This will have to be a mini-epic, kids. I’m just warning you. I’ve been without my laptop for almost two weeks, thanks to an unfortunate mishap involving the power adapter…but even if I’d had something to blog upon, I’m not sure what I would have blogged about.
It’s been a crazy time.
In a nutshell: Sam accepted a contract job doing physical labor in the middle east that will pay off his mountain of student loan debt — and keep him tens of thousands of miles away for the next nine months. For exactly one moment, I entertained the notion of going with him, but it’s not exactly the green hills of Ireland, and my own options would have been restricted to some pretty unpalatable choices. Besides which, as it turns out, my presence would interfere with one of his main objectives for going (more on that in a bit). We had talked about vacationing abroad together during his two-week break in four months, but apparently that possibility has been shelved as well. I guess. I don’t even know where we’re at now. All I know is that I’m bereft, and sad, and that I don’t want to go back to our stupid workplace. This has made me want to fly to my own far places again, find my own adventure.
Sam and I didn’t part the way I would have wanted, but I can’t regret what I did that precipitated his angry withdrawal. He may have been looking for an excuse to withdraw, anyway.
As if that would make it easier on either of us.
**
I don’t know what I’m going to do now, how I’m going to cope, waking up without Sam’s arms wound around me, without the rich musk of his sweat-dampened skin or the surprisingly sweet, comforting scent of his hot breath. My inner animal is permanently chemically bonded to him. And that’s to say nothing of the sex: unprecedented pleasure I had felt doomed to live largely without ever since my mother “cursed” me (“No man will ever satisfy you”), whether because of social or previously discussed physical handicaps. With Sam, I’ve felt like the pornographic version of Goldilocks, finding “just right” at last. (Who’s been sleeping in my bed?) Not only that, but Sam has proven to be every bit the lover most women will tell you they long for: attentive, accommodating, passionate but loving, taking his time, with just the right touch. (And Jesus, what an outstanding kisser.) I’ve loved everything he’s ever done to me, without exception. I cannot say that about anyone else. Not anyone.
I love Sam’s body now as if it were my own. Perhaps more: I still judge my cellulite and varicose veins ruthlessly, whereas everything about his body I don’t adore I simply accept. I know all of his smells and his textures and his sensitive spots; I know the landscapes of his black, wiry hair and his scars and his rippling stretch marks where he lost lifelong fat. It pains me, physically, palpably, how cruel Sam is to this body I love, treating it like a malfunctioning machine or a workhorse to be beaten into obedience rather than as the sacred and irreplaceable temple housing and expressing all of the beautiful tenderness and passion inside of him (and giving us both so much pleasure). He will sacrifice scores of cells to kill his chronic pain; he will inundate his struggling lungs with foreign toxins, and think nothing of repeatedly burning or cutting his wonderful hands. It makes me want to weep, and to kiss them. (As things are, this would probably piss him off.)
**
“Would you have his babies?” my life coach friend asked at one point. He always asks his women clients this to determine how much in love they are on a visceral, biological level. About Sonny, I said yes; about Rick, I said no.
Sam and I, STD-free, and with me on the pill, never used any protection. At first, this made me nervous, given the sheer quantity of unfiltered sperm he was pumping into me on a regular basis. But when I started my period last week, the week of his departure, I felt the pangs of a strange and ineffable sadness.
**
This young man, about whom I once felt so ambivalent, has effectively ruined me for other men. Now even the most devastatingly attractive stranger evokes the question: How capable would he really be of intimacy? and: How could he possibly be a better lover than Sam? Even my way of seeing has changed. In the office on Sam’s last night at work, greedily gazing at his hair, his face, his body as if to memorize every last detail, I thought him the handsomest man on the planet. I think of the beautiful poem by Peter Handke that runs through Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, “Song of Childhood,” beginning the film with Als das kind kind war (When the child was a child):
When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.
I seem to have exchanged what Rilke called “the adult’s defensiveness and scorn” for the wide-open eyes of childhood. Every person I meet looks different to me now. No one gets judged — any longer — against anything but him or herself.
