It ends with your warm beer on the table between us

It felt important to go. Because to want the intimacy of a relationship is to accept the intimacy of breaking up.

...

It ends with your warm beer on the table between us--only half drunk, you having chosen your words carefully. We just weren’t a match, I say, trying to make it okay for you. Trying to make what feels slippery in our mouths, less so. You seem more terrified than I feel, and I really want to make this okay for you. We sit in silence for the length of a few beats before I suggest we leave. You don’t like your beer, no use in forcing you to drink it. We push back our chairs, barely looking one at the other, hugging uncomfortably. I walk west, you east.

I am not angry. Hurt yes, but not angry. I do not fault you. We love who we love.

Or not.

What’s hard is that we cannot sit there for a moment longer. The promise of friendship as a thing belonging only to a future in which time has passed.

This hanging ellipses. This moment between discovery and something else. This passing of the time as strangers.

Days later over different beers you will use my words as a way of explanation. You will say “we just weren’t a match” and someone will relay this to me. But those weren’t your words, they were mine. And my heart will break, just a little, because that wasn’t my experience. Or, well, it was, at the very least, more complicated than that. And those were my words for you.

Perhaps there is more I should have said, sitting at that small table, warm, bad pub drinks between us. About doubt and how it is a thing that multiplies in the absence of a warm hand or the sound of a person’s laugh or the lines that ring our eyes. How it grows in silence and alone, under the unrelenting glare of others’ comments. How it is a nasty trick of  fear.

And we were both so busy.

But it is not my job to convince a man to love me. It cannot be my job to convince a man to love me.

I was not in love with you. It’s really not like I was in love with you. It’s just that, every time you met me at my door I’d think, This is a man I like walking towards.

And that was not nothing.

Ambivalence + Belief

I’ve had to do a few things of late that have been really quite difficult. Mostly because I’ve been deeply ambivalent about doing them. For the majority of my life I thought ambivalence was about not caring, when actually it’s about caring in different directions--wanting two things that seem to oppose one another. I both desperately want this and desperately don’t.

I can hold those opposing truths in both hands at the same time. The libra in me tries to weigh them, but that’s not really the point.

I am fine. And I am not.

This is okay. And also, it is not.

I both want this and really, really don’t.

I recently had to make a decision about something and was torn by my warring desires. I spoke to my girlfriends and got their advice, but realized, at the end of the day, the decision was mine alone. And that decision didn’t really have anything to do with my wants or needs, so much as what I believe. What I believe in. Which is to say, my value system.

Which is to say, who I am.

Value systems are incredible because they cut through the noise very, very quickly. And a path erupts before us. But very often that path is the most difficult--mostly because it has to do with vulnerability and telling the truth.

So I swipe on an extra coat of lipstick for courage and practice remaining soft--feeling the things--all. of. the. things--that are so very hard, but give life nearly all of its meaning.

the 6:45 south

There was a moment, walking up the stairs together, just after I caught up to you--I was saying something and looking ahead, but I watched, from the corner of my eye, as you tilted your head away and mussed with your hair. Sweeping it behind your ear. Or patting it down, perhaps. Three quick flicks of your wrist. It was not a cool-guy-hair-sweep. It was the gesture of a boy who’d been caught unaware.

Later I will tell you that was the moment I fell in love with you. Which isn’t true at all, that happened nearly as soon as I saw you. But that was the moment, my lip caught behind my teeth and I thought: oh, you too, huh?

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a toast | to both what came before, and what comes next

There are very specific things I miss about Texas:

Cowboy boots worn unironically.

How late nights, when dressed in fine formal-wear, almost always, and perhaps inevitably, end up at Whataburger.

The obvious appreciation of a woman's beauty and how it is never mistaken for the whole of her worth.

Chivalry, and manners, and nods to long-standing traditions.

Space.

It was so special to be home this weekend for one of my dearest and oldest friend's wedding. It is my great regret that I do not have more photos of the event (I had so many cameras with me and such grand plans!). But I think it is a testament to the people I was with, and the movement of the weekend, that I didn't want to pause to pull out a camera, too invested, as I was, in the actual moment.

I love that last photo taken of Whitney because it was the end of the night and probably the first time she'd sat down in hours and her makeup had worn off a bit, but she looked so beautiful in that way that sees the full weight of the day on her face is like oh-yeah-we-just-did-that--we-got-married! A good while ago she asked me to give a toast at the rehearsal dinner and while my delivery was less than stellar--my hands were shaking so badly I could barely read the words on the teensy sheets of hotel stationary (something about getting older and nerves manifesting themselves in different ways)--I, with her permission, want to share it here now:

This is my wish for you:

A lifetime of the hand on the thigh in that way that does’t usually survive long marriages.**

The hand that hooks the back of your waist when you step off the curb a moment too soon.

Quiet Sunday mornings and meals around a full table.

Caught eyes in a crowded room.

A lifetime of listening for the other person’s footsteps. For their keys turning in the door.***

I wish for you laughter. More than anyone can reasonably expect. 

For the the arm that reaches out at three in the morning after you’ve gotten up to use the bathroom. 

For silences that are full and familiar. And words that are honest and reaching. 

Unsolicited smiles. And affection without agenda. 

I wish you traditions and rituals--Chinese dinners sitting legs crossed on the living room floor—because the furniture will come, no rush.

That you take to heart the lessons of your parents’ incredible commitment to one another.

And that you break a few rules for one another.

And when things get cold and quiet and still, as they inevitably will because life is long and not tremendously easy, I hope you remember that on a day in the middle of an unseasonably cold Texas November, you pledged your lives to one another—you pledged your whole selves, imperfect and flawed and human as they are. 

And that commitment is carried out on the level of the everyday gestures. 

The pot of coffee put on before the other wakes. The passed sports section. The flowers for no reason at all. Dancing in the kitchen, two in the morning, bare feet and no music. Tangled sheets and all the fun that that entails. 

I won’t wish for you a perfect life because how uninteresting. Nothing worthy is easy. And it is the difficulty of any journey—the trudge of it—that gives it meaning and shape. 

So I wish you both a bit of fight and quite a lot of grit.

But more than anything, it is my great hope that you remember you are loved. By this incredible person sitting next you. This person who seems like an impossibility—because how the hell did you get lucky enough to meet them—and how the hell did you get lucky enough to wake up next to them day after day? I hope you remember that this impossibility-of-a-person has chosen you. And in the face of that—of that love and that choice—failure is laid waste to. You. cannot. fail. So take risks and dare on a grand scale. Because whatever mistakes or missteps you may make—the person on the other side of the commitment you’ll make tomorrow is your absolute champion. 

And how lucky that is. 

So to everything that comes next, I raise my glass…

**brazenly inspired (perhaps, stolen) from a line in an Anna Quindlen novel.

***hijacking the notion of a quote I love, but can't seem to find in this moment, will link as soon as I do.