5 - distances untouched
What really makes us is beyond grasping, it is way beyond knowing. We give in to love because it gives us some sense of what is unknowable. Nothing else matters. Not at the end….
—Stephen Fleming, last scene of Malle's Damage
~~~
It doesn’t come to you gradually, it just happens, like startling awake from a dream/nightmare, raising up in a sweat, eyes wide open, and there’s no one beside you… I’ve got cancer, I’m dying, and the woman I once loved, dead to me.
No fiction this, no film narrative, no conjured tragedy or fanciful story gone awry, it’s real. No Consuela/Penelope Cruz to turn to, or a Fanny/Abbie Cornish, or any incarnation of grand and passionate women they’ve artfully created, just this, sitting at Pannikin’s Coffeehouse looking out, alone, thinking about distances untouched.
Rilke: “Each time we reach out with joy, each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following, but also alter the past within us, weave it into the pattern of our existence, and dissolve the foreign body of pain whose exact composition we ultimately do not know.”
Altering the past within?... Eight months since relationship’s end, nine months since chemotherapy ended, and I’m asking about the word, the experience of “love.” What has it meant? What did it mean with Maya? Ever so unsettling to realize what did not exist. I appreciated her work ethic, her excellent effort, her driven and leaning-forward passion to study and follow her ambition, an ambition I think she never fully understood. And of course, I was drawn to her physically, enchanted and ensorcelled by her natural sensuality, but love, what was it over the years? We did not adore one another, did not admire one another, reverence for the other did not exist. How horrible to see it now, that from the very beginning we were at odds, a kind of sexual tension that kept it all wild and engaging, and I tried to keep my distance, to not trust, to not be vulnerable, but I could not resist. I knew it was dangerous to completely open up, but I was lost. She had always been hard on others, critical and demanding, unwilling to allow and accept others for who they were. Always measuring them, comparing them competitively, and fierce in her demands and condemnations.
Crazed it is to understand post facto, that we were wrong for each other, that there were so many opportunities in the early going to walk away. We lacked the courage to be honest about who we were and what we wanted in life. The last years of misery, loneliness and suffering—the end result.
This is it for me. I think I get it. Moving on… You have to wonder about romantic love, the “forever” sensations given to us by our poets and writers. She had it with the one before me and I wooed her away from him, and I wooed her unintentionally. I had no idea what I was doing. Hadn’t imagined a relationship with her, how could I, she was this young, vital, gorgeous creature who had looked at me askance, hadn’t really imagined she’d be interested. I just made up my mind to try and dazzle, “I’ll show you, I am worthy, I am someone lovable and interesting.” And I bombarded her with letters, I wrote to her for a full year, without fail, and I rarely got responses, and I kept at it. And in the midst of this perverse letter writing campaign, the one she’s in relationship to, the one she would return to after her journey overseas, the real love of her life, well, he got wind of my unintentional wooing and he came round and lets me know she’s “his,” and I smiled, thinking to myself, “Well, you’re fucking clueless.”
An exercise in imaginative writing: I had written myself into the life of a woman who from the beginning had found me wanting. Beware of what you imagine. I broke off with my lover when she returned, she hers, the beginning of the end.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 5:51AM 
Reader Comments (2)
As one who knows all too well the pain of broken relationships, this entry touches me at a very deep level. How clearly we can see when looking back - how blind we are in the moment. Thank you for your courage to travel this road of self examination and telling of your story. I am in your debt...
The framing insight from David Hare's screenplay (based on Josephine Hart's novel) really got to me. One could just end the search to understand, to know, and in another sense it goads one further. Nothing else really does matter in my view, the experience of love and the attempt to comprehend what we are told is incomprehensible. To attempt always to be in that "looking back" moment even when in the ever-present.