I’d waited a long time, thought about it a long time. I knew there were complications, but there were always complications, with anything, with anyone, and I wasn’t a kid anymore. Okay, legally I was still a kid for the next few months. I was seventeen. I think you were twenty. Not the point. I’d resolved myself to the idea and that was that. It was too hard to wait any more. I’d lost track of what the waiting was about. I guess I’d thought I’d be the sort of throwback who waited for marriage, who only ever had one lover, and, look, I knew from the first second I laid eyes on you that there was no chance of that. The idea still honestly really appealed to me – the high school sweetheart model, the One True Love Soulmate Missing Piece It’s So Sappy Walt Disney Wouldn’t Touch It model.
I didn’t get a high school sweetheart: I got you.
I got you, you chimera, you kaleidoscope, you liar, you weirdo, you gorgeous enigmatic irresolvable equation; you, part James Dean part feral cat; you Houdini, you genius, you specialist in the unsaid and unsayable, you cognitive dissonance, you unhealable, no-closure, no sutures for it slice down the midline.
And nearly a quarter-century later, I still don’t know what that means because everyone who had you, whether for a moment or most of your life, got something slightly different. And I don’t mean it in the normal sense, the way in every relationship there is a fusion of my you and your you; my me and your me. I mean you had a mask collection to rival Venice at Carnaval. I doubt any two people who knew you remember the same person.
I headed east for college, and counted days until I’d see you again. You were infuriating, sent strange love letters, often made a point of saying you’d call at such and such time on such and such day and then very specifically not being around when the time came. You screened your calls and I often got the sense that you enjoyed listening to my increasingly frantic messages. Sometimes I’d get upset – I knew you were there – and call several times in an hour. In between, your outgoing answering machine message would change to things like “Don’t hang up, darling – just leave me a message.” People told me you were sadistic, even abusive, and I understood why they said it but I never saw it that way. I knew you couldn't help it. Why I put up with it is still a mystery but I guess we can just say I couldn't help it either, and sometimes love is like that.
You made a point of offering to pick me up at the airport when I came home for Christmas. Then you made a point of not doing it.
Now what? I’d made up my mind to, you know, take the “relationship” to the “next level” and you were pulling one of your little games at the worst possible time. A different girl might have blown you off at that point and moved on. Not I, friend. I refused to make social plans in case you called. I skulked around the house, wondering if you’d had one of your little breakdowns (or one of the not little ones) or if this was about that girl with the curly black hair and the big butt who dressed like it was 1890. I was tough, tougher than you realized and tougher than you were and I was going to stick this out. I was resolve incarnate.
Resolved: resoluto. in pieces, broken.
When the vase of gladioli showed up on the porch with no note in the middle of the night, I didn’t call you. There was something really weird about that. It was like putting flowers on a grave and I did not appreciate the implications. Besides, if I was dead to you, why did you bother driving all the way out to my house?
But then you called and wanted to know if I’d spend New Year’s Eve with you. I was young. Old enough to understand I wasn’t being treated well, but too young to say no. Oh, let's be honest, I was floating. Finally, I'd have you for real. Finally the games were over.
We drove up into the hills, to one of the overlooks – you know which one – where you could see the cold glitter of the city and the obsidian black of the bay reflecting the lights. Absent the summer fog, the view was pristine, sharp – well it was high-resolution. I turned to you with every nerve ending on fire. The piece-by-piece inch-by-inch absolute ravishment of you, the one I’d charted out in my head like some kind of erotic cartographer night after night as I fell asleep: never mind the shenanigans, it would be now.
As I leaned in to kiss you, you said, abruptly, “I think this is over, don’t you?”
It was New Year's Eve, 1989. It was nine o'clock. I was seventeen. Over?
Resolution, in fiction and drama, means something like closure. Loose ends tied, narrative brought to a satisfying conclusion. The solving of the essential problem. Hero isn't dead after all, the wedding goes on as planned and Beatrice and Benedick admit they love each other and tie the knot too. Resolution literally means untying, but we've been over that. It's an untangling, a locating of the truth.
You taught me, at seventeen, a lesson that I, as a child reared on fiction and poetry and plays and music, still haven't fully embraced at 41: resolution is not ever guaranteed in real life, and you have surprisingly little control over whether it happens. Some wounds don't heal. Some things stay broken, never cohere. I drove home in a panic, reeling at the sheer number of things I'd never be able to stand the smell of (your cologne, on a stranger in an elevator, still makes my knees buckle), the music I'd never be able to separate from the thought of you (that whole summer of Passion, Peter Gabriel's soundtrack for The Last Temptation of Christ -- the imprint seemed so indelible I'd never get over it), the chains of association sparked simply by the view from the Lawrence Hall of Science or a cluster of red grapes or a pomegranate. You dissolved me. Whoever I was going to be after you, it would be someone else. (Indeed the person I think I was before you went dormant that night and it took me twenty years to realize it was still there at all.) I knew for certain, in all my over-passionate adolescent silliness -- because you were never going to be the worst thing that happened to me -- that I would never eat, never sleep, ever again, knowing you were out there and not with me.
I didn't know it then but it wouldn't be long. There were to be only nine months and three weeks more in which you were out there, and not with me. After that, half of that would stop being true. I had just said goodbye to you for the second to last time.
Resolution? Not an option you ever gave me. Not in the sense of closure, or clarity, not in the sense of law, which is agreement to enact something, or the sense of math, which is to make an equation more elegant. Not in the sense of music, where dissonance returns to consonance. The medical sense of resolution, in which inflammation disappears without infection, Time gave me, not you.
Ben, I've had a lot of crappy New Year's Eves. A lot. But you, my dear, set the bar so high I doubt anyone will ever be able to top it. I know you couldn't help it and I don't hold it against you; never did. But I still miss you. Whoever you were to the rest of the world, you were my first totally consuming experience of love. You left me with a hell of a lot to learn about boundaries, about need, and about the aspect of passion that means suffering. And I suppose it is in the nature of grand passion that it be, as you were, a study in the unresolved and unresolvable. What was I supposed to do with all that energy that had nowhere to go? With this love?
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