Wrestling my angel
Self-mythologizing as a Valentine's Day Treat ... and gifts!
When I met C, I had no intention to fall in love. I had just gotten divorced and moved to New York with the intention to make all of life an adventure, except for in the kingdom of love. There, I wished for a certain type of boredom. I needed this because I came into the world a certain way. A very dangerous way. I came to the world prone —to being swept away, flooded, damaged, and desired. My astrologer told me that the snapshot of the sky at my birth promised a tumultuous romantic life, until I could control my snagged, agitated, self-saboteur subconscious. He told me I came to the world in love with love, and this was the fruit of it: I had been abused, cheated on, disappointed, married, and divorced, all before age 30. Did this enervate me? Yes. But I had never let my frustrations hold me back.
When I met C, there was no intention behind it. There was only fate. The elements of luck, synchronicity, destiny, karma drew us together. We had both moved from California to New York in the same month, and we started our new jobs at the same bookstore on the same day. We were hired into different ecosystems of the same building, him in the warehouse, and me on the floor. When we met, we were colleagues who greeted each other at work every day, without actually connecting. I blame the quadrants of existence that separated us. He was just so tall. His plane of reality was a deviation above mine, and our eyes never seemed to meet.
Before I met C, my quest for romantic boredom had been going well. In boredom, I found shelter from the dereliction of love. I was still licking my wounds from my marriage, where I was obsessed with self-obliteration as a means to gain my husband’s approval. Back then, this had been no different from love. To leave my husband had been like waging a war, but I had won, somehow. For the first time in my life, I had utilized radical imagination, employed self-love, and weathered the annihilation of certainty. I had reached toward a small chance at a happy life.
After I got divorced, I also got cocky. It was proof that I was invincible against the forces of love. Look ma, no hands! I said as I leapt into an abundance of mediocre relationships after the divorce. I came out unaffected. Almost zen. What did these men and women have on me? My astrologer had also informed me of some deep psychological wound I incurred as a baby. Perhaps when my mother left me in India, only to come get me again later when I was sick with heartache and anorexia, a deadly combination for an eighteen-month-old. Or perhaps because her guilt and inner emptiness transmuted into a lifelong emotional enmeshment, where instead of a child, I was merely a specific echo of longing within her. My marriage had echoed that same dynamic. Like a gasket, I blew up with fury of all the hurts that came before him. This was catharsis. I had been subhuman then, and now I was superhuman. I never wanted to be in a situation where I had to be this furious with the world again.
When I met C, the boredom had become intolerable, veering toward contempt for the mundane. Perhaps this is why it happened so quickly. When we finally noticed each other, it was at the water cooler as he bent down to fill his bottle. We finally saw each other at eye level, but what caught my attention wasn’t his eyes. It was something behind them. Something unnameable, beautiful, and chaotic. A promise for excitement. When I finally saw him, my snagged, agitated, self-saboteur subconscious forgot all about her mission for boredom in order to stay safe.
But can we ever promise safety in love? For love to be sacred it must contain mystery. It must obey its own prayer. The prayer of love is that the world will take on a dream-like quality where reality seems to shimmer, and certainty becomes profane. The feeling of it is like a hand reaching out from an abyss. Do you trust the hand? Inside the prayer, there is infinite potential, an unfulfilled promise. Not of safety, but for a journey. Where one can find a new way of being, or one can find a way back into themselves. But there is a type of love where the prayer is bastardized. When the potential is lost, and love is weaponized, controls, or seduces past its expiration date. To dance in the waters of love, we run the risk of drowning inside its trance. But this is the risk we accept to be allowed access to the magic of the prayer.
Falling in love with C felt, at first, like finding a way back to myself. I fell for him quickly, with the fervor usually anointed to the best of endings - as surprising as it was inevitable. I loved him almost the way one imprints onto their own baby. The first time we hung out, he put his head in my lap, and I laughed because it took up my entire body. He was just so tall that his beauty was exaggerated unto itself. It was outlandish, nearly obscene. I couldn’t stop looking. He handed facts about himself to me readily, and at the time, I wondered if this was some radical form of self-acceptance. He told me about his life. His anxiety tummy aches as a child, his fragile teenage years, his addictions as an adult. Then he told me about his recovery, his newfound stability. We connected over the fact that we were both artists, and how our art had saved our lives, over and over.
Because I wanted him to love me, I showed him the parts of myself that I thought were most loveable. I told him I was divorced, but never got into the details. Baked into the movement of how he talked about himself was a certain care for me, to be precious with my feelings. I wanted to take care of him too. “I love how deeply you feel things, how loose you are with your emotions,” he said. There was something patronizing in his tone, but I bit my tongue. For in sharing himself, he was bestowing me with trust.
As C and I got to know each other, I began to think we had the same battle. Everyone comes to life with a battle — a karmic quest that defines the movement of one’s life. It took getting divorced for me to understand my battle, but I understood it with clarity. My battle is a wrestling match with an angel. I see beauty and fury as two sides of the same coin, and everyday, I sharpen my sword on the side of beauty. And I drink from a cup that contains passion, and when I pour from this cup, I choose to call my passion love instead of anger. The anger is always easily accessible. Anger for being abused, for allowing myself to be abused. This anger could destroy anything I let it touch. But when I am loyal to compassion and betrothed to grace, I gain sovereignty over my life. In getting to know C, I came to believe that our inner battles were similar.
