Fade Into You
This is a goodbye, and a hello. This will likely be my last post containing certain themes. It's not that I haven't let go. It's that some things still affect me. In all these things, my choice was to make things work. It was only with great reluctance that I was made to let go. I approached every relationship with kindness and patience. This isn't about healing. I will heal the rest of my life. Letting go is different. I had to try everything — and fail — first. It's a story that repeated. I was more than intentional. I showed up. I loved, was pushed away, and died over and over. Finally, I let go.
They say if a writer falls in love with you, you never die.
The last thing I remember was her small frame standing in the doorway crying. Fade Into You was playing from the turntable. The blonde girl walking on the dark street was so drunk, but when she saw me standing in the Ohio drizzle that night with nothing but the sodium lights illuminating us, she said something I never forgot. "Smile, beautiful man. Nothing is forever. Let's leave this town together." Her smile was brilliant, her teeth so white, gums so healthy, I almost did leave town with her. It's called drunk sincerity. In the morning, she surely forgot, like other women I knew. For a moment, I felt seen and loved, then was forgotten.
Chris Isaak's Wicked Game plays on repeat. For a long time, it was the soundtrack of my life. It's been often covered, so why not by me too? The first two lines are gold: "The world was on fire, and no one could save me but you. It's strange what desire will make foolish people do." Just when you thought you could dance to this song at your wedding, it becomes clear it is an anti-love song: "I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you. And I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you." Hateful slurs like, "This world is only gonna break your heart" and, "Nobody loves no one" put the nail in the coffin of romantic love. To this album I became a full-blown alcoholic, sitting in my green, thrift-store chair. She saw me die, night after night, and consented.
I can still see you there, with your beautiful, curly hair, half hidden in the bathroom mirror as I died in the next room. I wonder when you first left me. When did you make that decision? And how many times did I choose to stay? So many years I waited for you to see me, but you chose to walk away over and over. When you came home one night, expecting me to be there, I was gone. You weren't the first, nor the last. My heart endured so much from so many.
I wonder how many people know Leonard Cohen (perhaps the most famous lyricist of all time worldwide) wrote Hallelujah? He's gone now, but the love he poured into his songs remains. His words will never die, just as my love will never die. Though my love stories ended in crime scenes, it was beautiful when in bloom. All of my love affairs were beautiful because they were pure and meant everything to me, though they were discarded by those I loved. We sometimes fail to see the beauty we bring.
Fade Into You by Mazzy Star and Chris Isaak's Wicked Game were as wrong as I was. It's a beautiful thing to love. What someone chooses to do with it stands for eternity. I believe when we do something like love someone, there is nothing better we could do for them. To have that turned aside is strangely human, but God sees. I'm not talking about loving a random person and expecting it to work or even make sense. No, I'm saying when you both fall in love and one walks away, God notices. I wonder if that's what He meant by returning evil for good.
I may not live long enough to see my heart's desire. Only God knows. I laid awake so many nights wondering if the woman I loved ever thought of me. Now I know she didn't. And the one I spent so many years with. I'm sorry, dear. I didn't guard my heart, and I lost you forever. I couldn't stoke that fire again. And you love me still and maybe forever. To you, everyone is a reminder of who you lost. I left all of those things behind, dear, and wish you would too. Tell your heart to move on as I did. If not, I know you've found God's love.
They say everything we ever experienced is still in our minds. Somewhere. Most is locked away, requiring a key to access. We call those keys triggers. (It's not a storage issue; it's an access issue, and protective that we can't recall everything whenever we want, as we would be quickly overwhelmed, even traumatized, in some cases.) That tells me all the love I ever gave lives on in the minds of those I loved. Somehow, somewhere, they know, whether they accepted it or not. And our memories are eternal, as we see in the story of Abraham, the rich man, and Lazarus. Our memories may be a comfort or a torment, depending on what we did. In heaven, our torment will not last for eternity, but we still remember. What we do here lives on, long after we leave.
To the one who destroyed me last, I don't know what else to say. You likely will never see these words, so this is for me. Thank you, I guess, for hurting me so deeply. I will never know why you did it. But it drove me away from you and into God's arms, where I will never leave. If I had any doubt about how you felt about me, you answered. I'm glad you will never feel what I felt. I'm glad you never had to lay awake at night with those same thoughts and feelings. Someday, the nightmares will stop. Someday, your hurtful words will be forgotten. There are a lot of things I wish had turned out differently, and this was at the top of my list. At least one of us got our way.
