Strange sweaty disoriented hours, these last few days of summer. Three-popsicle days, sleeping-all-afternoon days. Cardboard boxes everywhere and unpacking them to find things I already had forgotten I owned and in a few cases am not quite sure why I brought along. I isolate, don’t return phone calls, talk mostly only to the cat; am in denial about the fact that I’m teaching 27 new people on Monday and have neither a completed syllabus nor a plan for getting to school (since parking will be pretty much out of the question this semester, unless I get up at six and arrive before seven). I don’t read the textbook or walk to the bus stop to test out a route to school. Instead I alternate dozing on the sofa with vigorous unpacking.
And it’s going okay and I’m doing alright with the unpacking, until I somehow come across that which I had managed to successfully avoid while packing: all the notes/cards/letters he’d written to me since 2006, carefully rubber-banded together. I adore you, my gorgeous lover, you are such a mysterious beautiful gift—
I come to my senses several minutes later, sitting on the bed staring numbly into space, the papers having spilled across my lap during this brief fugue state. I gather them again, trying to understand. Seeing these words written in his handwriting rekindles my sense of ontological crisis, one that started when he first admitted to me he’d been lying. What is to be believed? What kinds of information constitute proof? Who is to be trusted? Because now he says it was all a lie—that he was lying the whole time—”running a racket,” which his Higher Power won’t allow him to do anymore—pretending to be committed to us when he was really only acting a part, only feigning partnered love to get sex and approval. Is that the new truth? But surely it’s just not possible, to lie so convincingly and for so long about something so huge. Is it? I don’t think I’m “trying to make the past a better place to live,” because I don’t live in the past; I’m just wondering whether the past ever really even happened. And it’s the mundane kinds of love that confuse me most—I can see how one could fake being generous in bed, be performative, in order to reel another person in, to feel like the best lover ever, to gratify one’s narcissism or grandiosity—but what about the “myriad petty, unsexy ways” in which he seemed to love me? All the times he made me cups of tea in the middle of the night, gave me footrubs when I had my period, took me for walks, listened to me, wrote me these notes with all their endearments—were those moments lies too? Is that what he’s saying? Or maybe he’s lying now? Either way it seems like I should know; it was my life too and it seems like I should get to know what happened in it.
A few months ago, I thought: I understand now why his ex-wife made him a photograph album of the years of their marriage. Not sarcastically, not to rub his face in it—but just to reassert, when he claimed he’d never wanted to be married: This was not a lie. This was real. I know. I was there, and so were you. Pictures of them with their arms around each other, laughing. Pictures of them on the couch with their dogs. An attempt to validate her memory of her own past, to shore up that which suddenly seemed to be built on the same quagmire which apparently underlies Houston, and I’m told that’s why there are so many cavernous potholes, as the sand or marsh underneath the blacktop roils and ripples and settles. What is the substrate, what the substance of reality.
What is real. What really happened. Is it possible to know someone. These kinds of questions, so fundamental to our human being. You think you have a mutual understanding with someone about your life together and then they vanish for a year and then they sit opposite you in a coffee shop and say, with genuine sympathy and compassion, I’m sorry but I never wanted to be in a real relationship. I know I said I did, all that time, but I was lying. It caused you great harm. Please forgive me. And you try to accept this new truth, partly out of habit, and because they are still so pretty.
Yet even in the midst of a full-blown flashback into howling ontological chaos I do know one thing now: There’s no point trying to wrap my head around the incomprehensible.
I shove everything into a manila envelope and bury it at the bottom of a drawer. Maybe I’ll send it to him, at some point. Let him try to reconcile past with present, instead of me always taking running leaps at it and failing and feeling crazy.
I go downstairs and eat tuna with olive oil, steamed broccoli with fresh lemon juice, and a coconut popsicle; and then return to unpacking socks and towels and hot water bottles and office supplies and books and can openers and shoes. Sufficient unto the day are the ex-boyfriends thereof. And maybe it’s just the broccoli, but for a long while I enjoy one of those extended moments in which I revel, one of those long sane-feeling stretches during which I consider myself well out of the whole business, and lucky to be alone. The cat is querulous and grating, but at least she can’t lie.
Tomorrow is going to involve the Montrose Starbucks, a grande matcha latte, and tackling the syllabus, since if I hang out around here I seem to get sucked into unpacking, giant brown boxes everywhere cueing me to open them and see what’s inside and where I can squirrel it away. Also I have a standing date with the Twombly Gallery, which I think will be my weekly antidote to Sunday night freakouts over Monday morning teaching. That and the back-to-back episodes of The Daily Show which I’ve been mainlining. I can barely wait until my own classes start. I desperately need an intense, complicated, richly intellectual dose of something new, to take me out of my own head, out of these alabaster chambers through which cold draughts of bewildered drunk history sometimes meander. If I want to know what’s real, what’s here, what’s alive, what counts, I can just look around me. I have three voicemails on my cellphone from people who love me. I’m lying on Rae’s queen-sized bed and looking at a blue heart woodcut print made by my best friend; over by the wall are stacked three quilts, one made by each grandmother, one by me at sixteen. Love is physical, tangible, present, direct. Love is something you don’t have to guess about or wonder over or try to figure out. Love is the dogged way I’ll get up for those students at 6 am if I have to, so I can find a parking place and photocopy our syllabus and start memorizing their names and encouraging them to write.
Anything else is just passing through.
