Mins,
“My
lover, down below.”
Does it sometimes feel like
we are having the same argument over and over again?  A wise man, wise from experience, once said
that every fight is the some version of “you don’t understand me.” There is
something to that. Intimacy comes with a lot of baggage. There is the sense of
slight in everything. A loose word and some careless act can lead to a mighty
fight. There is this heightened sense of betrayal in everything.
Romantic love particularly has
this way of making us feel like everything is at stake in every argument. It heightens
the stakes because it is one of those things we can choose to walk away from. We
are not as entangled as we can be with families and complex friendships. If pushed
far enough we can endure the separation and the divorce court, push past
selfless love for child and other points of union and escape into freedom. For a
long time I did not even believe in romantic love. I did it. I went through the
motions. Yet I hid it all under the banner of general love. I tried to keep it
out of the specific. I had a template for loving others. I had a template for lovers.
I had a wedding date set and all my children named and a way to act and be
without really feeling one way or the other. Of course I fell short of all my
ideal. First of all, I am human not God or even Godly. Slights hurt whether I was
the tin man or not. Second, the other person could see the deadness in my eyes.
They kept on wanting more but I was efficient enough to make break ups their fault
and keeping the leaking ship sailing my preoccupation. Love was general and I was
an army of one spreading the fairy dust of indifference over the un-salty
earth.
Then I met you. There is nothing
more real than running into the absolute love of your life. It is like getting
hit by the fastest train known to man. It comes up on your blindside. I had
written about you all my life and tried to dress others in your peculiar
dresses but nothing fit. I guess that is the way to describe that first moment
of holding your hand: you fit. The joke I always make was finally true in
reverse: I was powerless against your light arts. I could not look away. All the
things that were hard for me to say or do or be became simple and all the
things that I thought were just general became very specific. The problem was
you were frightfully human. Just like me. You did not come with angel wings or
a heart made to bear my stupidities. You were a real human being and not an
illusion. You were not made for me. You had an existence outside me. Yet, you
loved me and I still struggle with that. You opened your life to me and told me
things I did not want to hear. Still I could not bear to not look. All my
troubles, all my perversions, all my excuses for inertia and distance
disappeared at the idea of loving another human being from knowledge and wisdom
and understanding and with all my emotions thrown in. It is not that you are
some deity up above. It is that you are my lover down below.
Everything is real when set
to the music of loving you. Of learning to love you.
I still struggle and I still
fall. This is fine. You are not Christ to redeem me or God to anchor me in the
eternal real. You are my lover, down below. Life is an adventure and you are my co-traveler.
I am not above you and you
are not beside me. We sort of mingle into one. I don’t know what life will be
without you. You are all my hopes and dreams and fantasies come true but as a
real person. It is scary really. It is scary meeting the person you should have
waited for.
Yet in your eyes I do not
see my own regret. I see the future and finally it is in the shape of love.