Anniversary

This month was a sort-of anniversary for me and my bear. Two years ago in June, my bear was just a co-worker of mine. He was all sorts of wild about me, but I didn’t really know that. I’d talk to him and say something about comic books, or Japanese horror movies, or role-playing, and he’d just get this face like somebody had punched him in the nuts, then run away. OMG, I thought, he must really hate those things, I must be saying some kind of stupid crazy. I didn’t know these were all his favorite things, and to have them coming out of the mouth of a beautiful girl he’d been crushing on for years was just too too much.

My husband and I were planning on moving to another state at the end of the month, so my bear got up the guts to ask me out for a casual drink. Just a farewell sort of thing. I remember when he asked me, he got that same pinched nuts look on his face right after, like he couldn’t believe he’d just said that. I wondered if I should accept, thinking maybe he was just being polite, and was making that face because he was horrified I might accept and he might have to spend time with me. Anyway, I did go out for a drink with him one night, and we got along so famously we decided to go out for drinks again the next night. We ended up spending the whole day together, about 12 hours of drinking, driving around and talking, and somewhere in there he revealed that he’d been crazy about me for forever and a day.

Not to sound conceited, but I was in some ways used to that. I had a really great figure, and spent a lot of wasted time and effort excessively focused on my appearance and massive charm; I really needed some kind of validation that I was liked and wanted, even in the most superficial way, and so I got that validation fairly often, and usually from very superficial people. And I responded in a very superficial way, all hair flips and oh isn’t that sweet, I’m flattered, really. But when my bear told me, I tried to flip my hair and just kind of got a convulsive tic. I tried to laugh gaily as if it were all some joke and just froze. He was so very serious, and my reaction was so very serious in response, and I realized I was crazy about him, too. I’d sort of known that, on a very subconscious level. I’d once had a sex dream about him, and I never had sex dreams, never. At that point, I barely even thought about sex; my genitals existed on the astral plane somewhere. But my subconscious must have somehow clicked into the vibe between us and sent me along a lovely little dream. I had told somebody else at work, laughingly, about this wild dream I had about my bear and I watching an Uwe Boll version of Green Lantern, and then having hot hot sex in a bathtub. She immediately told him, after having heard him talk about how in love he was with me, giving my bear the guts to try to talk to me in the first place. God loves the subconscious.

As the day went on, I kept trying to convince myself I was just having an infatuation, a stress reaction, a projection. I used all the psych tricks I’d learned in school to try and define, box, and whittle away what I was feeling into a sublimated counter-projection of unfulfilled unconditional positive regard, or something like that. And all the while we just kept talking, sort of reeling back into stunned silence each time we said something so incredibly compatible with the other’s worldview. We drove wildly across the countryside, my bear hellbent on getting us to the perfect place to watch a sunset. We had given up on finding it, and the sun was already starting to set in the distance, when via some magic of backroads we suddenly turned a corner and were exactly at our destination. We piled out of the car and were immediately accosted by some friendly folk who had also come down to the park and wanted us to take their picture for them. I leaned against a tree and waited while my bear snapped some shots. At one point he turned to me to crack a joke, and I realized it like a punch in the gut: I’m in love with him. Oh fuck me. Somewhere out there, there is a picture of three jovial folk laughing on a park bench, and me pressed against a tree in the background, looking queasy and shot as my whole life changed.

When he took me home that night, sometime around 2 a.m., I wanted nothing more than to stay with him forever. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to go home ever again. I could imagine how it would be, walking through the door, Mr. Flint picking a fight about something because I had stayed out too long, because he could tell my mind was somewhere other than him. I could imagine how the smell of our house, and the visual stink, and the depressing pall would suck out the fiber of my memories, that feeling of love and safety and being cared for, the wild unencumbered, and dangerous way I’d been myself. But I figured, that’s just the way life is. I really thought so. I didn’t know anything else. It was the first of many such moments where I wished then, and wish now, that I’d told my bear to just keep driving, that I wasn’t going back, and I didn’t care what happened because of it.

