date machine : love of my life

Date Machine: Moving to New York and Where It Got Me

amboabe — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:09:00 GMT

It was lucky that we met.

When I look back, it seems impossible that I ever would have met N. Of all the things that had to fall into place, all the plans I made that didn’t work out, all the unexpected offers that led me into places I never though I’d wanted to go; at every step, one little change would have meant none of this would have ever happened.

If I’d been accepted at conservatory when I was 18; if I’d skipped the poetry workshop my sophomore year of college where my friend H planted the idea of interning at a movie production company; if I’d been accepted in the trainee program at the management company instead of leaving for Peace Corps; if I’d been hired at one of the random office jobs in LA I’d tried so desperately to get when I came back; if I’d taken my prejudice against San Francisco seriously and never moved there; if I’d decided to stay home last Easter because I was tired and didn’t feel like socializing; there are so many little details that could have thrown it all off. It was luck.

Before I met N, I thought I knew myself well enough. I had been through a lot, had fended for myself, taken lots of risks without any clear payoffs waiting ahead. I knew what I wanted out of life and I had a clear understanding of what I was going to have to go through to get it. I knew what I had to share with a partner and I knew what I would expect in return.

One of the first things I learned about N when we met was that she was moving to New York in two months. When we went out on our first real date I knew there was another man waiting for her in New York.

After our first meeting, I spent two hours on the phone with my friend S. I was convinced that I had to send N a wedding proposal in a text message. I knew this would have been fantastically stupid and so I begged S to explain to me in detail why I should wait for at least a second meeting before thinking about marriage. The proposal would have been a joke, and I would have meant it as one. But not really. Impulses like that don’t materialize at random. I’d never felt it before.

A week later we made plans to go out again. I was scared. I called my friend C and told her what was happening. We were about to start something overwhelming and inarticulate. It was like watching a whale coming up from under the ocean. I saw the smooth, alien surface rising just above the water and had no idea what it was. But I knew that it was big. I had already decided to go with it, but I was afraid of that choice. I wanted C to make sense of it for me; to tell me why I was going to do what I was about to do.

As N’s departure drew closer I didn’t feel like I had any place to do anything other than loosen my fingers and watch her slide away. That end had been beside us during every second we were together, even when I consciously turned my back on it. And when she left I watched her go.

N is the love of my life. When I was finally able to say that out loud without feeling embarrassed about it, I decided to move to New York. Love isn’t something you find, it’s something you give, and, though I didn’t know how to say it for a while, I wanted to give her everything. That’s why I moved. This is all I have to give someone. And I brought it to her.

We haven’t gotten back together. We talk. We go out together sometimes. When we’re together it feels like it did. But that’s not enough.

I’ve been lying to myself about the move since I decided on it back in September. I’ve tried to describe it in pure rhetorical terms. “This is all I have to give someone.” That sentiment describes the amorphous emotion that’s propelled me all this way, but it’s an incomplete description. It’s a sentence fragment.

I didn’t just come to give her something. I came to take something, I came to ask her to give me something back. Like giving someone a birthday present and watching expectantly as they unwrap it, there was an unspoken expectation in my coming here. I didn’t want to acknowledge that part. I didn’t want to say that part out loud. I don’t want to be that needy one, that demanding one. But I am.

My friend C told me that I’m in love with my own ability to be in love. When I wrote about coming here last month I said N had black hair. It’s not true. She has brown hair. I was wrong. I moved across the country for a woman whose hair color I couldn’t even get right.

The other week we had a fight. We were supposed to meet for drinks but she was in the middle of a busy week and had been out late the night before. I felt wounded. “I can handle not being your boyfriend, not being your sweetheart,” I texted her. “But I can’t handle feeling like an albatross, an asterisk appending your real life.”

How is somebody supposed to make another person not feel like an asterisk? How can anyone ask another person to make them feel differently about themselves? For all my opaque rhetoric about wanting only to give to her, here I am wearing my wounded emotions on my sleeve and wondering why she won’t do more to fix them.

