a word | i walk these broad avenues

Someone sent me the card below and it immediately struck me. "It's weird how you go from being strangers to being friends to being more than friends to practically being strangers again...and it all happens so fast." That's right, I thought. You are the best of friends, then perhaps lovers (or not lovers, but in love in some way, joyous, kindred, symbiotic - all of those important words that so apply when you are spinning in the moment, to suddenly having the proverbial carpet pulled out from under you.

A cliche, I know - the rug bit - but it is as if suddenly your world stops spinning. It felt suspended when you were with that person, as if you were held in the palm of the heavens while the rest of the world spun around you and you two held steady there, as if nothing else mattered - because truth to tell, it really didn't. Then one day, perhaps over the course of an hour, sometimes not even an hour, everything changes and your life as you had experienced it is now gone. It leaves you lost, for me, bewildered how one can be in-love one day to the next day, quite literally the very next day or eight hours at most, to not speaking with you at all, as if none of the past had never happened at all. No explanation forthcoming other than, "I can't..." 

It begs the perfectly natural question, can't what??? Was there an acute attack of aphasia that leaves some other unable to explain? This, in turn, leaves you aphasic - without word, without sound - but a screaming void nonetheless. That "defeaning silence", thunderous and frightening, it is suddenly you, legless, halved, unable to even move or speak because when you truly love, and I mean truly, truly love, not some teenage infatuation, it is as if you had lost a limb somewhere along the way.

Nothing is ever the same again. Even if things change, even if the friendship eventually picks up again - which it may because time is a funny thing and you cannot know tomorrow in the today - you cannot go back to yesterday. As Lewis Carroll astutely noted, "I can't go back to yesterday... I was a different person then."

That's right.  

As I got older, when I was in junior high, there was a girl who was very popular and a friend of mine as well and she was dating, naturally, an equally popular boy (not the type of boy I would ever have gone out with, but that's what makes the world go round; our differences). So there is Kirsten, let's call her, with her boyfriend Brad or whatever his name was, and they sneak off into the woods and they make out and do mysterious things of which I didn't really know the likes because I was rather naive in this regard and chose to be. Certainly there were boys who wanted to change that, but I did not and that's what counted most to me. The experience I had was precious and my own and I wasn't ready to share that yet. But that's another story. Back to Kirstin and Brad.

They really looked like the golden couple - blonded and preppy and her in her then fashionable Jordash jeans and I remember thinking wow, and asking her if she loved him. "Yes" she told me unequivocally, "I am in love with him." So Kirsten and Brad were in love for a long time and I would leave her at the end of the school day to go off with him and be with him and sometimes, I would even be her cover (Yes, she's with me and etc... You know that game). But I knew she was safe with Brad and besides, they were in love, and what could be more romantic than that. Even then, I knew being in love was what it's all about. That when push comes to shove in this life, it is love and being truly in it - and I don't mean cohabitation or some screwed up co-dependency, but really just being in love. Loving someone for who they are, their every little move that to you, and maybe only to you, is graceful and elegant, the way they lean their palms, or gesture when they speak, the exact shade of their lips, their eyes, the scent and smell of them, that you can recall in exact detail the last time you went for a walk with this person, for example. This sort of in love is what I am talking about. I'm talking about being really in love. Not just words, but something to back it up. It may all sound very Song of Solomon, but why shouldn't it? Isn't that what being in-love truly is? "I search these broad avenues in search of my beloved..."

That's right.

One day, everything changed. Brad and Kirsten "broke-up", which was okay. Maybe they were just young, I thought, but it was more than that. After it ended, and knowing what I did, which was that Kirsten and Brad had lost their virginity to each other, they had, in some ways, grown-up together, he had been with her in every sense of the word and she with him and then suddenly, within a matter of hours, it was as if all of those feelings were pulled tightly back, or worse, as if they never existed at all.

