On the Other Side of the Mountain of Love
Falling in love was the single most formative experience of my life. Maybe that’s why I’m always writing about it. Before it happened, I’d spent my whole life wandering down shadowy tree-canopied paths that always hit dead ends and dried up riverbeds, looking for something I had only heard described. That kind of ignorance allows for clumsy mistakes. But when the real thing finally arrives it’s unmistakable. Silk hangs on the body differently than polyester.
It came out of nowhere and with someone I never expected. So many things were wrong: our lifestyles, our beliefs, our habits were all discordant. In fact, I strongly disliked him at the beginning. The first time we met I couldn’t remember what his face looked like. I felt he was a remote mountain whose peak was shrouded by rumbling clouds. He was obstinate and strong-willed and bristling with self-defenses, while I was an open book filled with optimism that I have come to suspect is just stubbornness in a prettier dress.
Despite all this, something about his compulsive defiance pierced through me. I wondered what was hidden within the storm. We began talking and found we disagreed on almost everything. But I was thrilled by the way his mind worked. I learned ruthless self-protection from him. And from me he learned that there is power in allowing yourself to be seen. Falling in love with him was like waiting for the snow to melt - slowly and then all at once it’s springtime. Has someone already made that comparison before?
It’s a thrilling thing to stumble upon a new vantage point on life that you never had access to before. I learned that love, like all things, is defined by opposing truths. I discovered depths of tenderness and mercy I never knew I was capable of. I also learned how deep into the valley of self-betrayal and rage the desire to cling to love can take you.
We began communicating through our poetry. I wrote from the viewpoint of a worshipful congregant. He wrote from the viewpoint of a predatory animal tamed by its prey. We made each other laugh in a way that only two people who know each other intimately can. We never really learned to communicate out loud. We had the kind of understanding that happens mostly in subtext. Sometimes loving him felt like talking to the moon and expecting her to talk back. I learned my problem is that I have to pick at scabs. His is that he would rather gnaw off his own leg to free himself than wait to see if a trap was ever even set.
It ended. For a long time I was still living in a room that had long been packed up and emptied - refusing to leave something that I had happily poured so many years into. No amount of anger or humiliation could make me leave. I cried every morning on the train ride to work and every evening on the train ride home for a year. I felt like I would burst from all the love I still held for someone that I could no longer give it to. I began to hate everyone and hated myself even more and hated him the most. I obsessed over every mistake we had ever made and wondered if I had been different: kinder, crueler, anything, if it would’ve been different.
I no longer feel the need to dwell on how we fell in and out and in and out and in and out of love anymore. There are a million ways that love was discovered and shared and sometimes treasured and sometimes handled badly. Now I’ve found myself at a new vantage point: on the other side of that mountain of love. It’s a lonelier walk but no less filled with interesting discoveries.
I’ve come to the conclusion that loving someone, like all things, is a solitary act. It’s wonderful when it happens in harmony but it is still a journey you must take alone.
Falling out of love is like getting over a cold. For a while it seems like it’s all you will ever feel and you wish you had appreciated your health while you had it and then one day you realize you can breathe again. I don’t cry anymore when I think about our relationship. I don’t think I could even if I tried.
But I had a strange experience a week ago. They were giving out loaves of bread in the lobby of my work. Ludicrously huge loaves of thickly sliced bread. My first absurd thought was that I should reach out to my ex and see if he wanted one. I don’t eat breakfast most days but he does (toast with baked beans with a smear of laughing cow cheese like he used to have back home and 2 fried eggs on top). Is loving someone like a habit that’s hard to shake even after you stop loving them?
I didn’t reach out to him.
And still there is sadness there for me, even as I write this. No one likes to see something beautiful die. But I know now that winter never lasts and spring will always come.
