Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

It’s not fair, summing up a relationship in a single image. A year, six years, ten years – reduced to one interaction that can’t possibly capture the complexity and nuance, the reasons you liked the person and the reasons you you’re not together any more.

But it functions as sort of shorthand. Can I really tell the story of a slowly developing friendship, going to prom, spending all my free time with you, when what I really remember is being told that you couldn’t be yoked to a non-Christian? I know it’s not fair, and that one sentence can’t by itself capture why it defines that relationship. But there you have it.

Sometimes I tell the story to see how someone will react: she told me that I didn’t like jazz.  I can tell a lot about a person in their response to that single statement.

Other times I’m giving a warning of sorts: she threw herself headlong onto the couch and started bawling, because the pie crust had crumbled. That’s not fair as a summation – truly fails to capture the bulk of that relationship and what it was really about – but, for me, clearly shows why I couldn’t stay, and what my expectations for mature behavior are.

Sometimes I’m giving myself an out: I really tried, I worked at this relationship! But the anger, the rage she showed while driving down the highway after I mumbled, “there’s the Oscar Meyer Weiner-mobile” shows the pervasive levels of mistrust and paranoia. The manic laughter that followed my belated, clear restatement, “we just passed the Oscar Meyer Weiner-mobile,” was just icing on the cake. There are many, many other stories I could tell, but this woman was just nuts.

What does it mean when someone disappears for a week after I discovered her secret? It was a dark secret –although not as dark as some of the other things she had already shared – but once again, there was no way of establishing a level of trust. I was dating a wild animal whose instincts would always be in control.

I can’t seem to write the story that’s on my heart this week; and there are other stories I’ve left out, maybe the most important ones. But today I’m struck by the vividness of the idea of the single image, how it captures something important and broken at the heart of each relationship, even as it leaves out so much.

And I wonder, what will be the next image? How will the next relationship be summed up? For once, can’t it be something good, something positive? Or is it only possible to find that image after the fact, a coroner’s report – in which case, I don’t want the next relationship to be summed up.