besotted and bedazzled

I longed for a soulmate. I confessed this to my soul many years ago on a night when the sky was a blackboard and I wrote my wishes upon it.

She looked up from her knitting, her large jungle green eyes. Aren’t I enough?

Well, I said, kind of, but you know, I get cold at night. I get lonely. I hear there’s a big big love out there just waiting. Eternal love. Transcending time and space. The besotted and bedazzled always no one else but you.

She came and sat beside me. Placed her warm hands on my trembling heart. Oh kiddo, she said kindly. You poor thing. You are asking for what only a god can provide. But ok. Here’s bread for the journey and a twenty if you need to call a cab.

Into the woods, onto the seashore, across scalding deserts, I set out dressed all in white, a crown of flowers in my hair. No map, just the faint prints left in the sand by the barefoot seekers before me.

 The first years tumbled and toughened me. My dress got dirty, the flowers withered and died, fallen by the wayside. My hands, my feet, my innocent young girl burned up in a pyre.

But then. But then. I met and married my beloved and holy shit it was hard. We fought like alley cats. We hurtled words hot as lava. We threatened and wept. Gradually I learned to hold back my asp tongue before the fast strike, before regrets. We survived, cautiously drew in our claws, began to listen to each other instead of pulling the pin on the grenade.

But yesterday I woke up missing my old self. I was tired of being and having a soulmate, always rubbing the hard edges off each other, always ready to point out the hubris, the inconsistencies, the plain daily pain in the assness of dirty socks on the floor and dishes left in the sink. I felt snappish, critical. 

I had wanted passion, the emotional and spiritual intensity of a committed relationship, but had been dumb blind to what it would ask of me, how it would transform the very fabric of my being. 

My soul had by now knitted several dozen afghans and watched quietly from the corner.

Told you so, she said. Told you it would be hard. No lovey dovey all day all night. Just the dirty work of getting down to loving each other in all your shadow and light. The hard work of seeing the other as yourself.

Yeah, well, I need a timeout.

I began planning a trip to the coast to see a friend. Refused dinner. 

Then it was bedtime. My husband fell like a brick into dreamworld while I chewed my cuticles.

Wake up, I finally said around midnight.

He bolted awake. What? What happened?

I’m upset. I want to run away. This soulmate shit is too hard.

Now you tell me, he laughed. After all these years?

Don’t laugh, I said, jamming my finger into his rib.

Don’t hurt me, he said.

I will if I want to.

Ok, I was five years old, passing in and out of love faster than a pinwheel sparkler. I was needing something I couldn’t name, some freedom, some time to spin with the planet turning from spring to summer, time to have coffee with a stranger. Nothing but time to dance under the sweet soft jazz of the full moon. I wanted to kick off my shoes and wander the earth looking for Buddha in a dappled shade forest. I wanted to hear him say what took you so long?

I hated you today, I said, and we laughed.

And then for the next two hours we hashed it out…how he felt when I said X. Why he said Y. How he feels pressured, how I feel invisible. The same fight we’ve been having only now it’s been transistorized. We are both quicker to say I know. I do that. I’m sorry. Our outbursts of outrage tempered with laughter that float above the bed like fairy dust.

 And then it’s all been said. We agree we have both been wrong and both been right.

And there it was. The conflict that has followed me, defined me in this lifetime, in the lifetimes before this one that I have glimpsed in dreams and altered states. I need to be alone. I need to be with my mate. One lifetime alone in a field of wild plants, a botanist, on my own, free of commitments, no children, no chores. And then the loneliness and yearning that pulled me into the next life: mother of six, wife lover baker songmaker, the work of sustaining a family all consuming, yearning for a taste of alone. 

Alone. Together. But never alone together. 

Alone together that does not swallow me until I need to break out, take a hammer to the adobe walls of our union so that I might pick through the rubble, gather the ash- covered pieces of my long abandoned self and bolt for the light. 

Now I follow the hieroglyphics of love, like bird tracks in sand. A relationship so long together you have to wonder if the binding will hold, or if the glue will become soft and crumble like the spine of a well-loved book of poetry.

The days and nights when love feels dried up and threatens to blow away on this hot desert wind, when all that is left is habit and the routine of what shall we have for dinner.

And then the magic of touch on a barely cooled down night with the covers thrown off, our bodies hollowed out from covid, from sleepless weeks and fevers and bad dreams and then finding each other again through touch, like braille, like reading the book of love backwards to the beginning. 

The years rolling back, the laughter returning, remembering the other as our mate, remembering desire, remembering how the body moves when it is moved, and the now thank you breeze coming through the window cooling our fevers, dispelling the anger and boredom, helping our fingers find the pulse of our longing, dissolving the restlessness, stirring us awake with the magic of love renewed.

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This is an excerpt from my book The Ripening – Essays on Love, Loss, Marriage and Aging available for sale on Amazon February 24th.