S was my best friend in high school. She dated a guy on the periphery of my friend-group, but always made time for me. It was a joke on weekends - one night she was with him, the other with me - that R and I would never see each other again. In college, a couple relationships later, she finally decided she had feelings for me. We were two states apart, we made out awhile, but I had decided I was all-in on a woman I worked with at the mall (at Waldensoftware), S and I had an awful end to our friendship over the phone. I totally pushed her into a black hole.
Five years later, for reasons unclear to me now, I reached out and invited her to my first wedding. She demurred, but we talked on the phone awhile and maybe she got a little closure, describing the intensity of her despair at the time. At the end of the call, I said, trying to make things feel OK, "Well, I’m really glad we got to talk and catch up.”
“Wow, you haven’t changed a bit.” she said. “‘Oh please like me!’” she mocked. And that was the last time we talked.
Zachary Schomburg, from “Scary, No Scary”
Of late I’ve been struggling with the battle between wisdom and want. I talked with a friend today who’s been married over 25 years about the overwhelming balancing act of freedom and loneliness that comes from my past five-ish years alone. I made self-deprecating jokes - “I probably have a bunch of weird old-man habits I don’t even know about” - and opened a question of whether anyone would be attracted to a 50-year-old man without a corresponding memory of what he used to be. She said that if she were single, she recognized that she would be very driven to have the stability of a long-term relationship and another marriage. And what’s weird is that I feel exactly the same way, yet here I am.
The third person in our conversation was a man in his early 40s who divorced his wife (and two kids), then used the past couple years to gain 30 pounds of muscle live some sort of waking dream of hooking up, showing some skin and owning a sports car. (I’d be more specific on the last front, but I am completely missing the car-guy gene.) He is very active with his kids, and he’s a perfectly decent guy. I’ve told him that if I were as close with my ex and my son as he is, I would very much want to try to make the marriage work again.
So which one is that? Wisdom or want?
Nick Flynn, from “Some Ether”
If it’s true that in every relationship one person’s the flower, then the other’s a pot of dirt. On good days, I was nourishing, on others I was just taking up space and when I was drinking, I’d compare myself to a pile of shit. I’d spend my days on high alert looking for clever new ways to ensconce my partner in a velvet balloon, so they’d never feel discomfort, since discomfort was my domain.
This meant, for example, disassembling the espresso machine daily to pinhole clean the steamer so it wouldn’t clog, since my wife never cleaned it after making her post-workout, protein-packed whole milk lattes. When it would clog anyway at 6am, I’d hear her roar like a furious muppet from the bedroom and anxiety would lightning-strike from my stomach to my throat. When she directed me to contact the company to get it fixed, that lightning prompted me to buy a new one, hiding the charge on my credit card the same way I did all my liquor.
August Kleinzahler, from “Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow”
Wisdom and want had nothing to do with it. At that point in my failing marriage, loaded with alcohol, perpetually confused due to three completely lost evenings per week due to blackout, I was in an animal-like survival mode, dissembling myself without a plan. I lost my way to my pulse. I heard only the corrosive white noise of anxiety.
My lightning and cowardice came from the daily shame of secret drinking. Because if I made sure she felt as little discomfort in her life, I could get away with embezzling another month of gin and bourbon through our finances. I know it’s codependence 101 to be such a people pleaser, but I weaponized it when alcohol asked me to.
Susan Briante, from “Utopia Minus”
I’m a few months away from five years of sobriety, and sometimes I’m still stuck on the Serenity Prayer, so willing to accept the things I cannot change, so afraid to change the things I can. It’s only been the past few months that I’ve felt angry at myself for my years of refusing to ask for help, treating myself so disposably.
Tonight I spent 20 minutes talking my son to sleep with a comic version of counting sheep. Some of the sheep jump impossibly high, a couple are actually skunks in disguise, one is a spy for a nearby herd of llamas involved in corporate espionage to gain the Lone Star Sleep Symbol Contract. One stepped on a cartoon-style springboard that launched it to the stars, so high it never came down to be counted again. My son said, “I hope he’s OK.”
It takes some self-respect to know there were other opportunities to be OK along the way, and to find some pride in walking through the fire I set.
That final couplet, though. I want the wisdom to be angry like that.