Crosscurrents
By: Adam Phillips
(© 2005-2013 by the author)
I stared off into forever.
The night was black. A full moon shone down upon the water.
The tide called to me with its hypnotic, incessant song, as I watched it kiss
the shore and fall back, over and over and over.
"More Than Words" repeated itself endlessly on my boom box. Beth's boom
box, actually. My sister's portable player was the only one I ever brought to
this place. I thought about that first time and smiled.
The fire I'd lit flickered in my peripheral vision, and if I'd had company, they
might have asked me about the streaks that the fire illuminated. The ones
running down my face from my eyes.
It was the song, really. The Extreme song, and the memories of first hearing it
down here, and the memory of the awful year that had led up to that night on the
beach.
A year I produced and directed to punish him for loving me enough to go where I
was, even though it wasn't first nature to him.
But it wasn't only those memories. There were so many others, and I'd
been soaking in them.
All week long, I'd lived him. I'd lived us. I'd traveled back in time.
Back to the Endless Summer.
Back to my earliest, scariest longings for him.
Back to our early days, and on through time to the current ones.
I'd been us all over again, at all our ages. And with every memory, I
looked at him intently. I listened to his words carefully.
And I loved him through all those memories as if I were living them for the first time.
And I felt him loving me. More clearly
than I'd felt it the first time around.
Soaked in all that, I tried to make sense of the road that lay ahead of me.
The desperately rational part of me saw long odds, dim prospects, and no
realistic way to guarantee that we had a future together that in any way
resembled our present.
But life without him was unthinkable.
So why did I keep thinking of it? Why did I keep dreading it? Why did I keep
assuming it as the default inevitable future?
I knew there had to be an answer for me. Some peace for me.
For us.
And I knew the answer lay in those
memories.
Rich and inexhaustible, tenacious as Matt himself, the memories had accompanied
me every hour I'd been here.
Branding me. Marking me.
And there on the shoreline, on the final night of my stay, a quiet understanding
came to me as I gazed out into the Gulf of Mexico.
I'd walked into the condo at the beginning of the week prepared to load all my
past with him into my mental museum. To remember with love...and then to
release. To go back home and enjoy his love until our lives diverged, and then
to let him go. For his sake. So he wouldn't have to figure out what to
do with me as he moved into his future. A conventional future that had no room
for me.
Over the five days that I'd relived my memories, though, I got a better look at
him than I'd ever allowed myself before. The time didn't flash by. I could slow
things down. Replay them. Live in them again.
And I discovered that my memories had pull. Even more surprising was that they
had intention. They weren't interested in merely providing a mental
playback of my life with Matt.
At first, I'd resisted the conclusion they'd been urging me toward. Not because
I didn't like its contours or content.
No. It was because I wanted to be responsible, and loving, and to do the right
thing, and I'd been stubbornly committed to believing that what he needed was a
return to the conventional life. Pressuring him to carve out a space in
his conventional life for me felt selfish and self-centered. I didn't want to
keep dragging Matt back to me if and when life called him forward.
Called him away from me.
But as I stared out into the Gulf, the things he'd been saying to me over the
last year rearranged and repeated themselves in just the right order and at just
the right level for me to hear them.
As if for the first time. As if I'd never heard them before.
And when I listened...
I understood that preparing for us to
drift apart wasn't necessarily an act of love. It was an act of self-protection.
And I understood that--just maybe--the highest love I could give him would
involve summoning the courage to trust what he'd been telling me.
You are my fuckin' life, Andy. You've always been.
I played the words over and over in my head as the sound of the waves against
the shore soothed the anxiety that was trying to rise up in me.
This week, this concentrated immersion in Matt and all he meant to me, brought
me to a point of decision.
It was time to decide whether his words
meant anything or whether I'd always think I knew better. Whether to soldier on
in monster-slaying mode, or whether to risk getting hurt for the sake of
trusting a promise that as yet had no shape.
A promise that was as essential to my life as it was to his.
I took a deep, cleansing breath of the salty air.
And then I went to that mental door, the one with his name on it, the one
through which I'd been so frantically anticipating having to shove him and my
memories of him.
It was standing open. And, oddly, given that I'd decided to make the place a
museum, the room was still empty.
But it seemed like a different kind of empty. A waiting kind
of empty.
I closed my eyes as the deepest aches and yearnings and hopes I lived with
swirled to the surface of my consciousness.
And a conviction broke through the swirl.
There aren't any monsters under beds. There's only you, and the roads you
walk, and the choices you make. And you are loved throughout all of them. And
you are asked to love throughout all of them.
I don't know which part of me that internal voice was, or whether it
was someone else, or whether it was just something convenient my subconscious
tossed up.
But it was as clear as a bell, and it felt like some kind of final word.
I took another deep breath, and my mental eye looked up at the nameplate on The
Door of that room.
This time, it read "Andy and Matt. 2/2."
I opened my eyes. Nothing looked different.
But everything was.
I breathed in once again. Deeply. Gratefully. As I exhaled, years' worth of fog
dissapated, and the diamond-hard clarity of the night brought this place home to
me once again, giving me an opportunity to experience it--at last--with an
unclouded mind and a heart free from crosscurrents and cross-purposes.
I grabbed handfuls of sand and put out my fire with them. Then I picked up my
belongings and began walking back toward the condo.
It was time to go home.
THE END
So concludes the story of Andy and Matt. It's been a long, strange, trip, and I thank all of you for taking it with me. You haven't seen the last of me. Check my latest few blog entries here at GA.
I finished it, Sean. This is for you. It's always been for you.
--Adam
© 2003-2013 by Adam Phillips
Posted: 08/09/13