You Are the Rain

There is a bare patch under the tree in the front yard from where we neglected to pick up the fall leaves after Aria broke her arm in the shape of a triangle. Slow, reluctant seedlings sprout from the dense, packed Earth and it is, I think, so painfully beautiful and hopeful and peaceful.

I spoke with you the other day and I left our conversation feeling empty. There is so much to say these days and so little to say of import. It is easy to talk about the running of our respective homes and the details of the adult decisions we are now exclusively responsible for and so difficult to talk about the things we have spent years lying to ourselves about, burying under the unfulfilled desires and disappointments of growing older. I wish I could say that I feel hollow and empty and so desperately lonely right now and I wish you could remind me of the truths of the universe, of our connectedness, and of the normalcy of these emotions. I wish we could be precisely the people we dreamed of when we were eighteen. But there is no dress rehearsal. A point you and I have both begrudged for many, many years. This is our one go at this life and we are, frankly, winging even the important decisions. Perhaps most dreadfully, we are fearfully evading the biggest lies and painting them with a shiny gloss in the hopes that the facade will, impossibly, last.

If you were here, you would probably comment on the bunnies and the lightning streaked sky and the smell of fresh rain on cement and the way the wind blows in a particular way just before the drops fall. It always blows into the storm, right, when it's going to be most severe? And there is often a pause just before the brunt of the energy hits, as if the storm itself is taking one big, deep sigh before the inevitable release? You taught me to watch the clouds and the wind and the storms when I was just a child and I have never stopped to wonder if your statements made as a matter of fact had any actual validity or if they were just a way to paint a veneer of magic over my eyes.

I worry about the disappointments of life and how we will recover. I have always been a stalwart believer in resilience and inevitability, as though the pains done to one over the course of a life time were lessons and leverage toward growth. As the years move inevitably forward, I worry about the consequences of having been wrong. What if pain and sorrow exist in and of themselves and we move on, we recover, but never fully intact? 

You are in such a desperately hard moment of your life and if there is a silent prayer said before I close my eyes at night, it is that you will recover and you will laugh and the world will hold many tiny, beautiful things again. It is that, somehow, there will be some blessing in all the difficulty, and we will smile again on a beach somewhere with some over priced beer and the anticipation of too much cheese and white bread and cookies that need decorating or a new cake recipe that needs to be tried.

The air here is tricky. So painfully, painfully dry moment to moment. But after a rain, it's as though the moisture floats and fills the desperate senses to bursting with moisture and cool and a connectedness to the natural world that is otherwise so very, very difficult to capture.

When I was younger, I think I used to fight the distance between us. I would think that we would both journey for a time and then, inevitably, find one another again. I thought geography was temporary. And, it turns out, I was entirely right; the geography that was so precious and invaluable to the person I have become was absolutely temporary. And driving away from you before the most monumental changes in our lives has proven that I can live in your absence and that life marches on without you.

But I miss fireside chats. And decorating Christmas cookies with names. And hazelnut nectar. And the way being around you made everything hilarious. And the way that you could read precisely what I needed with one look or one word or one tear. And it's so good that you are out there and living and doing all the things we dreamed of doing when we were younger. But I would give so, so much for a borrowed moment of time with you. For a quiet night and a boston creme pie, and drinking too much wine and talking about Kundera and listening to the ocean waves and knowing that you have always, always, always, always got my back. 

I miss you. I love you. So much that the veneer of adulthood fractures entirely and I am able to say, with no sense of regret or hesitation, that you have always made everything so much more beautiful and hopeful and peaceful. And though watching the rain without you is a thing I still do, it can never be done without reverberations of the way the world felt when it was you and me and me and you.

Fire

The anticipation of the touch is the thing.

The electricity that is everywhere all at once before someone garners the courage to demolish the chasm in a noble act of faith. The audacity to assume that this person is yearning for your touch in the same way that you are yearning for theirs. And the world is all enchantment. It is stars that shine brighter and mountains that seem taller and every ray of sunshine is imbued with potential. And the longing is guttural and deep and from a version of yourself that existed thousands of years ago on a plain in some savannah in the hot, hot sun when instinct was the main driver of behavior and societal norms held less sway.

