The Elusiveness of Love
Love is elusive
a fleeting moment
in which a whole lifetime
can be gained or lost
She wished that the psychologist wouldn’t dwell on that part of it - she had tried not to think
of that day, or the events that had
finally led her to flee her home, but they continued to haunt
her. Even though several
years had passed since her abusive marriage had ended, she could not seem to stop
those thoughts from replaying all the painful details.
It had been just another
Saturday night - dinner simmered on the stove - he would be home any minute. She stirred the
noodles constantly, watched them cook, as that was what she had to do - produce the
perfect supper to set on the perfect table to fit with the perfect conversation with the
perfect wife in their perfect home. She replayed his earlier angry phone call, in her
head, as she continued to stir his favorite home-made pasta sauce. Her nervousness turned
to realistic anxiety as the door slammed and he entered the room like an
erupting volcano. The silence of the room was broken with his abusive, hurting words, and
with the shattering of the dishes
as as they hit the floor. Early the next morning
she slipped quietly out of the bedroom and away from the reminders of his forced, sexual
pleasures. She entered the kitchen in all its upheaval and began the cleanup before he
came down for their Sunday morning breakfast. Her body ached as she collected the
shards of glass and bits of food from the floor. “Bitch”, he would spit quietly in her
ear as he left the table to collect his Bible and the papers from which he would lay-preach at
the morning service.
Her thoughts brought her back to the present.
She had continued to go for counseling about the depression, which seemed second
nature to her now - a numbing grey fog that hung like a cruel judgement over
everything. But all she really wanted to do was hide from herself. She used to wonder if there is ever an exact moment when your life changes, or if it's just like riding a bus and not having a window seat. Things just change around you when you're not watching and, before you know it, its time to get off. A lot of people ignore what happens to them until one day they can't ignore it anymore and the bus they've been sitting on all that time runs right over them. And she supposed that she had never really
noticed how sad her world was. She had never noticed how much her heart had filled
with all that sadness, and how it had started to leak out at the most inopportune time, like now, when she was waiting for a table at the mall's food court. She watched people walking in and out. She liked to do that, especially in a mall. There were always so many people in a mall that, if she stood still and quiet and just watched them, the ground shook a tiny bit under her feet. She wondered if anyone else took the time to feel the shaking. A family sat across from the table she had chosen. They placed a baby carrier down on the floor. She guessed the baby to be about six months old. She kept watching it just look around the space, staring at all the people and the bright lights. The baby's skin looked so smooth and flawless, and each finger was so perfectly placed, and moved on it's tiny hands in a delicate rhythm. It's eyes were beautiful and glassy, like the marbles she used to play with as a child at her grandmother's house. They took in each person, each inch of its world, with such careful consideration. Her own eyes welled up with tears and she couldn't hold them back. She just started to feel so much all at once. She was strangely envious of this tiny, new life - the fresh start that she felt she would never see again. Her head ached. She watched as the baby was whisked away and she saw the mothers wide eyes on her. She guessed that a crying, middle-aged woman staring at her child made her nervous.
Not being able to control the thoughts in her head, the need to run and hide, she left the mall to head to her appoinment. At the subway entrance she slid her token into it's slot and plodded along with the anonymous mass, down the stairs to the subway stop. She liked being underground - she felt lost but at home and as she leaned against the wall, waiting for the train, she thought, not for the first time, how simple life used to be, so easy, so unencumbered. With a roar and a squealing of brakes, her train rumbled into the station. She boarded and collapsed into a seat. The train rushed forward. She watched the windows fill with light and dark and movement, like clips from a jumble of movies. At her stop she got off, climbing back up to ground level, her heart so heavy that she thought she'd have to crawl up to the street level on her hands and knees. On the street, crowds flowed around her - students and professors, sales people and secretaries, hurrying to and from classes, work, coffee breaks, early lunches. Young women passed by, lithe in their bodies, fresh in their skin, and men, young and old, followed them with their eyes.
She left the counselor’s office in tears,
and walked in the park for what seemed like hours in the cold, blustery winter weather, and in a fog of memories she somehow reached the door to her new apartment.
She took a breath and entered - found her way to the bedroom, laid down on the
bed, the blanket pulled high. Squeezing her eyes shut, she clamped her hands
over her ears so that she would not be able to hear the sound of the elevator doors
opening and closing. She would not think, would not feel, would simply let time
pass till it was morning again. She did not know how long it was before she opened her eyes
and saw light through the window - not daylight, but the muted glow of the street
lamp. She was safe. She could breathe. She lay like that for a long time and
then found herself remembering again. Her life had slowly shattered into a million little
pieces but now that she had finally found the strength to remove herself from the abusive
environment in which she had become emotionally crippled, she began to reflect on,
and question, how she had allowed herself to end up in such an existence, and, in
hindsight, she now recognized that all the signs seemed alarmingly obvious.
Her mind went into replay - thinking back to
when she had met the man who would become her husband. She had dated several men
in her younger years, but none of the dates had turned into a relationship. She
didn’t really mind not having a significant partner in her life. Her studying was her
priority and she really wasn’t all that certain that she was capable of loving someone enough to
consider permanency or marriage. She became very independent and was totally
involved with her career in the local Public Library system. Her work was her major interest and her only priority - everything else was irrelevant. It
wasn’t until she turned 40 that she realized that perhaps life could have more to offer her.
They were introduced when he joined her church.
