Seventh Date Tears, Part Two

I miss him so badly all the time. I still, nine days later, can’t believe such a pretty date could go so, so wrong. By the time we were just starting our walk through the fancy gardens, he was correcting everything I said, taking up for anyone and anything I had a problem with—my disinformationy unvaccinated brother, Thanksgiving, Ronald Reagan, he took their side.

As we hugged and tried to reconnect in a quiet little vined alcove, he started in about how “Democrat” and “Republican” are just labels that divide us, how people like me on the left are just as responsible for the “discord.”

“You have to put “Moderate” on your dating profiles, I could have just swiped left!” I said in defeat and exasperation. I’m really, really glad, even in the midst of this annoying story, that I didn’t swipe left.

There was a moment, before I turned back up the path to go home. The alleé of pines and fall trees was decorated for Christmas, and even in the bright noon light, a cascade of blue lights lit up over the oranges, reds, and browns of the trees. He held my hand there, tried to keep me still. He tried to briefly to hold me by the wrists, but I was already fleeing.

(“Why don’t you just MARRY the moment?” I asked toward the end of the day. “I would love to, but it’s already past.” I guess that was the last time he made me laugh.)

I started missing him as soon as I turned away from those daytime Christmas lights. We talked/fought all the way back to the city. On our (dear, dear) third date, we’d watched Gremlins 2, and now we were breaking all of our own Gremlin rules. Instead of “don’t feed them after midnight” it was more like, don’t talk about Dave Chappelle, vaccine-deniers, Russian disinformation campaigns. I felt the kind of crazy I felt before I estranged from my mom, the kind of scary detachment that comes from living in separated realities. The gaslight feeling.

I took him home with me anyway, I wasn’t ready to let him go, I’m still not, even though I guess I have. We’d missed our garden lunch so we had peanut butter and honey sandwiches. We sat close on the couch and my queenly fat cat crawled into his lap. The three of us sat there, beautifully captured in time.

I was still kissing This Charming Man, but I wasn’t reaching him. I asked him to come up to bed and hold me, and he did, off-to-the-side and chaste. As soon as we were there, more tears came, so many tears came, brokenhearted tears, all-the-topics tears. Grief and loss and shame and fear and loneliness and love.

He did this thing that I can’t quite get my head around, that I love so much and maybe shouldn’t. I was apologizing for crying, trying to stuff my face into the pillows. I kept saying “This SO isn’t cute.” But he restrained my hands away from my face, stayed above me, and just kind of witnessed the tears. It was (maybe creepy, I don’t really care) an act of love.

“I’m still here,” he kept saying, but he wasn’t, not really, or I wasn’t. We were both trying hard for it not to be over, but the day was broken, it just was.