Cruising the internet a while back, I saw a video of her performing with Exit 19. The sound quality was shit, as sound on phones and digital cameras always is, but that wasn’t the problem. Even with poor sound, I would have been mesmerized if we’d still been together. With the months apart, it was like looking at a stranger.
Along with my heart, she broke my love goggles.
I once used the metaphor of an athlete being confined to a wheelchair to describe what losing Andi was like. That felt right for a while, but it doesn’t anymore. I’m up, I’m moving forward, and being with Becky is the best kind of freedom.
Now I feel happy and sad at the same damned time. There’s the person who promised to love Andi for the rest of his life, who meant it with all his heart, and who expected to die in her arms. Well, he did die. He died alone (more accurately, surrounded by friends, but not the one friend he expected to be with) and I don’t mourn his passing, but I mourn his innocence, his world view, his absolute self-assurance in matters of the heart.
Clearly, I needed to be knocked down a peg.
I miss our friendship, but looking at her fills me with sadness. The undying lover
has been replaced by a man who wishes her nothing but the best, and means it with all his heart. The home I shared with Andi in Oasis Condominiums only exists in my memory and in some great pictures, but it will never be again. While I mourn the official end of this era in my life, I’m also looking forward to what happens next. I feel pain and excitement, sadness and relief, regret and love, all jumbled together.
Becky and I have picked a place in the Gables, where our studios will share space, where Dylan can have his own room and attend an amazing school, where our family has room to grow. Like Oasis, the Gables home with Becky only exists in my mind, in pictures, and in dreams, but it’s no less real. I still don’t have a word for all these emotions; it’s just what happens now. Close one book and open a new one. Let one thing go to pick up another. Say goodbye to the defining relationship of your life to make room for the love of your life.
It's hard to deny a feeling of failure when faced with official recognition that a marriage is over. Hard too, to recognize that along with lost naivety or innocence that you have replaced blind acceptance for constant critical evaluation and comparison.
ReplyDeleteDistance in time shows not that I needed to be taken own a peg, that I deserved it somehow or that my heart was truly broken, but rather that we had tried until one of us couldn't go on; that change had to be faced or forced and that regretably change was easier for her without me and that all this had happened while I was completely and unforgiveably unaware.
The scary thing was replacing those rose tinted goggles with something that gave a brighter, clearer and more balanced perspective and overcoming the need to make sure that anyone trying to get close had to work harder than I deserved or was prepared to do in return.
This post was by turns uplifting and heartbreaking in its familiarity and sad and exciting in its lack of reconition that what is ahead will be infintely more defining of you than what is in the past.
There is no new book, only a new page. Each page, read only once, can only be referenced in memory. You have to hope that you have finally learned to read and not just skim the surface. It can truly be the best book you have ever read because you will read it together.
I wish you love......Al.
Al, I started off by cutting and pasting part of the first paragraph so I could respond, but really, I'd need to cut and paste everything you wrote.
ReplyDeleteYour words are poetic, touching, and they mean a lot to me.
Thanks for giving so much of yourself in my comments section, and thanks, as always, for reading.