Day Eight: The girl with the lantern
Last night, I reached critical mass. India Arie’s cover of the Don Henley song “Heart of the Matter” somehow managed to sneak into my “safe song” playlist rotation, triggering an unexpected deluge. The tears receded quickly, but the damage had been done. The immediate and startling side effect: clogged ears. As in, my body had finally finished filling up my sinuses from a week’s worth of tears and decided to move on to my ears as a secondary repository for fluid. Ouch!
This was torment. Advil did not help. Neither did saline nasal spray (in my nose, not my ears). I tried sitting in the bathroom with the shower on full hot again. Ditto. No help there. Finally, I just gave up and did my best to deal with it. Still, I tossed and turned all night. There was no way to get comfortable. I would drift off for a moment and then snap back awake from dreams filled with vague indications of pain. The sky was lighter each time I opened my eyes.
The waking moments left plenty of time to think.
It occurs to me that I didn’t fall into the stupid girl trap—you know, the one where you try to change a man. I fell into the other stupid girl trap: the one where you think your love will magically transform all of his wounded bits into bacon bits. I mean, his weathered parts into feathered parts, which would send him soaring up into the sky.
Because, quite naturally, my love is so amazingly stupendous and powerful and full of light that I could just shine it down a dark well and illuminate everything! “I see you down there in that well,” beautiful princess girl says, “and now that I’m shining my light down there, you can see a way out, right?”
It doesn’t work that way.
No amount of love, devotion, sex, six-packs of India Pale Ale, expensive cheese, tortillas, homemade quesadillas, bill paying, loans, or talking with him about his dreams was going to make it any different. He had to be the one. It was always this way. The only one with any power to change his situation was him.
But I wanted so desperately for him to break out of all of the things binding him down and accomplish what I knew he was capable of achieving—if only he believed it as much as I did. If only he would open himself to the risk of being hurt, it would also mean opening himself up to the possibility of joy.
Oh, my dear girl, I think to myself. You are sweet, but dumb.
He never thought things could be any different. In fact, over the years, he had perfected his various coping mechanisms for the sameness that permeated his life, the system of defenses and tactics; sentries, guards and walls; potions and pills for numbing, methods of distraction, modes of focus that would take him away from the things that had been unfair to him in life and bring him . . . respect, love, attention. He had figured out what worked for him. For me to suggest that this lifelong manner of handling his business was somehow inept or inefficient was . . . well, presumptuous. Arrogant. Irrelevant.
It must have been about me.
I wanted him to reach the potential that I saw in him because I thought it would make him happy. I thought he deserved good things after all the shit that life had handed him. And I thought that if he were happy, he would then be able to turn his attention to me. If I could give him enough, if I could just contort myself enough so that he could use me as a springboard, then . . . well . . . his success would bring me—not money, not fortune or shared glory . . . merely, love. And then, we would finally be on the same page.
Such late-night, inspirational pep talks (normally shared while I was sitting at the kitchen table and he was eating tortillas and peanut butter) fell on deaf ears.
That makes me think again of my clogged ears. As if they’re sending me a message. What blockages am I creating in myself? What am I not hearing?
No matter how much we may love, no matter how healing and redeeming such love can be—we have to be open first. We have to love ourselves first. We have to be willing to be cracked open, broken down, rearranged, totally dissolved. We have to be fearless in our giving and receiving of love, and in the end, I was neither. My love, once fearlessly given, turned frantic. Every step back he took led me to take two steps forward to try to fill the gap. Where are you? I wanted to say. Where are you going?
I was out of balance. Climbing into my car in the middle of the night, shivering in the dark, pulling out of the driveway, wondering in which direction to go. Running the circuit of bars at 3 a.m. Worried, feeling like a crazy woman. I am not the kind of woman who gets in a car and drives around looking for her man, I thought, driving around looking for my man.
“I don’t like being crazy like that,” I told him once. “Just let me know what’s going on if you’re going to be really late.”
“It doesn’t mean I don’t care about you,” he would say. But what did it mean?
No matter what, he liked how things were. He liked the wild unpredictability of his life. He liked such freedom—even more so, the freedom to be exactly as he was. Not trying to change him and thinking to transform his pain are simply two sides of the same coin—albeit, one side gives the bullshit a bit of a fancier finish.
All along, he was right.
And I was wrong.
He was never the one with the problem.
I was. Little lantern girl.
“ . . . and all the things I thought I knew,
I find I have to learn again.”
Those were the lyrics in the song that led to my tears. Because the thing I’m learning again is this:
If I’m going to be the lantern girl, I’d better shine that light into my own dark well and say,
“ . . . you can see a way out, right?”