Salvation and loss, (dis)continued

Well, it looks like the computer geeks were able to save pretty well everything on my now recycled old laptop. Since my external hard drive, designed as a backup, also malfunctioned, I am now looking for an online backup service. Another expense.

Included in the saved data were all my emails. I had been tempted to dump all the 8500 between me and B since we first met in the summer of 2007. Instead, I stowed them all away in a storage file. I looked in there today and found, not at all surprisingly, that our issues, the ones that finally broke us up, have been there all along and in exactly the same form, almost the same language. We both found each other very very attractive but we both wanted incompatible forms of relationship. And in the end, after three years, neither of us changed our minds or hearts about that. Square peg in a round hole.

It would not have taken a brilliant mind to predict that it would not work out. An astrologer classmate of mine --who never met B-- looked at our charts and said we'd make the very best of friends but that our romance was doomed. From our first serious talk about our relationship and all the way through, it was pretty well always in the form of "no, but". We found ourselves using language about each other that men normally do  not apply to each other: enticing, enchanting, alluring, intoxicating. Whatever that erotic trance is, what we call falling, well, we both fell into it. I guess it was a kind of soul drug. And although our physical attraction remained undiminished and overwhelming until just the last minute, it was more than that. For me at least, his brain --quicksilver fast and endlessly funny, curious and inventive-- and his lively smiling spirit were irresistible. I really have never known anyone like him. We also developed a flawed but real kind of friendship, too --by itself very hard to lose-- and I admired him very much for his capacity to do and be so many things that I could not. And he was the best playmate I ever had. When he was around, the rest of the world seemed to settle into place and I was aware of being effortlessly happy. I both felt as if I had known him my whole life and as if I had just met my long-lost other self. For me, the next steps were obvious; when you connect with someone like that, you make the mate bond, that combo of friend, lover and blood-brother. Not for him, though. For reasons, or lack of reasons, which, to this day, baffle me. Even if  we could not finally make each other happy, we gave each other floods of happy moments. For myself, I cannot remember better ones. And my fear, of course, if that I will never be as happy again.

For me this will always be a tragic puzzle. He used the image of a jigsaw puzzle and, ironically, it fits. We discovered early on that the central pieces did not seem to fit. So we focused on the other ones. And most of them fit amazingly well, easily and beautifully. So we went about putting together all of those, even expanding the puzzle far beyond its original frame. But when we came back to the center, where those two big pieces of the heart had to fit, we just could not make them match. For my part, I tried bending mine into shape but it just tore and ripped. We loved each other, but those heart pieces just could not find a way to match up. I finally had to face what I had not wanted to know, that this most wonderful of puzzles could not be solved.

What will I do with those many emails? Some days I think I should just push "delete" and be done with them. But part of the reason I hang on so hard to lovers --usually beyond the point where I should have-- is that they carry part of my life history with them. To delete them feels like deleting part of myself. So I think I'll just store them away again for a while, with the pictures and the cards and the tutarus and the trivet.

B told me that in reading about anger, he discovered Seneca's point, that anger springs from optimism and hope. I guess that means as long as you are angry, what you are angry about is still alive, a live issue. A very good point. God knows I have been angry, to the point of weeping and exhausting myself. But that is fading now. More often it is just sadness, or on a bad day, real sorrow. Facing up to a reality both B and I tried to avoid. Part of that was about deception and self-deception. It feels cruel to me that at this late stage in my life that I met a man so compelling, who made a jigsaw with me larger and more richly complex than I could have imagined, only, in the end, to find that because of a few pieces --crucial ones, alas-- the whole piece came to an end. I don't know if God and St. Jude are weeping with me or laughing at me.

What happened to us is neither unique nor new. To have come so close, but to have lost. Old old story. Although how often it happens between quite middle-aged men, I don't know.  But for me, one of the saddest failures of my life.  Someday it won't feel this way; I know that. I mostly put one foot in front of the other and do what I think I need to. In this world, maybe it's salvation and loss who are the blood-brothers.