Ten Times I Said No To Love: Chapter 2
August to August, we all fall down
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Ten Times I Said No To Love: and one time I said yes
I had a very different section of my work-in-progress, part memoir/part love story, that I planned to share with you all this week, and then this one wrote itself. The barn was empty because of the rain from Hurricane Debby and I had time to park myself on the farmhouse porch with my notebook.
If you missed the first chapter last week, you can access it: here.
We were spared the rain that has wrecked so many areas along the coast. As I wrote, the unusually cool, grey day harvested memories that were initially very disconnected but the images began to write themselves into an order that made me go — Ah! that’s what you’re doing. It was a lot like the life reviews that so many people who experience NDEs talk about when they come back to earth. Or like the free writing we’re exploring in my online workshop this Friday and in-person event next week.
I have learned more about forgiveness in the past few years than a lifetime spent in church — and I have so far to go. The words of the Hawaiian ho'oponopono prayer (loosely translated: to make right) follow me like a mantra, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.”
To write about love, I have to begin with forgiveness. And real forgiveness begins with me.
Let’s get started.
Ten Times I Said No To Love: and one time I said yes
What’s unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.
-Temple Grandin
2. August to August: We all fall down
I’m with Sarah at a horse clinic, a type of traveling classroom for trainers to ply their wares. We’re circled by strangers and our fold-out chairs are uneven and wobbly against the sandy, coastal ground. We’re seated against a retaining wall to one side of a manicured arena. In the center of the enclosure, the teacher and a horse stand beside each other, motionless, proud, and thinking their separate thoughts.
The teacher explains communication with the horse as a cloud of information humans have lost access to. We’re gathered here today to figure out how to regain our misplaced, interspecies language.
I toe the dirt at my feet and wonder how hard it must be to keep sand from building up in the horses’ intestines on this ground beside the ocean. The soil at home is quartz compacted on top of red clay. In the foothills of the Blue Ridge, sandy soil is an aberration, like the weird peak of Paris Mountain that I watch at sunset beyond the farm forest, solitary like Tolkien’s Lonely Mountain, a hill disconnected from its chain.
In the early days of the farm, we lost a pony to the build-up of this strange ground in her little body. We worked hard for three days to save her, but her scant manure was filled with calcified pebbles.
Decades later, I still have her stones collected in a red Solo cup on the dusty top shelf of the medicine cabinet in the tack room. We don’t feed horses on the ground outside in their paddocks anymore. The doors of the medicine cabinet are asymmetrical, at odd angles. It’s become part of my nightly routine to take stock of the cabinet and kick the doors shut.
“In your body, you’re creating a sense of safety and security, like you’re comfortable at home, in a safe place,” the teacher says.
The teacher is from the red rock vortexes of Arizona. He talks with a righteousness that holds the answer to solution-less problems, like a preacher, like a psychic, like a pharmaceutical rep. I haven’t yet discovered that certainty has power and that fictions can be crafted and re-written like a memoir, but I will before the year is out.
I nudge Sarah. “What feelings are we supposed to model?”
“Safety and security,” she says.
The horse the teacher works with exits the arena and another is led in by its owner. Both human and horse short-step with nerves, the handler pink-faced and straight-armed. The horse is a rigid statue with pricked ears and loud calls to herd mates grazing in another city.
The teacher takes the lead rope from the tight hands of the owner and we watch in silence while the horse is walked and halted into a state of zen, or a sanctity of surrender. It’s hard to tell the difference in a horse.
It’s hard to tell the difference in a human.
“What emotions are we trying to model?” I ask Sarah, again, because even though I can juggle ten tasks at once, I cannot remember these two words. My mind blanks as soon as I hear them. I’ve written the words down in my notebook, but the scene with the horse is so quiet that I am afraid to break the spell with the sound of my paper.
A horse will notice a turning page from a mile away.
“Safety and security,” Sarah whispers.
Later, I quiz myself as I watch long stretches of fields pass in blurred green on the drive home after the clinic.
Safety and security. Safety and security.
The words don’t stick.
The point of the exercise is to remember a time when these sensations flooded our bodies and allow the feelings to nestle into a felt sense inside our skin. The goal is to reach a state of calm in our nervous system, to create a muscle memory of inner peace that we can broadcast to the horse.
All things being unspoken in the herd, the changes in our chemistry, in our energy, are noticed by the horse and, ideally, become an invitation to join our conversation in a parallel, mutual relaxation.
Horses are also lie detectors.
I’m crazy tactile. I feel a lot. I can imagine all kinds of emotions and sensations, but modeling a sense of safety and security is the equivalent of me speaking Croatian. I can’t do it. I do not have an experiential memory to draw on or to compare these feelings with.
I am never comfortably warm or secure in the company of others and very seldomly alone. Maybe in the weird moments between sleep and waking, that underwater place before my mind hijacks my body, but my standard operating mode is one of unsettled watchfulness.
