like, my idol,” he might say, or, “He got me into writing,” or, “He got him into love.” “He’s kind of like my Jesus,” he’ll say, and you need to roll your fucking eyes. It doesn’t make any sense, but this seems a universal shortcut I’ve worked out so you don’t have to.

3. Do not date a man who tells you your “future selves” are incompatible.

4. If he fetishizes poets.

5. If he’s never left the state.

6. Trust him if he’s good with dogs.

7. And especially with kids.

8. Never, ever take back the man who once took you to look at Christmas lights and then broke up with you beside a cornfield. The drive home, remember, was awkward, and he broke up you because why? Because you reminded him of his father. It was December, for Christ’s sake, just two weeks before the holiday, so no matter how much he begs—no matter how fiercely he claims he’s changed—do not let that man back in. You know enough to know: a man who dumps you while looking at Christmas lights is kind of a shitty, fucking person who is not worthy of your love.

9. Be especially dismissive if, years later, that man writes a “fictionalized” account of said-dumping for a literary journal in which he takes on the persona of the wounded, troubled man, jaded by childhood ambivalence in a house with line-dried clothes. He was doing you, he’ll write, a favor.

10. Most especially peace the fuck out if that man doesn’t tell you about that story first, and instead you must read it for yourself in a public bookstore in New York City, and you’ll do your best not to cry, but you are you, after all, and it ruins the sleeve of your favorite sweater. It had little turtles on it, even.

11. Do not date the man who tells you it’s unsexy that you drink beer and like to watch football on rainy Sundays. It’s the Lord’s day, after all, but most of all, “it’s awfully masculine.” Be a badass and watch that game in absolute defiance of ‘femininity.’ A real woman does what she wants.

12. Be wary of a man whose Dinner Making Ratio is greater than 3:1. You should never, ever make a fourth meal until your date’s cooked one for you. (Note: it doesn’t particularly matter what he makes—grilled cheese or peanut butter spread over crackers—because the point is he did the work. The point is consideration. Helping someone with their life. Being an active, contributing person who considers others’ needs.)

13. While we’re on the subject of ratios, note the Writer-Reading dynamic should be no greater than 1:1. Do not read his manuscript unless he offers to read yours. Otherwise, you’ll eventually find yourself reading his novel five times in a row, making line edits and drawing hearts, drawing smiley faces over lines you love, and he’ll only ever steal your notes and never read your four page essay. And you can forget about “Acknowledgements.” Your name will not appear.

14. If he’s a writer—and of course he is—do not fall in love with him as a narrator. They’re often markedly different people.

15. Do not—if you’re listening to me at all—date the man who fears emotional intimacy, because intimacy is the most important thing and you know this and you have known this since you were five years old in that muggy waterpark, watching that man with so much hair embrace the woman who loves him most. Do not lose faith in love just because you’re getting older, or because here is yet another birthday, or because you’re spending your days with pillows and a box of Snyder’s pretzels. Do not give up on the Romantic Vision. Love is special, and so, too, is intimacy, and it is scary but no less necessary, and forming a genuine human connection is the most important thing.

And if—by some stroke of luck not even your mother could predict—you find a man who meets these qualifications, or even if he doesn’t meet all of them but you’ve decided he’s an Okay Egg, love him with all your heart. Make him dinner and read his books and pull him close to your beating chest. Put your running sneakers away. Learn how it feels to feel at peace. Then let yourself imagine it: first the porch with the splintered floorboards and then the dog everyone thinks is stupid, and then the Sunday mornings spent in the sunny living room that is lined with vintage bookshelves, texts of all different colors, the photo albums of your life—like still-frames from a movie—and allow yourself to see it: those doe-eyed, eclectic children, standing just before those bookshelves, running their fingers over the smooth, flat binding, and see it as it happens: how you bend down until you meet their level, how their faces are aligned with yours, and how you look at them and say, It will take a lot of time, say, it will take an awful lot of failure, but don’t you think—for just one second—you didn’t deserve this from the start.

***

Listen to Amy read her essay:

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Dream Girl
• HEAVY-HANDED: Cat Ladies
• Hateful Things
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• Multiplicity

I round a turn, and in my line of sight appears the water, glossy as stained glass. I wait for Dean to catch up. When he is beside me, I touch his face and ask, Are you having trouble breathing? Feeling any chest pain? Questions of body and of mind. He shakes his head. No. The answers I know by looking. His face is glowing, not gray.

Reaching the beach, we sit on a curved piece of sea-smoothed cypress and watch the waves. I forgot how sea foam scatters over sand. I forgot about sandpipers. We are both quiet, not asking one another, Where should we go for dinner? Neither of us exclaiming, I’m so happy to get away from work this week! Those forward ways of planning and believing our lives will be similar by evening are rhythms that may never be reclaimed. I can only count through the past with confidence.

This is our first trip out of Texas in nearly two years. The last time we saw the ocean was years ago, at Cape Cod. The May water was freezing, but Dean dove right in, emerging as though from a saltwater baptism. Cleansed. Granted a reprieve. That afternoon, there was only a small scar on his chest. He still had the heart he was born with then.

Congestive: referring to a heart too weak to pump blood through the body. Fluids slow down, pool up, accumulate in those places—organs, tissues—they normally pass right through. The system becomes bogged down in itself.

Failure: meaning the inability to perform what was once a common function. The inefficient work of a diseased heart. The end of relationships.

Interstitial: the spaces between and what fills them. When did I first encounter this word? Maybe in an anatomy class I took in college. Since then I discovered it does not apply only to the matter—and matters—of the body. Living is an interstitial event as we appear in birth and alter form, through life and into death. Loves, marriages, divorces, illnesses. Memories. Cities.

This beach is an interstitial environment, existing between land and sea. What if I could take a sheet of tracing paper and outline our figures, the shape of this ocean, and the reach of a sunrise long past? Stacking these thin pages, I could discover what edges fall between edges, into the interstices of history and memory.

Dean is a poet and a teacher. A man who had a heart transplant. Who loved long runs, beer, red meat. Who fell in love. As with any life, these desires and roles, his form, can be traced, grouped into the life of his person over time. I am a person—a writer, a photographer, a woman in love—sitting beside him on this battered driftwood, pulling words up from ground, down from air, from birds moving between the two, trying to make sense of this all.

