jfink216

time and everything after

"and this is what i love- that one minute there is a fire and the next there is a calm as you lay your head on my shoulder and i wrap my arms around you, inviting you to rest and to be safe with me. telling you that i know i'm safe with you. letting the admission that we find ourselves in each other drown out all of the other things, and when you bring your lips back to mine i kiss you as sweetly as i can so you know that i mean it. because i do mean it."

time has healed some wounds. let's start at the beginning, with a private entry dated october 2007 that amounts to this: i'm in love. i hate my life. 

that is not how i imagine it going when i have my first conceptions of romantic love. i am married off in 1995 to my next door neighbor; my parents tie empty soda cans to the bumper of his battery-powered jeep and we ride off into the sunset of the cul-de-sac. well, in a sense. it is actually the middle of the day and the sun is high, scorching, searing hot against the fabric of my white sunday dress. his jeep runs out of batteries halfway there and they have to push us the rest of the way. it is a makeshift sort of commitment-- i am five years old and not looking to settle down. the whole marriage falls apart, anyway. we probably should have lived together first. i would have discovered his penchant for stealing my cookies and juice before i made the mistake of jumping into a relationship. my family moves away after my younger brother is born, and i do not see that boy again. i leave johnny in my memories, in the driver's side of a faulty car, looking straight ahead and laughing into the sun.

the cycle of leaving and being left: i fall in love and get my heart broken for the first time at fifteen. an italian boy from my youth group who's a good inch shorter than me writes me love songs and leaves me via instant messenger after six months, citing time and space and inevitability. i cry through Mass the next day after he pulls me aside and tells me he really means it. in the end, two men have to basket-carry me out of the church, where my mother meets them in the narthex and has the decency to be embarrassed for me. i learn in that moment that loving does not mean being loved. i leave joe behind then, under a vast sky with shooting stars and the radiance of love before it fades into the darkness.

the cycle of loving and being loved: it takes me over a year to try again. when i do, it is with a boy i have been acquaintances with for years. we are both juniors in high school and he is second in our class of over eight hundred. he is smart and funny and safe and not overly religious; he is exactly what i am looking for, but as soon as it starts i know it is already ending. he takes me out to dinner and opens doors for me and writes me beautiful things in french. he is astoundingly close to perfect, and i convince myself that my heart is bleeding for him when i know it is only bleeding for me. in the end, he writes me a letter telling me he loves me. he tells me he knows i can't say it back yet. he tells me it's okay. we both know it's not. i try to push the words off my tongue, but they will not come. i learn in that moment that qualifications and good intentions are not enough. i leave alex in the winter, burrowed together into his jacket during a football game, the cold of the world pressed against the warmth of our skin.

there are others, but they are passing, men of large dreams but little substance. there are small fissures of my heart to be closed in, but the break is never absolute. months fold in upon themselves and then it is summer. i spend most of my time working as a lifeguard. my mornings are filled with the desperate heat of the sun. it kisses my shoulders, then burns them, and the red flares up and spreads out. it reminds me of my small white sunday dress and my family's history of skin cancer all at once, and i spend the rest of the summer under umbrellas. the days pass slow, drawing out the afternoon like a lazy lover, the sun touching here and there until it sinks into the skin of the earth. this is a summer of guitars and art. finally the heat burns itself away, and then it is september and i am a senior in high school. this is where it begins.

i have known him for years. i have often thought to myself that if only he were a year older, i would have chased him down, but instead he has always been categorically young to me. we have always had a friendship that is light and easy, though never particularly close; we laugh together and exchange tongue-in-cheek birthday gifts but have never spoken on the phone. there is no good explanation for the way i react when he walks in the door on the first day of school, hand-in-hand with his girlfriend of over a year. he is devastating, and it devastates me. i write it off as physical attraction, and it is an easy sell because he has always been widely considered to be particularly handsome. we talk about our summers and all i am thinking is when did you grow up?. i call him one night about something important but small that requires maybe five minutes of conversation. we are on the phone for four hours, and as i hit the end button on my cell it occurs to me that i may be in trouble. as it turns out, i don't know the half of it. this is how september ends.

i fall in love in october. when i finally articulate it to myself it is not a bitter truth, only a resigned one. in my writing i say that it is not a charge forward but a quiet laying down of weapons, not a retreat but a breath of peace. i am afraid of the words, and as soon as i write them i tuck them away. they are truths i do not want, and i decide not to face them. i hope that they will burn themselves away like the heat of the summer that came before them. most people say that love is a miracle, so i pray for whatever miracles are not made of. his girlfriend decides they should take a break and i begin to think that maybe this is God and the proverbial door. october comes and goes in this way.

