Love and other Near Death Experiences

Mil Millington writes the best titles, even when his books are really plotless, chortly adjacencies of witty turns of phrase. The title of his latest is really resonating for me this week.

I woke up this morning feeling a little azure, a little bereft, a pattern I've acquired in the last few years. I often wake up a thin malaise. Sort of like an inverse shivasana, an accumulation of simmering worries or sorrows. It dissipates over the morning and as I pick up steam, it vanishes and I get to be my usual optimistic and robust self. But first-thing-in-the-morning-Cate has a hard time not giving expression to the bruises or the soggy, quiet fears. I need to develop some better practices about calmer bedtime (no computer, no dvds on my chest) and not reaching for the email stream before I'm even out of bed.

These habits are a lot like the "Secret Single Behaviours" Sex and the City did a silly episode about. Unlike the SATC world, though, I suspect most people's "SSBs" aren't as much about examining pores in the mirror or eating crackers with jelly over the kitchen sink, and much more about what we do when we're alone and feeling the lack of refraction for the utterances that need voice. One of my clients, who's lived alone in the last few years since her kids both moved on, asked me seriously over dinner one night a few months ago, "when are you lonely?" Bedtime was her time, the echoing time between the day survived and the release of sleep.

My vaguely malaise-y morning was interrupted today with an email and subsequent phone call with a good friend going through her own near-death love experience. Discovery of betrayal, a hidden relationship, wrenching loss of trust, anger and self-lament. A story we all know, the set and the words hurled at each other the only specifics. (And even those words, so well-rehearsed -- "I thought you loved me, I trusted you;" "I was protecting myself, you were part of this." Scripts we all know). In my phone call, there were tears, reassurances, the girlfriend script enacted. Regrounding.

As I hung up, I was reflecting on a couple of things. This was a deep relationship for my friend. It's rare, really rare, to feel the kind of connection to someone that makes the air around you sing just because you're together, where just sitting and reading together can feel *active,* where you're not *working* to find things to look at together or talk about, but just flow. That's rare, and when we have it with our friends it makes us whole, and when we have it with people we also want to be naked with, it's an unbelievable, undeniable spark of good fortune. Dangerous to believe in, maybe, because we all know where it can go off the rails, and as we get older, we all carry so many other interlayered stories whose characters and voices appear suddenly in the now, twisting at it, reshaping against hope. But it hooks you in, that connection, that simultaneous threading of those moments in the dark when the music and flesh and shadows make you one, just right, the intense fragility of intimacy, and those moments that result in the tear-stained phone calls, the seeing yourself as foolish for the decisions you made that let you burrow further into intimacy.

When we connect in that depth of dimensions, that's also when de-connection becomes the frayed cord plugged into the socket -- and we all do that differently. Some of us cry and lament and yearn, others -- like her guy -- pull back, get cold, retreat.

My friend I was on the phone with is one of the open-hearted of the world, one of the warmest people I know, who gives and deserves so much love. This is a hard moment for her -- but she'll continue to offer her full self into her loves. I know that about her, and that's one of the reasons I love her so much. She believes that she'll find that connection that will bring her lightness. I believe that too, for her... and for me.

I don't know what's going to happen with my friend and her guy. In many ways, I hope this will give her the chance to let go of a story that she's tried to feed for a long time, a chance to let in another opportunity for that kind of connection, one where the map is more aligned. I don't know what's going to happen with F and me, either, not really. I wish our maps could be more aligned, but I certainly also understand that the leap from "I feel this connection" to "I'm going to dislocate my life abruptly" is pretty profound, and frankly, I probably wouldn't be able to do that quickly either. I get it. And... despite my friend's tears, the apparent folly of it all, I believe in that green light, and would like to be able to see if we could continue to feed the connection. But if we can't, if we can't find a way to do it that feels okay for both of us...I'll keep wriggling to find that current, that connection that infuses, that the edges of hope/fear that I feel every morning before my day takes me over yearn for.