This is part three of three. Part one is here, and part two is here.
The evening of Easter Sunday, my dad and I got ice cream in lieu of dinner. We ate it outside, sitting on a city bench in the blue light of dusk, the mildly warm day giving way to a cool night, too cool, perhaps, for ice cream. Through another tight throat, I thanked him for making the trip and told him that his presence had softened the edges of what could have been a much harder week. His return flight to Michigan was later that night; I would drive him to the airport once we finished our ice cream. I confessed to my dad that I felt sad anticipating his departure and my return to a one-bedroom apartment.
I didn’t say that I didn’t want to be alone, but that’s what I might as well have been saying: that I was sad anticipating how sad I would be without another person around to distract me. Whatever my dad said back to me, I took from it what I needed to hear; all I remember is the reminder of Easter’s promise, that morning’s good news that I had apparently already forgotten about come evening: Jesus hears me say I don’t want to be alone and assures me that I’m not, that none of us are.
I returned home from the airport to find my apartment just as empty as I anticipated, but it didn’t make me as sad as I imagined it might. Before bed, I scribbled some thoughts in my journal about the events of the week, eventually arriving at the hope that my ex might somehow be assured that he’d made the right decision. It needed to be made. I knew that, but I hadn’t wanted to be the one to make it. I had talked myself out of needing to make it at all, considering it but returning always to the same fear about our relationship (this might be as good as it was going to get for me), letting that lead me to the same verdict (I should hang on for dear life). Each time I considered breaking up with him, I pictured him indignant, or dejected, or confused; pictured myself wracked with doubt and regret. Even the weight of those projected emotions felt too heavy to bear, so I did what I tend to do when I’m afraid of deciding wrong: nothing at all.
But when the proverbial dust of that decision made for me settled, I found myself unexpectedly fine. I wasn’t angry with him, as I had imagined he might be with me had the roles been reversed but, instead, hoping that he wasn’t retroactively doubting the break-up the way I once feared I might. That sense of acceptance astounded me even as I wrote about it. The difference between how I felt Palm Sunday morning and how I felt Easter night—between how I felt in that moment and how I’ve tended to feel a week into a break-up—was suddenly there, stark and sharp, impossible to ignore. Those eight days had not erased my pain, but they had softened it, dulling its edges, leaving room for a quiet certainty to rise to the surface: this ending was right; it had come even as I fought it. I thought about that and felt thankful.
During that April 1 conversation, I told him that I didn’t want to be friends and said it with a stubborn kind of petulance that embarrasses me now. I both meant it and didn’t mean it, but I suppose now that more than anything, I meant it as a negotiation tactic, a bare ultimatum—this or nothing!—because I thought it might force him to reconsider. It didn’t, but I’m grateful for that now. I was the one who reconsidered and later recanted my initial refusal of friendship. Eventually, I sheepishly texted him to tell him that I’d changed my mind and wondered where he stood, and his response back to me—immediate, warm, receptive—felt so gracious that I cried reading it. I didn’t feel like I deserved that kindness, given how I had left things. That didn’t seem to matter.
I feel very fortunate to count him as a friend—partly because friendships that were once something else have not worked out often enough for me to appreciate this one, but mostly because he’s a really good one. I’ve since moved away from Minneapolis, but he and I talk most days, and he hosted me when I visited over New Year’s after more than a year away. I met his girlfriend and could tell right away why he liked her so much, because I liked her so much, too, right away. I thought about how strange it was that something I had once tried so hard to avoid, something I felt convinced that the mere idea of—us no longer together, him with someone else—would be unbearable was now reality, and once it arrived, it proved to be not only bearable but good, even right. I had seen the end of our relationship coming, and I tried to outrun it, to fight it, to force it to change forms. All of my protests against it were feeble, and it was somehow good that they were, because it was that ending that has given way to this friendship that I cherish so much, that has let the love I had for him take the shape it was meant to take, which is to say that being broken up with has—somehow!—been a mercy.
* * *
The mind craves meaning. It looks for patterns and order, unilaterally imposing its own framework onto reality. I recognized this tendency in myself some time ago, but that recognition alone has not neutered the impulse or shattered belief in the fragile possibility of narrative coherence. I was a bookish kid, then an English major, then a journalist. Like Didion, I’ve been trained since childhood: when in doubt, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Beneath this search for some grand unifying theory of my life is just the desire for control – understandable, though it rarely leads to understanding. A byproduct of consuming enough stories at an impressionable age is the tendency to narrativize one’s life, and one tends to be an unreliable narrator, unwilling to come to terms with those things one knows but does not want to know.
“What’s past is prologue,” Antonio tells Sebastian in The Tempest, my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays. Zadie Smith uses the line as the epigraph to White Teeth, my favorite of her novels. That double instance alone has been sufficient reason for me to force its semantic wisdom upon my life, to close-read it just like any other text: note repetition (see above), keep track of recurring motifs, return to the same few details, excavate them for latent meaning, speculate at what larger theme they might illuminate, what end they might foreshadow. It’s just quasi-magical thinking with a literature degree.
