Tag Archives: relationships

Low Cut

Comets

Certainly, you can imagine that souls have no real shape or form. They could be rounded and plush like clouds, or faceted and compact like gems. Maybe they are completely transparent, save for a single point of light. Perhaps it depends on the person they came from, or the next person they will be.

So it isn’t impossible to believe they could stretch for miles. If not all, then maybe parts of them reach out above and below. Long tails like comets, projecting behind them, leaving a path that alters gravity on some small scale. A sighting or a special event sought out in the night sky.

What if that happens while you’re still alive, and your soul is still inside you? Small parts of you, invisible to the eye, reach out without you knowing? To all the wants and desires you never talk about, the dreams you never attained. The people you never see anymore. The loves you can’t get over.

Each silent, auxiliary piece of us would still be us. The most concentrated version of us. With its own whorled structure, like a fingerprint. Its own level of warmth as it passes. A signature scent that wafts in its wake. A custom sound, too, the same way Tesla owners choose a backup warning as a personality trait.

And also, our weaknesses? An inability to calm oneself, a shameful compulsion for self-soothing. Incredible, all-consuming lust that blots out all other brain activity. Insecurity that wraps around the throat like a cold, dead hand. A restlessness that rivals even the most haunted of ghosts.

Your soul is showing, then, like a slip peeking out. It’s completely betraying your best efforts to be cool. But it’s also finding the other souls; the ones who are the same temperature, color, taste. Entangling tails as they sniff each other, get in to the real parts.

And when they do — get all wrapped up like that — there’s no undoing it. It would be easier to untangle a million fine strands of gold chains and pendants.

That’s why it’s so hard to forget them.

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Low Cut

The Night We Met, Again

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I meet you in a bar. Of course I do. It’s dimly lit and warm, with wine. You’ve come down here to me, and you are sitting in a barseat with an expectant drink, your back to the door when I walk in. You have on a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and casual boots. You’re fidgeting with your straw, or the condensation on the glass.

I am wearing something cool and comfortable. A pretty blouse with jeans, boots, and my favorite jacket. I did my hair so that I wouldn’t play with it too much. Right now it’s pretty and long. It curls just enough and casually catches the light. Soft jewelry and makeup. I feel calm and ready.

I walk up to you and touch your shoulder. You look back at me with a look that is half nervous, half disinterested. There’s a warm sea between us of uncertainty and long-awaited guesses. We aren’t sure whether or not to hug, so we only sort of do. That weird shoulder thing you do with coworkers at Christmas parties. We are all business at this point.

But we both smile, and search each other’s faces, briefly. Trying to read one another’s first impression. I remind myself to just be myself. I’m not sure what’s running through your head.

I talk to break the ice. Ask you simple things, and order a glass of wine. Your drink is almost done, so you order another. When you look away, I steal glances at your skin. Search for familiar marks, catch glimpses of memories. You ask me questions in kind, and I respond. It’s not an easy rapport, as much as we’d like it to be.

My hand reflexively wants to touch you. Feel you out for anything. A dormant spark. Any sort of remembrance.

Your last girlfriend is heavy in the back of my mind. I can’t help but wonder if she is in the back of yours, too. I feel compelled to tell you that I’ve searched for you in the past. That I’ve seen bits of your life, and have pieced together the parts you aren’t telling me. I have so many questions about things that are none of my business. They get in the way of me enjoying this moment, and you.

So I don’t hold back. There’s no reason to. I ask everything in case it helps to shatter this barrier. You aren’t sure you should tell me, but the alcohol is a good lubricant. It begins to pour out. I feel like a therapist’s pillow, just for a moment.

I tell you about my in-betweens. Work. New York. Men. Jenn and the babies and the now. Me flying and writing and shifting gears, hopefully for the last time. You are quiet, and either thinking about what I’m saying, or hoping this will all be over soon.

We switch to lighter topics. You and your simple dreams. Me and my complicated ones. The things that could be but aren’t for sure yet. You probably want to sleep with me, but aren’t interested in anything more. At least, that’s the conclusion I come to. But that’s what I thought the first time I met you, too.

And here we are. In some sort of odd homecoming. You trying to figure out why we are here. And me waiting for the answer.

