Echo

i’m in fremont right now, preparing to celebrate my mother’s birthday before i leave for amsterdam.

the last few weeks have been emotionally tumultuous as i prepared for this trip, and on a greater scale, the actual embarkment on the rest of my life.

the last month and a half (since the day before my birthday) was marked by a version of myself i’ve never seen before and one i could barely recognize, but as they say, the night is darkest just before dawn, and now in hindsight, i see it as the necessary rite of passage into darkness in order for me to emerge, cleansed, so that i may enter the next stage of my life.

if you know how dismissively, condescendingly, cruelly, rudely i’ve been treating david, then i’m sure you’ve heard it from me, not him, because as much as it sucks at times for him, he keeps saying he expected this and has been pretty philosophical for the most part. but me…i’ve been more than happy to confess to anyone who will lend an ear as to how poorly i have behaved around this man, who is one of the most sincere and devoted people i’ve ever met. i’m reading the kite runner right now, and got to a passage today where the narrator is unnerved by his friend because he’s the kind of person who knows only how to speak honestly, and it makes the narrator want to be cruel. i know the impulse, know it more personally than i wish i did.

they say the only things that really hurt us are the thing we know to be true. and sometimes, you meet someone who can be so unabashingly vulnerable because they are sure that if they love someone purely, that love will be returned in unadulterated form. unconditional love, in reciprical fashion, where it regenerates into infinity–the holy grail of energy that can be exchanged between two people. we understand why we seek it, we understand why we want it, but sometimes what we never expect, is what it will be like when we finally encounter it. sometimes, when faced with someone who wants to give it to you because they truly believe it will be accepted, you realize the truth of yourself–that the anger and resentment and self-loathing in your internal closet make your hands too dirty and scarred to possibly handle something so pure from someone who has laid their trust in your hands.

so you soil it. you destroy it. you want to teach them a lesson to show them that boy, did they peg you wrong…that you should never feed a beast brooding in its cage. and then you remember an afternoon that one spring, when a lonely, misunderstood little boy who adored you beyond reason, walked into your bedroom with a handmade valentine because you were the only true love he knew, and you pretended to rip it in half because you couldn’t possibly believe you were worthy of being loved by anyone who wasn’t as ugly as you.

but who are you really trying to hurt? the people who love you?

or you?

that afternoon, michael, just 6 years old, took it like a trooper, telling me, oh well, like he had just asked me if i wanted to take him swimming. but he had tears in his eyes as he turned and walked out. i waited until i heard his footsteps fade, my entire body pulsing with disappointment and anger towards myself, why i was so fucked up that i would hurt someone to that degree who just wanted to love me. i put the valentine on the wall where it remains to this day, but i refused to let myself cry, told myself i would kill myself if i cried because i didn’t deserve it, just the same way i dare myself to cry when i take out this memory from the perfectly preserved box where i keep it so i can cut myself with it every time i try to think i might be a good person. that box is filled with all of my precious sharp objects.

******

it started to get to the point where i made david cry a couple of times a week. all i had to do was infuse every word with spite, every silence with raging passive-aggression, every response with cutting resentment. i would tell him that i had doubts he was “the one.” that we weren’t mentally compatible. that perhaps he should just find someone who was less complicated to be with because then he’d be happier. when i was feeling particularly cruel, i would tell him that i didn’t want to be with him, that i would rather be with someone else. sometimes he would get really angry and put his foot down, letting me know that this relationship was mine to fuck up, that he’s being patient but i’ve been acting completely out of line and i’d better start showing him some respect and start appreciating him. this would usually tone me down, so that on days when i was able to wrestle a bit of control of myself, i would warn him that relationships should make you the best version of yourself that you can be, but for some reason, i was turning into a worse version of myself that i’d never encountered before, and that he should find someone who could treat him better. but he would tell me that he knew he could find someone else, but he wanted to see me get a hold of myself and grow out of this so that i could get to a place where i could be with him.

we went back and forth, me being secretly terrified of every interaction, terrified of what i would do or say next. every unimagineable act of disrespect towards him would quickly be followed up by a confession to a close friend, so that my loved ones could know what a piece of shit i’d become. i was bleeding all over the place, and i didn’t know how to stop it.

why do you keep doing this, they would all say. always, why. and i didn’t know. i honestly didn’t know. i didn’t know anything except that it made me feel really good, the way cutting yourself to see if it bleeds feels good because a part of you doesn’t really think you can bleed, even though some nights, i would wake myself up crying.

