“I have always known that I will die for love. I think I am dying while or because of waiting for it. I cannot bear how it feels like a surging throng of beats and yells and gasps inside of my small form.” Jenny Slate, Little Weirds
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the tree in the forest metaphor. Or, well, not the metaphor, but the actual mechanics of it. If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one – or no thing – to hear it, does the tree make a sound?
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My hands shook that morning. That’s what I remember. That the damn coffee lid wouldn’t stay on and the too expensive latte in the too small cup was turning my hands sticky from the milk.
I asked the bank teller if I could return the cashier’s checks as soon as she handed them to me, and she looked at me, a question forming – one that she was kind enough not to ask –and said, yes, and I walked out, ten thousand dollars tucked under my arm.
I just wanted to sit down. I wanted to toss the coffee and wash my hands and get rid of the terrible tingling feeling that had crept up my neck the night before when the realtor had called to say we’d been approved for the lease.
Instead I walked. I walked one terrible, heavy foot in front of the other. I took the 1 train downtown, my hand clutching the pole above me, tears streaming down my face. A voice inside of me suddenly so clear: No. No, not this.
I don’t remember the conversation. I half knew exactly what was going to happen when I made the phone call, and I half had no idea. I know I spoke in circles tying us into a terrible knot. When he finally asked what I was saying, before thought could catch up to words, I said, I don’t know, I just know I don’t want to marry you.
And suddenly it was done.
There had been a moment, in the weeks before, when I’d thought, Maybe I don’t get love in this lifetime. Maybe this is it. Maybe this man, this man who is a truly good human, this man who looks at me like I am lovely and worthy, this man who will be an exceptional father and a good husband, maybe this is enough. Maybe what I’ve always wanted doesn’t actually exist. Maybe love will come in the next lifetime.
But we’d gotten the apartment. We’d gotten the perfect apartment at the north end of the park. The apartment that I’d fallen in love with as soon as I saw it. The one that was too small and too expensive and too-far-north. The apartment that checked none of my boxes and was none of the things I’d spent the last few months talking about and, still, I knew – I knew in my bones that it was right. I knew by the way the light angled in in the evenings and the tangle of streets surrounding it.
And because I knew about the apartment, I knew about other things, too. I just didn’t yet know that I knew.
And so the feeling crept up my neck.
The day we got the apartment, the day before I was meant to get the checks and sign the paperwork, the day before that too small latte spilled all over my hands, I’d gone to dinner at a friend’s apartment. I’d described the neighborhood and shared photos and played the part of a person on the precipice, and when the next-door neighbor’s babysitter – still young and still new to the city – asked me if I’d missed him – if I’d missed the man I was meant to live with, the man I’d spent all summer away from, I’d smiled and quietly shaken my head: No.
It was the feeling at the back of my that did it. I’d spent long enough in therapy to know that that sort of discomfort in my body pointed to a misalignment. My body was telling me that my actions didn’t line up with my values. And, the thing is, deep down, what I knew – what I’d always known – was that I was the sort of person who would wait for love. For real love, big love, epic love. Because I believe in love, and I believe it is worth waiting for, even it never comes.
I have found that love does not exist in degrees. You are either in love with someone or you are not.
And there is only so long one can keep a thing from one’s self.
And so, on a perfect October day, I broke a good man’s heart not because I didn’t love him, but because I believed love – the real-deal-sort-of-love-that-I-hoped-existed-but wasn’t-entirely-sure – was worth the wait.
11 months later I fell in love.
I expected nothing. But then he called me on the phone before our first date and he laughed – this high, sweet, perfect laugh, and I thought, Oh, well, there’s that.
On our first date, he walked into the restaurant, and I liked his eyes. I liked his wide grin, and perfect teeth. I liked how he looked at me and I wasn’t afraid. How his hair fell against the back of his neck. How he seemed lit from within – I hadn’t known that was possible.
On our second date he paused in the doorframe, turned back to look at me and asked if I wanted kids. Yes, of course.
On our third date, I existed in a state of suspended terror, afraid that the words would spill out of my mouth. You cannot say that. You cannot say those words, I repeated to myself. It was ridiculous. It was not possible to love someone so quickly. And yet. Those words, silent, and locked within me, seemed to come before I was even sure of the feeling.
Later I would say, I knew the very next day. He was on a flight, somewhere in the air over the Continental US, and I knew. I was in love with him.
There is more to say that I will not. It hurts too much. And after all this time, the best I’ve got is this: Fear is a thing.
I’ve turned so many of the moments that followed over and over in my mind, rubbing them smooth with regret. I could tell you about each thing I said that I didn’t actually mean, each throwaway comment designed to make me seem cool and detached and fine, each moment that masked my fear and terror and delight. I’d do almost all of it differently. I’d grab hold of the thing, both hands, and hold on as hard as I could.
The thing is, I’d never before experienced falling in love with someone who was falling in love with me – and the experience of it was bewildering and disorienting and messy and perfect, and I just needed a moment to catch my breath.
At one point, early on, he said to me, If you write about this, tell me, so I don’t have to. I smiled and brushed it off, embarrassed. But I think of that often. No one had ever written about me before, and I wanted to know what he would say.
Now I wonder, at what point – at what moment – did he decide to end it. And how would he have written it.
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A tree that falls in the forest creates wavelengths of sound. It’s the ear, with its ability to translate those wavelengths, that perceives the sound. Which means sound is the strange alchemy that exists between energy and the instrument tuned to perceive it. Sound is communion. It is a holy meeting. And it is entirely dependent on two parts – and what exists in the space between those two parts.
Much like love.
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I found that falling in love was like watching the world suddenly come to life. It was like discovering that what had always been two-dimensional was suddenly 3-D and textured and perfect and impossibly bright.
And I found that when love goes away, the world turns flat again. But, the thing is, you know. You know what’s possible, and living in the dissonance – the space between what is possible and what simply is – is utterly heartbreaking.
Everything is a little bit harder now. A little bit lonelier. But I sit in the car, or I sip coffee in the morning, or I stand on the side of a mountain, and I send up something halfway between prayer and declaration, I would wait a hundred lifetimes for the real thing.
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When it all fades – when the anger and the hurt and the bliss and the shame and the fear – and even the love – when all those things fall away, I am struck by the fact that what I am left with is the ability to translate the energy that existed between us – the ability to perceive love itself. Alchemy. Communion. Holy meeting.
What is left is the very human capacity to understand and sense and experience love – the heartbreaking and potent and fumbling and magic version that we, as humans, make of it. Which, I think, is the point.
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I didn’t move into the too-small, but perfect apartment. I found another one at the bottom of the hill, one wall made entirely of windows.
In those first few months I refused to play the game of imagining what my life might have looked like had I not returned the checks, had we actually signed the lease, had he finally joined me in New York. I refused to play the game because I knew it wasn’t real. And, I knew that even if had happened, even if we had lived it, it still wouldn’t have been real. And while I sometimes think this loneliness might kill me – while I sometimes think I am dying while or because of waiting for love, at least this feeling is mine, at least this feeling is true. I am not lonely from or for myself.
And so I wait. And I catch my breath.
