Fright and Flight

In the previous story I described a relationship with a person in which the arguments were never about what they seemed to be about. In essence, they were desperate pleas to hold on, to not give up, to keep going because there was something that tied Gaza and Pumpkin Hook together. Permanently. Irrevocably. Despite all the rough edges, the sacrifices made on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis were worth it. That built-in discomfort, at times resembling one’s image in a broken mirror, became its own glue. A price was always being paid, and for that reason the relationship had to be maintained. Maybe it was a kind of investment.

So I needed to assess what was going on after the exploded lands of Gaza refused to disintegrate or choose silence. Words were threads, textures, hard measures of time. I needed to calculate what the shelf life for the words and their bubbles of silence actually was because I was beginning to worry that I wasn’t up to the challenge after all. To do the calculatiob, I needed a firm sense of who I was and where I was. And so I started where I had to start: by running my hand over the rough medieval wall. There are many such walls in the world, and I chose yours. Dry, dusty, yet occasionally drenched by rainy sheets that offered something in a language I liked. Old, tread upon by millions, heavily rising from supine to vertical, watching me as if they were the most seductive thing in the world. Walls are like that. They are cousins to tombstones, and my fingers run hungrily over them.

That’s where it all began. Not literally, figuratively. The hand absorbed by the tombstone. The oneness of me, you, the stones that never intended to bury us yet brought an architecture into our lives that we never anticipated nor wanted. We both loved stones of all sorts. My love could have begun in Mrs. Hatton’s Latin class in high school where we had to pretend we cared about the Appian Way and Roman roads and aqueducts. However, I suspect the boulders of the river where I learned more than I wanted to - those boulders with their blankets of lichens, their soft roughness, held me tightly and never let me go.

He was less articulate and just said who knows? Maybe our DNA binds us somehow? No, I doubt he said that. I’m just grasping at straws.

The rough draft purposely prepared as version one of this story, has been reworked now, and here it is.

“Flight or Flight”

We got along fairly well, but there were times when we both were rough around the edges. We were afraid and always one of us felt the urge to fly home, even if it was on our own wings. The prickling between us wasn’t anything we could avoid, but how it appeared and evolved was never a barrier to continuing, only the ragged hem of a path stitched slowly, erratically, faithfully. The needles broke at times and we pricked ourselves, swearing in different languages. The plane tickets were so expensive.

You see, you were from Gaza and I was from Pumpkin Hook, as I knew far too well. I didn’t like to trace that distance on a map because it gave me vertigo. In between our lands there was at least one ocean, maybe more, as well as a thousand languages, of which we knew a fair number. We sailed on syllables, got shipwrecked on far-off islands, survived hurricanes. Maybe we thought we were being original, but our sentences didn’t always mesh and we put our heads in our hands to will away the cacophony.

I said in the first story that I don’t remember how our paths first crossed, or why, but only know the threads of us got tangled and there we were. We swallowed our surprise and kept going without a clear idea of whether the east-west tug of war would dissolve both of us in the mists of excessive longitudes. Sometimes the shores were rocky and other times there were no shores at all, as I observed, but we kept imagining the ones we had were shared, not in two places but in one, one neither of us could locate.

We argued about this and that, not all the time and maybe not very often, but it did happen. Where to go on a drive over the weekend was never the last straw. How much money was being spent was usually kept in the background although the topic could occasionally get heated. If the bills were getting paid on time was manageable for the most part. Parents needing to mind their own business was more my issue, but in the early years it had no solution. When our parents died, the conflicts subsided. Still, I felt pretty awful in retrospect because you are so much your parents ’ child and aren’t reato blame for that. They gave you place, just as my parents did. And we both carried our places with us everywhere, like snails carry their shells.

Especially important in the discussions were household chores, which is nothing unusual, but in this case there was a sharpness in the conversations that resembled the newly-sharpened blade of a hunting knife. Maybe the intent of deliberate evisceration was never there, but the rubbing of the metal along a cheek, an ear, or an arm never was pleasant. The only thing that really got out of control, however, were words, so there was that. Like the phrase about sharp words one can’t call back. Those. No plates were ever thrown, although I was told my grandparents threw more than a few, no car raced off leaving skid marks in its wake. Just the raggedness and cutting edges that indicated the borders of Gaza and Pumpkin Hook were rubbing against each other despite all the efforts to subdue the noise we were each making.

We were nevertheless merciless in that frantic state of friction. We constantly sought out nooks and crannies in our days and underlined them, pointing out the differences yet ostensibly seeking to erase them. In the end, the customs in our two parts of the world were very dissimilar, and more than that, our social origin clashed in ways we hadn’t anticipated. The way this clash was manifested was frequently in the comparisons: In my place we say, we do, we think… such and such a way. In my place we don’t do (say, make, buy, eat, sing) that. In my place we … In my place… In my… my… my… It was so important to make those comparisons, which bored holes in our hearts and allowed the veins to flow in ways they shouldn’t.