I think I like the ways in which Sam has changed me.
**
Everything in my life has been disrupted lately, from my sleep schedule to my daily routines to my eating habits to my expectations of what a day or a night will bring. Sam introduced chaos into my life; I introduced calm into his. He fell asleep much more easily when entwined with me; my apartment was often the tranquil island where he shipwrecked at the end of a stormy night.
Before he left town, Sam was determined to share with me, as completely as possible, his secret second life, his insomniac’s nocturnal social circles and activities — some of which wound up making me feel akin to the girlfriend in “Twilight.” If I were to go into much detail about it here, most of my readers, except for possibly Russ, would engage in a collective hand-wringing session. Suffice it to say that, metaphorically speaking, one excellent reason for Sam to get the hell out of Dodge is to cut ties with the vampires — and to free himself of his own blood-lust. Sam was alternately defensive with me about his alternate world and pushing for me to be more upset about it. I tried to walk a fine line.
The past couple of weeks have been an uneasy education for sure. But as Rilke wrote (in the book I gave Sam), “if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.”
As if in response to my initiation into Sam’s alien universe, I dreamt of a sort of vast nighttime carnival populated by a motley assortment of semi-costumed individuals exhibiting various degrees of intoxication. It was as if I had inadvertently wandered onto the set of a Fellini film. Strangely, I was not in the least bit frightened, but meandered among them, eventually turning toward a destination where I had heard some kind of movie or show was going on. Sam’s friend Rob was there (I seem to remember him with a fishing rod and a tutu), and I easily befriended some of the others who were unfamiliar to me. I was comfortable and at home in this bizarre environment, and was almost sorry to leave my new friends behind when I awoke.
But then I guess I’ve always gotten along better with the so-called freaks.
**
“He’s twenty-one,” my coach friend reminded me. “Do you know what I was doing when I was twenty-one? Taking speed so I could whip through my job stocking candy machines, get out of there, and go party.” Doc (a pseudonym I came up with thanks to Sam) met with the two of us the other week; he liked Sam a lot. Doc can handle all of the freakier truths without overreacting.
Sam is just young, he said. I grew out of all that shit, and hopefully he will too.
**
To know the pain of too much tenderness. — Kahlil Gibran
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone so hard.
From the outset, I’ve striven to honor the inherent, impenetrable solitude of Sam’s being, even though his deep and persistent sadness — the byproduct of an upbringing filled with struggle and privation and cruelty — makes me yearn to make it all better for him.
Sam is, at any rate, a beautiful and extraordinary person. He has a mind unlike the majority of other people, sharing many of the gifts, and also many of the challenges, of people on the autistic spectrum (Russ and bluemorpho3, take note). He urged me to read Born on a Blue Day, the autobiography of a savant with Asperger Syndrome, in order to better understand him, and I complied in short order. The author of the book, Daniel Tammet, has synaesthesia, too, a fascinating multisensory way of perceiving and ordering things like numbers and days of the week. (Wednesdays are blue, hence the title.) Daniel grew up withdrawn into a world of his own, and has always had difficulty with social interaction. Much as Sam has.
An aside: the book had the interesting side effect of making me think long and hard about my own math-whiz father — whose rationalistic and unemotional values always seemed to denigrate and invalidate my emotive, intuitive, empathic self (as “frivolous”) — and who is very likely an undiagnosed case on that same spectrum himself. My fossilized resentment began to dissolve as I realized that he probably couldn’t help himself, that it was easier for him to be friends with numbers than with his own daughter. I started to find myself relenting a little, being more able to find a scrap of compassion and forgiveness for his limitations, rather than seeing him as the towering and rigid authority figure he seemed to me as a child. Maybe he had simply done the best he could.
But back to Sam. I spoke before of what a terrific leader and manager he is because of his listening skills and his responsiveness. I had no idea at the time of how hard he has had to work, both to understand others and to respond appropriately. It’s no wonder he has a way of making people feel as if they have his complete and undivided attention. He has to intensely focus upon their words and their body language.