It is you and I in the dead of the night in a hut in the middle of the Amazon, surrounded by mosquito netting and the carnal heat of desire played off as friendship in the daylight.

It is in that first hesitant touch, the electricity of our fingers intertwining and the slow circle of your thumb on my palm that made everything fire.

It is those long nights in a deserted hotel in a city we barely saw because it was enough simply to be near you, to wake up to unchartered skin and the anticipation of touch.

It is the infernal heat that rises from the depths of one's soul in anticipation of the next fleeting, accidental (was it accidental?) connection. And it is one brush of the hand that leads to a touch of the lips and then the entire body is alight with need. So much need that, at first, one can't help but drown in the desire that knocks ceaselessly all night and all day until one is driven absolutely mad with its intensity and persistence and infernal heat. 

It is breath that is held until the space between us is diminished and hours that pass in only moments when we are together. It is the crisp summer air on my skin and the endless, destructive heat whose only means of ceasing is your touch and your lips and the exploration of hands in the muted hours of the morning when the whole world sleeps but not the infernal heat of need.

For mere mortals, the anticipation of touch in the dead of the night is all glorious fire. It burns everything down except your face and your fingers and that look in your eyes. It turns everything to ash and leaves the world alight with the fallout. 

The anticipation of your touch is the thing. It is everything.

Christopher

I think if we had fallen in love in a different period of our lives, things probably would have ended drastically differently. When I think about us, I think about the long, slow heat of summer evenings and the eager anticipation of young love. The long year of friendship before we kissed and the pain of watching one another date and flirt with other people while maintaining the illusion that we were simply platonic. I remember the crushing break up of a boyfriend who cheated and your quiet patience while listening to my anger and sadness. And later, the reveal that you were actually elated I was suddenly single and that, perhaps, we would finally be together.

I remember the shock and dismay of teachers and parents who felt I was, somehow, too good for you; people who took your grades for a representation of your intelligence and your obnoxious behavior as an indicator that you were secretly up to no good. Despite things having ended for us at the time, I was so proud when I heard you landed your dream job; you literally told me at the age of 17 that it’s what you would be doing, that you would be good at it, and you were, of course, absolutely right. You have been so right about so many things for so much of your life and so many people have doubted you. I think the vast majority of your early years were filled with voices of skepticism about your worthiness and I am so glad you proved all of them so terribly wrong.

I remember long summer evenings and mosquito bites and pools and playing cards. I remember laughing and laughing until our stomachs hurt; it was an uncontrollable, chaotic chemistry between the two of us and I recall the joviality rapidly spinning out of control when we really got onto a topic we found hilarious. We were both dark and awful and absolutely stupid and together we were explosive. This would come, of course, to describe us when we were happy and when we were sad and, especially, when we were angry.

And I remember, of course, the three of us traveling to different parks throughout the city to roll down hills and play on equipment made for children. The grass was always so cool beneath my bare knees and the air so terribly weighted with the heat of a sun that didn’t set until after nine. You would take turns chasing and tackling me, the air absolutely thick with the sexual frustration of teenagers who have no idea what to do with their own bodies and sudden autonomy from their parents. I always looked behind with eager anticipation, hoping it would be you I would glimpse giving chase. I spent long summer evenings thinking about you and about us and hoping I wasn’t the only one waiting with bated breath for the next time I would see you.

You were at every swim meet and drove to Fort Collins for the big ones. I encouraged you to challenge for a higher position in band; you had such a phenomenal sense of pitch and rhythm and your musical ability was literally assessed based on the perception that someone like you, with the grades you kept, wouldn’t and couldn’t be better than second tier. I helped you finish the very last projects required for your graduation and celebrated with you upon your admission to school. And later, you hung around far longer than you probably wanted to because you graduated before I did and, of the two of us, you were always more loyal.

