Two Different People

I’m having crazy thoughts about Carolina again. That we’re really meant to be together. That we didn’t get the right help or any help, and that I just didn’t know how to make her feel safe and accepted or stay calm when she would flip out, but now I do. Of course, this is nonsense, and the only time we were even in the same reality was when we were fucking. We needed to be smashed together by the compressed intensity of sex just to be in the same reality! But I don’t care, I still love the idea of her. Of somehow turning that huge accusatory vehemence she felt for me at the end into a grand fuck-stew of ultimate forgiveness. So much does she miss me, so unique are my gifts, so unsatisfying is the companionship of others that she absolves me of all crimes and brings me to her modestly enhanced bosom to drink. Curtain. The end.

She was a real beauty, and we were almost getting somewhere before it all got blown to smithereens. But before I go full Caruso and sing my shame aria (or maybe I’ll save that for a different opera) let us remember that last trip we took; a rain soaked, sexless miserable three days in off-season Lake Arrowhead. It was bad juju from the start. A progressive distancing ‘til we found ourselves in different time zones but the same quaint cabin. We worked a little, cooked a little, and took every opportunity to not connect. And then the drive back, a truly vile excursion, winding down the mountain in zero visibility, then breaking up at 80 miles an hour, and finally ending (one more time) our absurd on again off again ten-month trauma bond.

Back in LA, we divided the rest of the beans I had made (food and the preparing of it our one point of dependable connection) and parted wordlessly, the deafening silence of our failure the only sound heard. We didn’t speak for three days and then a text saying she wanted to talk and get some closure, as if closure was any realer than unicorns. Never one to pass on another page of the story I got in my car and drove over.

The door was unlocked as it often was, and when I walked in, she was standing in the middle of the living room dressed in black stockings, garter belt, heels and a collar around her neck. The outfit was a time worn trope, but for some reason I was feeling trope friendly. It was also meaningful, because the third or fourth time we had seen each other I had brought a collar over there, just to see where her political alliances lay. It was a simple black leather strap with a ring, and she got very offended, told me it was ugly and that when I left, she “threw the fucking thing in the trash.” Then the next day she admitted to me that she had also dug the fucking thing out of the trash and hidden it somewhere.

That right there explains pretty much our whole dynamic, a lethal mix of intense desire for surrender and an equally intense resistance to it (on both our parts). There was trust gained and trust lost. Long declarative emails and swoon-lunacy. We’d march toward each other in bliss formation, then a whiff of distrust and both armies run for the hills. I could set my watch to her post fight emails; long treatises of self-insight and apology, her rage blamed on her “Latina temper,” even though she was the whitest woman I’d ever met, at least on the inside. This is not to say my behavior was exemplary, but at least it was in a lower octave, her missives always mezzo soprano.

(By the way, it was a true LA romance, and you could tell if we were hot or cold by whether I was in possession of her parking clicker. When we were hot and heavy the clicker stayed clasped to my sun visor, but when things went fallow, my visor was naked as a jaybird. I’d drive over there clickerless, a New York Jew terrier firmly ensconced in the doghouse, but after a night of pasta, poetry and mud-puttering, the clicker would once again be mine. Sometimes our quarrels would require an emergency exit, and as I tore down Sunset, the all-caps texts would start pouring in mid-getaway. BRING BACK MY FUCKING CLICKER! Followed by NOW!!! Followed by “I CAN’T KEEP DOING THIS!” Once I brought it straight back and the dark turned to light right there in the foyer, the clicker back in my hand before my shvonz had time to dry.)

So, I walk in there 72 hours after our Lake Arrowhead low pressure system, down the mountain break-up ride, and there she is in heels and collared with a daring and dangerous smile. It was a unique notion of closure, and so I say “Carolina, what are you doing?” as if it’s a very well meaning, but ultimately unhealthy and misguided gesture that I, in my ivory tower of clear headedness, am above participating in. And as I say it, I’m walking toward her, and soon I have my finger between her throat and the collar and I’m tugging a little to see how that plays and it plays pretty well and so I begin thinking, okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Now she’s finally ready to give over to me, which of course she’s incapable of really doing nor would I have any idea what to do with her if she did. But it doesn’t matter. We have sex, realize important things, and decide not to break up for three months no matter what, giving this beautiful love of ours the chance we have both know it deserves. Two weeks later the thing explodes, crab meat risotto needing to be scraped off the walls. There was accusation, vilification and other words that rhyme with those. She blew the thing up like a cartoon character pushing down the plunger on a box marked “TNT.” To be honest, it fucked me up and I was laid low by her wrath. That’s why it’s especially troubling that now, three years later, I wake up thinking of her, wishing she were next to me with her sleep mask and ear plugs, my beautiful, petite, deaf and blind girl who felt so good pressed against me in the morning light. We really were meant for each other. If only we’d just been two different people.