*****

i believe in the hollywood bowl. that it’s magic.

i had told myself i would not go to amsterdam just to be a crazy bitch to david. especially when this person i had become was someone i couldn’t even recognize in the mirror, someone my friends couldn’t believe existed when i told them about me, even when i swore up and down i’d really said the things i’d said to this guy who’d been nothing but kind and generous with me. the level of rage inside me terrified me, and it only made me more thirsty for blood.

aubrey and candice flew in on saturday for the gnarls barkley concert the next day. we hung out and somehow, the conversation turned to the movie closer. i have it, i said to candice. suddenly, i had a desperate need to watch it that night, and was terrified that they wouldn’t be willing to since it’s a pretty dark, difficult movie. but candice agreed and we put it in.

the thing about the movie is the question of motivation–why does each character do what they do. dan (jude law) has a meeting of fate with alice, and leaves his girlfriend for her. alice (natalie portman), magnetic and muse-like, motivates dan to pursue his personal potential. once dan publishes his first novel, he leaves alice for anna (julia roberts), who simultaneously leaves larry (clive owen) whom she finds too simple for her when compared to the complexity of dan, the idealistic, closetly self-loathing artist.

when dan informs alice that what he’s about to say will hurt, that he’s leaving her for anna, alice tearfully asks him why he won’t let her love him, why he doesn’t think he deserves to be loved. but whether or not he’s convicted about his decision, she disappears.

when larry discovers that anna has been having an affair, he demands her to reveal every grotesque detail of the sex in one of the most emotionally brutal scenes ever committed to celluloid, until she’s given him enough details for him to destroy the part of himself that loves her. once he’s had enough, he thanks her and tell her to go fuck off and die. in the end, larry, who’s simple but not stupid, turns out to be someone who can command the game at will if he chooses to (and originally he had chose
n not to, trying to preserve the illusion and idealism of love, but reverted to his cold, hard truth, that women don’t understand the territory because they are the territory). alice realizes that truth for dan is not what’s important to dan, but rather the illusion of love. she realizes that dan will never love her because he can’t see her, the value of what she can truly give him, and that he is only in love with the idea of love.

watching this movie made me think of many things. aubrey noted that alice is a character who has an ambiguous relationship with the truth and is at the core, distrustful. yet, she offered the purest degree of devotion to dan, who didn’t understand or appreciate it. alice, who often lies, tells the truth to strangers because it doesn’t matter–they don’t know the difference and will never be able to use it against her to get close to her. they will only see her for the superficial things she possesses which have no true value. but to those who matter to her, she tells lies as smokescreens, almost to see if they will be able to get past them to see who she really is, the true value beyond all that is superficial that she can give–the ability to unconditionally love someone. i liken it to trading currency. if you are someone who possesses gold and you live in a world of bead traders, people who obsess with worthless beads, who fight and even murder for beads, you know that what they have has no value while what you have has great value. but you wouldn’t want to trade your gold for beads because you know that the bead trader will never understand or appreciate the value of your gold. you want to trade with someone who understands the value of what you trade in.

(by the way, it didn’t go unnoticed that natalie portman was nominated for an oscar for this role whose complexities and subtleties she played perfectly. also not unnoticed, was the fact she’s a gemini projecting into this character.)

i realized why i like strangers, why i always lay smokescreens to people who try to get close to me. i’ve always gone back to the sword in the stone analogy, how the right person can remove the sword even after being told it’s impossible, how the right person will have the key that turns the lock. why do people who are basically honest people lie? because they are protecting what they have to offer, if they know what they offer has great value and can not be given away to someone who can not understand the value of it. if you don’t trust people, you set things up so that only someone who appreciates the value of what they’re seeing within the illusion can reach it, thus by reaching it, you know they are someone who deserves it. no, it’s not the simplest way to go about things, but most people don’t really understand the value of what i’m capable of giving, so i have to be careful of only giving it to someone who will inspire me to give it.

