June 3rd, 2024 - Woman, Frog, and Devil
Dear TNY,
I’m in Stansted airport waiting for a flight to Dublin and I couldn’t finish “Woman, Frog, and Devil”.
Because I don’t care.
I’m just so fucking sad. I tried to break it down in the shower this morning. Why am I so sad? I have anxiety, right? But in a lot of cases, I fight that anxiety with courage on the daily. This nomadic adventure I’ve been on has been killing me for years, but I know it to be right in the long run so I stick with it and act, even in fear (even though most people in my life tell me to stop because it's killing me). Because that fear, it’s of a thing that won’t kill me; not fully experiencing my life. Same as public speaking or agoraphobia. But the anxiety that I can’t beat is the fear that comes from the belief that some of us will always feel alone. And I hear you. “We’re all always alone.” Fuck off. That’s the shit that people say to shore themselves up or tell people who perpetually feel alone like it’s going to help. It isn’t. The truth is that mammals couple up or group up. This is hardwired into our code. It has ensured that we survive. And when you look at a good deal of the data, things like neglect, heartbreak, and loneliness kill people every day. So unlike public speaking, this fear is real. It’s tangible, it’s deadly, and I know that we have all felt it. Deep in our guts. That if this goes on, it will kill us. So why am I so sad? Because I can articulate this to myself and others and…for reasons unknown to me and the rest of humanity, the handholding isn’t there a lot of the time when it’s needed. For me and many, many others. And that’s heartbreaking.
I’m going to a wedding this week. I’m going alone. I know it will be couple after couple. The whole thing will be about love and being together. Fuck, man. I won’t even have someone to dance with, not that I want to dance (fear of dancing!). But I want to have someone that I want to dance with or that wants to dance with me, you know? Or at least could dance if we so choose. And I’m leaving London where I watched a good friend and his girlfriend swoon over each other in that lived-in way that is so beautiful, the way she preens him all day and the way he gets her snacks and drinks and makes sure she’s comfortable (she’s pregnant). And before that I was in Luxembourg with another friend, his family filling out even more (his third on the way!), and they are all so happy and in love. I’m once again in the interstitial space between lives, the witness of such gargantuan beauty, packing my bags and moving again, moving again, moving ever again and ever forward, almost invisible in the amount of pain I’m in. Commenting on all their love and its intricacies, them saying, “wow, I never noticed we did that,” or, “what a sweet thing to say, I guess we never paid attention to that,” me, putting as much light on the god, Love, as I can so these folks might get to see what I see, the real purpose of living, of coupling up, of having a family in this seemingly pointless existence in which unfairness reigns supreme, that we are here to bear witness to each other and all of our idiosyncratic beauty, to say to each other, “Hey, I fucking see you, what a beautiful 40 years we got together, love,” but I’m telling it to a fucking piece of paper because it doesn’t seem to matter how loudly I say it in my own life, or how many different ways I say it, or how observant or attentive I can be, the way things are are the way things are. In fact, being so observant seems to be a bane because I am acutely aware of even the slightest removal of affection or addition of neglect. So I sit here in Stansted and cry, quietly saying aloud to myself, on repeat, “It’s okay buddy, you are spectacular,” but it doesn’t do a goddamn thing. Actually, it makes it worse.
Ben died of a broken heart. Because she couldn’t make him happy and he couldn’t make himself happy. That’s what people tend to see and believe. And they say, “You should make yourself happy, not rely on other people to do it.” But, has anyone ever thought that maybe, especially in his case, that he was sad because she made him sad? Sure, he is responsible for part of it in the way that every relationship fails because two people fail. But…maybe he was fully capable of making himself happy. Maybe a lot of us are. But these other people are making us sad. So profoundly sad. But we hold on because Love is absolutely everything. So when his wife would say things like, “About 20 minutes a day is how much I can stand you,” from her perspective she couldn’t be around someone all day who was that sad, but from his perspective that shit demolished his heart every day when he just wanted to be happy. He was begging her to stop making him sad. And she looked at it as him asking her to make him happy.
My father? Same jam. He was a jolly fellow. Had more friends than I can count. It was standing room only at his funeral with people out the door. Yet he would call me and cry and say that my mother would verbally abuse him every day such that he would drink a pint of vodka before she got home to tolerate her. Did he ask her to stop? Many, many times. It went unheard. Even on his deathbed, she held his hand and said, “See, the sex wasn't that important, was it?” Brutal.
