Hole-hearted Love
Ice is sliding off the brand new World Trade 1 building… they are putting up protective scaffolding. There are ghosts everywhere in that downtown square. Anyone can feel them. To have erected a slick expensive Port Authority money-maker so close to a sacred area seems somehow an inappropriate challenge to the skyscraper Gods. There are souls there… there are living fossils… business as usual here in a 21st century phallic overpriced tower with bragging rights seems a violation. Some boyish spirit is up on top, throwing chunks down, the way my mischievous son couldn't resist throwing gravel from our roof on the cars below.
Valentine's Day is tough for 9/11 widowers. Some have not learned to love again. This building does not represent closure for anyone except the developers who will bank the profits. It pokes the sky like a bayonet, like a pointy thorn in grieving skin. Hearts are not welcome here.
So many of my friends are feeling down on this particular day. My facetious Facebook remarks about requited love being over-rated are not appreciated. One of my girlfriends keeps reminiscing about a perfect February 14th, oh-so-long ago. What she will not remember is that she sabotaged and abused every single relationship she ever had, and ends up compulsively alone with a bottle or a pint of Haagen Dazs watching Bette Davis movies on Netflix, rewriting the past.
I have been to not one but two February 14 weddings…. one with the red heart-shaped guitar picks with the names of the bride and groom forever. I still have the pick. They still have the divorce papers, I assume. The other one lasted 5 months. Couldn't take the July NYC heat.
For me, I always take this day with a grain of salt. I lost the great love of my young life to a horrid illness and rather than bitterness and child-support, I only have the lovely letters, sand from the beach where we slept our first summer, promises, a piece of his old jacket, a box of cigarette butts, some locks of his golden hair… memories. Everything else has been gravy. The meat and potatoes of my life, actually. Children-- things of love that are beyond love. My family.
Weather can make things a little worse. For the moderately depressed and solitary, a snow day can be a trigger. My own father, when we were small, spent a snow-bound weekend barricaded in our den with several bottles of scotch and ended up in a hospital rehab. I understand him now, although he'll never know, and I can never say that to him, because that was an era of denial.
I can't stop thinking about Philip Seymour Hoffman. The weather was thawing when he shut himself in; it was practically spring. They do say that April is the cruelest month, and more suicides take place in spring than in the dark winter months. Or maybe that's not the way it happened at all. But my Dad-- in the 1960's--- we had telephones, and a television, and when that claustrophobia set in--- there were no windows-- the snow was nearly 4 feet high.
Today we have the internet. We are shut in, but our friends talk to us and look at us and email, and we exchange heart wreck and poetry and songs at 3 AM… a window in the darkness. For true heartache, nothing helps. I keep telling my niece, who can see her most recent 'ex' on Instagram-- laughing, hanging out, half naked with his latest tattoos not of her… We are women, I say. We are the biblical 'vessel' which in layman's terms is a 'hole'. Men fight and lie to get inside of us. Some knock and politely enter, some slide in, some thrust themselves in… and some crawl in like a dog. But when they leave-- and they do leave-- even my first and only true love who assured me we would stay this way forever, on the beach-- entwined-- has long been buried like the good Catholic he was-- they leave a hole in our heart in the shape of their body. In the case of my niece, it is a rapper's penis-shaped hole. Whatever. But we don't enter them in the same way.
I always knew this. In the 7th grade this kind of cool older boy with a blue car used to drive down the road as I walked home and would roll down his window and stare at me with these hooded eyes like a snake. He told me he was going to get inside of me and of course I had no clue what he meant, and I would run…and he never did, but someone did. And then I knew what he meant.
For most women, all these holes leave a scar somewhere. Some of us are married to other men, and never let anyone see these marks. New Yorkers have a 9/11 scar somewhere inside. Those towers left a hole in us, and this new monstrosity does nothing to bind that hole. Quite the opposite. I can't help thinking there was someone--- at least one person inside, who had no family, no loved ones--- a lost soul who had no funeral or service, no name read aloud, was never engraved on the walls. Odds are, in New York City, there are lurkers and strangers everywhere. Maybe he is throwing the ice chunks down. Maybe he has befriended Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The snow muffles things--- mutes things. A strange white blessing in a city of soot. Like the white rose petals we threw onto my friend's coffin as they buried her. And spring will come, whether we like it or not. I believe this with certainty.