Kirsten and Brad would pass each other in the hallway without so much as an acknowledgment. They may as well have been dead to each other. Yesterday they were in love, today, they do not even speak. It was beyond my comprehension. The same way my parents split up was beyond my comprehension, but it's not even the split up really that confuses - because i understand why people break up. They don't love each other in the way they once did and that's sad, but it happens, they grow in opposite directions and this is why they don't love each other the same way. That makes sense to me. But to suddenly have a complete void of feeling - a black hole - that seems like having a black hole where you heart used to be.

The truth is, I still to this day do not understand it. I love. When I love I love without holding back. I've been told I love "like a chilld" which is to say that i love without reservation and I love unconditionally and for the most part, I would say that is true. I love as I live, which is intensely and I mean it. I don't just say "I love you." I live it. I become in love. I allow myself to fall and I have true faith that when you say you love me, you mean it too and that it isn't just a cheap line or something to be said lightly because if you've read The Song of Solomon, regardless of your faith, it is among the most beautiful poems in the world, I think. "I walk these broad avenues in search of my beloved..." Who among us would go about New York or any other city with such broad avenues and tire ourselves out (and if you've done as much walking in New York as i have then you know) that you don't just do this. There are a million faces, so many streets, but if you are in love, it doesn't matter. You'll search and seek and maybe if the other person has stopped loving you, there is something pathetic about that. I don't know. I don't think so.

I'd rather say there is somethign pathetic about two people who were in love, or in my view, you never really fall "out" of love except in cases where demands are unreasonable, your life is not your own, you are forced in some way or feel that you live like an animal, then no, I think that is one of those co-habitation, co-dependency, screwed up deals that you just walk away from and don't look back. You don't look back in anger, as Oasis said, but you don't look back at all and I can understand that.

But to have had or to be a lover is a serious endeavor. It should and does have great meaning and is not to be taken lightly. The word "lover" has become an almost dirty word or a sordid word or even a joke, all of which are sad. In Yiddish, the word is "Ohev" which means "Lover" and "Hartsvatik" which is "my heart, my one" - Ohev, mien hartsvatik... you get the idea. You don't just "be" a lover when you feel like it and then turn it off. It's something that just happens to you - it's not a choice you make. You can't just "choose" between people. Life doesn't work out so neatly.

Yes, you can make choices about your actions. You can deny yourself the in-loveness, you can vow never to see that person again, either because you feel you can't have them or they can't have you and it is "beyond your control" (which is nonsense because as an adult now, you allow yourself to be infantilized when you let another dictate to you how to live your life. You're not five anymore. Nobody can "forbid" you from doing anything and anyone who does dish up such ultimatums is not loving you, but looking out strictly for themselves, afraid that if you were to decide on your own, perhaps you wouldn't decide in their favor.) Frankly, I wouldn't want to be the person dictating to another who they can and cannot see because i would want my lover to love me and naturally come and be drawn to me - not because I "say so" or handed down some ultimatum like the Queen of Hearts, jealously shouting, "Off with her head!" about someone else.

That's just not me and yes, I do know whereof I speak because I've been on both sides of the equation. I've been loved, I've been left, and cheated on, and I have left and done the cheating myself. And, wow, amazingly, I have just loved and I remain. I remain in love because the heart - my heart - is not so fickle. I stand before you, totally exposed in the bright Kleig light and offer up all that I offer up and I do this because I love.

I am not good at pretending. Kirsten's attitude always somewhat amazed me.  She could pass by Brad in the hallway and look the other way, or sit at lunch with us and laugh and smile, yet I would catch her in the bathroom crying at various points throughout the day; she was desperately unhappy, but put on a "happy face", almost out of spite, it seemed to me. Not to let him know that he "got to her". What is this all about? "get to her" "out of spite" etc.  Weren't these people in love? What changed and what changes us from wholly human and a love that can and I know, can border on wholly holy, sacred, sacrosanct, so much it leaves you running scared... why would you run form that? And again, if it is as I said because told to, how sad and really, pathetic is that?