A fierce Libertarian, Sam talks the talk of unlimited personal freedom (and chafes at any infringement thereof), but walks the walk of a “bleeding-heart” caretaker who frequently assumes responsibility for the well-being of others (often at substantial personal cost). Miranda was far from his first emergency. People utterly exhaust Sam, but somehow he always winds up in the thick of the fray. When the assistant director got suspended from work, Sam wound up putting in a lot of extra time as the only person at the company who knew how to take care of everything.
His tragic flaw is that he can’t say no, at least not when friends and coworkers ask him for help. This leads to a whole host of other difficulties, including the extreme stress he suffered at the time of his leaving that precipitated our blowout.
**
I have never had any man let me so unreservedly and unequivocally into his life before, and share even the most unflattering and trying aspects of it with me. It’s as if Sam were as ready to find me as I was to find him. He frequently said that my timing was impeccable. I don’t know about that, but things did seem to fall right into line once I made up my mind to make my move. Sam’s pre-dawn dealings among the night-crawlers and his cognitive obstacles did create challenges for me, but I somehow located equanimity and patience within myself beyond what I even knew I had. And he fully recognized and appreciated this.
What makes me sad is to think he’s convinced himself that I don’t fully recognize or appreciate his own needs and priorities.
**
After an idyllic weekend, our harmony began to disintegrate in the days leading up to Sam’s departure for his childhood home in the midwest. He had planned to drive the 650 miles to visit his parents (and brother) before leaving the country.
Sam being Sam, however, he had agreed to take on numerous shifts, trainings, workshops, and other responsibilities at work that week, including closing on Friday night at ten o’clock (after which he would leave on his long drive!). He was quickly running out of time. On the phone, after I complained about him not returning my calls, he vented bitterly (and with escalating anxiety) about all the things he still had left to do, including figure out what to do about his apartment still under lease — which he had asked me if I could move into not long before, and I had said I couldn’t — and what to do about his truck, which still had no brakes to speak of. A relative he had paid to repair them had never come through. His anger, and the desperation of his situation, completely infected me with anxiety (how could I stand by and watch him drive away in a car with no real brakes?) and I offered to buy him a plane ticket or rent him a car. He was adamant about not taking any money from me, or anyone, and about not being indebted to anyone.
He informed me that he intended to get as much sleep as possible that night because he had to work all day the next day, Thursday. He had originally hoped to have all day free. (He even threw some of the blame for that at me, thinking he was taking a workshop or orientation I had begged off of, but that just wasn’t true. Another employee had gotten sick.) I kept asking how I could help him, but he just wanted to be left alone that night.
So I left him alone that night.
And stayed awake for most of it, weepy from worry and Sam’s curtness and trying to figure out what to tackle. I agonized over my decision about his apartment, even though I knew for certain I couldn’t live there. I appealed to my old absentee boss: “Help me help him,” I prayed, to whomever would listen. In the end, I realized that what was bothering me most was the truck. I couldn’t let Sam drive away in a vehicle that big that might not be able to stop. Flipping through the Yellow Pages in the wee hours, I decided I was going to get that damn truck to Just Brakes tomorrow, somehow, even if Sam never forgave me for it.
Except that Sam didn’t show up at work the next morning. And he wasn’t answering the phone, either. So I went over to his building, tossing pebbles at his window the way his friends do. Some facially-pierced skater kids let me in the front door, and I went down to his garden level apartment and knocked. I heard a door open somewhere inside, but no one opened the apartment door. I left Sam another message, reiterating my full intentions, waited in the hall awhile, and then left.
