I’m coming back, Dakota

I left a man. I left an island. I left the false self I came with and the true one that came to me.

A few days ago, I sat beside the pilot, looking down at the harsh edge of the island, trying to understand where I found the strength to force myself onto the plane. There have been many others that came before me and could not leave; at times, it felt as if I would easily find myself among them. There’s something about the maddening grip of this island on the ones it wants to keep, and it’s near impossible to pry loose.

But who am I without the place that brought to me who I am? Without the man who said here’s your false performance and here’s your essence?

Departure’s no longer a game to me. There’s a heart in the middle of it all and I can’t play it like a dishrag anymore. I can’t test how many places I could live in and how many I could leave just as quickly. There’s something lost in the leaving. Sometimes, it cancels what was gained in coming.

And I came without thought and extended my stay just as recklessly. With every passing day on the island, I buried myself deeper and deeper. What could have been a mindless, painless departure became an agonizing one. I could have left when the island meant little. I could have left when there was no one to hold me outside the airport, no one to shed a tear over my absence.

On the night before I left, I laid beside him and spoke about how badly I wanted, for once, to be the one standing on the other end of the airport.

I can imagine vividly now, standing behind the security line, waving goodbye. I would be the one in the terminal of arrivals, waiting on someone else to arrive. I’d buy flowers, like they do, watch each body walk through, and wonder, just for the sake of wondering, why my loved one hasn’t come yet. Then I’d drive home from the airport. It would be evening and I’d make a pot of coffee, hold the cat, check on the birds. I’d have a desk right there by the window overlooking the sea, the city. I’d show my guest around, walk with them through the dark streets, maybe find a cafe someplace where they know me. I am no stranger here. I have a visitor. Someone has come to me, and I am walking them through my world. Somebody I know passes, waves to me. I show my guest where I go when I need to think and where I go when I need to speak. I show him where I go to listen to the pianist who plays from the second floor of his studio, how I sit by the entrance and pretend to be waiting on somebody. I tell him the pianist has no idea anybody’s listening. He plays more beautifully because of it. I always did believe that the absence of an audience made the art emerge from the artist.

Only this departure was different. Something about it was so drastically different. I remember the way I used to say goodbye to the man I loved in Jordan. How I’d turn a hundred times and go back to hold him, to touch him, to cry. I remember the white shirt he wore, the dazed look on his face when he thought I’d gone through the terminal. But I could not leave. I simply couldn’t. I remember that love, all the pain. What is love without that pain that follows you and follows you? It’s the only love I recognize, the only one I could believe in.

From the first day I loved that man, it was painful. There was a blade in my gut, an agony that made me desperate, wild, unyielding. I needed him to live. I carved the largest place I could in my chest and put him in there. I left no space for me and I needed no space then. That love… god that love. When he’d wake up at 6 am in the morning to walk up the street to where I lived, how I’d open the door and he’d be standing there with the sun behind his neck and he’d step in and take me into his arms like it’s been a year when only a night had passed. My hell is that I live in the territory of my memory, of days that have long passed, days I can’t stop myself from desperately, desperately wishing for. I miss being the source of his madness, the reason his gaze used to lift and lose itself in what it saw. The poet in me has died with his dying, and time passes without life with his passing.

Then, just as suddenly, here comes another love that is tempered, independent, slow, painless, and I can’t seem to understand it. I hardly recognize it for what it is. I do not need him. He does not need me. We are more ourselves in each other’s company, but we do not exist only then. I can be without him. He can be without me. There is none of that anguish, and if I’ve been kept awake all night it was only because I was stunned by what of me emerged with him. It is the self in me I have never met before that comes with him. It is her company, just as much as it is his, that makes me want to sit and talk with him through the night. I see her so clearly, more than I ever have. Her and all her past errors. All that clarity in his presence…all that he brings, all that he keeps away. His company has layers to it. It is love, yes, but so much more. I did not know it could be all that. I thought love was a dancing flame on charred wick, the candle at its end, the tragedy inevitable. This love feels more like a set of blocks. There is work that needs to be done, a building that has to happen. It is only potential, now. It’s what the mind wants to make of it. There’s no tragic, predestined fate, no whirlpool of sentiment. There’s plenty of space for the mind, though sometimes it troubles me that there’s not enough left for the heart to do its reckless, wild work.

It should be obvious, no? A balanced, mindful love in the place of a maddening one. But it is not so easy for me to choose which I prefer. At times, the calmness feels so foreign, so strange, and I thrive in the silence, and the clarity and gentle tenderness that comes with it. Other times, I yearn for that mindless passion, that rage, that misbehavior of impulsive love. It’s as if I’ve made a pilgrimage to the opposite ends of love, and in the end I came back to write of each, and to declare my place in the valley between them.

Until recently, I knew only one kind of love. In this territory, there was always a storm, and in the rare hour where one passed, another was always drawing near. There was never any rest. There was despair, and there was despair. Even the most tender moments were tainted with anguish. Every precious moment was precious because it was fleeting. Either I was preparing for another departure, or another fight was coming, or life was calling him one way and me the other. There could be no peace when two lovers are holding their breaths, even in the calmest hour. The tug never yields. There was a vast source of sadness and rage in me that mistook again and again his presence for its source. And so the fighting would begin again. And when I left and the sadness stayed, I understood. It wasn’t him. Only then, I understood it was never him.

And maybe love is supposed to feel more like a gentle tide. It rises and falls, rises and falls. Sometimes the feeling is there, sometimes it is not. Sometimes, love pulses in me, sometimes not. There are hours when I feel a desperate urge to see him, and hours when I do not. Sometimes he is mine, all mine, and sometimes not. Sometimes he is the he that I love, and sometimes he is foreign to me and love is only a vague memory. Is this another kind of love? Have I only learned to recognize one?

Some days, it feels impossible that I will ever let go of the old tenant of my heart. His absence is like a sea and each driftwood I mistake for him. I need to let him go. I cannot.

I cannot.