A squeamish child, I didn’t pull the wings off of flies. Or petals off a daisy. I didn’t much want to know what the insides of anything looked like – animal, vegetable, sea creature, automobile or electronic equipment. I was satisfied with the outer surface of things. I was happy to allow fate to determine my choices. My son still chants eenie meenie miney moe, half to himself and half out loud; I realize how easy it is to believe that any choice is just as likely as the next, any outcome as livable as any other.
That is the simplicity of youth. She loves me, she loves me not. Two possible outcomes, only one clear fate. It is just a matter of time, seconds, until yours is revealed.
Oh, that exhilarating, first, “She loves me.” Our quaking fear of being the only one in this thing is put to rest. We are relieved with the promise that we have landed on the one, the right, the permanent answer. She loves me! Of course she does. Because I love her!
Until she loves me not. Or I love her not. Youthful crushes ricochet between extremes. We gather our daily evidence: reread text messages to ourselves and everyone we know, dissect the minutiae of moments together, play interactions over and over again, searching, pulling apart word from omission, smile from frown, warm touch from tentative withdrawal, kind words from sarcasm. We still believe there is only one answer. We search again, re-classify the data to emerge with the outcome we must have.
We survive the evaporation of teenage crushes and move on to REAL LOVE – secure, now, in the knowledge that we do, really, once and for all, understand what love is. We have learned, yes we have, from those youthful follies. We won’t be fooled again. We can tell the difference. We just have to wait for the right person. The right time. It’ll be so obvious, we can’t possibly get it wrong like we did back then.
Finally, the objects of our adoration and fascination last longer than a season, long enough to make us live the consequences of another’s choices, long enough to factor another person in to decisions we used to make solely, long enough to comingle books and sheets and bills and refrigerator shelves and dreams. Then we are hit squarely with the inescapable truth that was hidden in our childhood prophecies: the two outcomes always remain. One outcome contains the other. Love includes not loving just as much as it includes loving. We will never choose between the two, as there is no choice. She loves me, sure. And she loves me not. I love the sun until my eyes squint in pain and the next day my love of the sun rebounds, leaps up like my black Lab when she saw the leash in my hand. I love the winter until I rail against the darkness and frigid cold that have taken up residence in my bones and then my love returns when I’m marveling at the reliable moon sitting low and bright in the night sky that goes on for hours and hours and hours. I love the sound of the words as I write them until I hear them another time and bristle at their utter wrongness; by the next sentence I’ve recaptured the spark that only that a perfect phrase can ignite.
Eastern philosophies allow for how a thing and its opposite are always inter-related. The flower and the dung heap. Suffering and joy. Anger and compassion. Otherness and understanding. Loving and not loving. Contained and held by the magnetic pull of familiarity, of need, of loneliness, of emptiness, of longing, of meeting, true meeting, which can only lead to its opposite, the turning away.
A story begins, and so, with the first word, with the title, with the briefest desire to capture the idea, the very act of beginning a story insures it will end.