Report from the Love Shack

Thank you for your comments on my previous post about love. I've been reading them over and over again. I appreciate your wisdom, your stories, and your honesty from the bottom of my heart.

It's not too late to leave a comment if you haven't done so already. I'm listening. Tell me what you know.

Just scroll down to the previous post.

Love: I Need Answers

My parents.  I think they really dug each other. Look at my dad. Don't you want to be looked at like that?

I've been thinking a lot about love lately. Why we use the phrase fall in love instead of soar into love, melt into love, expand into love. So many possibilities. Fall out of love seems right. But why fall in?

How is it that you can commit your life to being with someone and then it doesn't work out? You promised. Now you're un-promising? How is it that you can laugh hysterically with someone for an entire summer and then just up and decide Nope. How can you waste weeks trying to convince someone that you really have nothing in common when you're so attracted to that someone that the house burned down every time he walked in the door? How can you love one person and then find that you also accidentally love someone else but you still love that other person too? Can you fall in love just by reading a person's words when you've never even met him? What if you never meet him? Will you go on loving him? 

I fell in love when I was 15. Does that even count? Does it have more traction because we had a baby? Why don't I ever think of that man I was married to for 30 years? Am I a psychopath? Is it pure survival? Can you survive love? Can you fall in love with someone so gradually you would have never predicted it? How slow can love go? How fast?  If Train A leaves the station at 4pm and is traveling 40 mph and Train B leaves the station at 8pm, traveling 60mph, how many hours will it take for Train B to pass train A? If there are lovers on those trains, what will happen then? Can you fall in love with someone when you don't really ever talk? How in the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say? (This last question courtesy of John Prine)

I'm asking. Just asking. Tell me. Tell me what you know. I'm listening. Tell me a story. Your story. Tell me everything you know.

A Poem by Amy Gerstler

I read some poetry most days. It's good for a writer of prose to contemplate a story told so concisely. In a good poem, the language is vivid and the emotional pay-off is quick and strong.

Dusk

Dear, I can't subsist on this diet

(really more of a fast—celery

seed and a soft word every other

month) any longer. Is that blood

on your pillowcase or another girl's

lipstick? I want you to know,

I've had such unalloyed joy

over the past several decades,

smelling your hair and petting

your sweat-beaded feet while

you were asleep. It was far sweeter

than I ever thought possible.

But my ancestors are welling up

in me now and keep nudging me

toward the door. Bells are rung,

harps are played: recessional music.

We both know the theater will close

in a few minutes. If you had been

more attentive or a better pretender,

I could have run on fumes for a few

more years, sipping snowmelt,

remaining quite high on it. Let

the record show, I recited prayers

for your perpetual ascension

and good health as I laid this note

in its frozen envelope on your desk

and left, taking both dogs, the teal

parakeet, and the black cat with me.

They got custody of our love.

Fall, Fell, Fallen, Falling

It's easy to forget a past emotional state. When your heart hurts so bad you wonder if you might actually have broken your breastbone or fractured a rib, who wants to recall the nitty-gritty details of how the hurt really felt?

Songs have a way of bringing those states back to us, I think--whether we want to be reminded or not. A couple of nights ago I was sitting in the kitchen of the man who loves me when he began playing Lucinda Williams' album Little Honey. I listened to this album everyday last October (in fact, I blogged about one of the songs here-- http://hisbigfatindianwedding.blogspot.com/2008/10/taxman.html when I was doing a writer's residency at the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts. And if you had asked me recently to recall how I was doing during that month on the slow trajectory of divorce recovery, I would have said,"Oh, I was pretty much over it. I was concentrating on my work... blah, blah." But hearing those songs again this October while sharing the kitchen table of the man I love, I saw the night and day of these 2 Octobers.

Which says something about memory and trauma and music. And love.

And I think it might say something about writing, too--how to get at what it was we were really feeling in a past moment.

Anyhow. If wishes were horses, I'd have...an empty pasture right now. There isn't anything I am really, really aching for.

Tragedy

I'm feeling the tragedy of it all. The fallen. The woman beyond grief.

If a marriage has to end, it shouldn't end like this.

I'm in Paris writing my thesis while short stories spin in and out of my head. But there are even more words flying through cyberspace between me and my attorney. Me and Mr. Ex. Me and the sweet financial guy who's helping me understand how to divide what can be divided.

A battle.

