I
have had the great fortune of loving and being loved by many tremendous women.
In
the entirety of my conscious recollection I’ve sought a romantic, passionate
love that burned as thoroughly as my desire to obtain it. To my dismay I
learned time and again that love, being loved, and being in love are an elusive
trinity in which most often achieved is only two of the three.
As
recent as earlier this week I was certain that the love of my life had come and
gone. But as it always is with certainty, many facets and layers lie deeper
than comprehension, revealing themselves in that distinct instant that resolve
is achieved.
I’ve
never experienced love without the accompaniment of a commitment to “forever.”
I’ve instinctually known and repressed innumerable hesitations (and glaring
forewarnings) in the belief that opening myself up to the possibility of
possibility equated to loving unconditionally. Where this pursuit has failed is
in the reality that no creature or concept exists unconditionally. Every
present and future detail hinges on the condition of past circumstances.
Often
I’ve encountered the role of probability in love, like a seedling that on one
particular day falls to the rainforest floor, nestles in wholesome soil, but
fails to bud in the enveloping darkness. But in another equally obscure week,
month or year a seedling almost identical in proportion and ambition falls in
perfect unison with the collapse of a massive tree. Sunlight suddenly inundates
the crevices of a previously insurmountable blackness, nourishing this particular seedling to rise higher and
higher toward the life force that sustains its very existence.
The
difference between life or death for the seedlings is the same for the life or
death of romantic love. What roots and springs in darkness starves rapidly,
though try as it might, withering dissipation is inevitable amidst the lack of
sustenance. In a bout of unpredictability, as fate so chooses to tumble a
monstrous blockade and let light in, an equally deserving particular seedling, a similarly honestly-intentioned love, has a
chance to flourish that was previously proven impossible.
Therefore,
I’ve concluded that it is not possible to love without condition, without
expectation, because every moment prior to the collision and surrender of two
compatible energies is conditioning the reactions, rejections, stipulations,
tendencies and tolerances of the unique individual and it is not until agitating conflict or synchronized revelation
that two souls are capable of deciphering the circumstances of their lovers’
past and compassionately embracing such conditions as the manifestation of
their lover in the present. This is
compatibility. The unification of two people as they were, transformed into who they are and either optimistically or
pessimistically, who they will become.
In
October I found myself tangled in loves grip. The failure to be truthfully
compatible with anyone for an extended period of time had left me in shambles.
My reaction to the suffocating lack of unconditional love was to sprout wings
and travel. Through a series of unpredictable interactions I was introduced to
the poet, to Brianna, to Bri. While acknowledging the bristling nervous energy
that was exchanged between us, I was still in love with one woman and falling
in love with another. So I set aside the possibility of possibility and
proceeded to participate in my previously initiated emotional demise. I was not
ready to shed the familiar disappointment so often encountered in the Midwest
and embark on a new adventure. Though knowing I must, I had yet to redefine
myself, to know myself in perfect alignment with the Universe as I did in the
solitary cross-country drive. Our seedling had fallen but remained indeterminately
dormant.
I
arrived on California’s doorstep somewhere between molting and being renewed, a
process that took weeks more to complete. Finding that I was, for the very first
time, entirely alone led to silence, then exploration, and then to an eager
young lover intrigued by my withholding. Another first- to be viewed as complex
and mysterious. She would often say, “Tell me everything,” but I was uncertain,
undefined; free of the slavery that coincides with being known and naked in every way. I was vulnerable to presumptions and
misinterpretations within and without my silence.
We
were lovers who shared stolen moments between obligations.
We
were enemies, suspect of agendas.
We
were friends, backtracking the canyons and canopies overlooked in our haste for
instant gratification.
We
were companions in particularities: .07 black ink pens, highlighting Camus,
adoring the rush of substances that removed us from unalterable realities.
My
heart fought against her lulling tide and sweeping undertow for months –
conflicted by the emotions this stranger evoked with her foreign mannerisms –
tender gentleness I’d rarely encountered with lovers twice her age and who,
even after thousands of hours of invested effort, still felt like strangers
themselves.
She
first told me that she loved me after discovering an Einstein book (a
post-shift surprise) I’d tucked between the windshield and wiper of her
stylishly logical hatchback. Her reaction floored me. It was too soon for my
heart, but the intuition that guided me on many an unfamiliar route advised me to be patient with myself. The uncertainty of such uncertainty is the
potential that all one should feel
never comes, that one has forced the impossible and therefore lied by omission.
The elusive trinity glows like the Holy Grail, to love and be in love are
concepts divisible by acceptance. I have more than once believed that the woman
in my bed, on my arm, occupying my mind, would call me their wife and have the
flexibility to achieve “forever” one day at a time. I had already believed that
I’d encountered the love of my life.
These
ridged restraints left no room for Bri. I was certain that all I’d left
to offer her would eventually be unveiled as inadequate. But as it always is
with certainty, the compression of resolve grinding against the force of
potential erupted to reveal a sunset epiphany that I have had the great fortune
of loving and being loved by many tremendous women. I’ve once encountered the
love of my life as she pertained, as I pertained, to the understandings of one
another and ourselves in the defining moments we shared. Evolution is swift in
a famine and I have been starving for reincarnation for years – years that
manifested their trials, successes, failures and achievements into the very
moment when the compatible energy that shaped Bri’s reactions, rejections,
stipulations, tendencies and tolerances collided with my own – and through
agitating conflict and synchronized revelation, our compatibility was born.
Last
evening, on the bed in which she and I have shaped so many understandings of
one another, I found a 1929 Underwood Typewriter that even after I’d sold my
television, BluRay player, excess books and glittering reminders of promises
not kept, I was unable to afford. It is invaluable if you worship Kerouac and
Ginsberg, Anais and (moderately) Hemingway, as I do. Its steel keys offer up a rhythmic symphony
that pre-dates economic ruin, historically devastating mass genocide, the
technology on which you’re reading this. It reaches back to a time when there
was still something to hope for.
Be
it purposeful recognition or accidental indifference, this navy blue marvel is
as crisp as the pack of cigarettes in my palm and when I saw it resting there
with a note cradled across the type bar that read, “Because I simply
love you,” tears came easier than they have in decades. My broken heart was
suddenly laced back into a condition of entirety it cannot recall having known
since the age of double-knotted tennis shoes and learning to ride a bike. Years
of self-inflicted scars faded to expose delicate skin worth treasuring. My mind
was flooded with gratitude and appreciation for the probability woven amidst
pure chance that resulted in our initial introduction and conditioned our pasts
and present with such purposeful coincidences that it impossible to dismiss the
obviousness of the miracle of us.
I
will never be able to regret, or cease, or dissipate loving or being loved by
the many tremendous women whose conditions did not equate to long term
compatibility. On the contrary, I am eternally indebted to the perpendicular
intersections of magnificent loves and lovers whose labyrinths charted my
course to Brianna’s arms, to my head on her chest, feeling the glow of that
most sacred trinity within her, within me. I am loved, I love, I am in love
with a woman flexible enough to achieve forever
one day at a time. She is the cinnamon in my coffee, the ink smudges on my
wrist, the answer to every prayer I’ve ever said or will say. She is the
passage in the novel that incites reckless dog eared, furiously highlighted
gasps of utter disbelief while tugging on the sleeve of your subway companion, clumsily
forcing the literature in their hands, begging for them to experience the
incredible beauty of the simplest words that, when combined, induce emotions within
you that are so profound -- you are absolutely certain that it is in this
moment that you have been brought back to the galaxy of the truly alive, reincarnated from the famine, no longer near
extinction, now widely proclaimed as the happenstance phenomenon of strictly conditional
evolution.