We met six years ago, at the height of a humid North Carolina summer. It was the first residency of my graduate poetry-writing program, and over those ten days, we exchanged maybe three words. But at a party the night before, with cheap beers in hand, we started talking about writing, running, and my divorce, and found we could not stop. Alarmed—he was a professor, I was a student—my friends tried to pull me away. His colleagues, shaking their heads, attempted to distract him.

I was aware of his wedding ring, but I cannot say it gave me pause. As the party ended, we slipped away and walked through the dark, wooded campus. In the early morning, among singing cicadas, we kissed. A line from Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese,” flashed through my mind: You do not have to be good. It was not so much an excuse for my behavior as an accompaniment.

A year passed. Back at school, we met again. I was in the final lap of my divorce. He was still married. You’re taller than I remember, I said, accidentally walking out of my flip-flops. Grinning, he muttered something about my toe ring. In the sunlight, I saw his eyes were not brown, as I had thought, but a fluctuating mix of limestone green and blue.

Weeks later, when both of us were back at our respective homes, the first letter arrived. Living with a boyfriend outside the Catskills in upstate New York, I took the small envelope into the bathroom to read in privacy. Dean’s print was fierce and blocky, like a series of small, linked explosions over the page. The word heart was on the paper, but not failure. Should I respond? Faintly, I heard the Greek chorus of my friends, warning me away.

But I craved an escape. In addition to the stresses of divorce and graduate school, I juggled jobs as a Pilates instructor, a freelance writer, and a temp writer in New York City. The man I lived with had revealed himself to be an unmotivated alcoholic, heavy on promises but light on deliveries. Dean’s letter was a tractor beam, pulling me towards a place of passion and danger, but also of quiet and safety.

I wrote back, saying certainly these letters could be between any woman and any man. Romantic, but striving to be realistic. No subject was off-limits, and Dean was honest about his health problems. He was diagnosed in his forties with idiopathic cardiomyopathy, and in the years since, his condition had remained fairly stable. He wrote books of poetry. Taught creative writing in Iowa. Lived in California with his wife. Remembering his morning runs in North Carolina, I wondered if these reports of his heart were tortured exaggerations, or medical truths.

In the next six months, one thing became clear: neither of us excelled at having affairs. Although over a thousand miles usually separated us, and we craved physical closeness, it was the emotional distance—and detachment—we found impossible to maintain. During a heated phone call that winter, Dean said, exasperated, “I can’t give you anything else.” But I was not begging him to leave his marriage, or to meet up for a week in Maui. What I wanted was something he could not manage to do himself: to stop wanting our conversation to continue.

I tried to move on. He tried to stay married. Something always pushed us together—or we let it draw us closer. A text about a February lunar eclipse. An emailed picture of a newborn giraffe. Our elemental need to write one another and to hear back.

Two years after we first met, Dean moved to Austin for a position as professor of creative writing at the University of Texas. I left a proofreading job in North Carolina and joined him. Though he was only separated from his wife, life was just different enough for me to believe living together would work. Graduate school was over. I was an ex-wife, and single. Dean no longer wore his wedding ring.

But though he looked healthy, over the next months his energy faded. A failing heart, I soon learned, takes its pain to many places. Symptoms unfamiliar to me—a constant, dry cough, stomach cramping, shortness of breath—indicated the heart he had coaxed along was starting to fail. His buoyant, skinny-legged stride I loved to watch from my desk window where I worked, as he left to teach class or returned from writing at the café, began to slow and shorten. Our romance intertwined with his whirlwind decline, as if we were trying to take off while preparing to crash land.

So there we were, far from being any woman and any man. I was a thirty-four-year-old unemployed poet and writer. He was a fifty-three-year-old poet and professor still married to another woman who lived two thousand miles away. We were both living in an unfamiliar city, without strong support systems. Suddenly, we were not going to poetry readings, but to heart failure clinics.

Swimming one morning, I grasped that no matter how much I helped, Dean was getting sicker. That he was married to someone who did not want to do the chores of caretaking—driving him to work because he could no longer manage the walk, taking notes as the doctors and their tests revealed the same undeniable results—but still wanted the marriage. That while he was in love with me, he also loved his wife. That I was about to be dumped by a man who was desperate to return to the life he knew before his literal and figurative hearts unraveled.

Time passed and we lived apart—ineffectually—for a couple months. A defibrillator was installed in his chest, to shock his heart with the force of a mule’s kick if it suddenly stopped beating. For six months, he reclaimed some energy, and his divorce resumed. Time passed. We were back together, but he could no longer run with me. Walking across campus, he stopped to rest more frequently. Like the body, love gets weary. Unable to find full-time work in Austin, and tired of filling a wife’s role as girlfriend, a part of me was pulling away. Despite my worry for him, the next fall I would move to Massachusetts for a job and graduate school. Leaving always gave me a measure of security. I loved, I tended, I left. Idiopathic. Meaning: with no known cause.

***

Children run through the shallow surf. Does time pass? The phrase posits the idea that we remain static while time tumbles forward, the action of passing requiring a pass-ee. A duality. We cannot pass ourselves on the highway. We cannot pass ourselves a bowl of cereal.

Yet, passing can occur within a solitary body. Twice in less than five months, during two open-heart surgeries, Dean was hooked to a bypass machine. It circled his blood through his body while a heart pump was installed; and again, when the pump was removed over four months later and his original heart was taken out and the donor’s sewn into place. Passing can involve states in the string of life bypassing death bypassing life.

Riding the waves are black birds, each with a single white spot on their bills. Coots. I saw them for the first time when my first husband and I moved to Monterey, California, from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I saw them again, last summer, as I sculled on Lady Bird Lake. Me cutting over the water, sweat and sunscreen burning my eyes. Pulling the oars, dropping the oars. Passing no one as I tried not to consider other versions, wondering had Dean’s heart failure been diagnosed at the start of our relationship if we would have had time to fall out of love.

Collecting information about the heart’s function can be like mapping the deep sea floor and pinning the waves to paper. Before I left for Massachusetts that fall, I drove Dean to the Cooley Heart Transplant center in Houston for a second opinion. Which was, truthfully, closer to a tenth opinion. A refrain of what we already knew.

