love post

ladies-and-craig, today id like to write a post about love.
a love post.
like a love letter.
but not.
because this is about love thats done.
done like the corn pudding i left in the oven on low for over two days and had to throw the whole casserole dish out.
done like you felt after finals with one greasy strand of hair sticking out of your head dragging yourself across the green with a broken pencil and some notes about a class you cant even remember in your hand kind of done.
done like a kid on a potty screaming for you to come wipe his butt, hes done.
love-thats-done has been cropping up all around me and its taken until now for me to catch the trend and have enough sense to reflect on it.
the kicker came last night. ive been elbow deep in dust up in my attic trying to rob my own house of anything i might be able to use in L and my new home (rosemary grinder! set of flowery dinner plates from paternal great grandmother ruth! silver chalice! ?) and in the process ive re-remembered why my attic is the eight wonder of the world. so many secrets. so many lives. so much squirrel shit.
in my digging i came across a box of my dads, who is himself part squirrel. ive never met a man who collects and keeps and hoardes more than this man. there were about three hundred notes from him to my grandparents written from hotchkiss and camp (fat camp, if were going to be honest, but the family doesnt talk about it) who KEEPS that? but in all fairness the box had some gems, like his Dragons (dartmouth secret society) paraphanalia, pictures of his first wife (found out about her existence in another one of these attic hunts about seven years ago) and most of all, a whole file on my mother. including, yes, love letters.
reading a love poem written by my mother to my father, unhappily married for 15 years, seperated for ten, currently in the midst of a hell of a divorce, was bittersweet to say the least.
first of all, who knew my mother could or would ever write a poem. a POEM. and it wasnt the kind of poem one person writes blindly to another, it was the kind of work one does when theres no doubt the reader feels exactly the same way. it was so intimate it was practically written in their own language.
i always assumed my parents married for convenience. i basically excused their pathetic attempt at a marriage, based on that false pretense and ive always taken comfort in the fact that i wouldnt settle for that if i ever got married, so i couldnt possible end up the way they have.
at first, sitting there reading, i was moved. warmed. she had it in her to be soft. they had it in them, to love.
but then i had no idea what to do with it. its the kind of thing one keeps. evidence of a species of love that science, and i, never knew existed... but i cant tell you how dirty i felt reading it. not only because i was litterally covered in dust, head to toe, up my nostrils. not only because it was a little too racy for me to stomach. mostly because it completely tore down my faith in what i thought i knew to be "real" or "false" love. and poetry. poetry! this vehicle of supposed truth ive used my whole life to sort out and express how i feel, particularly in love, and here it is sitting in my hands in its most honest incarnation and its completely irrelevant. they actually loved eachother. and now they actually only communicate through their lawyers.
the creepiest part? three lines in this poem, albeit short but words not commonly used together, were startlingly familiar.
because i wrote two of them. and one was written to me. recently. what the hell.
and it was particularly startling because against some odds ive spent the summer wrestling my opinion of my most recent love into the success column of the scorecard my heart seems to be keeping. it was beautiful while it lasted and i refuse to let it drift into the questionable column but it is taking all i have to remain untainted by doubt or bitterness. so maybe i am lying to myself. or maybe thats just the natural tendency when love is ending to re-file it as a failure even when it was a success in the moment...
well i eventually slipped the poem back into the file and eventually, its lines looping in my head, fell asleep.
and then i woke up to, of all things, a text message from a dear friend renouncing love.
based on an ex's behavior now, five months after the relationship, she decided it had never happened, theyd never been in love, shed never been loved.
basically she was doing what my parents did. they stopped believing it had ever happened to such an extent that they convinced everyone around them that they couldnt have possibly been in love at any time. well they were. i saw the note and believe me, thirty years later it was still hot to the touch. just as words to and from this person ive loved will be thirty years from now when my nosey offspring finds them. just as notes passed between my friend and this guy will still be full of the love i saw between them, even years from now. the emotions were valid in the moment. and the relationships are each done now.
so is love a formula? are we all wandering around thinking its happening in a unique way to us and were really all just drinking from the same crazy coolaid?
what makes the difference between a love thats left to rot up in an attic and a love thats kept alive, that fills the rest of the house...
to say that my parents, or she, or i, should accept that love happened and accept that its ended now feels incredibly trite, incredibly insensitive, and incredibly impossible to move forward from. and yet we keep trying.
i feel like theres a cherub somewhere laughing his ass off as he puppeteers us into painful situations asking "why ya keep hittin yourself? why ya keep hittin yourself?"