September 20, 2009

Harrison's Flowers

We watched Harrison’s Flowers again tonight, because I had that feeling you get about favorite songs or movies or books – the crest of panic that you can’t go on another day without revisiting them. Rendezvousing like old lovers.  Fuck I love that movie. It collapses my heart in about four different ways and leaves me aching for a bigger life. Wondering about the stories in my own oblivion, 18 years after that Yugoslavian winter.

Also, thinking about death.  No; Not exactly – about outliving.

Once, years back, my sister and I were talking about losing our significant others.  She says I told her that if anything happened to K, I would fall right down into ruin or run to the other side of the world alone – that I couldn’t see how life here could go on.

I used to think about that fairly often, about K. dying.  Which is perhaps an eyebrow raising insight into my omnipresent fear of losing what I love.

I thought about it in a silent movie, underwater sort of way.  How I would seal up the house from the inside; refuse to see his family or mine.  How I would sort his things out around the living room like a quilt or a shrine.  His army jacket.  His camera. His photographs. Favorite books. The last white t-shirt he wore.  How I’d pack up his messenger sack with books and pictures of him; love notes and the prayer beads he wore for safety.  Strap them to me.  How I’d sleep with an arm out, forever reaching to his cool side of the sheets.

I can’t write about this in the same way tonight; Can’t conjure up the preemptive terror I used to feel at the idea.  It’s interesting to me how you can evolve from that role:  From Adoring Andie MacDowell – Best Friend and Lover - Who Would Take on Militant Serbs To Find Her Beloved.  To ex.  To resigned stranger.

Objectively, I mean, there is so much of interest in this subject.  The transitory loyalty of the heart – or maybe, better put, the heart’s capacity to retrain itself out of self preservation.    Clearly, I would not have imploded and fallen like the condemned sky scraper I imagined.  Because, when he pulled away and slowly disappeared, when I began to understand our future was counterfeit, it hurt tremendously.  But it did not condemn me.  A few months later and I don’t remember exactly what he smelled like. I know I loved it very much. I know I did and maybe I would have gone on doing so forever.  But time and actions change those memories until they begin to lose their power, which is exactly what we need.

By design, his and then mine, he is no longer the man I would track and seek with blind devotion. He is a man I don’t know anymore and yet somehow, we both still see movies and go to work and make breakfast and laugh.  Life goes on and on and on. Incredibly.

This is like a death, like a divorce, people told me all summer. Encouraging me, I suppose, to take time to grieve or to be graceful with the unrelenting, new-every-day challenge of change. But it’s not really, not either.  It is a smaller, less noble thing.  It is the house lights coming up after the play has lost its luster, illuminating the shabbiness of the costumes, the hollow facade of the stage, the pancake make-up and wrinkles.   It is life going on and on and on when it senses a dead end, as it must.

So you are changed and gone and I won’t ever mourn you through a screen of sainthood.  Won’t ever know what it is like to see your cold still body sent away from me.  I love the movie so much and I admire Andie’s devotion and I would marry Adrien Brody’s character in a heartbeat, which is a tangent. But there is no empathy in my viewing any more, a realization that brings both certain melancholy and a strength of its own.   From the war to the marriage, it is all equally foreign to me and I can’t help thinking how funny it is that the charge of our lives can shift like night watch duty.  Lover, wife, vagabond, friend, lover, stranger. Student.

I didn’t intend this post as a gulf of a commentary but here we are and so I’ll say this:   Everything passes as stupid and trite as that sounds.  You can breathe through almost anything.  There are things I want, even now. Things that keep me awake at night, things I am afraid of losing still.  But every day now, I work to consider that fear and attachment and let it drift away.  In the past, in the future, love and faith exist because they exist – not because I will them to or pin them down or prop them up.  Accomplishment, or the potential for it, exists even when I am too scared or comfortable or lazy to seek it.  No matter where we all go from here, there really will be no imploding, no falling down in to ourselves.

Turns out, the concept of being unable to go on is a trick I play on myself when it’s unfathomable or too terrifying to imagine what comes next.  But change is never impossible and it is not the same as death.  That much I know for sure.