I sit in my room with a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Tonight I drink in the honor of a woman. The ever-revolving door they seem to have in my life took an interesting turn today, and here I am. Jack is for her. In a way he is her, a Proustian sort of way. I can't see it but I think of a summer even further back than the one where we last saw each other; we would split bottles of it and talk into the night. She was always a summer apparition. Vibrant and explosive, lingering to tantalize all through the other seasons of longing for summer's return, her return. Life was in the way all those other times, but during the slow monolithic march of monotony that is summer's oppression, we would find each other again to catch up and be lonely together.
I respect her more than I've ever managed to tell her, though I tried. I think she's one of the most beautiful women I've seen, but she never accepted my praise. She managed the extraordinary feat of being tough, independent, resourceful and indefeatable while still being compassionate, level-headed, humble and vulnerable. She would disappear for months at a time if not years before resurfacing, but always with stories of triumph: learning new things and coming out in one piece at the end. At times I wondered if she was not an Indiana Jones but a pathological liar. I discovered that in the absence of any way to say for sure, I was willing to accept her stories as true. She didn't embellish about the things I knew, and yes, I preferred that she be more interesting rather than I be too credulous. At the end of Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio didn't wait to see whether the spinning top ever fell over. I feel as if my being deluded on this point is no worse.
She disappeared again after we got a little closer than we ever had before. I made a rather stupendous blunder right at the cusp of attainment rather largely because of years of frustrated waiting. I beat myself up over it now. A matter of hours! I just had to keep myself collected and calm for the space of mere ticks on the clock, and instead I blew up and with it blew up the hope of many years of waiting. My pride wasn't so important that, though wounded (in error), I needed to defend it so idiotically.
That undertone in Jack Daniel's reminds me of bananas, did you ever notice that flavor as you drank it? It helps to let some ice melt into it for a bit (perhaps while you type lines of regret of your own).
I spent a night sleeping under the stars in misery, realizing almost immediately afterward how stupid I had been. Too late, baby, too late, as the song goes.
It wasn't long after that that she stopped answering when I called, stopped returning my calls or responding to texts. So she disappeared. She has done it before and resurfaced again, but never quite like this. I called every now and again, left voicemails hoping that she wouldn't be gone as long this time and that she would know that I wanted to talk to her regardless of whether she were mine or not. My life was better, is better, when she is around.
She finally resurfaced, on the other side of the country and engaged to some guy whose name sounds kind of familiar. It isn't the first time she's been engaged or moved somewhere far away. It is the first time I found out about both at the same time, and both via Facebook, some few months after holding her in my arms and thinking that maybe this time she and I might work something out and take a step into a more involved interaction than in the past.
Which leads me to what I guess my point is. I don't know how I feel about how I feel about her. I never want to be the kind of creepy reprobate that haunts strip clubs or makes women fear for their lives being ended by a man claiming that he "loves" her. At the same time, I have met women of whom I have thought, "If we were romantically involved, I would be very much in love with you." It worries me. I can't very well say to a woman I've known for years, "Hey, I think I might be in love with you, even though we have never been on a date and there are lots of things I don't know about you and you are seeing someone else and don't find me attractive enough to act in such a way that I can tell you find me attractive." It works in the romcoms, but consider how someone reacts in real life. They smile politely and try to get away as quickly as possible to search for "restraining order" online. And that is sensible! Anyone declaring love in that manner is very likely crazy, or at least much too into you to be mentally stable. Even if they were, how could you know? Any sane person would no longer feel comfortable around such a person.
She isn't even the only one. I have met many women of whom I have had this thought. It turns out there are a great many women (and maybe even men) in this world who are very much worthy of being loved by me in my eyes, and I think all of them have not been told as much by me because I can't think of a way to express it to them without coming across as insurmountably creepy. I think some have guessed, though I hope most have not if only because I dread the thought of being so transparent. We live in a world where love is an old-fashioned word, to quote one of my favorite songs. Oddly enough, for as old a word as it is, we (I) seem to be still very uncomfortable with it.
Old news! The unbridgeable gap between souls is well known, the critic says. Yes, I do feel these good feelings toward other people, and find myself unable to express them for fear of exposing myself to ridicule and my relations with those I love to damage, but so what? We're all there. Are you going to complain, you who wonder whether you even are human at times, that your way of trying to be human is hard and tends to enforce solitude upon you, when you drink bottles of Jack Daniel's just because a girl you fancy didn't want to kiss you? People starve to death or die in natural disasters in this world. You are good looking, though not as fit as you could be. You have a job you hardly deserve and a lifestyle richer than was even conceivable until very recently in the lives of all human beings prior to you.
Critic misses the point in that my concern is how to act given the reality of what is. I complain as well here, but my complaint is meant to serve as background for the question. How do I show my affection to those I cannot love physically? And how do I demonstrate love to someone in other ways when sex is an option? With a woman I am involved with, I tend to use sex as an expression of that feeling. That tendency, unfortunately, also means I don't use other forms of expression to make those feelings clear. Many are the relationships of mine ruined by my presumption that sex was enough to show I cared about someone. But other ways are so banal! I rage at the profound lack of emotional power of the other methods. But the problem lies in how entirely internal the experience of emotion can be. We use these tired forms because we have few ways of showing externally what we feel internally. There is little structure to our emotional communication. We don't change colors. We don't have brain tails to connect to someone else. All we have are our bodies and our words. Perhaps I should reconsider my disdain for the phrase "make love".
I just want love to mean something more than I think it usually is meant to mean. Something so important should never be treated so trivially. The relationships we have with others are the only things that give our lives any meaning at all. Thus, the most important of these most important things deserve yet more differentiation than they already get. I don't have the words to say these things well enough to the ones that deserve it most, and it makes me furious. Let me love you! Let me let myself love you! May we all find a way to make ourselves understood to those we wish to be understood by, and to forgive ourselves for failing to be able to put into words how strongly we feel about the people who matter to us.
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