Reviewing the results of Dean’s latest echocardiogram, the doctor did not look up as he said, in a gentle Texas drawl, “Things could carry on for a while like this, but then there will most likely be a steep decline.” He drew a line in the air with his index finger, and it fell at an angle with the words steep decline. Then phrases like heart pump and bridge to transplant and heart transplant shot out into the air.

Like that office, hearts have no windows. I stared at the shelves crammed with the doctor’s collection of rare books, and at a muted television running a video of him working as a young medic, years ago, in Vietnam. Suddenly I remembered a quote from an essay on illness by Roberto Bolaño, written as he neared the end of his life: When people are about to die, all they want to do is fuck. True, our sex life had not suffered. Why didn’t someone map that? I glanced at the screen again, just as the camera zoomed in on a nurse’s rear end. The doctor, embarrassed, said something about the cameraman’s taste in women. Dean just looked down at his hands.

Back on the East Coast, I escaped his cough; the doctor’s appointments; the clinging, heavy ceiling that settles over households of illness. I was out of earshot of the arguments with his estranged wife. Busy with my jobs as managing editor of a literary magazine and as a graduate student, most of my time was spent in a tiny, dusty, un-air-conditioned office as I tried to pull my first issue together.

One afternoon, Dean called. Since he taught during the day, we usually talked in the evenings. Outside the office windows, orange and yellow leaves shifted in the October breeze as he said the doctors were admitting him to Seton Hospital, in Austin. He told me not to worry in a voice growing thinner with every word. Looking at the dust on the windowsills, I hoped Whitman had even the slightest clue when he wrote nothing collapses. Whether we were together or apart, he would still have congestive heart failure. How close did I need to be?

When we had broken up the year before, his wife had visited. When I moved back into the house, her pumice stone was in the shower, as though she might return at any time. I waited a month before I threw it away. This is another woman’s. It is here. Now it is not. Events gathered in a stack of tracing paper. How wide the space between Dean is here and Dean is not here? How can we know what will come to mean the most to us, until we do?

In two days, I drove back to Texas, with our dog. Pouring a cup of coffee at the nurses’ station one afternoon, I read a news clipping pinned to the bulletin board. It was the obituary of a man who waited over a year for a heart before succumbing to kidney failure.

I knew Dean’s heart was too expanded and weakened to snap back into shape. That Dean might qualify for a place on the heart transplant waiting list. That he might die before this could happen. I thought of friends I knew with sick partners, with dying parents, with chronically ill children. Everyone goes through these times, I constantly reminded myself, hoping that particular truth would diminish my fears, if only in that it made grief—and the need for bravery—less foreign.

After ten days in the hospital, Dean stabilized enough to be released home. He was now officially waiting for a transplant. As was the case for every patient in this situation, in an unpredictable range of time, his name would move up the list as his heart continued to fail. That was if things went well. No one—no doctor, no nurse—knew when a match might materialize because acceptable donors would not appear in order.

Within the next days, Dean’s divorce was granted. Immediately, we applied for a marriage license and petitioned to have the 72-hour waiting period rescinded. Cell-phone pictures from that warm fall afternoon show our faces blurry and bluish in the hallway lights of the Austin courthouse. The dark-haired judge closed his eyes and swayed as he read. I wore a cream-colored corduroy dress patterned with deer. Dean taught class later that day.

The first time I married, at twenty-five, the phrase in sickness and in health was spoken in theory. Every possible choice existed, it seemed, and all of them had positive endings. With Dean, I was deep in a different type of not-knowing. Not just in terms of our inability to predict the outcome of these days, but also in living among human beings, many of whom did not understand the body’s limitations. When friends inquired, politely mystified—Why did you pick today?—I felt unable to explain it was simply because now we could legally be married and Dean was still physically able to walk from the car and into the courthouse. Finally I saw the wisdom of drive-through wedding chapels.

In the week afterward, there were more midnight trips to the emergency room, when Dean’s lungs became so congested he could barely breathe. There was the port put into his arm, with a line connecting to a small pump, so he could continuously receive an intravenous medication that kept his heart beating. There were visits from the home health nurses to change the dressing and give us more supplies.

Some people said to me: You are brave. Some people surely thought: You are a fool. Was I brave? Was I a fool? Was there a demonstrable difference? I thought of Hemingway’s stories and of the impulse to read his work as brave because the tears and blame are kept from the page. As if bravery ever meant omission. I thought of our vows. Of how in sickness precedes in health. Of how being frightened did not mean I had to turn away.

Less than ten days later came the steep decline. During those hours in the intensive care unit, I felt there were two of me, separate but partially overlapping. Internal, interstitial distances both shrinking and expanding. This extra self observed the cardiac physician’s assistant blocking my view of my husband in his hospital bed. Watched her take my elbow and walk me to the nurses’ station so I could sign my name to various directives, indicating how far the doctors should go, if there was no time to ask. When Dean’s room cleared I sat again in a chair beside his bed, trying not to count the monitors, catheters, IV lines and other endless unnamed tubes disappearing into his bruised body. My brain could not imagine how one piece of time would link up with the next.

I did not have to wonder long. The PA came back into the room and crouched down beside my chair.

“Nice boots,” she said. A gift from Dean: cowboy with turquoise stitching. I liked them for their sharp strike against the hospital floors.

She said, “If things continue to proceed in this fashion, Dean will not make it through the night.”

For all my rational observations, my brain had not equated decline with dying.

A few moments later, one of the surgeons came in and said Dean’s kidneys and liver were failing. What I heard was flailing.

Dean himself was past hearing. As if on cue, the molecules in the room began to disperse, taking a little color, a bit of matter, with them. The barriers to his departure were rupturing, like the membrane of an expiring cell.

***

Start with surprises. It was a scene very unlike the one where he and I stood that July evening on a rainy, rhododendron-ringed patio. Far away from metal bedrails, disinfectant, and shrieking bells. Surrounded by our friends, not by worried nurses and cautious doctors.

“Falling in love is like falling through a trapdoor,” a professor said during a lecture that day. She had paused. “And so is falling out of love.”

I was thirty-two. The previous spring, I left my husband of seven years. At that point, I could not have explained, exactly, why I left, other than to say I was unhappy. Who says, “I’ve put eleven years into this relationship and I’ve chosen to fall out of love”? Who says, “I’ve decided to fall in love”?