I’ve given up on every woman I’ve ever been in love with. I never fought for any of them, I never tried to make a case, never made a show of what I could give them besides a passive and easy-going friendship. When you fall in love with someone you ask them to sacrifice for you. You ask them to amend their own plans for the future to include you, to forgo all the new experiences they might have had with other romances, to never experience another person’s body after your own. It’s cruel. It’s a prison.

“I wish we understood each other better,” she told me a few days after I got here. “I am often surprised about it both ways, how we do and don’t.”

I don’t know how this is supposed to end. There isn’t an answer buried in any of this. There is no ending.

I remember looking at her in a bar the other week. We were talking about music. I had just finished tearing down The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips for being grating and overly saccharine. She told me it was about Wayne’s father dying of cancer, the adolescent dregs of super hero fantasy turned into a coping mechanism for the inevitable parting of everyone you’ll ever love. We went to see The Reader. I laughed the whole way through. I was filled with incredulity for the stodgy camera angles, the baroque dialogue, and the hackneyed soap opera plot. She liked the actor who played the young boy. She saw past the surface, the stupid superficial flaws, and found the pretty parts underneath. She left the theater with those. I left with my own stupid punchlines and in-jokes.

I admire her as much as anyone I’ve ever known. She’s strong in all the places where I would come apart. She listens where I’d jump in to filibuster and orate. She’s direct and unapologetic where I’d talk in circles and avoid having to answer.

It was lucky we met. I wish I had more to give to her than this, my wounded feelings and dusty luggage.

I remember one of the first nights we went out together. I invited her to come to a friend’s birthday party with me. We had seen each other twice before. I had been in her bed and we had kissed for almost two hours on her front step. Still, I was nervous when I went over to her apartment to pick her up. I didn’t know where we stood with each other yet. I was afraid I liked her too much.

We walked down the sidewalk towards my friend’s place. We stopped at the big intersection by Church and Market waiting for the signal. We were both looking straight ahead at the red circle shining in its black metal housing across the street.

I tried to look at her without turning my head. I could feel her body next to me in the cold night air. It was like a little ball of soft energy. It was good.

The light was getting ready to change. I could feel the seconds moving by. We would have to start walking forward again soon. I leaned down towards her without looking, then turned my head and kissed her on the cheek.

I stood back upright and looked straight ahead again, watching the stoplight. After a couple of seconds I looked at her again. She kept staring straight ahead, but a smile spread across her lips as she felt me looking at her. The light turned green. “Come on,” she said. I put my arm around her shoulders and we stepped into the crosswalk.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Who Am I and Why Am I Here? or Let's Keep in Touch

Date Machine: How to Pick Up Women

Date Machine: Women at 30, or the Scent of the Medicine Cabinet

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

Date Machine: How to Pick Up a Nurse at the HIV Clinic

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again

Sex Machine: Come On My Face

Sex Machine: Because I Can

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

Love Machine: My Mother

amboabe — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:08:00 GMT

Last year I started using the phrase "love of my life." It had never occurred to me to say it before. I had been in love plenty, and at various points felt like I would have been ready to make a life-long commitment to those different women. Still, I never would have thought to say one or the other was the love of my life. It's an ugly phrase to me. It's written on greeting cards, said in shabby television shows for very special holiday episodes, and scrawled into high school diaries with dizzy abandon. I'm sure I don't know myself well enough to speak for what will happen during the remainder of my life. I can't predict where I'll be in the next few years, so how could I expect to honestly say I know how I'll feel? How could I come to such a conclusory statement, speaking for an entire lifetime?

Parents allegedly form the romantic model that we're instinctively bound to pursue in our lives. Some people want to replicate mommy or daddy to continue the peaceful domesticity of their childhoods. Others fall in obstinate love with their parent's diametric opposite as an extension of developmental anger and personal autonomy; to reject the unhappy models of their upbringing.

