Yesterday was tough. For a good part of the day, I had this empty, sinking feeling. It felt worse than the usual Sunday/Monday work anxiety… which shouldn’t have been much of an issue because I have the day off today (though I have a few work things I need to do). The day started off well enough – big breakfast, uneventful dog walk in the tundra, warm coffee and some reading on the sofa. Two new books had arrived earlier in the week: Stephen Dunn’s Pagan Virtues and Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems. Both are pretty great – and as much of a fan of Dunn as I am, I feel like I’m getting more from Kenyon’s book. During my reading I paused a few times to write what was on my mind. Some of that is mixed in here in this post. During the writing, I also struggled with wasting my time on this blog when I could try to reduce my thinking to its essence in the form of a poem or two. That didn’t happen.
Yesterday was tough because Kenyon’s writing made me think of my ex-fiancée. That and maybe the fact that this is the week we got engaged three years ago. For a while, the thinking was nice… not overly idealized, not angry or sad or hurt. It was a type of fondness – we could have been contenders. If anything, I was pleased and pleasantly surprised with the smile it brought to my face and the slight sense of detachment I had… If there was any sadness, it was only in that we didn’t get to know each other better. Sitting around reading and writing and sharing seems like the type of thing we would have done well together. As pleasant as these thoughts were, I also worried that by “going there,” I was playing with fire and might wind up emotionally singed.
The early poems in Kenyon’s book, made me think about my ex. The poem “From Room to Room” made me think about her experience of moving in with me and how unsettling it might have been:
I move from room to room,
A little dazed, like the fly. I watch it
bump against each window.
I am clumsy here, thrusting
slabs of maple into the stove.
Out of my body for a while,
weightless in space…
Poem after poem, my ex came to mind. I once wrote a few poems about her folding laundry, and here was Kenyon’s “The Socks”
While you were away
I matched your socks
and rolled them into balls.
Then I filled your drawer with
tiny dark fists.
That is a fantastically tense statement about domestic bliss. I wanted to send my ex a copy of the book. I wanted to say, maybe this was us. I started thinking about what I would write inside.
Then, an entirely different way of thinking hit me. Had she not left, had things not played out the way they did, I might not be ordering books of poetry, or writing, or doing any of the things I seem to enjoy doing on my own. I wouldn’t have these things to bring to the relationship because I’m not sure I would have made the time to discover them. I know how I am in relationships. I hold back on myself because I want to share everything. Given the choice of watching a TV show together or going off and reading and writing on my own, I would almost always choose the former (and I kinda hate TV). I would also expect my partner to choose us first – which can feel suffocating. At least that’s how I used to be… and that slight suggestion, that I might be different now, made me wonder if it would have made a difference then.
Coupled with this way of thinking, I also began to recognize a type of freedom in how I think about my ex… what I can ascribe to her. Because she is, in some ways, no longer real, no longer tangible in a day-to-day type of way, she can be just about anything. In my mind, she can become a more authentic version of herself, unencumbered by reality. I used to joke with her and tell her that she was a well-designed human being – flaws and all. That to me, is where poetry lives… in the less than ideal, in the reconciliation that comes after disappointment. In a weird way, she can be all these different things that I encounter in the world – which is far more interesting than the reality of who she might be in the narrowly defined guardrails of our relationship. There’s a bigness in that way of thinking.
From the Dunn book, I came across the poem, “The Woman in the Blue Dress.” In it, Dunn seems to be describing an enigma of a woman, an amalgamation of several women and experiences and wisdom. It begins:
What is said about the woman
in the blue dress attracts and worries him.
There is strength in her fragility,
her former lovers say, a fearlessness.
He thinks it would be terrifying
to be in love with her…
Dunn describes a woman “whose heart seems always divided / between revolt and acceptance.” and writes, “It would confound you, her fragile power / to live with contradictions. You’d want / to be better than you are, or could be.” I’m not sure those sentiments could be expressed in the tumult of the here and now relationship. They require close attention but also distance and perspective. Reading these lines, I began to wonder if that’s what I’m approaching.