Trapdoors give, and you can drop through. You can also push them up, from the inside. For many years, I fell, in or out. It was what I did, what led me where I went. A trapdoor opened, and Dean and I were in love. A trapdoor opened, and Dean needed a heart transplant.

Then another trapdoor opened, and another, and now I sit beside my husband and look over the ocean again, the air pushed across our faces by the motion of the waves. We are no longer counting an unknown number of days for a call that may or may not come. Right now I want to press my hand into his so that my body passes into his. Instead of stopping there, I want to intertwine with particles of sand, of salt, of water, around, above, below, and behind us. Nothing, and everything, collapsed.

Until that night, we knew nothing about BIVAD heart pumps. Because both sides of Dean’s heart were irreversibly failing. He was losing consciousness and could not wait for a new heart. Due to low rates of organ donation, in the game of transplants, a patient must be sick enough to inarguably need a new organ, but not so sick that the chances of survival are slight. Surgically connecting him to a biventricular assist device was his only chance at staying alive, if he survived the operation. It would temporarily perform the work his heart could not.

Bulky and unwieldy, the pump was a machine of metal and plastic sewn to tissue. Four tubes, quarter-sized in diameter, would be inserted into Dean’s heart. They would exit through holes—open wounds, really—in his abdomen, and would lead to two pumps in clear, hard plastic cases about the size of slightly flattened baseballs. From the bottom of each ran pairs of pneumatic and electrical lines, four feet in length, to the forty-pound computer driver powering the device. Old Reliable, one of the nurses called it.

Once he recovered from the open-heart procedure, he would again be placed on the transplant waiting list. He would go home, on this machine that plugged into an electrical socket at night and ran off large batteries during the day. He could not be left alone. If the pump gave out, he would die if someone were not on hand to switch him to the back-up machine, or in an extreme case, to attach hand pumps to manually move blood through his body.

Keeping expectations in check, the surgeon told me, “This procedure is mainly a salvage operation.” Meaning: a last-ditch effort.

As the doctor spoke, I thought, Lupine. California poppies. I thought of one morning in Monterey, driving to the hospice offices where I volunteered and seeing cars pulled over and people standing in a green field awash in a sea of vivid purple-blue. It was my first spring in California. I had never seen lupine. I was twenty-five, and I did not stop.

***

Around midnight, I was allowed to see Dean. The nurses, serious and unsmiling, buzzed around the bed. My first thought was: He looks like the inside of a package from Amazon.com. Covered in a puffy green blanket, only his face, extremely swollen and shiny, was visible. His hand, pale and unusual like something from the deepest ocean washed up on land, was the single part of him I could touch.

My second thought was a line of William Carlos Williams’s: “The pure products of America / go crazy.” Imagination created poetry, and it created the BIVAD. Was this crazy in a good way or a bad way? Was it worth it, this way of waiting for a heart? One of the nursing assistants walked in, and her eyes grew round when she looked at the scene. “Freaky,” she whispered. The pumps popped like snapping fingers, the force of the machine slightly shaking his body.

When I spoke sentences of uncertain relief, the words hung in the air like half-deflated balloons. It would be days before Dean could hear me telling him over and over what had happened, gently and simply, so that he could slowly come to understand. It would be days before I could crawl in bed with him, loop my arm lightly over his stomach, and feel the surge of the pump moving us both.

Once we stood at this same beach, before I went to Massachusetts, back when Dean was still managing to manage his illness. Outline those selves; lay them over our selves, now. Suddenly, we are not the same people we were. The interstices feel wide.

As Dean is adjusting to his new heart—which at times seems like a Prius with the engine of a Dodge Charger—we are both adjusting to second marriages and new physicalities. The immunosuppressant drugs he must take, to prevent his body from rejecting the heart, cause many side effects: fatigue, frequent migraines, and anemia. Others, more serious—kidney failure, cancer—dash in and out of my mind. Though those are illnesses many face, for different reasons.

Suddenly we always know too much. When he looks at the ocean as though from a different angle, a greater distance, I cannot ask him to explain.

Memory can allow for a gentler reinterpretation of the facts, as a brain moving on from traumatic events wants to soften the edges. To believe it was not so bad, after all. Some histories, however, refuse soothing.

There is an expectation that when a loved one arrives home from the hospital, it will be a celebration. That there will be no confusion over the changes in one’s body (I was not like this when I last sat on my couch) and no frantic realizations when the caregiver understands there will be no nurse coming on shift at 7:00 pm (Dean is here, and sick, all the time).

After a month in the hospital, Dean coming home on heart pumps did not mean Let’s throw a big party! It meant the cat hid under the bed and the dog hunkered under the dining room table, her tail wagging in low sweeps. It was impossible to ignore the wheels of the cart rolling heavily over the wood floors, or to tune out the groan and beep of the batteries winding down. The click-clock sound of the pumps was everywhere Dean went.

The world of making plans disappeared as our lives grew around strange routines. Twice a day, I performed the “flash test”: using a flashlight to check for blood clots forming in the pumps. Every afternoon—eventually, every morning as well—I washed up in our small bathroom, donned a sterile gown, laid out supplies, and changed the dressings where the pumps entered his body. In our living room towered a stack of boxes from the wound care company, containing more medical supplies than most healthcare facilities in the world will see in a month.

As medically intended, the pumps gave Dean a temporary stay, a bridge, a way to wait for a transplant. The quality of his life did improve, in some fashion—he could take short walks, he was not coughing and out of breath, he had energy to write.

But the taxing physical and psychological weight of the BIVAD was always too much to bear. A temperamental Band-Aid, it said: Maybe I’ll help you, and maybe I’ll add to the list of worries you and your wife fold and unfold in your hands. It gave him constant pain, anemia, and a serious blood infection. But he had no other way through.

It is lonely to be ill and to care for someone so ill. Neither can be put aside or checked off. Outside of the heart clinic, our support network was a tight loop. I grew savagely impatient with those who said, I didn’t know he was sick or How seriously should we take this? We had just a handful of friends and family who called or visited and sat with Dean and walked with me, who listened as I cried under the pale yellow light of the street lamps.

Take care of yourself, people said. Yes, but how? There was no place in the world to stand in and forget. Any moment, the phone could ring with the news that a heart had arrived, a call we desired but feared, as it would initiate another life-threatening operation. Days passed, accumulating into months. I realized I no longer looked at myself in the mirror.