Sam called me in the late afternoon, fuming. He had been up all night dealing with shit and had been trying to sleep during the day…but “people kept fucking calling me, and throwing gravel at my window, and knocking on my goddamn door!” He had told me twice he wouldn’t take money from me. Why couldn’t I respect his wishes or trust his judgment? The Miss Cribb in me, who had surfaced over this issue, wouldn’t back down, even though the rest of me was trembling, and I told him I wouldn’t push so hard if it weren’t a matter of life or death, and if I didn’t love him. If anything happened to him on the highway, I’d never forgive myself. Still furious, he snarled “Well maybe at least THEN I’d get some peace and quiet!!!” (He didn’t see the humor in this.) Anyway, it wasn’t for me to worry about, it was for him to worry about, and I was just adding to his stress.
After his angry hangup I called Doc, crying. Doc talked me through it. All people in relationships fight, he reminded me. You’ll get through this, just like everybody else.
At work that night, Sam did seem to have calmed down some. He was still dealing with trainees when the rest of us were let go, so I called and left him a message while walking home.
He called me back, but was brusque and cold, telling me that I wasn’t one of the people who truly understood why he was taking this job in the first place, and that he hadn’t ever been able to communicate it to me. No, he didn’t want me to come over. He had too much packing to do. He ended the conversation saying “this could have gone more than one way”…meaning, obviously, that I had done something wrong, “blown” it. He was eager to get off the phone, despite my pleas for further communication. He said he’d see me at work tomorrow (his last day at work and in town).
Reeling from shock, I had a Three-Mile-Island-size meltdown.
Such irony. I was afraid to start something with Sam for fear I might break his heart, remember? And here I was, feeling rejected, abandoned, shattered. He had urged me before not to let him shut me out, but I had no idea how to break down this wall now. Sam was going away, and I felt he was corralling me behind the fence with all of his “unnecessary” people, the ones being cut loose. I curled up in bed in the fetal position and convulsed with sobs.
That jagged, ancient heartache I’ve often spoke of was not only present, but radiated outward, until every cell, from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair, throbbed with pain. I fancied I might fly to pieces from the internal pressure. Soon after the first wave engulfed me, there was a blinding flash of light, then the crack of thunder. An electrical storm raged outside. As the feeling ebbed, the storm seemed to do the same; when another wave washed over me, another flash of light illumined the room. I began to believe, with mad conviction, that the wildly oscillating electromagnetic field caused my my overwhelming pain was causing the storm, not unlike the way the sky is said to have gone dark as Christ writhed crucified upon the cross. And it did feel as if I were carrying not only my own anguish, but also the burden of all of Sam’s disowned and banished emotions. I thought I had plumbed the depths of heartbreak, but this was agony. I wept myself totally dry. I imagined that my hair might turn white overnight from the stress, or that I might otherwise physically transform.
And indeed, in the morning, I was confronted by a stranger in the mirror. My face was hideous. Both eyes were swollen beyond recognition: baggy frog-eyes with deep creases and circles beneath them, both eyelids drooping heavily. My left eye, half closed, made me look as if I had had a stroke. It was frightening. I looked like someone else, someone twenty or thirty years older. I can’t go into work looking like this, I thought. I can’t let Sam see me like this. What was I going to do? Recalling something I had read in a magazine about how supermodels alleviate eye puffiness, I smeared the affected area with Preparation-H. Then I got dressed, put on my glasses, and went to see Doc.
**
“Yeah, yeah,” Doc said. “I know you think he’s so mature, but don’t forget, he’s twenty-one. Guys, when they’re twenty-one…when I was that age, I thought I knew everything, and I had that same kind of an attitude, like — fuck everyone, nobody understands me, and I’m going to go off and do my own thing.”
He chuckled. “You can’t take any of it personally. He’s under extreme stress, and just isn’t equipped at this point to handle his emotions. He probably has problems receiving, too.
“Look, you just love him. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
**
At work that evening, Sam came to get me, sat me down in the office, and closed the door. He smiled faintly. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m getting the brakes fixed tonight.” He had apparently used “the right threats” with his deadbeat uncle, who was going to get the job done for him at midnight, after which Sam would take off.
