The Greatest Work I've Ever Written

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.