In my last post, I wondered about the single image as a summation of a relationship – and I have two
further thoughts. More than two, really, but at least two.
Does the image have to be negative? Maybe not, maybe focusing
on the negative is part of my problem. What if I simply declare that the
abiding image isn’t the abrupt departure, but instead: hiking at dusk around
the lake, listening to the whippoorwills? I’d never heard a whippoorwill
before, but it was immediately obvious what it was. That’s a nice image, one
that obliquely reveals what was good about that relationship (at some point I
may have to write out that story, but not now).
What about flying a kite on the beach – not just any kite,
but the box kite I had made by hand for you? That starts to get at the paradox
of this exercise: the images of hope are filled with more sadness – because
it’s ultimately hope unfulfilled –
than the actual disappointments I wrote about before. I still have the pictures
of that first day, the kite getting smaller and smaller as you let out the
line, eventually fully extended, that kite soaring above all the others,
holding up in the stiff breeze off the ocean. Why are so many of my later
memories, in the different cities in which we lived, individual rather than shared:
things I did by myself, or with friends of ours, but almost never with you? Of
course there are shared experiences -
you telling me about your catered lunch, in detail, because you know I like
Chinese food, but me absentmindedly singing over the top of your description
because I had stopped listening and really couldn’t care less? Do you remember what
song I was singing? But the burden here shifted, something that was my fault;
or maybe even simply revealing of the space that had grown between us. In any
case, I’m back to a negative summation. The positive images all seem to be early
in the relationship, not late.
Other images offer different problems: repeated across
relationships, perhaps as an attempt to regain what was appealing about that
first one. The uniqueness fades, and little is left of that first image. Or maybe
they’re elusive, hidden in a haze of alcohol. How is it that I remember so
little of the specifics of the relationship to which all others are compared?
Maybe they’re embarrassing - “NSFW”- and yet in that fact
reveal the essential nature of the relationship: but I’m not writing erotica,
after all. That I can’t write anything I’d want my kids to read shows why it
was doomed, based on something ephemeral, not really the basis for a
relationship at all.
Does the positive image come from the uniqueness, or from
the repetition? Maybe it depends on the person. Playing gin rummy every night –
seriously, we wore out a pack of
“uncoated” cards – served as a kind of anchor in an otherwise chaotic
relationship. But standing in the parking lot of the Japanese Gardens, one
August afternoon (and that’s a story I will tell again, one day) - really does
capture a lot of what I like about you. And the paradox reemerges: that makes
me profoundly sad, in a way that so-called “sad” images don’t.
That question, repetition or uniqueness, leads to a second
question: does the relationship need to be over in order to provide an image,
or can there be an abiding image that serves as a lived ideal? And if so, does
it come from a single moment that captures, not the attraction, but the
bonding? Or the patterns that emerge out of time spent together, forging a
common experience? In either case, I would suggest that the image, whether of a
pattern or an ideal, needs to be something shared if the relationship is
ongoing. That is, if the relationship is over, I can shape my own narrative to
fit my needs. You profoundly
misunderstood me, I never trusted you, you never trusted me, I realized that I
didn’t really like you that much. But if it’s ongoing, those images are
part of the narrative that two people are (maybe not consciously) building
together. You and I tell the same story: this is who we are.
On a different – but not unrelated – issue: I’ve been
accused of not seeing people as they present themselves, but instead
constructing theories in my head. Well, yes. I live in my head, and have
trouble translating that to action, and sometimes am so caught up in my own
theory that I miss really obvious things in my environment. (I remember a
friend – way back when I was still an undergraduate – saying, “Your students
will worry about you as you get older, profoundly absentminded, oh, poor
professor is really losing it – and I’ll know, nope, he’s always been like that.”)
But my theories allow me to see things that others miss: I ask, “when did your
dad’s mother die?” And your answer revealed the solution to the long-standing enigma:
he’s a jerk because emotionally he’s stuck right
there, never got past being an abandoned teenager. And that’s a powerful
insight that no one else ever seemed to recognize. My theories aren’t always
wrong.
So here’s my question for you: where am I stuck, and why am
I stuck there? My brain, the size of a planet, doesn’t seem to be able to turn
that telescope around in this instance.
Sorry, no cartoon today!
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