I’m coming out of an impossible relationship and I am about to elaborately extricate my former partner from my guest room where he’s been holed-up like a squatter. Living for a few years in a constant state of vigilance in my own home, I realize that it’s not the situation that creates my continual discomfort, but the ease with which I accept the situation as normal. Engrained patterns and survival mechanisms are hard work to break.
I vow to give myself a recovery period, like an existential day of rest before I begin to unpack it all. This clinic with the trainer is a gift of time, somewhere away from my normal surroundings that is an offering of space and distance that might allow me to figure it all out.
It’s evening after a long day of learning and driving when Sarah drops me off at the farm.
The old fences lining the driveway are heavy with late summer honeysuckle vines, the blooms long browned and fallen. Poison ivy creeps through the upper field, winding up the fence posts.
Low clouds of mist steam up from the gravel as I gather my bag, snacks, and three unread books and turn to walk to the farmhouse.
“Safety and security,” Sarah says, from a crack in the car window as she drives away.
August rain: the best of summer gone, and the new all not yet born, the odd, uneven time.
- Sylvia Plath
I hire an interventionist for the final extraction.
We meet in an orderly line of days which makes the process feel less messy but incredibly slow. We gather on the porch and stare at each other — me, the interventionist, and the subject of the extraction — across the heavy, scrollwork table.
My former partner drapes himself across his chair like a boneless cat, as if casualness will protect him from reality, that it will protect him from consequences, daylight, or the need to eat.
“You have two options,” the interventionist says. “You can enter a treatment facility immediately, or you can leave the house. These are your choices. You have until Friday to decide.”
Addiction is many things but living inside the stomach of it with my former partner feels like following a white tunnel after death only to discover that there is nothing on the other side. It feels like a black hole, an emptiness, a void. I’m not judging or exempt. Every one of us has our thing, you know, something we can’t let go of.
I’ve watched my former partner detox twice and both times it was like trying to calm a fear-blind horse when the horse has every reason to be lost in terror. It was a descent into what Gabor Maté calls The Realm of Hungry Ghosts. In that place, language doesn’t matter. It’s all vines of feeling choking out the light.
On the first day, I’m haughty as I battle the former partner’s alternate reality with my lived experience. Which is pretty much like gripping water in my fist.
In between discussions, I pace down a wide, overgrown dirt path in the woods. Staring at the details of late-summer muscadines and the cool ferns etching through the carpet of moss at the base of the beech trees, I can believe that my feelings won’t swallow me. The shade from the tall, old branches, the ceiling of leaves, knits a cool shelter of logic. The woods feel safe. The forest doesn’t feel empty.
On the second day, I beg with love. I tell the former partner how he’s my friend, how I’ve known him my whole life, how I can’t stand back and watch my friend die in the guest room. We both cry and the interventionist remarks on how much we love each other.
On the third day, there is anger — rivers of rage drenching the porch. After threats and delusions, the interventionist tells me to make sure I’m not alone at night, that I have somewhere safe to go, that I remain very aware of my environment and have access to protection.
On the fourth day, the guest room door stays shut and the room is occupied, but silent. The former partner doesn’t join us on the porch. The interventionist and I wait at the table and stare at each other awkwardly. We make jokes.
On the fifth day, I’m working in the barn as I watch the former partner walk across the lawn. In his hands are a little bag and a button-up shirt on a hanger. He makes a great show of entering his vehicle and driving away.
On the sixth day, I go to my high school reunion.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
-Rumi
I was not a candidate for a participation award at the school that I graduated from. I spent half my days in classes there and the other half at a magnet high school for the arts. But I haven’t missed a reunion for the home high school stamped on my diploma. I have no answer for this.
I skipped the organized reunion celebrations this year because of my guest room drama, but I’ve planned to meet with old classmates in a pizza restaurant. We’re the sorts that do better off the record.
I’m defeated as I enter the loud, packed dining room that smells like bread and grease. I stink of the barn and am scared of leaving my post at the farm unmanned for too long. I have my excuses ready to make this visit brief.
None of the people I’m meeting tonight hung out in the school cafeteria back in the day. We gathered on a hill beside parked buses. Catching up in a restaurant is strange, like how outside cats must feel when they’re rescued and carried, ruffled and growling, to a bowl and scratching post.
I was one of the punk kids, the alternative kids. I hung out with artists and wrote sappy poetry fueled by the angst of bad breakups (kind of like now). I’m also a story-chaser, which is like storm-chasing, but not. Despite all this, I was able to shape shift and move between high school factions relatively easily.
At the heart of it all was a tribe of similar freaks who to this day, all of us, at a moment’s notice would stop what we’re doing and help each other out even when we don’t see each other often. Like my barn-sister and tribe member, Trish, who is with me as we make our way across the crowd in the restaurant to where everyone is seated at a table against a back wall.
Like Christopher.
