A Hard Memory Relived in Maine (excerpt)

Chapter 5

I had never been openly afraid before, not the way I was afraid in Maine those first several years after I moved there. In Florida, I raised two kids on my own and traveled the world every so often when I got an extra classes at work or online (at the time I taught American Literature classes at a career college in Miami—two sessions on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, from 9 am. to 12 p.m., and 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.; and Wednesday and Friday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.  I also worked for another online school out of California). With the extra money, I traveled to Paris twice, Rome, Florence,  Reykjavik, Bali, and Amsterdam for up to four or five days at time, which was the most I could afford for hotel/flight packages I purchased on online travel sites.

In those faraway places, I ate yogurt, ice cream, crepes, and I drank oat milk--whatever was cheap and nutritious. Whenever possible, I rode the Big Red Bus, with hop-on /hop-of, all-day sightseeing privileges and one-time charge.  I thought I was brave then, traveling with only $200 in my wallet, eating whatever I could afford for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and asking the locals for directions. But that bravado was only for show, another fast and easy distraction that kept me from thinking, standing still, and knowing myself in an intimate way. I traveled to run away from the stress of single motherhood in Florida--and it worked for bits at a time, or at least enough to re-energize me for the next lap in my stressful life. 

Being alone in Maine, though, triggered the real demons, the ones I had spent a lifetime running away from. That first winter, sitting alone in Deering Oaks Park at 5:00 p.m. (I thought the park might be lovely in spring, summer, and fall with its varieties of maple, oak, pine and flowering hardwood trees, but in the winter it looked as dead as I was) on a dark, snowy afternoon with bags of groceries items I no longer needed like steak, potatoes, beans, rice…--foods I once cooked for my children but were no longer good for my diet (I  needed to lose the 70 pounds I put on during my stressful post-divorce years, extra pounds that sent my weight sky-rocketing to 210 pounds).  That first winter as I sat alone that park bench all I could see, feel, and know was silence and how my thought loomed large against its overwhelming power to conquer it all.

At first, Maine’s silence 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.

Still, 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, solitude, and wild, natural beauty. The place was hell with large pockets of heaven that seagulls that soared even in the most violent of storms, constantly reminded me to reach in their expansive and life-affirming flights, which I could see outside my bedroom window. The personality of Maine was like that the Brothers Grimm German fairy tale, “The Old Woman in the Wood,” the story of a lost traveler who found a cabin in the woods and in it an old woman who all night rocked him back to health until morning when he rose 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?  I asked myself as I sat with all the heavy grocery bags on a park bench in Deering Oaks in the middle of a dark, snowy winter.  Even though I’d taken a large courageous step into my future, I still lived in my the past, especially my most recent relationship past.  

Looking back, my first relationship after my divorce was a cliché of modern-day romance.  We met online and chatted for six months before meeting in NYC.  He was an English businessman, getting divorced, and seeing other women. He never lied about his relationship status, except he called me his soulmate, said he would marry me, and take me to live in Europe. I fell madly in love when we met in New York City, walking around Central Park, the United Nations and Broadway for four days. But he disappeared after the trip—and that was two years ago.   

It hurt me terribly when he flew to Maine and didn’t let me know about it, even though I had mentioned moving to the state in one of my last emails to him. But he had to have the last word and leave a heartbreaking welt in his path, as I figured from other relationship-ending stories he shared with me when we were still communicating online. His email about his trip to Maine was as clear as the hurt he intended by it:

I have been in Bangor, Maine passing by Stephen King’s home, going to a beer drinking place taken out of Twin Peaks.  I remembered you once told me that you wanted to live in Maine because it has seasons!!! At first, I did not understand what you meant, but when talking to people in Bangor, I understood that it is just as in Scandinavia, with snow, rain, wind and sun changing through the year. I instantly felt at home there….
 
  And because I wasn’t haven’t our relationship end on his term, I bought, on an internet travel website, a four-day ticket/hotel package deal to Copenhagen, where he now lived, flew to Europe, even though I couldn’t afford it, and emailed him about it:

Really, it was strange that I stayed at a hotel in the vicinity of your apartment in Copenhagen. My original choice was a hotel by the harbor, but my arrangements were changed at the last minute.  Actually, when I got lost, the SAS building and Tivoli amusement towers were the “beacons” I followed back to my hotel.  I also walked by the Hard Rock Café and swam in the pool at the public bathhouse, DGI-Byen, across the street from the train station; I thought then you might live in the area since you mentioned these places in our online chats.