And it is funny this many years later that the way we ended still causes me such pain and regret. Because I was unkind and you were unkind and I think we were simply too young to know how to handle the enormous changes we were both undergoing. I was desperate to move out of the state and you were desperate to hold onto us. I think, with your uncanny ability to understand precisely the gravity of a situation (which is probably why you are so damn good at your job), you fully grasped that my departure meant the true end of us as a couple. And, perhaps, the beginning of a very limited correspondence and connection to one another for the rest of our lives.

And per usual, you were right on all fronts. The years since we were together have flown by and memories that were once precious are now elusive. I can remember the feel of your fingers on my skin or the anticipation of our first kiss, but could not tell you when or how we finally dared touch lips. I remember our slow unraveling and nights where we yelled far more than we laughed. And, of course, I remember the slow, deep missing of a time when my entire life was defined by my relationship to you. Being affixed together gave us both somewhere safe to land and the erosion of you and I meant discovering precisely who we were apart.

While I can’t claim to know who you are in any real way, I still see glimpses of the sixteen year old you in every FB post that pops up in my feed. You are still witty and magnanimous and larger than life and disciplined and driven and dedicated and probably slightly mad. You are still hilarious and clever and wonderful and I can’t help but feel so very, very proud of the man you have become. I doubt he is so different from the one I knew so many years ago, although I imagine there are substantially fewer jokes made about erections (which would be, honestly, something of a disappointment given how HILARIOUS we always thought they were).

As We Age

Tim and I had a unique opportunity to leave our lives behind for half a day on Saturday to hike and eat nachos and drive through the mountains. And although I think we always care for one another, it is nice to spend time remembering what, precisely, brought us together in the first place. I think about the people we have become and it is difficult to isolate specific moments in which either of us changed in any drastic manner;. it is a slight alteration over weeks and months and in this way, barely perceptible. But if you asked either of us if we are the same person we were twelve years ago, I think we would agree that we are both drastically altered.

I have been ruminating a lot lately on to what extent change is within our own grasp to control. Can one wake up and decide to practice gratitude and undergo a transformation that makes you unidentifiable to your loved ones and to the world because suddenly you grumble so little about the small things and are shockingly slow to anger? And if something absolutely horrible happens to you--perhaps the worst thing you could ever imagine--can you come through it intact or will you eternally be a shell of the person you were? And will it matter, in the end, if a terrible life event changed you or an intentional decision was made on your part? Whatever event catalyzed the alteration, it seems to me that there is often no return from certain scars and transformations.

But what if the thing that happened to you leaves you less joyful and less jovial? What if you find it more difficult to laugh and you find yourself less open to new friendships and people? What if you look at the world and you find the things you once believed with certainty hold more cynicism and doubt?

As we gain wisdom, can we also catalyze joy and elation? And do they take on different forms than they did when were younger? How about those old people who can still laugh until they pee their pants? What essential truth did they hold onto that now feels elusive?

As I age, can I choose to be vibrant and open? Can I continue to travel and continue to challenge the things that become comfortable?

One of the more difficult things with the passage of time is that we wear our comfort as a security vest without even realizing it. A trip overseas or a new friendship or a move to a new home or city requires a lot of energy to embrace and, I think, we are naturally resistant to such change. But always, always at the end of something that has shook me to the very depths of my soul, I find a new part of myself is uncovered. A new resilience or toughness or passion is unearthed along with the turmoil of finding my roots unearthed.

As we age and we begin to lose those who have defined our own identity, what more is there to uncover? What essential truths keep retired individuals from burying deep into the lazy boy and surfacing only for groceries and trips to the bathroom?

When we are stripped of all our external defining characteristics, are we truly anyone at all? What is at the very marrow of identity if not for the people and things and places we use to define ourselves?

More questions lately than answers. But this is, I suppose, only typical for me. Next week: more questions and absolutely no answers. Stay tuned.