I was tired of noticing so many other things. Of gauging blood on dressings. Of watching Dean’s careful dance around the machine, making sure the pneumatic and electrical lines did not twist up. Of people gawking as we walked slowly through the grocery store, the BIVAD pushed in front of him or trailing behind. Of knowing that his wait for a heart might last more than a year.

During those months, I daydreamed of lives I left behind, outside of the dry sear of Texas. I missed the winter in Northampton, starting when friends packed up the last of my things to mail back to Austin. I mourned the loss of sitting on the scuffed leather couch with the dog and watching snow fall outside, the steam radiators whistling. Time had passed. I could not be twenty-five again.

As in my first marriage, there were many late nights with my own quiet tears in the bathroom, our dog whining in the hall outside the door. This time, I was not crying out of confusion or from fear over a fading love. My questions were not “Why?” or “How?” I knew those answers. Tumbling through my tears, what I heard my voice saying was, “Please.” Begging in the face of the fact that every body in the world is finite. That each alteration—a fence falling apart, a divorce, or heart failure—happens for a reason. We are not always privy to where the string of events began, to what caused that first nail to come loose in the plank.

Many of my friends were learning the lessons of staying by becoming parents. As always, I was out of step. I thought of the miscarriage I had at twenty-one. How, after all the losses and near-losses of the last years, wanting a child would be an understandable response. How I could not bear the guilt if we passed along a heart defect. There was once a life where I could pack a few things, grab the dog, and go. There was a life where I could say, “Someday I’ll have five kids.” I misplaced those lives. I missed daydreaming about the future and trapdoors that firmly locked. Others looked ahead with a freedom I envied.

Oh, just to get away. Because we always had to be within two hours of the hospital, in case a heart arrived, the best we managed while Dean was on the pump was a short drive into the Texas Hill Country. The machine plugged into the cigarette lighter, clacking away. Dean sitting in the back seat, so that in case of an accident, the air bag did not damage the surgery site, his heart, or the pump. The air conditioner rattling in our ears as we drove out under a piercing blue sky.

Sitting on the beach here, I think about how our dedication to one another, and our connection to our work, helped push us through those months. For Dean, writing was both habit and distraction, a focus on something other than his body. For me, it was a compulsion. I knew that if he died, I would need the solace of writing and photography. While he lived, my work was a way to demarcate the space between us, to say, “I know you are sick and I will take care of you.” To say, as caregivers must, “This is me, here.”

After nearly five months of waiting, a new heart arrived for Dean when a healthy, generous young man with similar blood chemistry died as an organ donor. The call did not shock us awake in the middle of the night as we expected, but came around 10:30 on a Thursday morning. I want to say we had some amazing epiphany during the ten-minute drive to the hospital, but living with a machine like the BIVAD makes a heart transplant a relief, despite the dangers of the operation and challenges of recovery.

“Are you scared?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Dean replied. “Are you?”

I never answered. He was the one going into this new space. This yearned-for door opened because someone unexpectedly died. Even more could be lost in the next hours. There was no celebration, just muted, taut anticipation.

I thought of the cardiac PA who told me Dean was dying the previous winter. How I once saw her bringing ten bright red, heart-shaped balloons into the ICU. I thought of another young woman, an inpatient, meditatively walking a hospital corridor one evening as I left to go home and sleep while Dean remained on the cardiac unit. Eventually, memories accumulate and swirl together, refusing organization along a specific timeline. A glance, an explosive connection, or a kiss that brings on a divorce. Decisions to stay or go. A diagnosis dictating a body’s abrupt end, slow decline, or unexpected recovery. Trapdoors flying open or sticking shut. Operations that fail or succeed. In memory, they happen all at once.

***

In many ways, the months after the transplant are as blurry as the time of waiting for the transplant. Now we are no longer paused, but living what happens, as people sometimes can.

Driving back from the beach, I notice a giant rock formation, gray and heavy against the green hills. “That looks like a fist,” I say.

“I think it’s called the Hand of God,” Dean says.

An adult heart is close to the size of two fists. From here, I can’t tell whether this landmark is pressing down from the sky, or pushing up from the earth. Outline both versions. Layered together, they are what is, and what is not.

Six summers have passed since our first kiss. At times, I wonder if my actions were, in that tally-keeping sense, good or bad. What I find is that I no longer believe in or. I must live by and, the one word allowing me to be giving and faulted at the same time. Slowly, I make peace with the dissonance of possessing both the innate selfishness I used to justify having an affair, and the compassion that gave me the strength to stay and care. In the world as it is, Dean’s heart failure and path to transplantation cannot exist separately from our affair, his divorce, and our marriage. As Mary Oliver’s poem goes on to say, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Remaining with Dean, what memories have I traced? A finger sketching a heart’s decline in the air. A man sewn into a machine, who now writes and teaches with a heart born in another’s body. A woman who loved, tended, left, and returned. I gather my histories in the pet hair on my sweater, in gulls calling from coasts both west and east, and in black-and-white birds riding the waves. In the shape of Dean’s hand over mine.

Start here: love is impossible to explain. An assault on body and spirit, heart transplantation is also a matter difficult to unravel. It aims, ultimately, to be restorative. Sometimes the terms of continuance can be born, as the perils of falling in love can, and the world will open again, though on a different landscape on another night, into a new pattern of rain. In health and illness, our lives are forever a series of outlines—of interstices in time—both collecting and rushing past.

***

Listen to Laurie read her essay:

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• A Memorandum of Ghosts
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #5: Darin Strauss
• Tandem Reading
• Books For The Dark Night Of The Soul
• GENERATION GAP #4: Sexting in the 18th Century

On the dating site, I tell charming stories about setting off the smoke detector whenever I attempt to cook and spilling coffee on my shirt daily. I join the masses in declaring my love for Happy Hour and brunch on Sundays. I am bombarded with responses from men who claim they’ve found their dream girl.

I go on one of these dates, and the guy treats it like a job interview. He asks me how much I make; he asks me how much I weigh. On another date, the architect-who-runs-marathons brings me cupcakes and tailors our outings around the interests I list on my profile. It is sweet and awkward and overwhelming. There’s the lawyer who holds me hostage in a never-ending game of pool. The Minnesota transplant whose ability to avoid eye contact throughout our entire conversation at Powell’s is nothing short of incredible. The list goes on.

