Six years after we fell in love and
four years after we stopped talking, his memory came rushing back to me on a
Labor Day morning in September.
I woke up at six a.m., looked out the
window at the silver maple trees with pale green leaves ripening in rust
colors, and took a deep breath of cool fall air, also inhaling a memory of his
love for me – or was it my love for him? The emotion was surprising. For a long
time, signs of him had stopped tugging at my heart – Roger Waters singles,
Danish cities, Viking lore and legends no longer followed me around. I had
surrendered: he faded into the past somewhat and I lived in the present and
occasionally feared never finding great love again, even though I dated every
so often. Yet, for the last several days his memory haunted me: Mats was the
protagonist’s name in several foreign movies I rented from the library
downtown, and "Gimme Shelter," his favorite song by the Rolling
Stones, had played at a couple stores in town where I shopped.
From past experiences, lessons learned
during my heartbreak were preceded by signs of him. Jolts and bolts of
eye-opening epiphanies rained down until I accepted their message: Love
yourself even though he found someone else to love; think yourself worthy even
though he did not recognize your worth; know you are beautiful even though he
never said it; realize he loved you even though you did not love yourself
enough to believe it. It could be a conversation I overhead of Vermeer’s “Girl
with the Pearl Earring, a constant topic of our conversations ('did he or did
he not love that girl with the pearl earring or did she love him,' as implied
in the book by Tracy Chevalier) or finding the sterling silver necklace of
Thor’s hammer he gave me for protection, which I found lying around several
years after losing it, that triggered a tsunami of realizations.
This time, his memory didn’t spur anger
or an urge to send him to hell telepathically, or to give him the psychic
finger. It didn’t matter if he had been a soulmate, twin flame, karmic
relationship, anam cara, king, better half, kin, companion, husband, lover,
friend. All labels I once studied with intention of applying to our connection
now staunched its mystery, as if trying to stop a mountain waterfall with a
raised finger. The mysterious and the glorious had to be trusted, experienced,
and left alone – yet another lesson.
That morning his memory promised
another epiphany, so I breathed it in, slowly and joyfully, a sensation I
perceived as I walked to the YMCA up the street where I intended to work out;
it floated above the uneven brick pavement that rose and fell from cracks
caused by the roots of Canadian maple bulging under the sidewalk; and it
traveled in the air with the scent of last night’s pot smoked from the
neighbor’s house and a cake baked in the following house. This time love felt
different, not like a cavalry of cherubs shooting their arrows at my heart and
groin, causing an invisible gash like the first time.
The YMCA was closed for the holiday, so
I returned to my apartment, grabbed my khaki jacket because the morning was
cool 65 degrees, and went for a walk in the town center. It was 7:00 am and streets
were deserted, except for a tourist waiting for a cab at the entrance of the
luxurious Weston Eastlander. Portland,
Maine, was quiet most of the time but especially in the early mornings and
evening hours, and quieter still on Sundays and holiday Mondays, as if its
residents had an unspoken agreement to rise and go to bed at a mutually
convenient time for all to start and end the day as to not make any unnecessary
noise.
I recognized the Maine silence now, but
at first it was heavy, dark, threatening, and accusatory; it recollected
mummies and werewolves from the chatter heard on street corners by those who
knew it only on face value, or as interpreted in the books of one of its most
famous Mainer and celebrity, Stephen King. Really, silence had been my road to
facing personal demons.
My first three years, I tossed and
turned every night on a $70 foam mattress. My 200 square foot attic apartment
in a converted 1800s house was bare -- no curtains, rugs, furniture to block open
space. I was married to the seasons. Spring rains, summer's blue skies, fall
leaves, winter snow tapped on my window like old friends. I acted intuitively
-- and insanely -- when I abruptly left the South, my friends and job, for a
place I’d never even visited, only movie romances set in Maine and its
lighthouses seem to inspire me to leave everything behind. My kids were off to
college. I was 45. I had always wanted to run away from home.