I gasped with relief. “Thank God,” I said. “Thank God.”
“I told you I’d take care of it,” he said, busying himself with a printout he’d made for another employee. I could have wept, if I weren’t already cried out, and told him so. He really didn’t want to hear about how I spent the previous evening, or what my eyes had looked like. He said he’d shoot me an email when he got to his folks’ place. I wanted to know if we were okay, but all he would say was “I’m leaving for nine months.” Then he shooed me out of the office.
But I was still smiling. I’d won the right battle. Sam would be safe.
At the end of the night, I lingered. There seemed to be a small posse of guys hanging around waiting for Sam to close up shop, and my fear was screaming at me that he didn’t want me there. I told my fear to shut up, went into the office, and sat down next to Rob. And gazed at Sam’s face, trying to memorize it. What else was important? My beloved was going away. Even if he didn’t love me, I was going to stay by his side until he chased me off.
When we did get out of there, it wound up being me and Sam and Rob and another guy named Brad in the truck, heading into the heart of the Hill to pick up something necessary to the repairs (I forget what). On Eleventh Avenue, we pulled over and piled out. Brad lived close by, and was walking home from there; Rob walked toward an apartment building, then turned to wait for Sam. I walked toward Sam. “I was just following you,” I said, shrugging.
“Right on,” he said. He and Brad said their goodbyes. As Brad walked away, Sam turned toward me. He pointed out that I wasn’t far from home, and I understood that I would have to get myself there. He went to embrace me — an embrace without any Sam in it — and began to say “See you…” but I interrupted.
“If this is over,” I said over his shoulder, “I want you to know that you gave me the time of my life.” I turned my head to speak into his ear. “Take care of this beautiful body I love.” (He expelled a quick snort, the way he did when I surprised him with an unaccustomed compliment.) I kissed his cheek, and pulled back to look at his face. “Take care of this beautiful mind that I love.” I kissed his lips. For once, Sam was virtually unresponsive. As we separated, however, I saw a flicker of the Sam I knew best in his eyes before he turned away. “I’ll be back in June!” he boomed heartily over his shoulder, walking toward Rob.
I started home, and the tears started again. But I felt no regret. I had said what I needed to say. And Sam would be safe. I could sleep well tonight.
**
The next day I attended to all the neglected things in my life, like buying groceries and an adapter for my computer. Coming back, I decided to catch the bus home over by Sam’s apartment building. Absorbed in Sam-reverie, I suddenly heard Glen Hansard burst into song in my pocket. It was Sam’s ringtone, “Falling Slowly.”
He was calling to tell me he had reached his brother’s town safely. I was elated, and thanked him for letting me know (especially since I’d never expected a call). He said his uncle had fixed not only the brakes, but some other things too. He told me some of the things he’d missed about the midwest, like the smell of cow shit. I laughed. He said this would probably be his last phone contact before leaving, but that he’d be on email. And possibly Facebook. Even though he hated Facebook. I told him he didn’t have to do Facebook.
It was a pleasant and upbeat conversation overall. I didn’t try to address the state of our relationship; I just slipped in a “love you” before hanging up.
**
I told Sam, in happier times, that I’d take a bullet for him. Maybe in the end the “bullet” I had to take for him was his rage and his rejection in exchange for his ultimate safety. I was ready to lose Sam to save him. Maybe I did.
Or maybe Sam planned this all along — to put distance between us before leaving, even though he insisted he wasn’t doing this to get away from me.
Because the fact is, I do understand why he’s going over there. To get the hell away from people. To “be a robot,” as he put it, at least for a while. To work his body hard, and give his overtaxed mind a rest. Our relationship was truly heaven on earth for me — it was what I had waited for all my life — but it may have been too much for a boy born on a blue day.
Then again, when someone gives you everything you ever wanted, and asks you for just one big thing in return, it’s only fair to give it to him. Even if what he asks is for you to let him go.
But part of me is still crying in the dust like Psyche, clutching after Cupid’s fleeing golden feet.
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