Ghandi, whom I've quoted before on this subject, said only the brave can truly love. A coward is incapable of love, he said. It is the domain of the brave and perhaps that is true, although I've never seen myself as particularly brave, he may be onto something. There must be something brave about me enough to take that dive in the first place. To jump without knowing whether the person next to me is likewise going to jump and if they do, will they fall as far as I, or will they not allow themselves to feel as deeply.

I've been told I feel more deeply than almost anyone I know - or anyone I've yet to encounter anyway, which confuses me, just as I was confused as a child, because I just assume that everybody loves this way... but I am wrong. I may say, "I am my beloved's..." but I don't know that for a fact. I know "he is mine" as the song goes, but I don't know for a fact that I am his.

Me, I am the supplicant lighting candles in the church because I have faith before a stone madonna because I want so much to believe or Believe. I want there to be love, or Love. I want there to be Hope. I want to believe that when I loved, that it was real, that the love I feel is returned that all of the words spoken and written were and remain real. There is no renege in love. And in real love, there is no game-over. There are false loves bound by neuropsychoses, or two people sharing a delusion, which is not uncommon. People who stay together for the "sake of their children" (always a bad idea, because I can tell you, the children do not benefit from this... they know damn well. Instead, they grow up with a scrwed up idea about what "love" means or is and that's part of the problem right there.

Love is not an obligation or duty. It never should be. It is a visceral yearning and a want. And with that want comes a choice and a desire to act upon that choice and if you do not, or if you do not feel compelled to at least, then keep your cheap "love" and worship your false idols, but don't tell me or pretend you know where I'm coming from because you don't. The sad part is, while I may hurt in the here and the now and perhaps the forever, I can at least know that I am capable of giving my all and that is a rare gift and for someone to take that and just toss it aside, well... Maybe they never deserved it in the first place.

Someone said to me, Her moods are my obituary. This makes me wonder ... how does he live?

Thanks for listening,

s.r.p.

May, 2008 

Comments

[todd]

This is all SO true! Great article, and kudos to you for writing it. More!

[sadi ranson-polizzotti]

Thanks, Todd - the editorials, the section called "a word" just sort of happen spontaneously and whatever is on my mind just "becomes" and so what you see is an unedited reflection of my mind at that particular moment. It may not be how I feel forever, or it may be, but it's certainly true of that particular time anyway and i tend to write what is lasting for me; i can be protean, but my inner-core does not change or waiver. I run a steady course... I'm glad you're finding articles here you can connect with. This one and "Be Depressed" seem to be very popular from a traffic end, but the editorial is really my version of the State of the Union at Tant Mieux, which is sometimes Tant Pis... but that's just life...

thanks for commenting, and hope to see you around. you can email me direct if you want. just shoot me another note through here and i'll send u my gmail account information.

Cheers,

s.r.p.

[R1da]

I read your columns regularly and subscribe to your feed because you write some of the most honest and thoughtful commentary that I've found and it's smart...unlike a lot of shit out there. Your editorials that you call "A Word" are more than that. You should call them "Verbatim". You call it as you see it and that is a rare gift. You are a rara avis in a flock of pigeons writing about things of real relevance to every day people. I like your widget too, btw, and have it on my site. Great Dylan section. Amazing images and great articles.

[sadi ranson-polizzotti]

Thanks R, for all that you say. Glad you like the Dylan section too! We are getting more and more contributors, so if you want to contribute, email me through the site here (use the Contact link).

Yes, the editorials are meant to sort of go together, or are sometimes thematic because i may be going through a particular phase etc. (tho that can get boring too, so i try to move on)... that said, it seems the ones of late are really hitting home for some people and that's great! This one is important to me - well, they all are - but this is just something i NEVER understood... how two can be so close then act like total strangers when a day ago they were lovers. It just doesn't add up and frankly, it cheapens the "what was"... anyway, i could go on and on but will save it for my next editorial.

glad you like the widget i designed... and even more glad you found it! where did you find it? i know it's on Google, but not everybody thinks to look by my name etc. I should put alink in here... but thank you. If you send me ur site, i'll link back to you... : )

be well,

s.r.p.