Suddenly, I needed space -- not the
maple, teak, expensive and oversized furniture I got in the divorce many years
ago after a sixteen-year marriage, the same furniture I donated to the thrift
store before leaving for the Northeast. I gave up my luxury Acura now rundown,
stilettos, and $400 designer dresses – also acquired during my marriage - and I
donated my collection of over 300 books to the library. My soul started breathing.
Then, my past gurgled up like acid reflux, like the woman’s blood curdling scream
I heard one night and the explosion from what sounded like a Revolutionary War
cannon another night. Maine was strange and scary, I thought, and covered my
head with the pillow.
Without knowing it, Mats had started me
on a journey to truth. “I think your father didn’t treat you well,” He said in
conversation when we were still together. “Did I say that?” I asked, horrified
by his astute perception.
I’d never talked about my father, but
Mats sensed I hid the truth about him; they looked alike – gray eyes, short
stature, frenetic pace, and love of travel and women - similarities I didn’t
dare admit to myself. It was more important to honor a parent, I thought, than
to be honest about your feelings for them, even though my relationship with
both my mother and father had shriveled me within an inch of my humanity.
Anyway, that was the past: I had bravely survived and successfully buried
memories of my long-ago childhood. But in the darkness, silence, and solitude
of Maine its pain was glaring.
“Motherfucker,” I screamed out one
morning to my long-deceased father. “Why? All your cursing, spitting in my
face, and violence didn’t let up until you died when I was 17. I was just a
child." Then there was my cruel mother inciting him to more violence by
pitting him against me or my sister and me. I would forgive and let go later,
but now I had to understand and accept that my innocence was stolen at a young
age. That all my sensual, emotional, psychological and natural impulses
were made a perversion. That my curious nature was stilted and afraid.
That I didn't surrender to anyone or anything, not even great love, for fear of
the slightest hint of violence or rejection. That I was made
“shelterless” by my sheltering parents, and that I had never come to
terms or accepted the wrongs done to me -- even after being married, divorced
and raising two kids on my own.
The anger tightened around my chest. I
had Reiki in town, hiked in and around the city, learned how to breath slowly
and mindfully, and meditated twice a day. Like in Sarah Groves's song, “Like a
Lake, “ I braced for the storm:
Bring the wind and bring the thunder
Bring the rain till I am tried
When it's over bring me stillness
Let my face reflect the sky
And all the grace and all the wonder
Of a peace that I can't fake
Everything started to come up -- anger,
sadness, betrayal, heartbreak pommeled me. I was exhausted from raising
two kids as a single mother, working three jobs, finding love, losing love, and
releasing childhood trauma I had calcified into my psyche.
My immune system failed. I suffered
bouts of overwhelming fatigue from severe allergies. I developed a recurrent
ear infection that occasionally sent me to the emergency room, several blocks
from my place, which I walked at 2 or 3 in the morning with throbbing pain --
and I hadn't even had a flu in over fifteen years. Sometimes, I didn't leave my
bed for days (thankfully, I worked as an online American History instructor).
Even so, signs of Mats were always present to cushion the blows: his favorite
book, The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, popped up in bookstore windows;
his Mona Lisa, liked he called me, was on posters everywhere... – all because
like he said, “we arrived on the same meteorite at the beginning of time.” Everything
was going to be a okay, I thought. I once heard a great line in an Italian
film: "the one who loves you is always there. Even before you. Even before
meeting you." Maybe, that was also true.
I started to feel better: I took
French language classes at the adult education center and joined a reading
group. I was stronger and a bit lighter and was moving away from the darkness
for fear it was too familiar and must now avoid staying in its depth for too
long, like the drunks and drug addicts here who went from hit or bar to a
crumbled body slump on the streets, further confirming the allure of being lost
forever.
Later, I learned that the Portland was
also known as the phoenix, because two great fires, one in the 1800s and another
in the 1900s, had claimed the small city, which rose again each time as better
version of itself, like I was now trying to do. Resurgam, the Latin for “I will rise again”
was written on the Portland flag.
