The Escape Hatch: Final Thoughts
on the Matter of Us My mind stores these things: Walking with you in silence through the woods during a soft New Year’s Day snowfall; we, with our formless warm layers, toboggans, and silver eyebrows and lashes, looked like little old men. We fell in a heap together and concentrated on the nothingness around us. The time the hairless newborn squirrel I had
nurtured and dropper-fed died, and you When you would draw hot baths for me, and set up your laptop computer on the toilet next to the tub, so that I could watch documentaries as I soaked. Once, you surprised me with a set of sponge-containing capsules that melted in the water and expanded into the shapes of insects. You had me identify each one as it emerged: moth, beetle, fly, mantis, grasshopper, bee. One winter morning at 1:00 a.m., when I saw a recently-hit dead cat on the curb, and implored you to help me bury it, because I would have wanted someone to recognize the value of my cat’s life in similar circumstances. After retrieving a shovel, we wandered into some nearby woods where you dug through the frozen ground while I held and petted the cat’s stiffening black and white body. We said a prayer and drove off into the darkness once again. You and I are still the only ones who know where that cat is buried. The day we bought super-strength bubbles from the toy store and parked near the entrance of the supermarket, blowing thousands of the sticky, transparent spheres high into the air when no one was looking, so that we could see the reactions of customers as they walked in. We discussed the joy in being reduced to childlike enchantment, and we waited for other adults to break into smiles, look around in wonderment, or at least appear contemplative as to why so many bubbles were floating around. We were saddened that no one acknowledged seeing them at all. We agreed that we would never stop looking for the life in things. We would never be unaware. You would solve the Rubik’s Cube in less than ninety seconds, and ask me to mix it up for you again. You were a talented pianist, and I sat on your lap as you played, my chest pressed against yours, my head on your shoulder, my arms and legs wrapped around you like a monkey. You memorized in alphabetical order all of the counties of Arkansas (and their populations), and I listened to you blurt this useless information out repeatedly, just so you could sharpen your mental acuity. This exercise often annoyed me to the point that I would stick my hand in your mouth as you spoke, in an attempt to silence your prattling. You would bite my fingers, grin, and spare me any more. We discussed art and love and the categorical imperative, the functioning of the cardiovascular system, crime scene investigation, and the design of a house we dreamed of building in the future, complete with an aviary and indoor garden filled with dark, nutrient-rich soil. We sang duets on road trips, and rode roller coasters at every opportunity. We listened to Leonard Cohen’s Avalanche as we napped, our limbs wrapped tightly together in a protective ball, like snakes in cold weather. Sometimes, if I went to bed before you did, I would awaken to you leaning in close to my neck. Be still, you would say, I want to smell you. We made love without breaking eye contact. You described my face as intelligent-looking; you said that I was feminine and graceful. I thought you looked noble, delicate, and strong. You told me you had never known a woman like me. Even at the end, after our years together, after your betrayal, you were firm on this point: I can’t imagine coming across a woman as insightful or as genuine as you. Forgive me then, for the shock I felt when I learned about her. By your own admission, this was a woman who was most animated while singing along to Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy. When you chose her over me—even if only for an instant, for a few stolen minutes in a single night—you handed over to her every moment that had ever existed between us, every inside joke, every moment of intimacy or softness or connection. You were saying to her, You are more important to me than these trinkets; I have no loyalty to them. The feel of your body is infinitely more alluring to me than the love and history I share with another who trusts that I will never give you these things. Take them anyway. She didn’t understand what it meant to share a life with you. *** Perhaps I misplaced the grace you admired in me when I reacted to your revelations. I remember that I spat sound, wet and venomous: youcruelweaklyingsadisticfuckedupgoddamnpieceof You thought that my words had meaning, and they did. But did you not understand that I was speaking in tongues? Only it wasn’t Heaven that I saw. All of Hell had visited me, and made me cry out in garbled, disjoined phonetics. Reverse ecstasy. The betrayal cut deeper still when you didn’t rush into the fire to save me, when you didn’t quiet your defenses to hear the steady scream of my underlying torment. The translation was this: Where are you? I can’t find you. You were never seen again. *** Long after you were gone, I still looked for you in the familiar places. I read your old letters. I lay awake at night and remembered you. I quietly wept at times and collapsed and wailed at other times. I remained faithful to you—couldn’t even pretend to look at another man—and loved you in spite of my own health and sanity. I set up all of my memories of you daily like tiny fragile dolls in a vast playhouse. I reenacted scenes and words between us and tried to make you live again (I wondered if you had ever lived at all). I collected all of the parts of you I had ever cherished like grains of sand, carefully polishing each one, and protecting them all in the harbor of my closed hand. I kept you safe there. Actually, I swallowed that sand and allowed it to take my form, choking me, rendering me unable to sustain life. Make no mistake: I died, loving you. I did. When a co-worker found me with my face in my hands in the bathroom, my eyes swollen and bloodshot, I told her with a forced half-smile that I was just having a bad day. How do you tell someone that you haven’t seen the one you love in two years, but that you still can’t breathe without him? You can’t say that, and so you don’t. And not being able to say it, to fall apart and admit publicly that you haven’t yet recovered, is a brutal, self-inflicted misery. You become a liar, because you must. The state of grief is this: a madness too formidable, too excruciating, to live with, but that stops just short of leaving you of unsound mind. You know what is happening to you, but you can’t stop it or alleviate the agony. You are strapped down, immobile, being stung by memories and images and what-ifs that crawl over you like wasps depositing eggs into the body of a caterpillar. You watch every breach of your own emotional skin as it happens, and feel every injection of the parasitic psychic larvae that will poison you, take over your structure, and eventually kill you. But this process doesn’t kill you; there is no such mercy. You feel everything. And you won’t die from it, but you are no longer among the living. *** I was looking through an old journal recently, with entries dating from those uncertain first months after you left. On one page, there was only one line. It said: ____ will end your life and you know it. Find the escape hatch. It took two years, but I finally found it. It didn’t look movie scene-sophisticated, wasn’t draped in stoic elegance as I had expected; in fact, it reeked of the exhaustion and boredom I felt over having grieved your memory for so long that I had forfeited huge pieces of my own life. The escape hatch—my way out—took the form of two simple words that resounded in my brain with such exasperation that I couldn’t deny their force and instruction: Fuck this. I was tired of thinking of you, and was ready to feel something else. And with that decision, I was resurrected.
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Ties That Bind
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