then came the scene where larry demands that anna give him every detail of her sexual affair, even though it’s excruciating to him. i understood his motivation perfectly, the need to destroy something so real and honest within him. he needed her to cut him, destroy a part of him, hurt it so that it could never want anything real, honest and naive again. he wanted her to destroy his belief in something, his belief that love in its ideal, transcendental form can be anything real when it’s laid in the hands of fucked up fallible human beings. he needed her to kill it, to kill the part of him that ever dared believe that love could be real, that there could be any beauty between two people that transcends them beyond animals who somehow found a way to clothe themselves and convince themselves of the possibility of a god. if it’s true that it’s the loss of hope, not the loss of lives that determines the outcome of a war, then in the struggle to believe there is more to life than what is grounded by physical reality would begin and end in the idealism encompassed by our notions of romantic love. sometimes, we will kill our belief, so that we may never hope again, so that we may never again suffer the treachery of disappointment.

i went to sleep that night and awoke to what i thought to be a large spider descending towards my face. i rolled out of bed, screaming, and realized that where once i had a net above my bed that protected my dreamscape, now there was only me, surrounded by a hollow silence devoid of echoes.

******
we met up with friends at the hollywood bowl and i went through the motions of small-talking but i really didn’t feel like talking to people. lauren and pradeep came up and pradeep asked me how things were with david. not good, i said. i really have to get my head straight or i’m going to lose him.

the show was good and full of energy, but i was lost. i took a walk around the bowl, watching people, trying to find clues to help me unravel the thoughts and feelings tangled up so badly inside me that i couldn’t even get inside of myself anymore. i walked along the treeline at the ridge of the bowl, where the lights of the stage are unable to penetrate the darkness. in the sky, two large floodlights criss-crossed to form an X, as if to let god know that this is where he could find us all. in the distance, was a large cross blazing brightly against the hill, and above, was the moon. everyone was here, but for what?

i walked around, seeing people i actually recognized in my daily life, familiar faces of strangers i’d seen during my routines who recognized me, but none of them seemed like the people i should be talking to. i wandered back into our section and ran into lauren, and we took a walk. how did you know pradeep was the one, i asked her as we stood in the shadows of writhing dancers. she turned to look at me, seriously considering the question. i guess i always knew, she said. i just didn’t really trust myself, so i had to get to a place where i did.

i smiled at her and thanked her, thanked her for her truth.

i texted david on the way home asking if i could call him, and by the time i got home, there was really only one thing i could think of to say.

i’m really sorry for how i’ve acted and how i’ve treated you for the last month and a half, i said.

what was that?, he asked.

i repeated it and he asked me to repeat it again because he couldn’t quite hear me but started laughing. i was grateful for his forgiveness and his understanding.

oh, i’m so happy, he said. i was waiting for you to get to this point. you just needed to go through it all so you could get here, but i’m glad you finally got here.

i told him about watching closer and the things i understood. i admitted to him that i’ve been cruel to him because i was being cruel to myself, that there was a part of myself i was intent on destroying because it’s the part that wants to believe that people don’t always end up hurting you and disappointing you. that all this rage and resentment i’ve been directing towards him was just all the rage and resentment i had towards myself for getting me into a situation where i was going to get hurt.

i’m not going to hurt you, he said. i’m not going to let you down.

well, you can’t really say that. no one can really say that. but at the end of the day, sometimes these are things you just have to go through because there’s no alternative. punishing people who want to be close to you because you’ve been punishing yourself for a lifetime for thinking you might be anything more than something completely unloveable is not an alternative. i just can’t do this anymore.

i think we lock ourselves in our own invisible prisons. i don’t know what happens to us in our childhoods that cuts us the way they do, but some of us carry on the torture by reminding ourselves of those feelings and experiences in which we weren’t able to protect ourselves from the hurt, fear, anger, rage, guilt, helplessness or disappointment of our past, until we’ve built giant, formidable defenses around ourselves that tear e
ven the most gungho conquerors to shreds. and then along wanders one naked, courageous, well-meaning soul who politely knocks on your door offering nothing but unconditional love, and as you point all of your jagged edges and bloodied weapons at him, screaming that this is a bloody fucking war and threatening him with every intention to destroy him for the sheer audacity of walking into your battlefield thinking you could be tricked into believing in anything again, you suddenly realize, when the echo of your own shouting dies down, that you’re the one who’s completely naked, exposed for the scared, wounded child you claim isn’t you but whom you protect with an implacable savage vengeance, when the war is no longer haunting any other living soul but you.

it’s time to go home, kid.

the war’s over.