My heart is worn like an old shoe. It is scarred and marked and tattooed everywhere. I have loved too well and too many times and not well enough and have cried enough to make tracks on my face. But it still beats. Just 2 weeks ago Philip Seymour Hoffman's was beating and maybe he was dreading Valentine's Day-- -the weather report-- breakfast, the unbearable contrast of his children's innocence on the West Village playground. Who knows? But as all of us who have witnessed birth know--- the millisecond between life and death is that one heartbeat. Between utter joy and unfathomable despair. And in between is a beating bloody heart. Relentless until it isn't. Love, like our bodies, is timestamped. Women, I believe, take the hit most of the time. But let's own it. Alone, in a relationship-- separated, together… whatever… like all matter, or anti-matter, it changes in form. Embrace it in all seasons, in all its forms.
Valentine's Day is tough for 9/11 widowers. Some have not learned to love again. This building does not represent closure for anyone except the developers who will bank the profits. It pokes the sky like a bayonet, like a pointy thorn in grieving skin. Hearts are not welcome here.
So many of my friends are feeling down on this particular day. My facetious Facebook remarks about requited love being over-rated are not appreciated. One of my girlfriends keeps reminiscing about a perfect February 14th, oh-so-long ago. What she will not remember is that she sabotaged and abused every single relationship she ever had, and ends up compulsively alone with a bottle or a pint of Haagen Dazs watching Bette Davis movies on Netflix, rewriting the past.
I have been to not one but two February 14 weddings…. one with the red heart-shaped guitar picks with the names of the bride and groom forever. I still have the pick. They still have the divorce papers, I assume. The other one lasted 5 months. Couldn't take the July NYC heat.
For me, I always take this day with a grain of salt. I lost the great love of my young life to a horrid illness and rather than bitterness and child-support, I only have the lovely letters, sand from the beach where we slept our first summer, promises, a piece of his old jacket, a box of cigarette butts, some locks of his golden hair… memories. Everything else has been gravy. The meat and potatoes of my life, actually. Children-- things of love that are beyond love. My family.
Weather can make things a little worse. For the moderately depressed and solitary, a snow day can be a trigger. My own father, when we were small, spent a snow-bound weekend barricaded in our den with several bottles of scotch and ended up in a hospital rehab. I understand him now, although he'll never know, and I can never say that to him, because that was an era of denial.
I can't stop thinking about Philip Seymour Hoffman. The weather was thawing when he shut himself in; it was practically spring. They do say that April is the cruelest month, and more suicides take place in spring than in the dark winter months. Or maybe that's not the way it happened at all. But my Dad-- in the 1960's--- we had telephones, and a television, and when that claustrophobia set in--- there were no windows-- the snow was nearly 4 feet high.
Today we have the internet. We are shut in, but our friends talk to us and look at us and email, and we exchange heart wreck and poetry and songs at 3 AM… a window in the darkness. For true heartache, nothing helps. I keep telling my niece, who can see her most recent 'ex' on Instagram-- laughing, hanging out, half naked with his latest tattoos not of her… We are women, I say. We are the biblical 'vessel' which in layman's terms is a 'hole'. Men fight and lie to get inside of us. Some knock and politely enter, some slide in, some thrust themselves in… and some crawl in like a dog. But when they leave-- and they do leave-- even my first and only true love who assured me we would stay this way forever, on the beach-- entwined-- has long been buried like the good Catholic he was-- they leave a hole in our heart in the shape of their body. In the case of my niece, it is a rapper's penis-shaped hole. Whatever. But we don't enter them in the same way.
I always knew this. In the 7th grade this kind of cool older boy with a blue car used to drive down the road as I walked home and would roll down his window and stare at me with these hooded eyes like a snake. He told me he was going to get inside of me and of course I had no clue what he meant, and I would run…and he never did, but someone did. And then I knew what he meant.
