Instead there was Adrienne Rich, already dog-eared and underlined in faint pencil, insisting I had to figure out how I was going to live. “Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.” She adds, “The possibilities that exist between two people or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life.”
Because I could not bear to see him in tears, I agreed to stay for six months and see if we could change. But I was angry at those tears and what felt like my weakness, and in my anger I said every word I thought—how crazy and mean I felt, the way I am never satisfied and cannot imagine a future where I ever could be. He was kind and I told him I believed his kindness to be a lie, so then he was less kind, and in that way even more.
It was a slow spell and often a very boring and repetitive one, punctuated by rituals like watching him run the vacuum cleaner and fold the laundry for a change while I repeated such refrains as, “I am the opposite of sorry.” But in the end, there was a transformation. I could see that he was not a cotter, I was not a witch, he was not a laird, I was not on fire. We were only each other. An apple tree grows in the front yard now, too young to bear fruit, but leafy and spreading her branches over the hyssop filling a bed at her feet. I look out at her in the morning while everyone is asleep and notice I am content.
I have a friend who likes to ask from time to time if I am still in love. One of my answers is: I stayed because he wasn’t what I was looking for, but wasn’t not what I was looking for, either. Another: I never could find anywhere to put it, so I carry this floating feeling of infinite possibilities I think other people call love. Like a person with nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It has made me more dangerous and more kind than I ever would have figured out how to be on my own. A little like a bird call, sometimes lilting and sometimes squawking in the perfect quiet of my ear.
Brian spent the rest of that trip collecting hagstones and I will admit every night as he emptied his pockets of the day’s discoveries, some the size of an oak leaf, others no bigger than a violet, I saw him more clearly and loved him more truly than I ever had before.