Each night, the same thought arrives: I could be home right now. I could be watching The Voice and eating veggie pot pie.

“Nobody goes on Facebook to announce he has herpes.” The author Jess Walter said this recently, while sitting on a panel at a literary conference in Portland. He was talking about the narrative of social media, the way we craft our Facebook stories to present only the best versions of ourselves. The men on this dating site are presenting their best versions, and I’m presenting my best, and I am bored. I’m growing wary of the narrative, especially the one I tell about myself.

I try to present myself the same in-person as I do on my profile: quirky and charming and a little aloof. As if this tells my whole story. As if comparing myself to a Zooey Deschanel character is all that’s needed to encapsulate who I am: cupcakes and dresses with boots and awkward asides. This is how I’m supposed to present myself. Telling the truth—about my insomnia and depression and inability to feel normal—would be ridiculous.

In spite of my own truth, I expect my online match to be as predictable as his profile. He’ll be from the Midwest, just like the last guy I dated. He’ll be a photographer, too. That’s where the similarities end. He’ll be a salesman, and a very good one. He’ll own a condo overlooking the soccer field. The groceries in his fridge will be organic. He’ll own a fancy coffee maker.

I’ll like him for reasons that have nothing and everything to do with him. I’ll like him for the tiny wooden spoon he uses to sprinkle sea salt on his eggs. I’ll like him for his clean bathroom and his Tom’s toothpaste and the neat rows of shoes in his closet.

My therapist encouraged me to join an online dating site after I spent too much time processing the breakup from the last Midwestern photographer, the writer I met in graduate school. He had a broken vacuum cleaner and no dishwasher. He had mold in his fridge. He had enough fiction on his shelves to fill a small bookstore. I loved him for years, until he decided he loved someone else.

“Wait. I’m not telling you the truth here.” A resident says this to me at the retirement center where I work. He tells me that his youngest daughter is dead, and then he backtracks. “She didn’t die,” he says. “I don’t know how to tell you this.” And then he tells me the real story: His daughter joined a cult and moved with a man and several other women to New York. This was over thirty years ago; he never heard from her again.

My truth unravels, too. I didn’t actually love the writer from grad school for years. I loved the man I thought he would become. This is the most dangerous type of love because it’s not real. It’s the equivalent of lusting after a celebrity or having a crush on someone from afar.

Sometimes the lies feel more like truths than the truths. For all intents and purposes, my resident’s daughter is dead. My Midwestern writer is dead, too. I’m not sad he’s gone. I’m sad that the man I thought he was is gone, and worse yet, that he never existed. I’m sad that the person he thought I was, endlessly nice and bubbly and pliable, never existed either.

I stand up my therapist one day. I decide I’m finished. It’s not that I don’t need him—I’m still processing the breakup and my grandmother’s death and the fact that I’m thirty and me—but I can’t be honest with him. I hear myself telling him the things I know he wants to hear. About moving on and feeling better and spending less time crying in my car. He buys the lies, and I realize I’m wasting my money.

When I don’t show up, he calls me three times. He sends a bill to my house with a handwritten note, asking me to call him back. I pay the bill, but I don’t call. I think blowing someone off is the worst thing I could do; I do it anyway.

“Wait, I’m not telling you the truth here,” I want to tell the guys on the dating site. I want to remove the picture my hairdresser took moments after my last haircut and replace it with one of me on a camping trip, unshowered and wearing a red hat. I want to talk about being unable to face my own therapist. I want to tell them I haven’t slept in my bed in weeks. I washed my sheets and started to put them back on, only to get exhausted halfway through and stop, laziness leading me to the couch instead.

Even that’s a lie. I don’t sleep on my couch because I’m lazy. I sleep on my couch because my big, empty bed makes me ache with loneliness and I’d rather use it as a receptacle for laundry than a place to rest my head.

I can wrap my story in a glossy package. I can make myself sound fun, but I’m no more or less fun than any Midwestern photographer who wears plaid and looks sincere but doesn’t really give a shit about anything I have to say. Fun is the story we tell the world when we post our vacation photos and describe the epic meals we consume, but fun is not my truth.

My grandpa doesn’t remember how to eat. When my dad and I bring him lunch at his skilled nursing unit, he picks up his fork and examines it curiously. He holds it up to his head, ready to rake it through what’s left of his wispy white hair. My grandfather is 93 years old, and lately he has morphed into Ariel from The Little Mermaid, not a trace of recognition registering on his face as he takes in the everyday items around him with childlike wonder. Look at this stuff. Isn’t it neat? He stacks the strawberries on his plate into a pyramid and howls like a rabid coyote when he hears a nearby phone ring. The napkin tucked into the collar of his shirt finds its way to his head, an impromptu hat for a man who’d rather play cards with his grilled cheese than eat his grilled cheese.

Loving someone with dementia is complicated, because it involves loving a person who is a different version of the person he once was.

Dating is complicated, too, because it involves liking a person who is a different version of the person he will be.

Just as I did with my therapist, the date he recommended I take blew me off. We went out for dinner once. We talked for four hours and split dessert. He texted me as I drove home and asked when he could see me again. I felt happy for the first time in months.

I met him for drinks with his friends. They went their separate ways and we walked to a new bar. We stayed until it shut down, and then walked to where he lived. His condo, with its grand windows lending a sweeping view of the Portland cityscape I rarely got to see, awakened me. I lived and worked in the suburbs. I lived in a state of This Will Do For Now.

His house sparkled. His life sparkled. I thought of him and his sparkling life while he visited a friend in Tokyo. For a moment I believed that things were exactly as they appeared to be.

My coworkers and I ate our lunch on the patio, soaking in the last sunny days before autumn took its turn. We swatted at bees and talked about men. Cautionary tales abounded: husbands leaving after years of marriage, friends whose infidelities tainted everything. I felt the weight of their optimism as they shifted their focus to me: the youngest of the group, the single one, the one most likely to meet someone who could potentially change everything.

“Actually, I did meet someone interesting,” I heard myself say aloud, and immediately wished I could retreat. These were not the type of women who take such a comment lightly. One started humming the wedding march.

