Fight or Flight

Important: What follows is a rough draft purposely prepared as version one of a story, with a second to follow. It should be read strictly in that light.

“Flight or Flight”

We got along fairly well, but there were times when we both were rough around the edges. The bristling wasn’t anything we could avoid, but how it appeared and evolved might be a story worth telling…

You see, you were from Gaza and I was from Pumpkin Hook. In between there was at least one ocean, maybe more, as well as a thousand languages, of which we knew a fair number. I don’t remember how our paths first crossed, or how, but the threads just got tangled and there we were. We swallowed our surprise and kept moving forward. Sometimes the shores were rocky and other times there were no shores at all.

We argued about this and that. Where to go on a drive over the weekend. How much money was being spent. If the bills were getting paid on time. Parents needing to mind their own business. Especially important were household chores, which is nothing unusual, but in this case there was a sharpness in the discussions that resembled the blade of a knife. The only thing that got out of control were words, so there was that. No plates were ever thrown, no car raced off leaving skid marks in its wake. Just the raggedness that indicated the edges of Gaza and Pumpkin Hook were rubbing against each other despite how appealing they were.

We were nevertheless merciless in our loving state of friction. We found nooks and crannies of our days and exploited them, pointed out the differences (meaning superiority and inferiority). In the end, the customs in our two parts of the world were very dissimilar, our social origins (dare I say class?) clashed in ways we hadn’t anticipated. The way this manifested itself was 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…

I know I began to have issues around that concept of “my” or “mine” because I wasn’t certain I knew what things I even had or did that mattered. The tiny fissures that existed terrified me. That, of course, did not help matters. I think, too, that what his place offered was culturally above my place, so far above that I was always reaching, always on the edge, and that is traumatic for a person like me who is deathly afraid of heights.

It was easy for me to walk down a city street and see every last defect. Easy to harp on the traffic. Easy to point out obnoxious behaviors, much worse than any found in my place. Hard to defend myself from jabs regarding parent-child relationships or the ugly architecture or the lack of decent cafés. 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.

The delicious differences just refused to tone down their jagged edges, unfortunately; I mean, we could have been much happier if we hadn’t always been trying to compare two worlds just to end up pushing them aside to try and create a new one that would be artificial. I wish I had time to reproduce some of our dialogues for you here, but I’ll leave that for a revised version of this account. By then I may have been able to recall how the whole relationship started. (So odd that I can’t remember.)

Don’t get me wrong, along with the exotic (?) differences we both reacted to on meeting, there were things that meshed perfectly, things in common, and for me, things that were essential in any person of importance in my life. Kind, gentle, unassuming, focused, very intelligent. All of that. Except those jagged edges never got smoothed down. 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, no longer sharp-edged, more like the memory of something sharp. They had become a way of life (and slow death, if one accumulates a thousand of them) and had to remain as such: a structure for that life. A ritual, not quite a self-flagellation but close. The blades dulled, the life continued but it was barely alive. There was an effort.

The pages I’ve reread in my journals include a few examples of arguments, but there are many with no similarity at all to angry word exchanges. They clearly didn’t merit much of my attention or I was uneasy about putting them in writing. (I’ll still provide a couple of examples in the revised version of this account.)

This puzzled me for a while, until I realized why I’d never written about the arguments: because they weren’t really arguments about things of importance (they mattered, but not in an important way). They were cries for help, to be saved from drowning in the oceans that lay between our two places. They were cravos no corazón, spikes in the heart that bound us and created pain, physical pain. Every outstretched gesture engendered a little cruelty, more by one of us than the other, but still both of us are guilty. Our nails snagged on each other’s sweater and we knew the other was there, was present.

The present required rebuilding. Reshaping. Mostly, however, relearning, unlearning. I used what I had on hand to start construction. Knowing the pain that barbed wire can cause, I never get too close. I used to talk far too much. Not now, not usually. I can serve as memory keeper for the other, stronger memory. I ask more questions. I explain when I don’t understand. I hear better. I hear more. I say only good things, and I walk. I walk more than I should but not as much as I’d like to. My steps are beginning to understand what I should be doing. (This is another area I want to develop in my rewrite of this account.)

Each step is a stone, each stone a thought.