It ends with your warm beer on the table between us

It felt important to go. Because to want the intimacy of a relationship is to accept the intimacy of breaking up.

...

It ends with your warm beer on the table between us--only half drunk, you having chosen your words carefully. We just weren’t a match, I say, trying to make it okay for you. Trying to make what feels slippery in our mouths, less so. You seem more terrified than I feel, and I really want to make this okay for you. We sit in silence for the length of a few beats before I suggest we leave. You don’t like your beer, no use in forcing you to drink it. We push back our chairs, barely looking one at the other, hugging uncomfortably. I walk west, you east.

I am not angry. Hurt yes, but not angry. I do not fault you. We love who we love.

Or not.

What’s hard is that we cannot sit there for a moment longer. The promise of friendship as a thing belonging only to a future in which time has passed.

This hanging ellipses. This moment between discovery and something else. This passing of the time as strangers.

Days later over different beers you will use my words as a way of explanation. You will say “we just weren’t a match” and someone will relay this to me. But those weren’t your words, they were mine. And my heart will break, just a little, because that wasn’t my experience. Or, well, it was, at the very least, more complicated than that. And those were my words for you.

Perhaps there is more I should have said, sitting at that small table, warm, bad pub drinks between us. About doubt and how it is a thing that multiplies in the absence of a warm hand or the sound of a person’s laugh or the lines that ring our eyes. How it grows in silence and alone, under the unrelenting glare of others’ comments. How it is a nasty trick of  fear.

And we were both so busy.

But it is not my job to convince a man to love me. It cannot be my job to convince a man to love me.

I was not in love with you. It’s really not like I was in love with you. It’s just that, every time you met me at my door I’d think, This is a man I like walking towards.

And that was not nothing.

Ambivalence + Belief

I’ve had to do a few things of late that have been really quite difficult. Mostly because I’ve been deeply ambivalent about doing them. For the majority of my life I thought ambivalence was about not caring, when actually it’s about caring in different directions--wanting two things that seem to oppose one another. I both desperately want this and desperately don’t.

I can hold those opposing truths in both hands at the same time. The libra in me tries to weigh them, but that’s not really the point.

I am fine. And I am not.

This is okay. And also, it is not.

I both want this and really, really don’t.

I recently had to make a decision about something and was torn by my warring desires. I spoke to my girlfriends and got their advice, but realized, at the end of the day, the decision was mine alone. And that decision didn’t really have anything to do with my wants or needs, so much as what I believe. What I believe in. Which is to say, my value system.

Which is to say, who I am.

Value systems are incredible because they cut through the noise very, very quickly. And a path erupts before us. But very often that path is the most difficult--mostly because it has to do with vulnerability and telling the truth.

So I swipe on an extra coat of lipstick for courage and practice remaining soft--feeling the things--all. of. the. things--that are so very hard, but give life nearly all of its meaning.

The Edge of Uncertainty

There was an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times at the start of February of last year, 2014. I printed it out. Put it with a stack of important papers. I pulled the article out today. Pulled the whole stack out, in fact. The stack is actually meant to be turned into an important something-else, but I have only a pen instead of a pick axe, and fear is a thing.

Last night Julie and I sat in my favorite bar on the lower east side. Their margaritas are strong and their guacamole good. We talked about work and stumbling blocks and cute guys and then we spoke of religion. Julie married a man who was raised in the Catholic faith. I was raised in the Catholic faith. I spoke to her about why it is important to me. I spoke to her about the mystery of it. That I believe it is not meant to be known, so much as felt, and that to try to understand it is to miss the point. I spoke about my appreciation for original sin--how I believe it is an invitation to turn towards our own humanity, our own limitedness. 

The opinion piece is an incredible essay written by one Simon Critchley about a a BBC documentary hosted in the 70's by Dr. Jacob Bronowski--a  mathematician who devoted his life to science and literature. 

"For Dr. Bronwoski...all scientific information is imperfect and we have to treat it with humility. Such for him, was the human condition."

Now bear with me as I pick and pull much of the remaining essay:

"Dr Bronowski insisted that [Max Born's] principle of uncertainty was a misnomer, because it gives the impression that in science (and outside of it) we are always uncertain. But that is wrong. Knowledge is precise, but that precision is confined within a certain toleration of uncertainty...Dr. Bronowski thought that the uncertainty principle should therefore be called the principle of tolerance.

Pursuing knowledge means accepting uncertainty...In the everyday world, we do not just accept a lack of ultimate exactitude with a melancholic shrug, but we constantly employ such inexactitudes in our relations with other people. Our relations with others also require a principle of tolerance. We encounter other people across a gray area of negotiation and approximation. Such is the business of listening...