I was wholly in love with my mother when as a child. I swooned over her, found her scent in clothing and furniture, clung to her indulgently, romanticized her into soap operas so that all the faceless actresses in tight clothes and red lipsticks became ciphers for her.

I think I was twelve the first time I told her I hated her. I was trying to impress on her the fact that I needed to be driven across town to a friend's house and spend the night there. She was sitting in bed reading the paper and barely paying attention to me. I don't remember her reasoning, but she stood firm. I wouldn't be going. I felt betrayed. How could this woman stand in the way of my momentary happiness to such an unreasonable degree? I needed fun and play, exotic foods from the pantry of my friend's house, the luxury of his unfamiliar toys and videogames.

Instead I was shackled with the tedium and monotony of my own room and my own things. I could feel tears coming on the more I thought about it. I remember spitting out the words in a last gasp of brinksmanship to show how painfully serious my need was. I stormed out and sat on the floor of my room feeling spurned and abandoned. My dad followed me in and tried to mediate, explaining her position in some rational terms that I didn't pay attention to.

When I was in high school I fought with my mom like an entrenched solider. My parents' marriage was failing and she hammered against my father, bending every personal shortcoming into a metaphor for how he had stopped caring. As this was happening, I followed right behind, bending back the responsibility for their onset fighting so that it pointed back at her. She was the one picking all the fights, creating all the conflict.

When I was seventeen I saw my mother cry for the first time in my life. I was driving around with her one gray afternoon, running errands when she started talking about why we had started to fight all the time. She started explaining her side of things, the sense of isolation and of not having a partner who cared about her. I pounced on the rhetorical opening, describing at length what a faithless and selfish partner she had been to my father.

Those arguments were rote by that point, they were thoughts I had let fly at her before. They always seemed to bounce off her impenetrable hull like foam pellets, becoming less and less impactful the harder I tried to hurl them. This is the part where I want to stop writing; where the memory starts to taste like battery acid, becoming shameful.

When I was finished talking, I saw her face soften in a way I hadn't seen before. We were stopped at a red light on Shaw and Palm in Fresno, CA. She was staring straight ahead at the stopped traffic in front of us. "It would just be nice to know that someone was thinking about how I feel," she said. Her face pulled against itself, something cracked in her cheek muscles. Her eyes looked wet and I saw the first line of a tear fall down her cheek, like the trace of a small finger.

When you fall in love with someone for the first time, you get swept away on a wave of your own emotion. It feels like you're being filled with thoughts and feelings that weren't there before. It animates you and it's something you can see in someone else. It's like being doped together. You feel the warm high spread through your body and your thoughts, and when you look beside you and see the same glazed over look on your lover's face, it feels like you've arrived. Watching my mother cry at a red light, knowing that it was because of something I had done, I felt like I was at the far end of that narcotic tunnel.

When the dim shape of those words, "love of my life" began taking shape in my head, it wasn't on the upslope of some ambrosial high. It wasn't the gauzy idealism of looking at a new lover and feeling surprise at having wound up with them. If there's one thing you learn from your parents it's that you can't ever walk away from them. You can cut them off, stop talking to them, tuck them away into a mental lockbox and pretend they don't exist. But they're always there, the whispering voice you hear when you're alone and defenseless.

I was in the hospital last week with my mother. We would walk laps around the 5th floor as part of her recovery routine. In one room we kept passing, a woman with white hair was lying flat on her back. She was crying out someone's name, over and over again. "Ben! Beeeeeen!" She would arch her hips upwards and push her chin towards the ceiling with each call. She sounded like she was in trouble, had fallen and wouldn't be able to rise again on her own.

The love of your life: the person you miss most when there's nothing else left.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Date Machine: Look Ugly in a Photograph

Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On

Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry

Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner

Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Sex Machine: Getting Laid