you came along just then
I could date a boy named Malachi, I thought, when the guitarist introduced the drummer of that name at the Friday night show being held in honor of the end of Prohibition. A Repeal Party, it was called, which I’d never heard of.We had been on our way to 80s night, actually, but then Allie had heard that this guitarist she adored was playing at the Bagdad. So there I was drinking three dollar whiskey, surrounded by flappers and fedoras in my leg warmers and off-the-shoulder tee.
I wasn’t interested in that specific Malachi. The thought just entered my head unbidden that I could date a Malachi. And I remembered a few years ago in an Anchorage kitchen telling my friend about my plans to fly to Quebec for a boy I hardly knew, whom I’d met years before while backpacking and who invited me to visit via instant messenger. And the friend, happily married, told me that this was the one thing she missed: random and unexpected romance. Possibility.
Malachi, I thought. I rolled the name around in my mouth like a foreign airport.
I have spent the past year in an unfamiliar world of wanting. It might have to do with all of the babies I have witnessed – warm, sweet babies in the lives of people my age. Or it might have to do with this house I now own, the way it is too big for one person, and how scary it is to use the ladder alone. It might have to do with the entrance into my life of a man who seemed as intriguing as keeping my options open.
In any case there I was wanting, and not getting at all what I wanted. There was a lot of sadness.
Since things ended I have been remembering what it was I did before all that wanting. Namely, just doing. Doing things in the world around me as they presented themselves. Projects. Painting. Repeal Parties. And I have been narrating it like so. I feel like a gift he doesn’t want to open.
And up to and including this week, as I have been growing back into myself, as I have been staring in mortified awe at the person I became (who tried to need nothing at all and then less) I was still phrasing it like so. Why can’t I just be myself with him? Why can’t I be frank about what I hope for? His doubt feeds my smallness and my smallness feeds his doubt.
And this week especially, as I have taken stock of myself – as I have seen plainly that actually I am not lonely at all, that actually I have quite a lot of friends with whom I do fun and interesting things (when I’m not trying to keep my whole schedule clear) and that furthermore I often enjoy doing things alone – I was still phrasing it this way. Is he really going to let me leave?
But then somewhere on the dance floor, maybe when the adored guitarist was singing that corny pretty song about Colette, I thought about Operaman, for the first time, in the past tense.
And what has been hard for me, these past few weeks (though things seem decidedly to be swinging my way) has been accepting that Operaman will not be the story of my life. He will be – is already – just a story. Even though he felt so much bigger than that.
Once I loved an opera singer. He broke my heart.
Other things happened next that weren’t about him at all.
posted by tortaluga @ 3:33 AM
4 Comments:
yeah for getting back up again. I'm on my way back up as well. It is interesting, if only a bit unfortunate, that we were both in strange places when I came to live with you in Portland. we were both 'keeping our schedules open'--you for him, and me for what?? sleep I guess, where I could dream about doing what I wanted to do, instead of actually doing it.
Strange how we sometimes we let ourselves get lost, even though we know we needn't be.
ugh! pedes, i think about that a lot. how in what turned out to be the last summer of us three being in one place, jules was trying to live one foot in iowa and you were trying to get your post-grad-school bearings and i was trying to be the "easy" half of a relationship. sigh.
summer 2012 in madison, perhaps?
This post was perfectly written in so many ways.
If I could, I would give you a book deal.
if you did, i would take it.
thanks for coming.
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