As [Dr. Bronowski] put it, 'Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure on the edge of uncertainty.'

The relations between humans and nature and humans and other humans can take place only within a certain play of tolerance. 

If the human condition is defined by limitedness, then this is a glorious fact because it is a moral limitedness rooted in a faith in the power of the imagination, our sense of responsibility and our acceptance of our fallibility. We always have to acknowledge that we might be mistaken."

An unending adventure on the edge of uncertainty. 

This human life, this corporal existence is an unending adventure, and our own limits--our very failings--are an invitation for us to imagine and to play--to show up. To accept to the risk of living vulnerably is to accept risk. Full stop. 

And to be human is to forgive. To forgive ourselves our own fallibility and to forgive those around us their failings. And to play. To try again. To make mistakes. To turn towards what is hard and painful and incredibly uncomfortable and remain open to the fact that their might be some beauty along that edge--adventure, even. 

That's the thing about other people. There is no certainty. And because we are human, and made of flesh and bones, we are breakable. And because we approach others across the gray area of negotiation and approximation we risk--we open ourselves up to confusion and frustration and possible heartache. But that's also where the good lives. 

And so the risk is...well, the risk is everything. Because to pursue life is to pursue uncertainty. 

The Meaning of It

I am impossible. A mess of disparate wants. A tangle of contradictions. 

I want a big life. And also a very, very simple one. I want to write in a public way, but live as privately as possible. I am desperate to leave New York, but still here. I want all the avocados, but worry about the water shortage in California.

A while back I dated a very, very good man. And walking down the steps towards him was an exercise in looking into the face of the unknown, into the face of what is good and possible, and allowing desire to trump fear.

I am compelled to write about it because writing is the only way I know to make any of this bearable, to wrangle the affection when there’s no one left to receive it, and to find meaning in the chaos. And the meaning was in his goodness, of this I am sure. His goodness was the point of our small mess. And for that I am so, so thankful.

I was having a drink recently with a woman I was too quick to call a friend. She asked me a question. About the realities of my wants in the next few years. And I answered in a way that seemed tremendously rational to me. Essentially I said that it’d depend on who I end up with. That I am both preparing for, and very excited about, that day when the decision is no longer mine alone. She laughed to herself and said something quite cruel. I won’t say what it was because she might read this and that’s been getting me into trouble of late, but I will say that, offhand as it was, it was deeply, deeply hurtful.

Years ago I wrote that my sadness is the truest thing about me. That’s no longer the case. Now I’d say it is my desire to love. To give and receive such a thing freely. To experience the divine within that act.

I believe in love. In the mess of it. And the grace of it. And, frankly, in the mundane of it. In crawling into bed night after night next to it. To returning home and opening the door to it.

Because sometimes you just need a person to be quiet with, and sad next to.

But the desire for it feels so exposed and so delicate--a thin, translucent membrane. Sticky and fragile and terribly tenuous.

It is the truest part of who I am. And the most vulnerable. And when brought into the light, and exposed to the wrong person, easily damaged.

It took so very long to come round to the notion that I believed myself worthy of that want. Now the bridge to cross is the belief that I will get it.

Because, honestly, I’m not sure.

I’m reading Donald Miller right now. Scary Close. And there’s this bit about how doubting our ability to be loved is actually doubting the ability of those outside of us to love in an unconditional way. Which means the fear--the fear that we’re not good enough or it won’t happen for us--is short-sighted and selfish. Because to not believe that I will be loved, mess of disparate wants that I am, reveals a deep lack of faith in the man who will eventually call me home. A deep lack of faith in the grit of the human heart.

But good things can feel quite uncomfortable. And terror and excitement run on the same neural pathway. And faith isn’t meant to be easy.    

Because if love is divine, then the want for it is human.

And good men do exist.

Teresa of Avila

I sat in church this morning. Felt the wooden bench behind my knees and beneath my fingertips. It was a stolen moment. A few minutes before the day began.

I knelt and said a few words just as quietly as I could before leaning back and breathing.

Someone once asked Teresa of Avila what she did during prayer and she said, “I just allow myself to be loved.”

When Aneesha saw the Ganesh around my neck she said, You know the thing about Eastern religion--the difference is that we don’t believe that there will ever come a day when evil will be vanquished from the world. We believe in the coexistence of light and dark, good and evil.

I sat in church this morning thinking about how happiness and sadness are twin strands of the same thread.

And then I let myself be loved.