That first winter, six years ago,
though, I was innocent to what was to come and simply thought the silence
annoying when I sat on park bench at Deering Oaks Park, one night tired from
carrying bags of groceries with items reflecting my most recent past -- too
many meats, rice, beans, and cooking oil for a single person.
Silence was not what I signed up for. I
expected new friends, block parties, and all the merrymaking experienced by the
tourists who came during the summer from around New England and Europe to whale
watch, hike, drink beer, boat, fish, and sunbathe. I didn't know that the real
spirit of Maine was dark, deep, and mysterious and could only be experienced as
a soulful redemption brought on by silence and wild, natural beauty. The place was
hell with large pockets of heaven, which the seagulls who soared even in the
most violent of weather, constantly reminded me to reach in their expansive and
life-affirming flights, which I could see outside my bedroom window. Maine had
the feel of the old woman in the woods, the fairy tale about the lost traveler,
who finds a cabin in the woods and in it an elderly woman who rocks him back to
health all night until morning when he rises to become the sun.
Yet, my immediate present felt funereal
like the deserted park of oaks bald from winter, branches on evergreens weighed
down with thick flakes of wet snow, lake frozen with sheets of scratched ice,
and hazy pastels reflected off light posts. Why did I move here alone? Why
hasn’t he called? Why didn't he marry me like he said he would? Why didn’t he
love me?
Now, I continued strolling with my long,
lost feeling of love on Congress Street with its brick sidewalks (the city was
a small fortress of brick, flat, dented, uneven, and rising as buildings inlaid
with art deco touches, also constructed in light, deep, fading, or painted
shades of red brick). A few homeless men sat on city benches or
walked around as if lost.
When I turned on Temple street, with
the movie theatre where I enjoyed extra servings of hot butter on my popcorn on
days I caught a film, I finally breathed into life an epiphany: the pure,
sublime, sacred, mysterious, innocent feeling that overtook me the moment I
fell in love with Mats had never been made nauseous, inferior, or grotesque in
my human interpretation of it or in my effort to contain, understand, possess
or dismiss it– even when the sex was bad, even when he disappeared, even when
we stopped talking, even if he did not love me as much as I loved him, even
when I was heartbroken. Divine love had traveled to me from eternity and stayed
on.
Maybe, the man I once loved was the
source of such experiences – the stone from which the wild feminine pulled from
it her Excalibur. Maybe all the women he had loved and lost (and there were
quite a few) -- like his fiery Danish Spanish, as he called her, who I imagined
with red medusa like locks and deep blue eyes radiating a superheroine’s passion,
a woman he claimed took him to the cosmos in marathons of uninhibited sex --
had given him a taste of the divine, and in turn he confirmed the divine in
them.
My relationship with him had also been about
the other women in his life – the ones I thought were the competition. The
one’s I thought I had to outperform, compare myself with, beat out. Cry over,
be envious of. Through the frustration
of my limitless and long-winded grief and heartbreak of six years, which I was
ashamed to admit to, I found the courage to go deeper into myself and to my
piercing pain as a headlamp to see more and clear the debris - before Mats, before
my parents, before me. I had to surrender
to a limitless truth and in that truth include Mats’s women, their heartbreak,
healing, and my heartbreak and healing; then transmute it all In the end, heartbreak became more important, life-sustaining, and life-giving than staying with
him could have ever been.
O
nce, when I told my friend, who is
also a Buddhist, about my relationship problems she responded by saying it was
all about me. “No, it wasn’t,” I said. “He did this, and he didn't do that.” I resented her advice. But it had always been
about me -- what I failed to see, do, embrace, admit, release, forgive,
celebrate…. Through, with, and without Mats, I dared to be divine, even though
I could not appreciate it at the time. With its many faces, love had rescued,
nurtured, emboldened, frightened, destroyed, resuscitated, healed, and
transformed me--, and I was grateful.
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