Why did I mention him? I knew I’d never hear from him again. I knew he’d go to Tokyo, and return to Portland without a trace. I knew the texts would stop, and the emails, too. I knew I’d never see his ninth floor condo again.

While he was in Tokyo, I thought about his ironing board. It was the first thing I saw when we walked through his door, our bodies fueled by vodka and champagne, moments after being unable to stop ourselves from kissing on the elevator. My last boyfriend neither owned an ironing board nor understood how to use a trashcan. This man’s perfect ironing board and perfect house made me want to do wonderfully imperfect things to him. Everything about him turned me on: his smooth skin, the way he whispered words on my neck, his ability to slice a sweet potato into perfect cubes while making a breakfast scramble. These were the things I thought about while he was away.

On our last date before his departure, I exhibited Herculean restraint and kept my clothes on, though sex was so close I could nearly taste it. I was trying to be—what? Good? Proper? I was trying to be the type of person who was likely to be called back. I was trying to be more thoughtful. Less instinctual. My instincts often led me astray.

I knew nothing about him, but I mapped the various ways I might fit into his life. I made assumptions based on his books and the state of his kitchen. I could see us together forever, and I pretended this idea wasn’t absurd.

I never knew my ex, either. He spent most of our relationship voicing miserable discontent and I attempted to offer solutions instead of accepting the truth: he’d never be happy with me, and I’d never be happy with him. When my grandma was days from death, I was sick of hearing him tell me he was sorry, or telling me everything was going to be okay, or changing the subject, or trying to make me laugh.

“Just be here for me,” I said.

“Does that mean sitting here and listening to you cry?” he said.

That’s exactly what it meant. I wish he’d known me well enough not to have to ask.

I didn’t know the man I was with for years. And though I see the pictures of their gleaming engagement rings and smiling kids, lately I feel like I don’t know my friends. I only know the personas we’ve created.

I buy an extra toothbrush. I don’t know why. I’ve been single for almost a year. Sometimes I’ll sleep with my laundry on the bed. It makes the bed feel warmer, fuller. I’ll wake up with a pair of pants on my face, a shirt flung over my body.

In my solitude, I wonder about the reasons I am alone. Am I too fat? Too boring? Too weak? Maybe they think I’m too—what? The worst thing about a blank slate is everything we write onto it. We carry our best selves into public and our worst selves into solitude.

In my solitude, I wallow in my loneliness. I eat macaroni out of a box, as if I’m not worth the effort of real cooking. I set the smoke detector off and a scene from a charming sitcom does not unfold; instead, I stand cursing, groaning, irritated.

This is the most me I’ll ever be, and it’s the me I work carefully at concealing.

I’d like to meet someone who likes beer and coffee and rain and camping and brunch and smiling, but more than that, I want to know someone. I want someone to know me. I want someone to peel off my persona, see the madness behind my silliness, and like me anyway—not just in spite of my truth, but because of it.

***

Rumpus original art by Rob Kimmel.

Related Posts:

• We Are Only So Much Monkey: Lessons Learned From Failure
• HEAVY-HANDED: Cat Ladies
• Hateful Things
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• Multiplicity

Laying in bed, talking, cuddling, kissing, ravishing.

There are crates of records around my apartment and the album “The Bad Seed”, by The Birthday Party tends to get a spin on the turntable next to my bed when I have entered that beautiful space between …..is this something?…. to …..yes, we are something…..

The second track “Wild World” is where the needle gets dropped on the record.

Here is Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds performing the song:

“Our bodies melt together, we are one.”

Sexy as hell, right?

That was 2003, let’s back up 20 years to 1983. Here is The Birthday Party performing the song:

The Birthday Party, Tracey Pew on bass, Mick Harvey on drums and Rowland S. Howard with the haunting guitar.

One night Rowland joined The Bad Seeds in 1992 for a petit reunion of sorts of The Birthday Party. “Wild World” is the first song. Listen to the crowd go nuts when Nick introduces Rowland:

Here’s a pretty cool video with interviews of Rowland, Mick, Nick and Barry Adamson from a documentary on Rowland S. Howard:

In another interview, Nick discusses how they thought London was going to be an amazing music scene, and when they got there it was more like being gang banged by a bunch of marshmallows.

“Hold me up baby for I may fall, hold my dish-rag body tall.”

How can you not fuck and fall in love to that?

Thanks for reading and come back next week for Nick Cave Monday.

Related Posts:

• Nick Cave Monday #3: “Shivers” To “Junkyard”
• Nick Cave Monday #36: “Dead Joe”
• Nick Cave Monday #27: “Tupelo”
• Nick Cave Monday #24: “Mack The Knife”
• Nick Cave Monday #38: “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”

Abby liked to talk things through endlessly before she made a decision. Should she get a cat? Should she declare a major in Poli Sci with a minor in History, or a major in History with a minor in Poli Sci?  Should she reject the guy whose name was Colin because he pronounced it like the anatomical part?  (Yes to that one.) We talked and talked. We reveled in our similarities. I had also tried to straighten my hair in high school, with disastrous consequences. I, too, had harbored a strange obsession with Amelia Earhart in fourth grade! Abby and I were so much alike that, a month after my boyfriend, Zach, and I broke up, she started dating him.

I was working at a tiny, wooden flower stall on Library Mall, a little trailer, really, with just enough room for some buckets of flowers, a space heater, and one employee. The little stall had a name, but nobody knew what it was. Everyone called it the flower cart, and like its nickname, it was all-purpose and utilitarian. We sold single red roses to hopeful college kids, inexpensive, sturdy bouquets of daisies to young professors on their way home to their wives. That winter, I slogged through my shifts surrounded by the vibrant symbols of love and romance, while my own heart ached. Zach dumped me two days before Valentine’s Day, standing in the doorway of my little studio apartment, looking down at his feet and muttering nervously about commitment and the future and not being sure but definitely really liking me, though.

His timing didn’t strike me then as jerky, but rather, via my superpower of clinging to relationships long after they were over, as romantic. He was so overwhelmed with love for me that he simply had to leave me! On the day he was most overwhelmed with love!