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Low Cut

Hot Lava

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It took me way too long to see the movie When Harry Met Sally. I am a romantic, I love easy comedy, and Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan are two of my 80’s baby favorites. Of course I loved it, and have since thought a lot about the different kinds of relationships that can occur between a man and a woman.

I had drinks with a man last night who I can’t help but care about in a borderline maternal way. I have a lot of male friends who have fallen under this nurturing gaze, partly because I work in a male-dominated profession, and partly because I don’t have children of my own. I want to listen to them, feed them, and make sure they got home safely. I have this urge to bring them under my folded wings and warm them like freshly hatched chicks in an unpredictable spring.

A lot of times, these feelings grow into something more. As you share yourself with someone, and they open up to you in turn, it’s only natural that connections begin to forge in those soft streams of vulnerability that run deeply in us all. This can either cause a fraternal relationship to turn into something almost sibling-like, or plant a bunch of what if? seeds that lead to eventual catastrophe and awkward mornings.

None of my romantic relationships have ever started this way, though. At least, none of the ones that lasted more than a month. The big loves I’ve had in my life have always been rooted first in attraction, chemistry, and that thing. Of course, these haven’t been successful either, if I’m judging by the fact that I’m still single. But when I look back at those relationships, they were the ones that cut grooves through my internal landscape, changed the trajectory of rivers inside me, moved mountains around me. They altered my entire countenance, so that I was completely unrecognizable from the person I was before them.

Certainly, friendships can have that affect, too. But it almost seems like it’s a secondary purpose to love. To tug at the fault lines within you, and break you apart.

So that, through these fissures, your beautiful insides can pour out and create a brand new surface.

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Lacy Things

Taste

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In her most recent Brainpickings newsletter, Maria Popova reviewed Rebecca Solnit’s latest release, Cinderalla Liberator. In it, she talks about love that is free of romantic tropes and expectations, where two people can love each other without valuing it by how Instagram-worthy the pictures are. Where love can be a less formal endeavor and, in turn, a less loaded one. Where you can fall in love without having to justify it to your friends over drinks or your family over the holidays.

While I am not at all opposed to the molten and sticky sweet qualities of a passionate love that burns out of control over the course of a few hours, I’m also convinced that it’s a characteristic of learning how to love, rather than a requirement for it.

We grow up (hopefully) learning familial love, and the possibilities surrounding this sort of unconditional, comfortable, and subtle feeling. But familiar love is only one end of the pendulum, and passionate love sits at its opposite station. As such, it is more fleeting, less stable, and sharper in contrast.

When our bodies and minds bloom into reproductive beings, the various gradients of the love spectrum are opened up for exploration. Which is why, when we are younger, passionate love feels so exhilarating and unreal. It’s a newly-created, wild, ephemeral thing, unfurling inside and outside of our bodies. It’s immediately at home yet totally unfamiliar, a foreign entity that suddenly becomes part of you. It’s like tasting, for the first time, something so wonderful you could have never imagined it existing. Only instead of just lingering for a second on your tongue, it’s suddenly inhabiting every cell of your body, and simultaneously bursting from you like a thousand pricks of fiery light.

Replicating this feeling becomes less and less frequent as you age, whether or not you are with the same person or you’ve gone it alone. It’s not necessarily an indication that love is growing stale, or that you are growing bitter, but that your body has simply become accustomed to the fire. You’ve spent all that time swinging back and forth across the pendulum; learning people, feelings, conditions, stupid mistakes, ego trips, and lovely peace. Eventually, your sense for what love means begins to settle like pudding in a chocolate cream pie, slowly becoming level at the surface. Even new sparks, though they still light you up, feel more like licking the spoon than devouring the whole thing.

The quality of the jolt isn’t what matters, though. What matters is that it continues to shake you out of your blank stare into space, or your seething anger at standstill traffic, or your general apathy about life overall. When someone can continue to bring you down to earth — and, yet, every once in awhile allow you to escape it through a tunnel of shared looks and private jokes — to look at a horizon with you and somehow naturally also find the school of dolphins playing in the ocean  — to have the same craving for margaritas at the same time on a Wednesday evening — to assign seats on the couch without formal discussion — to fall asleep without having to apologize for every little thing first — to just sit in the same space without fucking saying anything.

What matters is that its your flavor of love, and that you truly enjoy it.

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