After that day, everything changed for me. I realized what love really felt like, that it felt good. You have to imagine, if somebody had been feeding you gristle your whole life and called it steak, how amazed you’d be the first time you ate a real steak, and found out it tasted good, and didn’t make you vomit. I thought I knew love, because I had a husband and all. And then I spent that day with my bear and found out that love felt good, love made you happy, love was wanting to be with a person, to talk with them, to learn more about them, to share with them. I didn’t know love was all those things. I pretty much thought love was endurance through trial and pain. Which, surely, love gives people the ability to endure through trial and pain, but only because the reward of all the good feeling is there. I had totally missed the reward, and just gone straight for the vise.

After that day, I told my husband I was in love with my bear, and he was in love with me, and I had realized that I was unhappy with everything about my marriage. I told Flint that things had to change. That I didn’t think I could stand to be with him anymore if they didn’t. I didn’t tell Flint the rest of it, but I quietly began to realize, in my own heart, in that same hammer-thundering way love had hit me, that Flint wasn’t going to change, that he didn’t love me, didn’t care for me, and didn’t want to make me happy. It took me a long time after that to convince myself that that wasn’t my fault, that there wasn’t something about me that made it impossible for my husband to love and care for me. Flint went double-time with the abuse in those months, telling me he’d change if only I’d stop being so depressed, if I’d stop being so mean, if I’d be more enthusiastic about sex, if I’d love him and only him forever. Then he’d love me. Then he’d care. But since I hadn’t done any of those things, I didn’t deserve love or care.

That was an old tune, but it had never been so upfront before, so spelled out. And, too, I’d never had anything else to compare it to. I had a lot of hardened beliefs that I and others had beaten into me over the years, about what I was worth, and what I deserved, and what to expect out of life. Those were hard, if not impossible, to just cast aside, and they still cling today. But underneath it all was, as Hannah Green says, a bone-truth, something that rang so right I could feel its honesty in every cell of me. Beneath it all was the memory of that day, of love, of happiness. It was like glimpsing some Bizarro world through a portal, where up is down, left is right. Love is good, happiness exists, everybody deserves it. Nobody deserves to be called ugly, or stupid, or worthless. Some world where feeling good wasn’t punished. I had felt it, I knew it existed, and I couldn’t ever honestly convince myself that it had been a figment of my imagination, that it wasn’t there, that it could never exist again. That, too, was helped by a very persistent bear, who never let me forget that somebody out there loved me, was waiting for me.

My bear and I didn’t “officially” become a couple until December, two days after I’d left my husband. We’d meant to maybe wait, because it sounded like such a sensible idea, the waiting, but in reality it was so laughable. Why would we possibly wait? We needed to be together, finally, in the real world. In the world of long country drives and intense love and endless loving, and the world of laundry and bank accounts and burnt pans. Between June and December of one year, the whole world disappeared from under me. Such a short time for a marriage to end, a life to unravel, but I will remember those months as the longest and most painful in my life. I wish fairly often, often enough that I make an active effort not to dwell, that I had ended everything sooner. Those were unnecessary months of holding on and torturing myself, and it turned out everything my bear had told me was true. That the sooner I ended pain, the sooner I stopped being hurt, the sooner I could have a happy life; not the opposite, as I supposed, that the sooner I began pursuing happiness the sooner I would be punished terribly, blind to the fact that I was already being punished as worse as I could possibly be.

But it all started with that day in June, when out of nowhere, an anchor dropped on me and him, stopping everything. It’s the anniversary of when we fell in love, and even though I was still married, even with the memory of all the horribleness that came after, it’s still a magical time, an unbelievable island of peace I stumbled across one day, with a house with a banner that said, “Welcome Home, Harriet!” and me still standing on the shore, thinking I could never actually live there, it must be some other Harriet.

I had meant to write about what we did for our anniversary, which was go to an awesome cottage on an awesome farm in an awesome little town, and how I’ve been feeling and thinking since. But I didn’t. So nyah, love story for you instead.