Written a while ago, this is a companion piece to Moving Out.
Blackout. Love is like a drug. But not because it’s addictive or because it too mixes up a chemical cocktail in our bodied brain, all of that is just side-effect. Love is like a drug because when it’s cut, or adulterated, love might kill you. In fact, it always does.
Recognition is strongest on the edge of sleep.
My fiancé was gone for two weeks. We were breaking up. I was packing up, about to leave our old apartment after living together for over a decade. Almost everything was at my new place, but I still needed to retrieve my cat—formerly our cat. I knew he’d return in the morning so I slept on his floor—formerly our floor—which I would miss dearly.
Although it was no longer my apartment, I would nonetheless, always find in it my home.
Tears muddled the dark room until, without noticing, I drifted from it. Night passed lightly, until the bottom of the door clawed across the floor. He was home. I rushed from the depths, gathering up all the details of my waking life, but the memories of each morning, every time before this—his returning to me—weekends, vacations, work-trips—their joy, relief, anticipation, all if it caught in my eyelashes as they opened. He was upset to see me, but for one last time he was home.
The world is here, now—never-ending as the present but always passing to be gone. Beneath the bitterness of an irreconcilable parting, unacknowledged sweetness quietly glorifies even broken hearts. So for whatever fleeting good, I could still rest momentarily in the joy that he’d always brought back to me, until at last, it was all finally gone.
“It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.” 1
To be without love at its best is undoubtedly better than being with love at its worst. No one ever says this out loud, because we don’t want it to be true. Unadulterated love is not out there. Purity of heart is to will one thing, but there is only ever one single thing, and it is everything; inextricable, restless, abhorrent.
“An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. … The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once -somewhere- far away in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”2
To love without error, is to err and yet love.
None of this is punishment, it is agreement to what is, a loving curiosity to truly see what was created. Remembering feels like calling home all the little parts of time we scatter out into the world, and I will never call his back again. The Lethe’s water is forgiveness, but to drink of it you first cross the river Styx. Darkness never hides.
“Now there’s a lot of things I’m gonna miss
Like thunder down country
and the way water drips
When you're running for the door in the rainNo, I didn’t want to die
I only wanted to die in your eyes
Grant me one last wish
Life should mean much less than this.”3
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
ibid
How to Rent a Room, Silver Jews
I spent a lot of my life opting for love at its worst over the prospect of loveless life. My masochistic tendencies I suppose. Berman gave voice to this approach toward life—thinking of the SJ quote with which you end the essay—alongside a few other Gen X singer-songwriters: Smith, Molina.