I didn’t expect him to be here tonight, but I haven’t really seen him yet, not in the way that matters. He’s always just been there for thirty years, gloriously kind to me, like the first day of homeroom in ninth grade, random encounters outside concerts, or car trouble. He’s the kind of person who knows the lost art of asking questions because he wants to hear the answers. He remembers birthdays and facts.
“When’s your birthday?” I ask across the table.
“I’m not telling you,” he says. He’s grumpy because he brought a gift for someone, an homage to a middle school time capsule, and the person isn’t here.
I’m busy feeling gutted and pretending my life is perfect so I don’t have time to fish his vague waters.
Christopher asks for coffee, but the restaurant has none to serve. I haven’t slept much this week and my eyes sting in the harsh fluorescent light. Coffee would be good.
“If I drive to the store and buy a coffee maker, will you use it?” Christopher asks the server.
The server laughs.
“I’m being serious,” Christopher says.
I don’t leave the dinner early. Trish plans to stay with me overnight so I’m not going to be alone and she has watched me during dinner, ready to make her way to the door at my lead.
But I hold out until the end and we’re standing at the edge of the crumbling, restaurant parking lot. It’s dark out and the air is thick and damp like a heavy towel. The trees are alive with night bugs singing in waves of sound. To this point in the evening, I’ve been silent about the happenings in my world. I’m not proud of them.
“I hired a professional to help me remove someone from my guest room,” I say.
A moment of working silence follows as the group decides if I’m telling a story about a past event, or voicing a present concern.
“Are you okay?” Christopher asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, because I don’t.
“I’ll follow you back to the farm,” Christopher says, without question, without details, just ready to act.
“I’m fine. Trish is staying with me,” I say.
“You drive ahead. I’ll follow,” Christopher says.
Christopher’s headlights illuminate the gravel driveway behind my truck. I stop in front of the house, but his car keeps going and he parks away from everything in a dark corner near the tractor. I wait on the porch for him to join us, but he’s taking a long time.
My feet follow the loose stone by memory as I maneuver around tools and equipment, sprayers, the old silver truck. Under a big oak tree, the shadows smell like damp hay and diesel fuel.
I knock on Christopher’s car window, “What are you doing?”
“Get in and listen to this,” he says.
I’m impatient and have other things I want to do. We should go sit with the others, I think, because when Christopher said he would follow me, others chimed in and did the same. I hear their voices on the porch and the sound is comfortable, the opposite of a void.
“Let’s go sit with the others,” I say, but I open the door and get into his car anyway.
He scrolls through songs and offers me a story for each one, why it was made, when he first discovered it. “We really should go sit with everyone else,” I say.
“Just listen to this one first,” he says.
There was a time when my stories arrived with music, with soundtracks that inspired me to write. Long ago, a distant cousin told me that she didn’t daydream anymore. She was older and wiser and I looked up to her in many ways, but I couldn’t stomach her answer.
But here I am, shipwrecked on a grown up island of to-do lists and responsibilities, in a mournful, continual shock that blooms like electricity through me, every day, as I understand that problems are more abundant than peace. Shaved off in imperceptible slivers, I don’t realize I no longer daydream until the dreams are gone.
Sitting in a car filled with music, I feel the ghosts of those dreams in my bones, drifting around like warm patches of air in an approaching storm, the comparison of what is to what isn’t.
“I’m going to take this year to figure out who I am,” I say.
“We have to figure out who we are before we can show up for someone else,” Christopher says.
Knowing who I’m not is easier. Like the high school chameleon who could flit between the factions, I have always tried to be everything at once. I am not a mother. I am not a wife. I am not young. I am not a writer. I am not okay.
Later, as we leave his car and walk to the porch Christopher offers an interesting proposal, “What if we meet every month and have dinner?”
I’m already calculating excuses. “It’s hard for me to get away from the barn,” I say, ready, as always, with the opposite.
“We can meet here,” Christopher says. “I like it here.”
“That would be better,” I say, but I figure that we’ll forget about it, that monthly dinners will be one of those plans that we set with good intentions but never schedule time to do.
August to August — I’ll give myself this time.
The coordinates will be simple: safety and security — I scroll through my phone to where I’ve written the words down in notes. Safety and Security. If I cannot provide the sense of these words to myself, I’ll never be able to find them in my relationship with others, or in my connection to the world. I will never be at peace.
Down the steep hill that leads like a gateway from the lawn to the courtyard in front of the stables, a horse blows loudly, an exclamation point of sound punctuating the night.
I will take this year and I will figure out who I am.
|| Chapter 3 ||
Thank you for following my journey with me. I’ll be back next week with more words and thoughts for you.
I hope to see all my paid subscribers at Friday’s Zoom. Our gathering is called Writing Unbound and there are no rules. We’ll all be sitting on the hill beside the parked buses together and letting our words find us.
They’re out there, the words, buzzing around with the tree bugs waiting for you to put them all together on the page — like I’m doing with my story every week for you here.
Let’s discover our love stories together.
Love,
Kim
I will digest and come back… can’t wait!