my road –the irresistible force

We had a conversation the next day.  We had no problem talking, it was incredible how it would flow.  I didn't know what to say, I only knew that the inability to share everything that happened with me would be a living death.  So we talked about the event that happened, examining it in joyful detail under the subterfuge of explaining it away, I suppose.  It was all about apologies and excuses.

You see it didn't matter whether we were together or not.  She was my soul mate and had been since we first met.  You might ask how I could live all those years apart when she was dating other people and the answer is that other people live or at least don't die after the loves of their lives die.  Mine merely found diversions.   But now there could be no diversion, for my heart was inflamed, my soul was not mine any longer.  I lived and breathed only when I lived and breathed beside her.

But I was different also at this time.

I did not realize it, but I had become an irresistible force.  I was imbued with all the powers of nature through my enlightened state.  My ignorance of this, however, was the only thing that allowed me to tap into it.

The genie was out of the bottle now for both of us.  Before I could pretend we were friends who had a hidden passion, but now it was out in the open.  At first I tried to hide it, I wanted to apologize for it.  And so, returning from a meeting in northern Louisiana, after that first night, some weeks later, I asked if I could stop by to apologize.  On the way, I stopped to pick up some donuts at a place in Opelousas that makes them in a way that is very rare and homemade.

The whole drive I smiled over her happiness to get them and fretted over the apology I would make.  When I finally arrived it seemed as if I had been driving for weeks, first through the country and then over the swamps before getting further and further into the city.

She met me at the door.  I cannot explain this well, she was in a loose fitting t-shirt and short pants and she was the sexiest woman in the sexiest outfit in the world.  And it was not just me, she was really that beautiful and the shirt said ‘fuck me’ and I did.  It was not just her beauty and the outfit, it was the way she stood, slightly off center, but perfectly balanced, so the shirt shifted to reveal a tantalizing view of what was underneath, what I had touched and held and petted and brought to a terrific orgasm and which had done the same to me.

She folded into my arms as if we were two puzzle pieces, magnetized and made to fit together.  We made love in the hall way, the living room, the bed room, we made love for hours as the afternoon faded into night.

I knew then there could be no apology.   There was no turning back, it was forever, a heaven or a hell.

Take out pizza and home made salad with lots of vegetable, a small glass of dark red wine for me after the meal while I write.

I remember pizzas of the past, mainly the ones we shared.  I don't eat many pizzas, so I can remember many of them.  I could write a book that went from pizza to pizza in my life.

We made love for hours, but the love making that took 8 surprising hours was yet to come; something we wouldn’t realize until after we had already done it, an entire day of lovemaking, something you would have to be perfectly matched sexually to accomplish.  It was done to the sound of intermittent rain and we matched the storm as it waxed and waned so that our hearbeats became not just tied to each other but tied to the beat of the earth itself.

It will become important later for you to understand how dreary I found the city of New Orleans.  Now don’t get me wrong.  For a day, a weekend, even a few weeks it was a wonderful place.  And to live in it had many virtues.  Riding a bike through the city’s historic streets was exhilarating, especially since the drivers had no concern at all for your safety.  

A bike left only partially locked would only partially be there a couple of hours later.  These things would become a problem in our relationship as commitment became more important than passion, for she was strongly tied to New Orleans, whereas my ties were all symptoms of my psychosis which had no particular geographic component.

You feel uncomfortable at many of the places where you’d otherwise feel comfortable.  There will be other stories of this later, but all things must come in time.”

“So you are saying she could not resist you, that she was compelled into your arms.  That you accept blame for what happened?”

“An irresistible force can be resisted.  She may not have intended it, but I was an a bearable relationship.  I existed in it, I didn’t live in it.  She woke in me the dormant life.  Before the night after the storm, I was not even interested in sex.  That part of me was dead.  But in her presence, I came alive.

I remember being at home alone with my daughter.  I was not thinking of the family we had, instead all I could think about was what life would be like for my daughter if we were together, but lived in different cities.  I smile when I think about that, it's something I imagined for days at a time, but I can still feel the distance as a tangible thing.  That is how I know that space is more than emptiness.  It was something solid between us.

When I'm alone like this, but I'm not really alone, I let my mind wander to what it would be like to be together, but apart.  What would we do on nights like tonight.  Would we find a cabin in the woods to build a fire, walk through the snow hand and hand, laughing at all of the people who were snug in their houses, or would we just huddle under the covers doing unspeakably good things to one another?

The thoughts make me smile, I can picture it so clearly, but then I am back again.  The reality of not being there, my soul shrivels up and dies.

But at the time, it seemed to me like we could never spend a night apart and every day we talked.  We discussed my business requiring me to live in Mobile and that we could, at least have a relationship that put us together on weekends.  It seems to me like it would happen every night, no matter how impossible, that we’d have to get together.  Perhaps we'd need to become pilots so we could actually make it happen.  I remember when my eyes were good and I was a pilot.  The dangerous life I led!  How much fun it would have been to share that.  I'm not sure that a pilot  with partial vision is a good idea, what are the platitudes?  Every good landing is a controlled crash.  And many of takeoffs almost were landings, I remember taking off with rime ice on the wings, polishing it off before jumping into the cockpit, what was I thinking?  Taking off into the night from a small field in Louisiana near a large lake, fog, the same fog that solidified on the air cooled wings to form ice.  Dark shadows towering over the plane as it accelerate, the shadows were enormous pines, the plane climbing slowly as if it would not clear them, but it did and the short flight home to a well lit air field, landing lights, sleepy ground control.  In place of the single pole mounted bulb  at the rural airport, the field has bright halogen type lights, like you'd seen on an interstate.  In place of the grass runway, wet with dew, the runways and taxiways and parking are all concrete.  In place of the sheds for the one or two airplanes, there are FBOs, fixed based operations, with gasoline. When I took off, the only supplies, the only gas and oil were what was in the plane, the only mechanic was me.

Oh how cheap life was in those younger days.  Now it became very dear as I considered the possibility of life without her.  Perhaps life apart might be made bearable with baths taken with speaker phones on.  Together but apart, hardly the same experience.  And yet, the effect of the sound of her voice soothed me, even more tangible than the very solid distance between us.

How hard it would be to be together but apart.  It would be a constant battle to overcome the distances, with phones, with letters, with travel.  All the things that are so fondly remembered now, the nervousness of being apart, the fear, the jealousy, the doubts, the desires, my pulse racing when I knew we were about to speak, when I saw a letter from her, when I knew she was coming, although she always made me wait for her.

But we shared a certain amount of aloneness.  And in truth there is never more than half of me when we are apart, no matter who else is around.  And even though I am sitting with you, I am alone tonight and I fear she  is not, a wild spirit hidden behind the competence, a wild force that belongs away from lights and concrete, in forests, deserts, on barely recognizable trails or no trails at all.  

I have none of that any longer.  You too are lost like me, with only our wits and those things which we carry to take on the world.  

But back then we were together, our dreams kept alive by sharing the same thoughts over and over again like the beating of African drums.