If you weren’t so far away and weren’t, you know, a
country, I’d have you over to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s my
second favorite movie, after Slacker. I used to have it on VHS. I’d
watch it after scary movies so I’d be able to sleep. It’s about a scared, lost but
fabulous lady and whether or not people can belong to each other. Spoiler
alert: they do. (If you watch this movie, I’m really, really sorry about Mickey
Rooney.)
The other day I was listening to Danny Lavery’s
podcast (https://slate.com/podcasts/big-mood-little-mood) and
he was talking about the Relationship Escalator. No one actually calls it that
unless they DON’T want it, he said, they’d just call it “commitment.”
What a weird thing to feel bad about, wanting commitment,
but it definitely feels like I was telling on myself when I let it slip. In my
defense, it was in the haze of beautiful rosy-hued morning goodbye sex, right
before he left for you. The Shy Ones wear stretchy bead bracelets instead of
wedding rings, and I said with the confidence of the just-thoroughly-fucked
that I wanted a bracelet too, a purple one.
I maaaaaaaaayyyyyy have said I wanted a commitment
ceremony too. None of this meant marriage, it meant whatever kind of commitment
we came up with. He said the bracelet part might be doable, but I wonder.
Is that why he came back liking me less? Did the bracelet
idea get vetoed and he just didn’t have the heart to tell me? Or did I know deep
down he wasn’t That Guy and push him away? Did he want to keep some of that
freedom he felt with you and I was the thing most jettisonable?
It’s far past time to stop wondering, but he did bring
something back besides maybe a little
malaria. (Which, I’m so sorry I overreacted. I only know it from novels. I
thought he might die.) Maybe he brought back a deeper commitment to his faith,
to his family, his eldest-son leadership responsibilities. It SEEMED like he
brought back that gift of all families everywhere: shame. I heard it in his
radio silences, in his quick zippering.
No matter which, I have a confession: I thought
somehow this would be the Last Waiting. I thought I could somehow graduate from
the always-missing-him if I got good grades those weeks in Being Self Contained.
And I aced the exam, we both did. Unlike the regular text thread, burdened with
pain and paragraphs and push-pull logistics, the WhatsApp thread from when he
was with you, it was all love.
Thank you for making us that unlikely space to be free
together, to belong together before reality smashed back down. Maybe because when
he was with you, he was happy. Maybe missing him hurt less when he was across
the sea than when he was across town.
There was a bracelet, not a wear-every-day-as-a-symbol
one. It’s carved out of coconut shells, dyed beautiful jewel colors. It came
with a necklace and red earrings like tiny coins. They live in The Box of
Things to be Worked Out Later by Unseen Forces (The God Box for short) in an
envelope marked Prayers for a Bigger Life:
