4
----*
K. was cordial over the phone, understanding but distant when I told her the news about my father. There had been some semblance of discussing my father with her during our time texting and talking and, at the very least, she was privy to the fact that we had a strained relationship which had gotten better over time. She wanted the best for me, I could tell, and she wanted to offer her sympathy without her direct involvement. I got the signals. The tilt-a-whirl had made its rotations and it was time to get off the ride.
Whatever she had discovered about herself, about me, leading up to and while on that camping trip had only solidified her resolve. She was patient, but she was also firm.
She assured me that I needn't apologize for contacting her. I told her I was sorry because I had decided not to bug her anymore if she really felt that our relationship was doomed to not progress any further. Stupid me was afraid of being perceived as being clingy, even on the night when I had received the worst news a son can be told about his father.
When I tried to shift the conversation away from my father, in the innocence of trying to get my mind off of things and come to a mutual resolution instead of leaving things between us hanging like an ellipses for all of eternity, rather than cornering her into a decision (I swear my intentions were pure), she said that she wasn't ready to talk about us. And that she didn't want to be entangled in the emotions that I was feeling about the sudden news regarding my father. Again, I understood. In a strange way I admired the fact that she respected me for being fragile in this moment, put aside the awkwardness that probably should have overtaken the conversation, and did what she could.
After forty minutes of speaking we said our goodbyes and something about it felt definite. I was depressed, but what could I do? If I learned one thing from my parents' divorce, it's that you can't force someone into loving you.
“No, Matthew, there is more than just love.”
An hour after we had hung up I shot her a text. I needed closure, any kind of closure. Even the smallest morsel would suffice.
So I texted her, “Just tell me one thing: should I give up on this?”
It took K. more than a half-hour to respond, but she sent back, “I hate to say this, but yes. It would probably be for the best.”
----*
I have the tendency to think on cosmic terms a lot of the time. I'm a proto-typical overanalyzer if one has ever existed (in case it's not obvious). It's a very counterproductive habit. I get lost in the macrocosmic and neglect the more important, day-to-day matters that should concern me. My mother always tells me that I was born with my head in a cloud.
Call it God, or fate, or the great fabric of the Universe that binds us all together even when we can't see the ripples before our eyes, I've always sought to put meaning to it all. I believe there is a context that lies beneath our noses, even if I'll always be too ignorant to have my Road to Damascus moment.
So what does it all mean? Why has this wordy motherfucker taken to /r/depression of all places to bare his soul (na-na-na-na boo-boo stick a mod in dog-doo)? What does he stand to gain by asking me to read all of this? I can see my old writing professors scribbling: What key insight are you driving at? How does it all fit?
I can't be too clear and definitive. But there has to be something in all of this, something to the rhyme of distance. The way that distance imposed on those we come to love can feel the same as distance imposed on us by those we want so desperately to love us in return. How, often, distance is the enemy of all that is worth appreciating in this life. Death is not the enemy, death is merely the force that closes distances we would otherwise spend our existences constructing.
One thing these events have forced me to do is to take stock of my life, of myself. I'm 27, I live with my mother in the home where I grew up, I'm overeducated and underwhelming, I'm charming but little else, I work a dead-end job to get by and I'm capable of so much more, my father has cancer, and I just had my hopes dashed by a woman who feels absolutely right for me.
The art of losing isn't hard to master
I am a loser. I've lost out on so much in just one day, some of it sudden and much of it having been built over time. But to be lost is no disaster.
In the future when I come to the end of this path, when my father has passed and faced that dark truth that we all hide from ourselves, that he is not the first and will undoubtedly not be the last to face cancer's unrelenting nature, when K. becomes an affectionate memory instead of a sorrowful what-could-have-been, and the trail lies behind me with its dirt stuck in the bottoms of my shoes, I'll have closed the distances in myself that were created today. Someday I'll make sense of this all just like I made sense of my prior experiences. I'll find the forest and not the trees.
I'll learn to love the mud. I'll learn to love the absurdity of it all, the way two people can share something, anything, even if for one night, even spent a lifetime pushing themselves apart. I'll even learn to love my father, love the way he earned his cancer by loving his life enough to compromise his body rather than hiding it away. To love K., her stubbornness and the favor she's doing me and herself by not committing to the many things filled with intent to be lost, even as she finds herself lost alongside them.
I will not lose my love. But, then, what else is there?
----*
In perhaps the most crushing moment of the night, the Mariners dropped their game against the Dodgers 6-5 in the 11th inning when Alex Guerrero hit a walk-off single with the bases loaded. When it rains it pours, I suppose.
I was reminded of an apocryphal quote attributed to Yogi Berra that my father used to tell me as a kid (though who knows if he really said it since, as the great philosopher Yogi once said, “I never said half the stuff I said.”).
“The best thing about losing the final game of the season is that there's always tomorrow.”
Thank you for reading. Get well soon, dad.