These were all good thoughts – mini epiphanies about memory and the human heart. I was recognizing discoveries and growth that I’ve made on my own – things that might not have happened otherwise. But lurking in the back of my mind was this sense of failure or lack of progress. There are times that I still miss her or think that we could have made it. I see no reason why not. And then I resent the notion that we define “moving on” as the complete banishment of those feelings. That, for me, is when shame creeps in. I start to wonder what it’s going to take to be rid of that type of thinking… or worse, what if it never goes away? I have avoided deeper commitments… I have avoided even trying because even if the “what if” thinking only pops up once a year on an anniversary, I don’t want to feel like I’m somehow being less than faithful. These are also the things of poetry, the explorations and tiny infidelities of the mind – how we sometimes deceive ourselves. Even writing this, right now, I worry about what a future partner might think. Chances are, this blog or this post will be hidden and we won’t talk about it because these are the thoughts and conversations that we seldom let see the light of day. Love has many depths and forms, and our insecurities insist that we be the deepest, the last, the most profound.
I try to approach these thoughts with self-compassion. I usually fail. I think of how I’m allowed to miss my cats and I say to myself, this isn’t terribly different. I don’t miss them every day, but sometimes it just creeps up on me. I think of how the woman I was engaged to was a widow, and (at the risk of a bad comparison) this isn’t terribly different. I get a little cruel and tell myself, it was one stupid relationship that didn’t even last a year (an attempt to diminish), but then I remind myself that depth and transformation are far more resonant than amount of time. I tell myself, good lord, human history is littered with failed relationships, and then I think of songs like “Ten Years Gone” or “Always Waiting” or the countless poems and movies and plays written about these very same feelings. I remind myself that there have been other women and I remind myself of another Dunn poem “Each from Different Heights” in which the narrator suggests that no matter how far we fall, the bruises all heal the same. Long experience tells me that’s true… but I also suspect Dunn specifically used bruise as opposed to memories fade because his poem about past loves is, in some ways, a testament to those memories.
I often think about what it means to “move on” (perhaps too often). In many ways I have moved on, but in some, maybe not… and depending on who gets to define the term, maybe never. I have avoided trying to fill in or replace, because something tells me that’s a bad approach. I spent a year and a half not dating because I didn’t want to do the rebound thing. I then had a long-term, long-distance committed relationship (one in which we didn’t see other people). This seemed like a reasonable approach to companionship – friends first and see where it goes. Reasonable and casual (as opposed to intensity) seemed like a good departure from previous patterns. We enjoyed each other’s company. We talked and saw each other when we could… but casual is seldom aspirational, and I’m usually at my best when I’m a dreamer. I don’t think I was bringing my best self to it.
I’ve come to recognize that I tend to view relationships as acts of creativity. The woman in the blue dress… “she’d remind you that loving / is an achievement, a constancy of renewal.” I tend to want the type of relationship in which I can show off the many different ways I can surprise my partner… and some people inspire us more than others. I’ve also come to realize that no matter how deep I dig, or how generous I try to be with myself, it’s not the same. I may not always be enough for myself (here, I depart from Buddhism). Clarification: I am enough for myself, but also recognize there’s more in going beyond the self. Part of me thinks the only way to move on is to supersede the past, to find something even greater… That feels like it would only invite comparisons which feels disingenuous and dangerous. I suspect moving on is the type of thing that you only know has happened when you stop wondering if it’s happened.
Yesterday was tough because I played with the fires of memory and got a little burned. Yesterday was tough because I felt like there was one person who might understand what I was grasping at, but….
Dunn closes his poem with the narrator trying to explain an infidelity to the woman in the blue dress:
he had one night in Venice… The truth is, he finally
says, I met someone lovely in many ways but not
the way you are lovely, someone who… but realizes
he’s just skirting the surface. Sometimes, he says,
absence makes the heart grow sluggish,
and desire only one person, or else should we
just lean into life, inhale what we can of it?
Don’t we all want what we shouldn’t have?
She’s smiling, which he chooses to think of as a sign
of agreement, as if a smile had only one meaning.