All of our love filling all of our room
Your low warm voice curses
As you find the string to strike within me
That rings out a note heard in heaven
How the passing of a month brings me back to the crazed way I used to fall in love – the main province of youth – so cruelly coming when we are least prepared to endure it. Spring, and its exquisite warmer nights perfumed with sweet fruit tree flowers, plants me squarely back in memories of being in the Boston condo, when alone and filled with longing, I’d lie in the bedroom and wish for the ache of loneliness to subside.
Back then I was brave enough to face the pain without trickery – no drink, no mind games, no convincing myself otherwise. I embraced my solitude perversely like it was a partner – and if I’d just met someone in the haphazard way destiny worked in a time before social media, I could work up an infatuation before they even learned my name, and I gave in to that feverish passion with my entire being. I always fell too fast, burning too brightly for it to ever last. I didn’t know any other way to love, and I didn’t care to learn.
In just a few weeks I could convince myself that he was the one, that we were meant for each other, that no one else was so acutely aligned with my own trajectory. Looking back, it was always a forced and awkward pairing, even amid moments of tenderness and occasional passion – and to think it was set and complete in under a month was romantic folly at best, self-destructive idiocy at worst.
I’d thrash out those emotions, giving space and time and obsession to those feelings, because I was desperately starved for connection and companionship. I don’t mind saying now that it was pathetic – honestly, I didn’t mind how pathetic it was then either. What could be wrong about loving someone? So what if it didn’t make sense – the heart doesn’t abide by sense and reason. I was deliberately in command and control over so many other aspects of my life, a little romantic fervor seemed allowable. To this day, I maintain there is no fault in not wanting to go through life all alone. (Nor is there any shame in actually going through the damn thing without a companion, so it cuts both ways.)
Heaven, heaven…
Not one part of me cringes at the way I used to behave – especially in the spring. Boston was too romantic in atmosphere and environment for me to do much of anything other than fall in love. When the cherry blooms danced like ballerinas in the slightest soft breeze, and the sweet scent of apple blossoms and Korean spice viburnum mixed with the nostalgic magic of lilacs and hyacinths – how could anyone resist the tiniest nudge in the direction of romance? It would be a crime against nature not to fall in love on those enchanting nights.
But every morning I woke alone, stomach faintly aching with the muscle memory of my weeping, eyes crusty with tears dried in my sleep. The condo was so quiet on those mornings, and it never felt right for a city to be that quiet. I treated it with reverence, padding silently into the kitchen to prepare a cup of tea and wonder at the ridiculousness of my emotional state.
Now I bend like a willow, thinking of you
Like a murmuring brook curving about you
As I sip on the rest of the coffee you left
A kiss left of you
Heaven, heaven, heaven…
How quickly I could conjure and conduct a love affair with the young men who so innocuously populated the world about me at the time – the cute barista who spoke broken English in an endearing French accent, the hapless gentleman who came into the store looking for help in putting an outfit together (always in need of tie advice), the classmate who knew my name when I hadn’t even told it to him. I always thought it was something intrinsic and inherent to them – to those adorable men and their soulful eyes – when all the while it was my own inherent specialness that bestowed such a gift upon them – my own willingness to bend and the invitation extended to share a life together. Against all charges of vanity and ego and selfishness, a certain generosity of spirit when it came to falling in love was my one redeeming quality. How unfortunate that it would always be seen and felt more as weakness and melancholy, some sad act of desperation when I really just wanted to play and laugh with someone deep into the night.
Hear the storm dances outside
Something set free is running through the night
And the dark awaits us all around the corner
But here in our place, we have for the day
Can we stay a while and listen for heaven?
Heaven…
When I look back at the young man I was back then, at how I’d turn the makings of a single spring month into a life-altering love affair that charged and changed my existence for all time, I feel nothing but tenderness for the man I used to be.
And I’d do it all over again – every single goddamned time.
Everyone is better for having loved.
Always…
Heaven.