All the love letters I wrote weren't for nothing; others will read them. What they think of them, I can only guess. Just because they didn't resonate with you doesn't mean they were totally unappreciated. If a stranger found a rain-soaked, tattered love letter someone tossed aside on the dirty street and decided to read it, they may be touched by the honesty and power of the words. So I decided to leave the letters unchanged for anyone to read and perhaps appreciate.
Neil Young was in search of a heart of gold. Maybe someone should have told him about that man standing in the Ohio rain, blonde girl in his face, wondering how he was ever going to live again. I was always a one-woman man and said other girls were like sunbathers to a drowning man. Nice to look at, but I had pressing matters, like escaping the undertow. I will never, as long as I live (which may not be long), love the way I did back then. I may love again, though never as painfully. She will love me back, fiery and strong. She will choose me as I choose her. And we will write our own love songs — songs with no undercurrent of loss or pain — songs that only ask, "Why didn't I find you sooner? Where have you been?"
We will whisper the tender things that only men and women in love whisper, sometimes without words and with only hot breath, tears, closed eyes, and kisses deep and haunting. There is a conduit between two hearts in love. If I'm lucky enough and God grants more mercy than I could imagine, I will fall in love again.
And then there's you, the one I favor. With you, my words rise and fall with my chest, throb with every beat of my heart, and slip out unguarded, weaving a gentle tapestry of tender, beautiful words. My beautiful words. They can't make you mine, though. Words aren't all-powerful. A woman has to see something in you that you don't even see. It's better if you don't. Better if no one else sees. Less competition. Once she sees that thing, it's over. She will fall for you. She already has. Her mind may battle for a time, but the heart wins, in the end. She may not even know when she made a choice because it came so fast. It snuck in unawares, into that secret place where women keep hidden things. Yes, my words may bring a woman to the brink of decision, but they can't cause her to capitulate. She makes a decision herself in some random moment of her day, when she's gone away from you into her real life, where you don't exist, where your words cannot follow. When she's making coffee, doing laundry, taking a walk. When she's alone and untouched by you, she makes that choice of what to do with you. You can't pull her, fine friend. Hearts cannot be made to feel. She simply decides she wants to bring you — the one with the words she loves, the one in her fantasy — into her real life forever. That's how it's done. But she will tell you it's your words or your promises that crumbled her walls. True, she wanted you to pulverize her defenses, rip off her clothes, conquer her, destroy the woman she was and the inferior love she had before you. She wanted love and lust and fiery words to set her ablaze. She wants passion, heat, noise, and then laying side by side in bed afterward, spent, out of breath, and silent but full of each other and in love. She wanted to be in love, so she was. She wants to be beautiful in your eyes, and when she looks at you, you see that question: "How do you feel about me, lover?"
If you want to know the mystery of a woman's heart, it's this. If she didn't fall in love with you, she didn't want to. Don't feel bad. 99.9999% of the women you meet will decide the same. The one who decides you belong to her is the only one you will ever have. She will belong to you completely. Because she wants to. To her, you are gold. You can't do anything to keep her. That's up to her. No one can pull her, unless she wants it. Isn't it a beautiful thing, to know the truth? There's no wondering why or why not. Just enjoy her, when she comes.
When I saw you the first time, I knew. It was different from every picture you sent. I saw the real you standing in front of me, and then our eyes closed as we embraced in that sweltering heat. We more than a little melted into one another. Our first time making love was unabashed and quiet, as if pulled to one another by an unseen force. As time went on, and we saw one another more and more, our laughter was the thing I noticed. Never was I so happy with a woman. You had a way of making me laugh, even at the silliest of things. If Neil Young was there when we met, he would have seen the coming together of two hearts of gold. With you, I'm present, forgetting my phone and the time and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life because the answer is right in front of me. I want to do this. With you.
The photos aren't random. They were from places I lived in Nebraska. The others are my last couple of days before moving: my last walk the night before I left, last bike ride with the boys, last time playing catch with the kids. God is imploring me to look forward and not behind, and this was a little of both, and definitely a goodbye. It's impossible to forget the past, but I forgive the souls who treated me carelessly. I hope those I treated poorly forgive me too. I didn't mean to. This is my first time living too.
This blog captured my past, present, and many possible futures, and it's time to look ahead. With what time I have left, I can write a very different story, God willing. Care to come along?
Thank you for reading. And God bless.
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