I cherished every moment with C. These were our memories. He showed me Brat before Brat summer was a thing, and we danced in the rain to it that June. He puffed cigarette after cigarette on his roof or on my stoop. One night I felt a thorn in my heart, the remnant of the heartbreak of some past life, and he stroked my hair until I became capacious enough to cry. He didn’t complain that my mascara had ruined his favorite shirt. He examined my wrists like they were an art object before he decided to kiss me the first time. Perhaps the mistake here was that in the quest for love, we only presented the version of ourselves that we deemed loveable.
The first inkling I had that C was hiding something from me came long after I had been sucked into love.
It started with his crying spells at work.
Of course I had noticed something was wrong already. For weeks, he had seemed far away, flattened, and desolate. When he spoke, his words slurred. “Reality is sparkling,” he texted me from the warehouse. There was a chill in my heart, and we agreed he should take a medical leave of absence from work. He needed a new psychiatrist, but instead he texted me, “I put down a deposit for a puppy.” Then, “I can’t stay awake.” I agreed to stay with him every night to potty train his puppy until he was able to sort out new medications.
This was when the boundaries of happiness and obstinacy began to blur.
I was determined to help C, even if it meant I slept four hours a night and never went home or to the gym, or saw my cat. I was addicted to his need for me, and his need for me was voracious. But worse, I was addicted to the shame. The shame that I was forever inadequate. I feared I could not weather this form of love. Maybe I needed the destruction. That snagged, agitated, self-saboteur subconscious inside me was still alive, and raging. So, every night I helped with the dog, every morning I woke C up and made sure everyone got breakfast, and every day I sent him contact information for new psychiatrists. But C didn’t eat, didn’t train his dog, and didn’t call his psychiatrists. He bought a new keyboard and made music. He went on a shopping spree, bought three wool sweaters in the summer. I felt caught between wanting to help him and wanting to experience him.
But almost overnight, another feeling opened up inside me. One I could not shutter, as hard as I tried. It was a twisted frustration. It was the sudden realization that C had transferred me custody of his life. I made his to-do lists, I made sure he ate, I booked him task rabbits to clean the house. Why did I do this? I was in love! A basic, feral love. But on the inside, I became derelict, ensnared, stern, and impoverished of spirit. Something was being drained from me.
But of course, I told myself these changes were quite reversible. Even when his texts began to confuse me. I forgave him. “Everyone is looking at me,” he texted from the grocery store. Then, “I am crying and crying.” I forgave him for needing so much from me, and resolved to do better.
Then came the unignorable.
C asked me to call his therapist. I didn’t even know such a thing was allowed. I called the therapist.
“I don’t recommend this lightly,” she said, and she asked me to take him to the psych ward.
Looking back now, I can see where I made my fundamental error in the calculation of our love. I thought C and I were both wrestling with an Angel. But his battle was more sinister. His battle was a dance with the devil. Every night as I fought for sovereignty over my life, C had been fighting for custody of his own mind. Maybe this is why he was mesmerizing. How he had such a hold over me. When I took him to the hospital, I finally understood that C had hidden this battle from me. Maybe he was worried he would scare me away. Maybe this was the part of himself he found unloveable. But at what cost to me? Now I had this feeling that if I abandoned him in the psych ward, it would say something terrible about me. That I could not meet his illness with compassion or grace. That I was not as capacious, as invincible as I had thought. And alongside this fear, was anger. I was angry that he raised these questions within me. Angry that he had hidden his communion with madness until it was too late, and now I was stuck because I did not want to be accused of being selfish.
The night before I took him to the psych ward, I was completely deflated, and he was embarrassed. He hadn’t wanted me to know this about him. That he was sick and wanted to die.
“You smoke cigarettes on your roof. Was that safe?”
He told me it was not.
We both expected this confession to make me angry, or despondent, but instead I became pragmatic. I wrote out his hospital packing list, ranked hospitals by food descriptions in Reddit threads, and planned all the logistics around the care and keeping of his dog. I think he felt both awe and fear of me. Fear of what my energy was hiding.
“Why aren’t you crying?” he asked.
I didn’t answer him because I did not want to make that night about me. The only pain of that night was fighting to stay in the room. I wanted to leave him so badly. My heart was shredded. I had already pictured the ruin of myself in his death. It made me want to rip out my bones, knowing there was a possible reality where he could have left me for death, and I would have never known about his true battle. I didn’t leave, and I never asked him “Why did you make me fall in love with you if you were just going to leave me?”
