Friday, May 4, 2012

The Stranger Who Took My Heart

"I want to hear about your first loves," says Tangled Lou. And I think, "Oh, goody. A writing prompt with some real depth and possibility. I'm game." But my mind settles immediately not on a love of literature or a love of animals or even on my first boyfriend, who looked like Jesus, because I know that this love was a love of the idea of love, more than a love for someone else. No. My mind settles on the second boyfriend, the one who ended up with a part of my soul in his back pocket forever. The one who reads my blog. And I have this thing–this silly superstitious belief that I am supposed to write about these things that occur to me. But what can I say? Boyfriends from the past are supposed to stay there. And yet, I am so profoundly glad that this one did not. So I will tell you a story.

I am in a drainage ditch, sporting velvet and pirate boots. Red lipstick and white geisha powder. Black liquid eyeliner, Camel lights and a bottle of cheap vodka. I am fifteen–the age my oldest son is to become in a few short months. My presence in this drainage ditch seems an accident of fate, a mistake. When one is invited to a party, one does not necessarily expect that it will take place surrounded with broken glass and cigarette butts and rat droppings. To the people I came with with, the only essential ingredient is the vodka. My friends are pushing the limits of my tolerance here. And there is a boy. He is a stranger. His bearing screams of streets as loaded as guns; his speech is razor wire. But he still has a face young enough to be covered with freckles and a touch of baby cheeks. He, too, is fifteen. I find this boy to be a fascination. He is not my sort of a boy. He is too rough, too cruel, too brash, too crass. And yet his eyes seem to see my soul naked. 

At some point, the evening finds me sitting away from the others on a high place with this boy and we are talking. I am complaining about my parents or some other injustice I feel has been inflicted upon me. And he is listening. And then he says that our parents are owed our respect and are not to be complained of. It is such a strange view that I find myself respecting it, although I probably argue. I don't remember that either of us get drunk.

Some point later, as my life continues to run parallel with this boy's, I find myself with him on a bus to his house, in what I think must be the ghetto of our affluent county–the place I would dare not walk alone at night. He has to go home because his father will be ill. His father will be ill, he says, because it is his third day off of heroin. It is his responsibility to be there. He says it without a trace of resentment. At his house, his father is not home. The boy plays with two little brothers, his face alight with affection. His mother appears and asks, without having been introduced to me, if we need any condoms. I have been transported to another kind of a world–a world of hard lines and low expectations and despair–and yet this boy shows his parents a respect I certainly do not grant mine. He has won my admiration.

Time winds on. Drunken nights pass, and my hair is held back as I vomit up the insides of my soul into stranger's toilets. This boy continues to be there. One night, I lie on a couch, almost choking on my own vomit, and that is the night that we decide that we will be boyfriend and girlfriend. Our lives are made rancid by addiction, by the inability to live as would be appropriate for young teenagers to do. After threats of physical violence are made by parents, this boy is allowed to move in with me and, at fifteen and then sixteen, we live as married people, but under my father's roof. He stays for a year. It is a situation that no one would think could last. Except me. I believe that it will. Because I have learned to love this boy with my whole heart. I am loving him and watching us die, and I am doing it with the emotional resources of a teenager. My heart is breaking and I am playing tea party and pretending we will grow up and have a yellow house with a white picket fence. 

When, in the end, I lose him, it is because I end it. I end it and I can hardly walk away. I never feel as if I am sure that I have not given up the other half of my heart, but I know that it is an organ that, if not cut away, will kill me. For a time we see one another sometimes in the passings dictated by proximity and then, someday, we don't. Old friends, when I see them, tell me he has faded away and the person I knew is gone from the world. Although I have moved on and my life is happy and sober, my heart is sick to hear this. And then, one day, there he is on Facebook. And he is OK. He, like me, has survived. He has a wife and a child. He has a good job. He was not broken like a stick upon the rapids of the world, but instead, was made stronger, as smart and as crass and as insightful as I ever knew him to be. We can now be friends.

I learn that you can love in all sorts of ways. I love my husband and know in him a partner that is by my side, day after day, a person to walk the world with. I love my children in a way that almost hurts. I love my parents and, finally, I deeply respect both of them in the way that they both deserve. And, too, I will always love this boy, for who he was and what he meant to me, for the time we shared together in the darkness, which was also funny and loving and fun. I love my present. I love my future. 

And I love my past, too.


Note on images: This bleeding heart and hand image was used according to allowable terms by Morguefile. More images by this talented photographer can be found on Photodaisy.blogspot.com

28 comments:

  1. Thank you,Tara. I admire your ability to write about what most have been a most of raw of times for you and for your honesty. You remind me to not be concerned over the superficial and, instead, be in the present.