After that they kept bumping into each
other at the different church events and
services. She liked his face and his salt and pepper hair. When he asked her out for coffee
she readily accepted. They shared conversation easily. They spent many hours
together and their feelings began to develop. Before she knew it, he was talking
about sharing a life together and making promises that unexpectedly filled her heart
with happiness and even though he sometimes seemed aloof, and sometimes was prone
to making sarcastic remarks about her and other people in her life, and sometimes
became angry and moody after drinking just a little too much at a party, she chose to
ignore those dark signs. Occasionally, though, she would make a list of all his good
points and bad points. She would read and re-read her check list, but could never quite
figure out what trait should cancel out another, and so it became easier not to
question the things in the relationship that she found unsettling.
He finally, after much coaxing, brought her to
meet his parents. They lived in an
old, refurbished farmhouse, just outside the city.
The drive there was pleasant enough even though she was more than a little anxious
about how she would be received. It turned into a very upsetting visit. His parents
were well-dressed and initially seemed pleasant enough. They appeared to be well-read,
but during the course of the evening they became overly opinionated, and they
interrupted each other constantly with contradictions, and continually interjected
cutting remarks. The atmosphere in the room became suffocating. In their wine-
induced haze, they seemed to take pleasure in making sure she heard unsettling stories of
their son’s life. They provided details that would have been better left unsaid, but the
most shattering piece of information they revealed was about his abusive behavior in his
previous marriage - a marriage of which she had no knowledge. He responded to their
verbal tirade with a grin - even though his body language clearly revealed extreme anger.
She became acutely aware that in her desire to experience more of life, she had
naively entered into a relationship filled with psychological uncertainties and was now in a situation that
appeared to be filled with doubt, and fear. But she convinced herself that
just as you can’t control the thoughts in your head, you certainly can’t control who you
love.
Now, in her alone and often lonely moments, she
reflected sorrowfully on her past. It was a strange feeling - loving someone. Love
was sad sometimes - even sadder than death, she thought. Love was something she had
never really understood. She had opened her eyes to death and felt it was real -
she had watched it happen right in front of her when her mother died, and she accepted
it, even though it wasn’t easy. But love wasn’t like that for her. Love had made her
weak and desperate. Love had killed parts of her that she never even knew she had. Love
had made her such an emotional mess that she had accepted behavior in her twelve year
marriage that she never before would have tolerated.
She continued the painful counseling sessions.
It was hard and embarrassing to dredge up all the sordid details, but gradually
the thoughts in her head - the voice that kept blaming and confusing her - began to
clarify and she gained emotional stability and slowly crawled her way out of the dark tunnel
in her mind. Her search for happiness had brought her much pain. She had experienced physical
and verbal anger and her heart had been totally destroyed. She had now become
almost comfortable in the grey area of her dreams. Every so often, though, along
the slow road of healing, the world began to reveal itself again and deep inside her soul
she secretly hoped that someday the scars on her battered heart would heal enough
to give her the courage to allow herself to love again.
Rays of light floated tentatively into the
small apartment she now called home and she wondered if she could believe it to be a
positive sign - an omen - that the intensity of her disappointment and sadness was finally on the
road to easing. She wanted
desperately to climb out of her all-consuming grey area
into a safer, brighter place, but had, until now, been unable to shake the nagging
depression that continued to tightly wrap itself around her. This particular afternoon, after
she had scraped off old wax and re-polished the linoleum tiled floor in the small kitchen
of her apartment, she found herself staring at the dancing shadows of light, imagining a time
when she might once again feel in control and free from fear. She had suffered
enough. Her only choice was to move on. She was functioning. She was doing the best
she could. Maybe, just maybe, her heart whispered, if she allowed some light into
her being she could brighten her blurred realities and finally dissolve the pain, the
heartache, and her ever constant, over- powering sense of emptiness.
She began to open up her social world again
with friends that she had kept at a distance during her marriage. She was
introduced to a man at a friend’s dinner party. After a few uncomfortable, embarrassing attempts at trivial
chit-chat, he was able to put her at ease. She discovered that they had a lot
in common, and that they shared a strong interest in the arts. There was
something about him that she liked - his easy manner, but, more importantly, he had a
gentleness and kindness in his eyes. When he asked at the end of the evening if they could
meet again and share some time together at the local museum she, with much trepidation,
said yes. His loneliness and intensity intrigued her. She was acutely aware that he
was different from her ex-husband and other men that she had met or had heard about through friends and co-workers who were suffering through unhappy relationships.
He was intelligent, articulate, communicative and confident without arrogance.
He was courteous - a gentleman - affectionate and caring. His honesty, integrity, sincerity and openness spoke volumes to her. He had a gentleness - a quietness - that
engulfed her - that allowed her to very quickly let her guard down. They shared their past
heartaches easily and she was amazed at the trust in which she was able to tell him
things that had been locked deep inside her - things that she had shared with no-one. She even hinted at the abuse and the
ugly emotional remnants it had left behind. She
looked up once, while talking with him and thought that she could see her pain reflected
in his eyes - the way she had felt his pain deeply on their third encounter, in the car, on
the way to the restaurant for dinner. His voice quivered and his eyes teared as he spoke of the family and the church
family he had lost when his marriage, through unthinkable
circumstances, had bitterly dissolved. Her intellect told her to step carefully - baby
steps - but for the first time in longer than she could begin to remember, she listened with
her heart instead and suddenly did not feel so alone anymore. She felt the unbearable
burdens she had been carrying lighten - only a bit, but it was a start - a beginning -
and she wanted, with all that was left of her heart, to believe that now, in her senior
years, maybe she could have a personal future after all, and maybe it could be with this man
with the kind brown eyes wet with their shared tears. She wondered if to risk love - to
chance all - should now be the single most important adventure in her life’s journey,
not to be missed because of fear. She wondered if she didn’t risk anything, would she
then be risking more?