Because my injury to his heart was as well executed as his to mine, his heartbroken email about my visiting his country without letting him know further confirmed it:

It is some days ago I read your mail. I was really kind of chocked-up that you have been here without informing me.  I did not know what to say. Imagine, you have been here, around Tivoli; it is very weird because it is where I live my life when I am in Copenhagen. My apartment is just next to the Central Station and the view from my window is the high amusement towers in Tivoli. It is from this place I have had all the wonderful conversations with you, and I am so glad you have seen it.  How I would have loved to walk you around and show you everything…  

Why did you come and why did you not tell me?

Still missing you

  

Even in our 40s we were immature, co-dependant, passive aggressive, and horrified of relationships, even though between us we’d had enough of them to know better: He had two marriages and two divorces, and I had one marriage and a divorce; still, we were as immature as teenagers in love.  But there was a lot more to my relationship with Stephen than my sizing him up as my next man.  Running into him was like running into the guide that escorted Young Goodman Brown on his journey through the dark forest, a guide who made sure his visitor kept his eyes wide open while traveling through hell.

 Maybe, the man I 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.  Because my  relationship with him had also been about the other women in his life – the ones I thought I had to outperform, compare myself with, beat out, cry over, and be envious of, I misunderstood the trajectory of our love story. 

Without knowing it, Stephen had started me on a journey to deep truths further compounded by my move to Maine and all the free time I had to see and deal with it. “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 Stephen 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 him or her, even though my relationship with both my parents had shriveled me to an inch of my humanity. Anyway, that was the past: I had bravely survived yet 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 or my sister against 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 my sensual, emotional, psychological, and natural impulses were made a perversion; that my curiousity was stilted and afraid; that I didn't surrender to anyone or anything, not even great love, for fear of 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. 

Everything started to come up -- anger, sadness, betrayal, and 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 to 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 instructor).

Even so, signs of Stephen were always present to cushion the blows: his favorite book, The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, popped up in storefront windows at used bookstores; his dedicated love song to me by  U2, “With or Without You,” played in malls and blasted from car stereos; his Mona Lisa, liked he called me, was on posters everywhere, all because 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. Still, I wouldn’t let him go, I wouldn’t forgive him, especially his sudden disappearance from my life.

From past experiences, lessons learned during my heartbreak were preceded by signs of him. Jolts and bolts of eye-opening epiphanies rained down as I tried to accept their messages:  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 Vermeer love, or not, the girl with the pearl earring, ' as implied in the book by Tracy Chevalier) or finding the sterling silver necklace of a Catholic Celtic cross he gave me for protection, which I found lying around several weeks after losing it, that triggered a tsunami of realizations. 

I waffled between being grateful for meeting Stephen and despising him for leaving me even though his leaving triggered a personal revolution: the need to leave Florida and start anew.   Suddenly, I needed space--not the maple, teak, expensive, and oversized furniture I got in the divorce 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.

 

I didn’t know that after Stephen, I would move to the city of resurrection: Portland was also known as the phoenix, because two great fires, one in the 1800s and another in the 1900s, had claimed the city, which rose again as better version of itself, like I was now trying to do.  Resurgam, the Latin for “I will rise again” was written on its flag.

 
 But those first years in Maine, I only thought of Stephen and wanting to be with him, anywhere else but Maine.  Sometimes because I thought long and hard about him, I ran into an epiphany of us, like the day I  strolled around with long, lost feelings of love on Congress Street with its brick sidewalks (the city was a small fortress of brick-flat, dented, uneven-that rose as mid-size 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 cinema where I enjoyed extra servings of hot butter on my popcorn on days I caught a movie, I finally breathed into life an epiphany: the pure, sublime, sacred, mysterious, innocent feelings that overtook me the moment I fell in love with Stephen had never been made nauseous, inferior, or grotesque in my interpretation of it or in my effort to contain, understand, possess or dismiss it– even when the sex went bad, even when he disappeared, even when he stopped loving me, even when I suffered his heartbreak.  Divine love had traveled to me from eternity and stayed on.

Being alone with my grief in Maine gave me the courage to go deeper and use glaring pain as a headlamp to see the debris-- before Stephen, before my parents, before me--so that I could start to clear it all.  In the end, heartbreak became more important, life-sustaining, and life-giving than staying with Stephen could have ever been. 

Now I was a hermit in Maine, and I hated it, even though living alone had been a long ago wish now come true (even as a teenager in the hurly burly of a violent childhood, I dreamt of running away from home to find solace anywhere but where I was). Still, in my youth, I continued putting myself in the juggernaut of life’s list of things-to-do like marriage and children.   And now my greatest wish was to be anywhere but in Maine because it was too silent, and I felt too alone.

My first two years in Maine, I tossed and turned every night on a $70 foam mattress. My 200 square foot attic studio 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 family, friends, and job, for a place I’d never even visited before. And now, I was at a loss for what to do with myself and all the free time I had ever wished for.