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    1. I really got a lot from writing it, from omitting all the blow by blow details and telling only the sad love story of it. I am not afraid of that part of my life. It has been a source of strength for me in so many ways. I have been able to use it to sponsor women who are trying to get sober, to contrast with petty complaints I have in my life, to inform the raising of my own kids and to deepen my sense of the shadow and light as they play together in the world. I am very glad I got to pass through it and that I got to have this relationship.

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  2. What a lovely and mature view of your love. I agree and I love many people from my past for what they gave me or allowed me to be. I love them for caring about me and allowing me to care for them. I get it and I totally love your attitude.

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    1. Thanks, Jo. This is an especially powerful case of that for me because we were able to come full circle to friends.

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  3. Thank you for writing this story. It's touching and hopeful.

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    1. I think it is, too. People survive all sorts of things and there is love to be found in all sorts of situations. The love I felt during this time of my life was very powerful and so was my experience of friendship with the kids I hung out with. There was a lot of laughter. Nothing is simple.

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  4. How is it that in most situations, I have the right words to express what I think and feel, but when I read you, I almost always sit back silently for a few minutes to absorb it all and then stumble to find a worthy response? My unusual blankness is due in part to your inherent talent with words, but it's more than that. It's also because you are so purely forthcoming--far more so than most people would ever consider being--and because you open it all up and lay the pieces out for inspection, the type of reaction I'd normally express for pieces that move me seem sorely insufficient here.

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    1. I feel vaguely guilty to have been any part of depriving the articulate–you–of their words for a moment, but I am touched by the compliment. I think I have sat in rooms full of people who were baring their soul for so many years of my life that I foolishly assume that this is the thing to do and write that way. It horrifies some and inspires others, I guess, but I know which ones I want for friends. :)

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  5. tara, that was just a perfect read. Thank you so much for sharing your life with us.

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    1. Thanks, Kelly. From you "a perfect read" is grand praise indeed.

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  6. I read your post, and had to walk away for a minute before I left a comment. This was a very powerful story from your past. I think most people travel through the darkness at some point in their lives, but some never make it out. This just reminded me of people who are still reaching, crawling, or have given up completely. It reminds me of my sister.

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    1. I know exactly what you mean. I am one of the lucky ones. So many addicts and alcoholics don't make it out or don't without losing so much. My gift was that I fell very hard very fast very young and then was allowed to get up and live my life completely awake, with the context of a sort of darkness that makes everything else brighter and more important. So I am very glad that my life happened just as I described above.

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    2. And I am truly sorry for your pain for your sister. One of the most profoundly frustrating things is watching someone else get lost and not being able to show them to the end of the maze. It hurts terribly.

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  7. What a great story! I always feel I am one of the few who remain friends with most of my exes. They hold such a strong part of my life (my heart in their back pocket as you say) that I don't want to not know about them, to not hear from them, to not know that they are ok.

    Glad you found yours and glad that both of your lives have moved on to better things.

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    1. Very well said. I find it hard, except in some cases, to walk away from people I liked THAT much to begin with. :)

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  8. Achingly beautiful. Truly. I don't know why I sound surprised ... I cannot relate in many ways, yet I was there with you, watching your story unfold. Wow, Tara. Just wow.

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    1. Thanks so much, M. It kinda wrote itself. I guess it was just sitting in my brain somewhere.

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  9. Your candor has officially just blown my mind. This has got to be one of the most awesome homages to young love that I have ever read. And read it, I did, three times so far. Will probably come back and read it again (you have been warned).

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    1. Megan, that actually sounds like something that should go on a blurb for me. If it ever seems useful, maybe I'll quote you, if it's OK–you know when I am publishing my book of this one story, I guess?–OK, now I sound weird. Anyway, it was a super-cool compliment and...thank you.

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    2. Now you sound weird? NOW you wound weird? LOL just kidding. Delighted to be of service :)

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  10. Would you think any less of me if I told you I was crying like a baby right now?

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  11. It's a pretty amazing thing you're doing here, Tara! Wow!

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    1. Thanks. I think it's maybe the only memoir piece I've done? Maybe I should try and do more of those...I never realized I would like it so much as a genre.

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  12. You should do more memoir stuff like this. I had a couple friends read it and they both teared up and said it was so well written. thanks for sharing it with us. -Keith

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  13. "My heart is breaking and I am playing tea party and pretending we will grow up and have a yellow house with a white picket fence."

    This is how I spent my 20's. Thank you for writing this.

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  14. 'And yet his eyes seem to see my soul naked.' You have such a beautiful way of describing a feeling I know well.

    I am glad to have found you :-)

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Faith in Ambiguity by Tara Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License