I have had the great fortune, or greater misfortune, depending on the state of my heart, to have loved four men.
The first one was all of my seventeen year old ardor for whom I privately pined for years, the second I married for a time, the second was my mentor, and the third came to me when I expected him least and granted me my freedom.
I met D when I was twenty-two and still in school at State. He was lanky and coltish and wore big yellow glasses and I thought, for sure, he was gay.
It was film class, I remember announcing the class, something utterly precious to the fact that I was interested in the anthropology of pornography, yada yada yada, as I recall, I believed in what I said and I had clearly piqued his interest.
He used to sit in the back of the class with a brown haired girl that I thought was too cool for school, I suspected, after I figured out that he was most likely not gay, that he was having an affair with Miss TCFS.
somehow we collided, I think because he asked me to appear in one of his films and I very gamely followed him a steep hill in Marin to have fifty pound angel wings strapped to my person.
I was a year back from France, with a year of city living under my belt, I distinctly (and since my parents were still paying my rent I could afford to do so) recall uttering as my mantra, the world is my oyster, I shall not want. And lo, I was so very, very wrong, on so many counts, for I did end up wanting, and my oyster was nothing but the shimmering, irridescent illusion of the insides of a pedestrian pier mussel...
And then there was D and I, and we were in love.
Emma is intervening.
how do you recount eight years, of a life shared. Nail it to a few sturdy anecdotes and gloss over the fuck ups on both sides and certain things that are too painful and too private to put out to the world. Things that are unsaid and now one divorce and several years later are the tenuous, silken threads that bind.
what I don't understand is how a person could be convince, or consumed by something that tricks them into thinking that love is dead.
Love doesn't die. I am quite certain that the love I felt for these three was true, and true it remains, it has shifted from steadfast mountains to malleable dunes, but it is there, and it endures.
Doesn't mean I would take them back, it simply means that after the wounds scarred over and all the scabs had fallen away, I looked to my coursing blood and found their traces were indelibly a part of me. And to make peace with hurts and betrayals, and peace within myself, that I should have loved them, and maybe not have been loved in return, but that I did love, that is enough.
That is enough.
The first one was all of my seventeen year old ardor for whom I privately pined for years, the second I married for a time, the second was my mentor, and the third came to me when I expected him least and granted me my freedom.
I met D when I was twenty-two and still in school at State. He was lanky and coltish and wore big yellow glasses and I thought, for sure, he was gay.
It was film class, I remember announcing the class, something utterly precious to the fact that I was interested in the anthropology of pornography, yada yada yada, as I recall, I believed in what I said and I had clearly piqued his interest.
He used to sit in the back of the class with a brown haired girl that I thought was too cool for school, I suspected, after I figured out that he was most likely not gay, that he was having an affair with Miss TCFS.
somehow we collided, I think because he asked me to appear in one of his films and I very gamely followed him a steep hill in Marin to have fifty pound angel wings strapped to my person.
I was a year back from France, with a year of city living under my belt, I distinctly (and since my parents were still paying my rent I could afford to do so) recall uttering as my mantra, the world is my oyster, I shall not want. And lo, I was so very, very wrong, on so many counts, for I did end up wanting, and my oyster was nothing but the shimmering, irridescent illusion of the insides of a pedestrian pier mussel...
And then there was D and I, and we were in love.
Emma is intervening.
how do you recount eight years, of a life shared. Nail it to a few sturdy anecdotes and gloss over the fuck ups on both sides and certain things that are too painful and too private to put out to the world. Things that are unsaid and now one divorce and several years later are the tenuous, silken threads that bind.
what I don't understand is how a person could be convince, or consumed by something that tricks them into thinking that love is dead.
Love doesn't die. I am quite certain that the love I felt for these three was true, and true it remains, it has shifted from steadfast mountains to malleable dunes, but it is there, and it endures.
Doesn't mean I would take them back, it simply means that after the wounds scarred over and all the scabs had fallen away, I looked to my coursing blood and found their traces were indelibly a part of me. And to make peace with hurts and betrayals, and peace within myself, that I should have loved them, and maybe not have been loved in return, but that I did love, that is enough.
That is enough.
posted by emma at
11:28 PM