Some Things Don't Make Any Sense

"Hi Beautiful," is what the guy I'm dating says to me when he recognizes my caller I.D. & picks up his phone. Or sometimes, in a surprised voice as though he's been looking for me everywhere, "There

you are!"

Mr. Ex used to answer his phone, "Is this going to be long or short?"

So why did I wake up this morning thinking I was still married & I was in the bed Mr. Ex & I shared? Why did I hear wild parrots outside & the clatter of dog toenails on our wooden floor?

Some things don't make any sense at all.

My Life Right Now

My mother has lung cancer. Her twin (my bonus mother) is in the hospital, impossibly frail. I feel nauseated from too many mussels in butter and garlic and too much cheap red wine. I want to pillage my mother's "drug box" and pocket a few xanax. I don't know if I should register for this semester of my MFA program or not. Mr. Ex owes me an email as we try to finish up the division of community property and the bitter taste of betrayal is not a distant enough memory and I wonder when if ever I will look fondly on the years we spent together. The man who loves me now says I will. But I think he is a far kinder and more forgiving person than I will ever be.

Nothing Compares to You

I'm a mess, I admit it.  

The road trip is over.  I'm about to board a plane and fly back to L.A. where I will be "home" for 36 hours before I board a plane to Greece. I've left my daughter M. in St. Paul for what we are calling her first "grown-up summer." She's almost 2o and she will live in my condo, drive the car her dad has handed down to her and work a  9-5 internship tutoring inner city kids. For the next few days she will be hosting her brother, his wife and their 3 kids and putting her first household in order.

Meanwhile, I feel like I've come almost full circle. I became a blogger after my trip to Greece last fall--when I left the country to be as far away as I could manage when Mr. Ex got re-married. I'm returning for a writing workshop + hiking with the author Meredith Hall  http://meredithhall.org/  and I have fallen completely in love with the man I've been dating since December.

Here's how I know:

M. found little to appreciate on my ipod during our long drive from California to St. Paul EXCEPT for Sinead O'Connor's hit Nothing Compares to You. We played it a couple of times every few hundred miles. Mr. Ex liked this song and when the two of us were driving in the car together when it came on the radio in the 80s or 90s or whenever that was, he'd sing along and put his hand on my knee.

On this trip, I remembered that and there was an interesting pang, but I didn't really care.  All I could think of was the man I'm going home to.

I am very, very lucky. 

And a mess.

A Poster on the Wall in the Burbank Airport

I was blind once. My eyes had to be patched for 48 hours after I scratched both my corneas by wearing my contact lenses (the old-fashioned hard ones) for too long.  I woke up the next morning unable to open my eyes in the sunlight. After a trip to the ER, Mr. Ex drove me home and made me beef stroganoff. Eating is  awkward when you are newly blind. You can't find your knife or fork or the plate, and getting a sauce-covered noodle into your mouth is nigh unto impossible. Mr. Ex fed me my dinner that night back when we loved each other.

Love is blind, too--or so the saying goes.  But I don't really believe that any more than I believe that justice is blind. I think we lovers see the writing on the wall and choose to ignore it--bind our eyes against the truth and go on our merry way until the wall falls on us and we can't ignore it and its messages any longer.

Another Fall

As I worked all morning on editing my memoir, I came across this passage:

Now, a year and a half since I’d met him at the audition, the soft-rough combo of his flannel shirts and the denim of his jeans were irresistible.  He smelled like everything good in Minnesota that fall--leaves, crystal air with the promise of snow, black earth, and apples.  I was still in my body cast and couldn’t drive.  I needed someone with a car to help me gather set pieces for a production of The Matchmaker.  We were looking for a turn of the century barber chair, an ornate hall tree, tables and bentwood chairs.

Eric and I spent afternoons burnished by pumpkin-colored sunsets driving through the flat Minnesota countryside to antique stores.  Birch trees flashed by the car windows; white-hot warning signals telling us that love was coming while I tried to keep my mind on furniture.  His Dodge was old and smelled like all cars that have been through a decade of winters--the rubbery stink of slushy boots, the burn of the heater coated with the dust of summer dying to the odorless scent of a hard freeze.  The air was brisk and dry.  You could give yourself an electric shock touching the metal door handle.  But that was nothing compared to the current of desire.  I imagined sparks--hot orange, red and yellow pulled from the palate of trees lining the road.  My idea of setting things right by marrying the father of my baby was getting harder to hold on to.  Setting things right would have to happen some other way. 

Editing one's life can be tempting, but I left the passage in the book because it's part of the story.  That's how it happened.