soopastryheart

Written by one of my favorite authors in one of my favorite books, this particular entry was my favorite among his essays. This is an example of perfect writing to me: beautifully composed, with unpretentious language and extreme vulnerability, and able to provoke a universal heartbreak in any reader.

Our Selves Between Us

It’s my opinion that my heart is rather broken. But that implies that I have a heart. I guess I do, but it’s a totally flawed heart. It doesn’t work for shit. I don’t know how to love. I’m forty years old. I’m bald. I think my penis has stopped working. My fingernails are all ridged and dying. A sun-blemish on my shoulder ripped open the other day and was bleeding. That can’t be good. I probably have skin cancer on my shoulder and it’s eating its way through me as I type. 

I’ve been crying for the last hour and not because of skin cancer, but because I was listening to the mixed tape that my love made for me. It takes devotion to make a mixed tape, and it’s a dying art. Sneaking off with someone’s iPod and downloading songs on the sly is not quite the same thing, but I imagine that it’s the wave of the future.

So the tape really made me cry. I figured that all the songs were like her singing to me. For part of the tape, I sat at the kitchen table where we used to sit. I sat in her chair. I’ve almost never sat in that chair and I’ve lived in this apartment for five years. The floor is at a weird angle by that chair. But for two years she sat there. I also gave her the bad side of the bed. She made those sacrifices. She wanted to be in my bed and she liked for us to eat together. I often felt rushed, though, when we had meals. I didn’t want to take the time to sit down and eat properly. But I would. And a lot of times, I would try to correct her posture. She told me I could. She has had bad posture and she wanted me to remind her to straighten up. She’s beautiful, but when she sits to eat, she slumps terribly, curves her spine. I never should have tried to get her to sit right. It was wrong of me.

So sitting there now, listening to the tape, missing her, I was starting to lose it, and then I heard this lyric – “We sat here with our selves between us.” It’s from a John Cale song, “Anda Lucia,” and when I heard that line I really started weeping. It made me think of the two of us sitting there, trapped, our selves blocking us from being able to love, the way all selves block all love. How do you get past the self?

Then I was back in the moment and the kitchen was empty – it’s a mess now that she’s gone. The sink dirty, the floor dirty. Everything barren and stained. I’m forty and I can’t take care of myself. Or, rather, I’m too lazy to take care of myself. 

So she moved out two months ago. It was a hard decision we came to. I moved in with my parents to give her time, and then I paid for her move. Big deal. When I came back to the apartment, the first thing I saw was her empty closet. It had been filled with her pretty clothes for two years. That empty closet was like a grave. A death. An end. I started crying bad. I took one look at it and ran to the bed and cried facedown in the pillow. I’m halfway through life and have no idea how to live.

There’s this scene in Richard Yates’s book, Revolutionary Road which is the most painful thing I’ve ever read. This neglectful husband has lost his wife to suicide. He goes into her closet and smells her clothes and for a moment he has her back, he can smell her, she’s there, not dead, and he feels all the love he had for her, the love which had been lost, and then this horrible intrusive neighbor is banging on the door, and the husband hides in the closet until the neighbor leaves, but the spell has been broken, he can’t get his wife back, he tries, but he can’t conjure her and he’s lost her for good now, and this second death is worse than the first. 

So when I got off the bed, done crying, I waved my hand in that empty closet to see if it was real. To see if I had really lost something so precious, and my hand sliced through the air and I knew I had lost her and I went back to the bed and cried some more. Just recently I put some of my raggedy clothes in there and they look ugly. They look like me.

– excerpt from I Love You More Than You Know, by Jonathan Ames