Zach was my first real boyfriend (as opposed to my many imaginary ones). He was my first love. I now credit him with teaching me the hard lesson most of my friends learned by the time they were juniors in college: You can’t give your heart away to the first boy with good politics and nice eyes and a flair for vegetarian cooking. You shouldn’t press your open, beating heart into his hands and say, “Here you go!” like you’re handing him a plate of pancakes. You shouldn’t, but you do. As it turns out, you do it over and over again.

It was my first breakup, and it hit hard. In its aftermath, Abby kept vigilant watch over me. She made sure I ate dinner every night, brought over pints of Ben and Jerry’s and stacks of cheery movies, and she sat with me while I alternately sobbed or droned on, endlessly, about what had gone wrong. I learned a happier lesson, too: there is a friendship contract, unwritten, and when love goes awry, your best friend will pick up the pieces and put you back together.

Shortly after I started working at the flower cart, when Zach and I were newly in love, a tall girl with hair that was shaved on one side and dyed bluish on the other came to my little window and bought one flower. It was a pink tea rose. I remember thinking it was pretty, sweet, its bud just opening – a flower that could serve as an unassuming token of friendship or love. I asked her if she wanted me to wrap it, and she tilted her head and said, “In a second.” She paid for the rose, took it from me and placed it carefully on the ground in front of the cart. Smiling faintly, she ground the flower into the concrete, smashing it hard with the thick heel of her black boot. Then she bent, picked up the corpse of the flower, and handed it back to me. “Could you wrap it now, please?” I nodded. My hands shook a little as I swaddled the wrecked stem in green and white paper. This girl had been through the wringer and had come out the other side damaged. She possessed intimate knowledge of something dark and dire. I felt sorry for her, and fundamentally different from her, and also a little scared she might kill me.

Months later, when Zach and Abby approached the flower cart on a chilly day in the middle of March, I was too surprised to be suspicious. They were friends, I knew. I had introduced them. We had all hung out together plenty of times, going for coffee, watching movies at the local art house. They rode up on their bikes and locked them together at the rack nearby. I watched them do it. I watched them walk toward me together, maybe a little too close? I didn’t notice. It was cold. I could see their breath.  Abby was wearing a gray hat, which she took off and clutched in her hands. They put their faces side by side in my little window.  “Zach and I are,” Abby started, and then faltered. Zach took over. “We’ve decided to see each other,” he said, and I thought, yes, I can see you both, you’re right here. Right after that I understood.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea at all,” I thought, but I didn’t say that. I don’t remember what I said, but it was probably something like, “Buh?” or “Gah,” or “Wha?” I don’t remember much about the rest of this encounter, aside from my overpowering wish that Abby and Zach would leave, would step away from me and be gone, or more precisely that the ground in front of the flower cart would crack open into a wide, brutal chasm and suck both of their ugly, cheating, hideous selves down into the fiery bowels of hell.

But who can be sure exactly what I thought? It was a long time ago.

It only took me a little while to get over this bold treachery… oh, let’s say somewhere between a semester and ten years. I knew one thing for sure: I never wanted to see Zach or Abby again. Their betrayal had torn a piece of me right off, and I was done with them. It was Abby whom I missed most deeply, Abby I dreamed about, Abby I felt most wronged by. That friendship contract? I should have had it printed out. And notarized. I had loved him but I trusted her.

In the weeks that followed, I thought a lot about that blue-haired girl who crushed the flower. She was my spirit guide, my familiar. It didn’t matter why she had done it: she was the yearning and the despair lurking beneath the surface – of friendship, of love, of trying to get through your day without turning into a weepy mess. I wished she would stop by the flower cart again, although she never did. I wanted to say, “Hey, sorry for feeling sorry for you. Sorry for thinking we were so different.”

I was twenty years old. My world didn’t actually end. After a while, I found new best friends, and new loves. My story veered off into another direction, and the story of Abby and Zach became their story, one of marriage and kids, and, years later, a heartbreaking divorce – and yes, I did come to care, again, about their hearts, mostly Abby’s. I haven’t spoken to Zach in a long time. There’s clarity to the end of love, finality. I thought my friendship with Abby fit neatly into that same category, but it didn’t.

Several years after they married, Abby sent me an email. She’d made a few attempts to contact me in the past, and I ignored them all – with righteous anger at first, and then with something close to glee. (She wants me? Good. She can’t have me.), and, later, with a tinge of regret. This email was casual and tentative, a shy, hopeful, finger-fluttering hello. She heard I was married and I’d had a baby. She was pregnant with her second child, she wrote.

Maybe that’s what did it, what finally sewed up the crack inside me, that second child, not the first, obviously – everyone knows a first child is a less permanent statement of commitment, really more like a pet. The second kid was the clincher. They had a life together, a family.

I hit reply to Abby’s email that day, and slowly, she and I rekindled our friendship. At first we exchanged the superficial details of our lives, after a while we went a bit deeper, and finally, tentatively, we began to talk about what had happened. She regretted what she had done, she wrote, even while it felt like it had been necessary. She was genuinely sorry but, she said, she wouldn’t change anything. How could she regret the life she had?

For years I was absolutely certain I never would have done what Abby did. I never would have stabbed my best friend in the back for a shot at love. Maybe love is like the North Pole – it skews the compass. Abby did what she thought she had to do to be happy. For a long time, she was. I’ve come to see that a thing can accommodate several truths at once: it can be both selfish and genuine, unkind and necessary, wrong and right.

Abby and I have become friends again. We live in different cities, and that makes things easier. I don’t quite know how we would manage the more potent demands of a daily relationship. Our new connection will never hold the same magical, uncynical love we felt for each other twenty years ago, that bright, fearless bond you have with a person when your hearts are as fascinating and thrilling to each other as the whole wide world – the attachment whose flip side is the impassioned crushing of a flower underfoot.

Related Posts:

• The Last City I Loved: Omaha, Nebraska
• HEAVY-HANDED: Cat Ladies
• Hateful Things
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• Hold On to What You’ve Got

At BOMB, an illustrated short story about a man falling in love with a horse, by artist Myron Kaufman. The story, Horse Scents, and its author, are introduced by filmmaker Charlie Kaufman, Myron Kaufman’s son.

Related Posts:

• Famous Rapes #1: Old Master Paintings
• Poems with Some Spine
• HEAVY-HANDED: Cat Ladies
• Hateful Things
• The Rumpus Interview with Jason Polan, Part II