I left C at the hospital, and over nine days, watched him wither. When he came back, he smelled strange and looked skeletal. His dog was growing into a stubborn little hellion. Our relationship had mutated. I was no longer a girlfriend, but a caregiver. He called himself the “manic pixie boyfriend”. Everything I did was with the singular goal of making him feel okay. But he was not okay, and he would not admit this to me, because he knew this failure on both our parts would be intolerable. So was it an act of love for him to pretend he was coping well enough? To pretend he had danced his devil away? Was it an act of love for me to care for him? Even if only to avoid feeling like a bad person? If there was love, it was a monstrous type of love. No longer was there a prayer. I did not see that I was stifled into a trance.
C’s episodes became worse after the hospital. We stopped having conversations. Instead we said “I love you,” over and over, as if saying it would make it true. In actuality, I was frightened. C had begun confessing strange things, terrible things, to me. “I want to die” was small fish. His new confessions were about violence. The way he had wielded his anger in the past. Outbursts, sexual entitlement, uncontrolled addictions. I tried to love him by accepting him no matter what.
Finally, he told me a confession that set me free. What he told me filled me with ice-cold fear. I cannot recount the confession, perhaps as an act of protection. Again, I wonder, is this love? But what he told me made me fear his blind capability for violence. Fear that I could be next. Even if there was love, it didn’t matter. Love could not protect me from this.
I asked him, “Why did you tell me this? Was it to hurt me?”
Now my anger, my self-protective anger, the anger I was ashamed of, had bared her teeth.
C did not like my anger. I was no longer presenting him this loveable version of myself. All along, this was the other half I had been hiding from him. When I asked him that, I showed him that all along, I had been carrying a sword, which is sharpened by beauty and fury. I showed him that when I poured from my cup, I could pour both love and anger.
He asked me to stop speaking to him after that. It was abrupt. It was wrenching. But at the same time, it was relieving. Finally, I could be selfish. Now instead of love or boredom or beauty, I had my anger to protect me. I had been battered by love before C, but before him, the break ups had been easy. Inevitable. Clean as bone breaks. In fact, with my last boyfriend, I cried more in the relationship than after. I had been anguished by the question, “I don’t know where to put all this love inside me.” With C, I knew where to put it. I swallowed it back into myself.
The last time I saw C, our relationship once again mutated. He asked me to speak to him, but when I arrived, he seemed in an altered state. He looked at me with the eyes of an animal terrified out of its wits. I approached him slowly and gently. I spoke in a soft cooing voice.
“What can I do, C? What do you want?”
He rasped, barely audible, an indication for a hug. He flinched when I reached out. I recoiled too.
Even now, writing from the aftermath of the relationship, my wounds licked and relicked, I don’t know whether I loved C. I don’t know if we were doomed by our own respective battles, or if there is a certain point our demise crystallized. I don’t know if we obeyed the laws of love at all. To truly enter the prayer of love, there has been honesty. C and I never showed each other our true cards. I never told him that I was dictated by my snagged, agitated, self-saboteur subconscious. He never showed me his death drive, until it became a weapon. Perhaps in the desire to be good to each other, we were not good to ourselves. Perhaps the ending is just like the beginning, where his plane of reality is a deviation above mine, and our eyes never really meet.
Novellas That Explore Love
White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky - The yearningest tale of yearning to ever throb the novella … a lonely young man meets the love of his life, who is incapable of returning his emotions. Alternative title? "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"
On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle - Tara Selter, a rare bookseller, has entered a land of unthinkable loneliness. Every day is the same day. November 18th. Again and again. And she is left wondering how she will ever find her way back to her life, and back to her husband, despite the confines of broken time.
Destroy, She Said by Marguerite Duras - All the classic Duras packed into here: erotics, dalliances, madness, violence, acerbic dialogue. When four people meet at a hotel, their erotic intrigue masks a violent madness.
The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg - A cool and startling masterpiece that spirals around an explosive act of violence, obsession, and love (or lack thereof). An unnamed protagonist shoots her husband in the head after asking him for “the truth”, and then begins a confessional tale, a log of grievances, and ultimately, a clear-eyed journey to heart of what taking control of truth means. We read this for my Reading for the Craft book club at McNally Jackson! Next month’s pick is here.
A Mini V-Day Gift Guide
I was always an expert in getting out of celebrating Valentine’s Day. Impeccable excuses: It is my brother’s birthday. I don’t subscribe to capitalist constructions of love. Every day I am swimming in love, why only acknowledge it for one day?
But now, I feel differently. Maybe I decided my love language is gifts. Maybe it’s time for the philosopher in me to stop speaking. Maybe I decided I am a romantic after all.
The Cinema - Take your special person to an arthouse curated theater. 35 mm please! This year my friend Celine and I are going to see David Lynch’s Wild at Heart at the Metrograph together, and we plan to be very, very insufferable about it.
Perfume (laudatory) - kind of like handing out a fancy, sublime superlative. I personally would be flattered by a Bitter Peach or a Fleur du Mal
Cheeky matches - how to say, “I love you, and you deserve only the finest, most clowniest things?” Probably these.
Monastary balm - I suggest this for a long distance bae who lives somewhere cold. Something practical, beautiful, and also sends the subliminal message … stay celibate until I can be with you!!!
Matching boxers - This and this spells power couple (or really any combo … queer it up!)
Coffee - but only a subscription of Patrick’s Love Bug coffee