For most women, all these holes leave a scar somewhere. Some of us are married to other men, and never let anyone see these marks. New Yorkers have a 9/11 scar somewhere inside. Those towers left a hole in us, and this new monstrosity does nothing to bind that hole. Quite the opposite. I can't help thinking there was someone--- at least one person inside, who had no family, no loved ones--- a lost soul who had no funeral or service, no name read aloud, was never engraved on the walls. Odds are, in New York City, there are lurkers and strangers everywhere. Maybe he is throwing the ice chunks down. Maybe he has befriended Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The snow muffles things--- mutes things. A strange white blessing in a city of soot. Like the white rose petals we threw onto my friend's coffin as they buried her. And spring will come, whether we like it or not. I believe this with certainty.
My heart is worn like an old shoe. It is scarred and marked and tattooed everywhere. I have loved too well and too many times and not well enough and have cried enough to make tracks on my face. But it still beats. Just 2 weeks ago Philip Seymour Hoffman's was beating and maybe he was dreading Valentine's Day-- -the weather report-- breakfast, the unbearable contrast of his children's innocence on the West Village playground. Who knows? But as all of us who have witnessed birth know--- the millisecond between life and death is that one heartbeat. Between utter joy and unfathomable despair. And in between is a beating bloody heart. Relentless until it isn't. Love, like our bodies, is timestamped. Women, I believe, take the hit most of the time. But let's own it. Alone, in a relationship-- separated, together… whatever… like all matter, or anti-matter, it changes in form. Embrace it in all seasons, in all its forms.
Labels: 7th grade, 9/11, Bette Davis, Haagen Dazs Netflix, Instagram, New York City, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Port Authority, Suicide, T.S. Eliot, Valentine's Day, World Trade 1
posted by mysocalledwriterlessblog at
1:18 AM
1 Comments:
Do we ever love again, the way that we first loved, or do we make a large target of ourselves, like a defensive soccer player, waiting for our opponent's free kick in the box, trying to cover the yawning goal-mouth, but ever ready to drop into that pained foetal curl when the strike hits our most vulnerable area? We have made a virtue of our suffering, as we turn the other cheek and forgive again and again. We are the back-line. That is our task it seems, and we do it without thought or question most of the time, until we become nothing but walking contusions.. and at the other end of the field, the strikers for our team are dealing the blows that our back-line will eventually inherit. I was not born to be a striker, alas.
To me, Valentine's Day is now all about when, three years ago, my father tripped on a paving stone as he walked along the street. He died a week to the day later. Essentially it has become the day I lost the only man who ever really cared for me at all. It is a cold realization that strips away the shallow peevish discontent I used to have about Valentine's Day.. ie. the non-receipt of candy and cards, which have never arrived, Janis Ian style. I have never cared for cut flowers, they are already dead, and when a man gives me flowers it just serves to remind me that he doesn't know or care for me as much as he hoped the flowers might say. Often they have evidence of being stolen from someone's moonlit garden. Other oh so romantic times they have been bought at a filling station, as a desperate afterthought, a sop to convention, a universal get out of gaol free card for a guilty conscience. On the day my last lover bought me flowers it was like a Judas kiss. I knew then that I was not the only one, though I managed to persuade myself for a while that was merely the paranoia borne of years of disappointment and disregard from the opposite sex... But yes. I should have gone with that first instinct, as it was, lamentably, the correct one, no matter how much I wished it otherwise.
I said "yes" to the first and only man who ever asked me to marry him. It was a massive mistake of course, but as a general philosophy I tend towards saying yes, and experiencing something, throwing myself in at the deep end and committing.... rather than saying " no" and always wondering what I missed. This is of course my prime reason why I have taken such an emotional battering I am sure, It is my own fault, ultimately.
I stopped saying "yes"14 years ago. Not because I had found wisdom or anything, just that nobody else asked me.. Not to parties, not for dates, not to kiss or have sex. I just somehow became invisible, as middle aged ladies in a small town setting tend to do. We become more diaphanous with each day until we are no longer there at all.. Eleanor Rigby was one such. Sad. It seems egotistical to say that mankind has really missed out on knowing me, what with me actually being fairly awesome in some ways, but really, the things I excel at are not bankable qualities, but lurk somewhere between the blue and the mist, too hard to figure out. It's not so. All I ever wanted was to be loved in return. It never happened
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home