I do this with most things (I am doing it now), but especially with relationships and especially after they end. I want a neat conclusion or at least some interpretative key to explain the unraveling, something that might let me impose some sort of meaning onto my sadness or that would at least let me understand it as justified or unjustified.
“I don’t have a narrative for you,” one ex told me mid-break-up. I told him that I wasn’t asking for one—but I was. I had just asked him if there was someone else, the only plausible explanation I could think of. He said there wasn’t and that he was offended that I’d asked at all. I kept returning to the same question: how things could have changed so quickly, when and why and how he fell out of love. I told myself I had a right to know, that I was owed that much after suffering the indignity of an unceremonious break-up.
But the truth is that no explanation would have really satisfied me. I just wanted a way to make sense of what felt senseless, to recover some illusion of control. The more I try to create some coherent narrative of some past event, the more trapped within it I become. Soon enough, I find myself stuck, relitigating an ending that has already passed, an ending that I’ve often wanted, even, but was too afraid to admit that I did.
* * *
Life tends to follow the same undemocratic logic that Gillian Rose observed in love. For her, ‘life’ and ‘love’ are one and the same; the phrase ‘life affair’ appears repeatedly in Love’s Work. That makes sense to me: both life and love refuse to be constrained by our desire for choice, which is to say control. They do not conform to our desires. We are unable to dictate their terms. These are all realities I’ve recognized even while railing against them, things I have known but have not wanted to know.
I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to circumvent pain by attaching myself to someone else, trying to turn another person into an anchor, instrumentalizing them by using our relationship—whatever its nature—as a proverbial human shield against life’s inherent uncertainty. I have not wanted to face that uncertainty and so have supposed that desire alone should count for something—if nothing else, a protest vote to register my fear.
I don’t know how to name what that fear was, except to say having to feel a certain way. “Loss is legion,” Rose writes of love affairs, specifically hers with a Marxist Catholic priest. “If the Lover finds the entanglement of love too harrowing, then, as it pulls back, his harrow crushes the Beloved, also in its path.” Both parties, Lover and Beloved, are left “at the mercy of emotions which each fears will overwhelm and destroy their singularity.”
I find few emotions harder to bear than loneliness and so suspect that is the root of my fear, that feeling lonely (and sad and ashamed of feeling that way) is what I’ve been trying to avoid by all of my flitting from one relationship to the next, the same patterns repeating each time. But I’ve been lonely in them all in a real, persistent way: unhappy and unfulfilled but unable to believe that it could be any different. The sadness of this cycle struck me only recently. It used to feel necessary, this constant reaching and grasping for something to stave off the loneliness, convinced that it was the loneliness that would destroy me, unable, or perhaps unwilling, to see that it was all my attempts to avoid it that were destroying me already.
* * *
I used to feel anxious at the thought of some prolonged period of romantic solitude. A few months once seemed like an impossibly long time, but two years just passed and I am—somehow!—fine. The thought that I might be happier than I’ve ever been has come to me often lately. It feels like a marvel that I can wonder that at all, given that I am in the midst of circumstances I never would have chosen for myself: well into my 30s, sober, alone aside from my cats, living in a hundred-something-year-old parsonage in a small Illinois farm town. The loneliness I was trying to outrun caught up to me here, but it’s in that loneliness that Jesus has found me, too. I often think about how I wouldn’t be here if that relationship hadn’t ended, how fortunate it was for that relationship to have ended when it did, how much of a mercy it’s proven to be.
It seems to me no small thing that the ending that gave way to this chapter of my life happened right before Holy Week. The timing feels imbued with too much meaning not to be divine. I was prevented from coping in the ways I usually would—isolating, disappearing into distractions, withdrawing into myself—and forced instead to cope by going to church each day. I was prevented from anchoring my life to another’s in the way I thought I wanted and forced instead to recognize that it has been anchored in the love of God all along.
I would have chosen differently if I could. I would have clung to the comfortable familiarity of life in Minneapolis, in the not-quite-right relationship that felt easier than starting over. But God has called me elsewhere—this strange and difficult place that has broken me wide open over and over and over again. It’s a place I never would have chosen for myself, a place where I’ve been forced to confront things I would rather ignore, but a place where God is working some great change in me that I can’t quite grasp and certainly can’t put into words but can sense as real and meaningful all the same. It’s here where God has helped me to put my life in its proper place, to see it as some small part of God’s redemption of the world and the people within it.
There is no democracy in love. Somehow, that’s good news. There is always mercy.
Beautiful as always, EC, although "I don't have a narrative for you" mid breakup is CRAZY
I can't wait to read your memoir when you write one.