i hate him in november. he mentions to me over lunch on a friday that he is back with his girlfriend, that things are wonderful and beautiful and glorious and they really never took a break at all. my jaw clamps shut because the words are pushing against it. they are so close, they are spilling through the cracks in my teeth and i choke out what i can- that's great- and i try to end lunch quickly without being conspicuous. i hate him for the words he says and i hate myself for the ones i cannot say, the ones that sit like bile in my throat and taint everything i swallow with sickness. november becomes the month for self-destruction. i am combusting from the inside, but i do not want the fire. i want nothing and everything, and finally the bitterness sets it and i start to believe that maybe he knows. maybe he knows and will not set me free. the thought births a rage inside of me, and it is in this moment that i learn that love and hate are sometimes mutually inclusive. november passes.

i surrender in december. i stop fighting because i know i have never been good at it; i give in to myself and to him and to her. i am bashed against stone and rocked by the sea. i am thrown and tossed. i focus on breathing normally and then the words i have choked back since november are falling out, the words i have held in since i was five and learned about love are coming alive and they are a part of me but also separate entities. i speak as the woman i am becoming and the writer inside of me listens. it takes the words i have that are truth and turns them into declarations, it molds them into bold statements in journals and to mutual friends. he hears the words, takes them simply, and then gives me some of his own. december is the month for these words-- i give him the sweet ones, but i also give him the ones that hurt. i bring forth all that has been stuck in my throat since the conception of loss and i pour it out on him, i make him hurt because in my heart he is not a clean break and he needs to know that. he listens and tends to the wounds he created in me. in time, the brands he has marked on my skin heal over and he sucks the last of his own poison out of my veins. december moves past us.

january comes and for the first time in my life the year really does feel new to me. the battles have been fought and won and lost; what has been done is done. we accept it and move on. it is a month of peace, and we spend it piecing the facts together. we discover who felt what and when, we talk about moments and mental photo albums and regrets. we talk about the people we are and the people we want to be. we talk about working at it together. i make a storyboard of our lives our of my english mind and he marks the mathematical points of intersection. we figure out what all the fuss is about with kissing. we figure out a lot of great things. january comes and goes, and so does february. winter becomes a rainy spring that turns into another summer- somehow hotter than the first- and then to fall. i go away to college armed with faith and his promise ring on my finger. i find myself wishing for something more permanent. the months pass until, suddenly, it is october.

there is something organic about returning to the places we have been. i feel the chill on my skin and think that this is what it felt like outside when i fell in love with him; i see the leaves change and think about how one must have been falling outside the moment i admitted it to myself. this is the third christmas we will celebrate together; it is the third time i will panic about what to get him and the third time he will love whatever it is. this is where everything ended and began for us, but i still have his claddagh ring on my finger and his picture on my bedside table. if what i pray for is fulfilled, it will be that way for months to come.

it is not so much about him as it is about me. this is not an anniversary of anything important for us; this time two years ago, he was seeing someone else and i was trying not to be swallowed up by my own tears. but it occurs to me that i have loved this man for two years, that i have been faithful to my heart and it has been faithful to him. it is a small number on its own, but when divided into twenty- how old i am about to be- it grows to something meaningful. i have loved this man for a tenth of my life. it is a truth and a capability i did not know i had; i am unstable and unsure save for this one thing, and it is the thing that matters. for seven hundred and thirty days i have put my heart in the hands of someone else, and it has not been dropped or broken. there have been cracks and bruises that we have healed together and ones that neither of us can heal. there are wounds that only God can stitch up in both of us, and we bring ourselves to the cross and beg for whatever He has to give us. it is everything. he is everything and i am everything and love is everything, it's everything.

there are words that are still buried in me, things that are dark and light that have not come forward yet. there are new things still to learn, there are miles and miles of skin and scent and touch laid out in front of us, grooves and slopes and curves like mountains. these are journeys we cannot take for a few more years. he traces absent patterns on my skin and veins and i think that he is blazing trails of his own. there are pathways inside my bones. there are secret doors in the walls of my heart that only he knows about, because some knowledge can only be acquired in time. it is like studying a piece of art; it becomes more or less beautiful based on the craft that lies underneath, the base image that inspires the work in its whole. to him i am art, and to me he is truth: comprised not at once but by a series of moments, just as time itself.