Perhaps I began to think more about that concept of “my” or “mine” because I wasn’t convinced that I understood what things I had or did that mattered to anybody. There was always a gap between me and the world, a gap, and little fractures in my understanding of what I was supposed to do with my life. The tiny fissures that Kept surfacing terrified me. That terror of an undefined abyss did not help me communicate with anybody except for the cool, rough stones of walls and graveyards.

I think, too, that what his place offered was culturally superior to my place, but it so far above my comprehension that I always found myself reaching, was always standing on the edge of the cliff at my beloved Baroña, and that is traumatic for a person like me who is deathly afraid of heights. Baroña is also very far from both Pumpkin Hook and Gaza, so ultimately it provided even more complication for knowing where I ought to be. He spoke so little when we went there and maybe was thinking of what he had left behind, just as I was.

It was easy for me to walk down a city street and see every last defect when I wasn’t in my place. Easy to lose my temper at the traffic and minuscule parking places. Easy to point out behaviors that were unacceptable, much worse than any found in my place. (Nowadays I can’t think of a single habit in my place that is preferable. Times have changed, it seems.) Hard to defend myself from criticisms regarding parent-child relationships in his place or the ugly architecture or the lack of decent cafés. Now I understand the ninety percent of the ugly architecture is located in Pumpkin Hook.

Barbed remarks about incivility, about the widespread ignorance of history and politics, about late-stage capitalism, about the poor quality of friendship in my place. I took all of these in, swallowed hard, agreed. That didn’t remove the jagged edges, but it was worth the lesson. Where I am from, there are so many things that are wrong. I know that now, but I didn’t before.

The continued, stubborn, accurate differences just refused to tone down their jagged edges, unfortunately; clearly we could have been much happier if we hadn’t always been trying to butt two worlds up against one another just to end up pushing them aside so we could write a new one. The new one would be artificial, but we didn’t know that. I know I said in the first version that I wished I had time to reproduce some of our dialogues, but I’ve decided not to do that. It’s all water under the bridge. By the way, I have been able to recall how the whole relationship started. However, I don’t feel inclined to describe it in detail other than to say there was a novel or two involved.

Don’t get me wrong, along with the differences we both reacted to on meeting and found confusing as well as magnetic, there were things that meshed perfectly, things we had in common although we never said them out loud. Now I see they were things that I wanted in any person who was going to be important in my life. Things probably everyone looks for among which is not money. A simple list. Kind, gentle, unassuming, focused, intelligent. All of those qualities are essential and shoukd be defining characteristics.

Still, those jagged edges that came about despite our good intentions never got smoothed over. Month after month of running into an invisible pane of glass and getting a bit stunned, never letting go of the familiar perch, the limb.

At some point the wounds became something else. They no longer sliced the cold silence, they became more like the memory of steel or flint. They had become a way of life (and its opposite) and had to remain as such. Living was congealed. A frigid ritual, not quite frozen starvation, but close. The blades became dulled, the life was maintained, but it was rather ignored and so was barely alive. There was an effort, but it was minimal. We took it for granted.

The pages in my journals include a few examples of arguments, but there are many that aren’t angry battles. The arguments, frequent or not, clearly didn’t merit much of my attention or I was unsure about putting them in writing. I had planned to provide a couple of examples in the revised version, but honestly I can’t even find what I wrote about harsh words. it’s possible I only imagined them.

This has puzzled me, but I have realized why I’ve never written about the arguments: because they weren’t really about things of importance. If they mattered, it wasn’t in an important way. The disputes were small cries for help, to avoid drowning in the oceans that lay between our two places, one far to the east, the other far to the west. A famous poet wrote about cravos no corazón, the spikes in the heart that bind us to another and create pain, true physical pain, that we grip for all eternity. Every angry syllable, each shrill tone, even if never uttered, somehow gave birth to a little cruelty. Sometimes the discomfort was caused more by one of us than the other, but both of us were guilty and we both know it, I suspect. Yet the truth was, our sharp nails snagged on each other and we knew the other was there, was present, feeling the clawing.

Things have changed. The map has shifted, become distorted. The present initiated a process of rebuilding. Reshaping. Unexplainable. Mostly, however, there is relearning, unlearning, new learning of what was forgotten. I have used what I have on hand to start reconstruction and will refrain from providing a list of my resources, which at long last I see are vast. I am calm, cautious, calculating. Knowing the pain that a spike in the heart can cause, I never get too close. I realize I used to talk far too much and still do, but not as often. I am happy to serve as memory keeper for the other, smarter memory that is flagging but still standing. Nowadays I try to ask more questions and explain when I don’t understand. I think I hear better. I hear more. I make an effort to say only good things, in a soft but not weak voice, and I walk.

At this point I walk more than I should but not as much as I’d like to. My steps are the beginning of understanding what I should be doing in order to sort out the oceans and the lands where Pumpkin Hook and Gaza reside, if in fact they exist anywhere. I might try to figure this out, the map of why and how and still but yes no longer. I just need to keep walking, and thinking. And like I wrote in the first version: Each step is a stone, each stone a thought.

Each thought needs to be weighed. Rough or not, the wall must be built. My hands need it. I will be a sculptor.