To
keep myself busy and distracted on sleepless nights, I started an online
storefront offering personalized love letters in categories such as crush,
unrequited love, true love… The orders came as far as Europe, Africa, and Asia.
For $25, customers were sent questionnaires, based on their chosen category, asking for the details needed to write their one-of-a-kind letters.
My
obsession with love had started when I was young. I read all the Disney fairytales in
childhood, Barbara Cartland books as a teenager, and Russian, German, French,
and South American literary novels in young adulthood and beyond. My favorite
books were “War and Peace,” “Dr. Zhivago,” and “Love in the Time of Cholera,”
and I rewrote their rapturous one-liners about true love in journals so that I
could reread and relive my obsessive infatuation with it. Great love lived in my
head, far away from the responsibility and sacrifices needed to be in a
marriage with children. Not that I
complained about my daily responsibilities, like grocery shopping, cooking,
cleaning… as repetitive and tedious as it was. I did not even wonder why there
was no spark between my husband and me.
Why would I? My parents’ relationship had been hateful, violent, and
manipulative. At least my husband was safe, stable, and secure.
I
accepted that our arguments were constant, loud, petty, and forgettable – what
to eat for dinner, what to do on weekends - and we had no genuine interest in
knowing more about the other -- not our hobbies, fears, like, or dislikes. In
our defense, we married young and did not know much about our true selves, or
at least enough of it to share it with conviction with each other. We
especially didn’t trust the chemistry of our bodies, not fully awake, yet
knowing without a doubt that we were not compatible or interested in each other,
even though we didn’t know how to listen to our bodies either. Because we were the other’s first sexual
experience, we accepted that whatever the quality or quantity of sex between us
was all there was to sex - a non-threatening, no-big-deal affair, that was
necessary for psychological and biological functions, no matter how others
touted it.
For
16 years, we pursued higher education, fertility treatments, and adoptions
abroad when pregnancy did not happen naturally. Bigger and bigger and better
furniture, boats, cars, and houses were also on our list of pursuits. That is
until my husband broke the unspoken understanding between us that if we could
not be in love then we would be successful; that it was more important to be
the envy of others than to be happy with each other or with ourselves.
On
the day he announced his real feelings for me, his hazel/ yellowish eyes were
clear, his large broad forehead unmoving, his other features stoic as if
reflecting his new seismic realization, as if he was admitting the truth of his
34-year-old life.
“I
have always loved you, but I have never been in love with you,” he said clearly
and unemotive, as if he was writing with gravitas the words into the space
between us.
I
was about to chomp down thoughtlessly on a piece of smoked beef when his truth
rang like distant church bells with an announcement I could not fully grasp at
a noisy barbecue restaurant, except for the cold twinge in my heart. At the
time of his great confession, he had already been secretly seeing another
woman.
When
I returned to my mental cave where soulmates, true love, and the anam caras
lived unabashedly and unapologetically, my husband had already left the house,
and we were on our way to a divorce. The idea for my online love letter writing
storefront stemmed from a need to return to love, to make it live and breathe,
even though I had given it its last rites.
I justified creating such a venture by having a master’s in creative
writing that I had never put to good use.
With
fervor, I sought out my customers’ memories and feelings. Questionnaires were
sent. Details were demanded in a volley of emails. When? Where? What? How?
Why? were the basis for my inquiry about their relationships. I posted an onslaught of questions to the
woman who needed to explain to a soulmate, who was about to do some time in
jail, that her body required sex from other men, even though such a physical
act with others did not diminish her undeniable love for him. I dug deeper for feelings of loss and the
hope for the return of a father who had abandoned his daughter in childhood.
Even
though they never said it, my customers thought me a fevered, fiendish, and
freakish raider of their emotions, too pure and distilled to be exposed to me
or to a world that threatened to question it or to squash it. Ironically, they sought out my expertise to
express great feelings to their beloved.
They did not realize what they had gotten themselves into by hiring me
for their precious tasks, nor could they guess at my fragile state of mind, and
my grasping and groping for love’s existence to stop its demise in my love life.
They
attributed the unclear qualifications for a love letter writer to include tasks
both daring and mad. They hoped for the
best but could not guess the outcome of my efforts. Some disappeared during the
truth-letting process while others pleaded for mercy: Why can’t you just
write something down? they asked in frustration. No, no, no, truth at all costs, I
demanded. How could I write your
soulful, one-of-a-kind letter if I don’t know your story, style, diction, and
tone of writing, I said repeatedly. You
must allow me complete access to your experiences, I demanded without stating
it in a blatant way.
I was shocked to learn that most knew little
or dared not think about the meaning of their emotions, even the hair color,
smell, and features of their beloved were hard to express or describe. I
wondered why they didn’t contemplate their ardent feelings and the changes it caused
in their bodies, mind, and spirit, as if their brains were snatched on a magic
carpet ride to love’s ethers. In the end, most of it was conjecture on my part: to write a
personalized letter, I spent days and nights contemplating my customers’ lives
and loves, and more than four hours every night writing their missives; still,
it was exhilarating and distracting enough to be ensconced in the rapture of
those others who were in love, always as if for the first time.
For
inspiration, I re-read my favorite quotes and rewatched my favorite foreign
movies about love, like “Children of Paradise,” “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” “The
Leopard,” “Brief Encounter….” I knew that the expression of love needed to be
as subtle and powerful as its experience, and that its communication could not
be hammered out in a few “fake” words but captured lightly, even when passions
ran high or amok.
As
much as I prided myself on understanding and communicating love better than
most, I was its greatest ignorant of all.
Many years later, I would tire of my visits to its stifling mental
sanctuary. I would realize that Love was
great because it overflowed even in the measured length and width of space I
allowed for it in my relationships; that it adapted to my well-read and
practiced application of its labels; that it crouched to fit my containment of
its eternal breath of life; and that it accompanied me on an arduous journey of
forgiving, healing, and belonging with the same unconditional selflessness that
it had shown me all along. But that was many years after my divorce, after I
had had more battering in personal relationships.
A Customer's Love Letter
My Papi, My Life,
The
first time we walked on the old railroad tracks, I fell in love. We walked for hours, even past the haunted
depot where others said they had seen the ghost of an old man holding train
tickets in his hand. Still, I never got scared or tired. That evening, sunset, twilight, dusk, and
sunrise felt like friends, and the leaves on the rotting tracks were the same
color as the Fall sky. You gave me your sweater to keep me warm, and you held
my hand.
Everything
you said about life was true, like when you said I should face each morning with
courage, no matter what I faced. And you listened to me, even when I
talked about worries about my grades in college. It’s rare to feel pure
love, like being seen and heard at the same time. Do you know I believed in you
then?
God
sent me a real man, perfect and beautiful with smooth, pretty skin like
dark, melted chocolate. Even now after seven years of marriage, I fall in love
every time I see you, like the first time we walked around the railroad track and
the evening turned into a new day, and I never got scared or tired. I knew then
I could count on you forever.
How
do I describe you? Solid, sweet, passionate… mine. My body craves you. You give
me goose bumps and make me want you all the time. You make me a strong woman
because you are a strong, honest, and dependable man. I can't help falling
deeper in love with you every time.
Happy
Anniversary, My Love
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