Again, I understand it’s two people. But Christ Almighty, why doesn’t anyone talk about the other person not listening and pushing the unhappy person more toward unhappiness? And what would they say? Leave if you are unhappy? No relationship would have ever made it if that’s the case. I think the beauty is willing to continue to communicate and find ways to make it work. Knowing that we will make the other person unhappy. And happy. It’s doing the work knowing that, in the long run, we can have those 40 fucking years. And that the struggle will have been beautiful. Not just the good times. But the vivid and vibrant total palette of colors that we shared together. The paintings we painted with them. The love we wrought upon this world. Together.
I worked at a University once. And they had this super old forklift. The parking brake on it had no indicator when engaged, so when people would drive it, they failed to notice it was on and would wear out the brakes, which got harder and harder to find parts for. So the mechanic wired in a light. A bright red one. And that didn’t stop people either. It wasn’t until he wired in a small box that lit up and had text that said, “Please stop hurting me,” that people finally quit driving with the brake on. And maybe those of us that are sad so often are saying that over and over again, because we love the other person so goddamn much that it overwhelms us in the best way, but they just keep hurting us, and the advice we get is, “Nah mate, take care of yourself,” which we hear as, “I’m going to keep hurting you over and over again, figure out how to deal with it.”
And that’s so fucking sad. To know the math behind all of this. I just want to grab everyone by their shirt collar, pull them in close, tell them how beautiful it could be, whispered right into their ear, and then hug them until we can’t tell who’s body is whom’s anymore. But yet, here we are, in a different version of humanity in which many of us are penalized for not following the traditional path or the zeitgeist. That is NOT how humanity should function. But it is good business. The illusion of answers to questions which have never and will never be answered. Step right up, as Tom Waits would say.
We have a responsibility toward each other. You and I. And we need to stop shirking our duties. If a friend is sad, we show up. A family member? We show up. I don’t know why so many relationships don’t get the same attention. So many of us are drowning. And I think the modern economy around self-help, consumerism, religion, politics, capitalism, et al benefits from our misery through perceived happiness and identity. And will ensure we stay that way, stay convinced what they are telling us is the way.
But fuck that. Love is the way. It’s always been the answer. And the only way to understand it is to live in it. Action on it. Pray to it. Be consumed by it. Build it up and break it down and rebuild it over and over again. To wade into it and let it take you, whether it’s as calm and flat as Huck Finn’s Mississip’ or tumultuous as Lava Falls in the Grand Canyon. To bend to the will of its wind. To submit.
So I’ll pack my shit up. Head to the plane. Go to this wedding and pretend to be happy. And certainly, I will be happy for all of the people who are in love. And I’ll talk about how beautiful that love is. I’ll watch hands touch bodies and note where they touch. The softness of fingers. The gentle pushing and pulling of two people navigating a crowd. The delivery of glasses of water that are unasked for. The opening and closing of doors and the caress of a forearm. The tucking of locks of hair behind ears and the power of tiny innocuous kisses. Hands on thighs at the dinner table. The leaning of her into him when she’s tired and the way he puts his arm around her. The entire, heartbreakingly beautiful ballet of the human condition, a symphony so beautiful yet rarely watched or seen. I’ll take it all in, from my solo perch, and cry for all of us. A dragon’s hoard of riches, so spectacularly shiny, crackling with electricity, invisible to most, and I’ll bring it all back to you, dear reader, a blank piece of paper who will never talk back, never appreciate back, never reciprocate. Never Love back. No not me. Not ever. Amen.
As for this story, I didn’t finish it so I can’t say. It’s not even close to worth reading, I guess.
And now I’m in Dublin in the Temple Bar area, choosing the emptiest bar I could find and sipping Guinness while ruminating on existence. Asking myself who I’d be if I removed all externalities from my life. And do you know who that would be? ME, motherfuckers. Affix your iron rods and your foundation to this motherfucking rock. True as North itself.
With an overabundance of externally facing love and a deficit-chasm internally, I wish all of you the best. Take a deep breath, put down the shit you are holding that doesn’t matter, and submit to Love. It’s the only way to fight entropy, anyway. And let’s build a life together from there. The kind that makes everyone else jealous.
Nick
P.S. One of the smartest humans ever, Einstein, was quoted as saying, “Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.”
Take a minute to let that sink in that a mind brilliant enough to sort out the universe understood that at the center of it was Love. And that it would NEVER be understood. How beautiful is that? How elegant and fucking terrific!
