Shattering

What lips these lips have kissed I think I know but wash away the thoughts that fully show. A tale, an ever-unwinding tale of falling and reconceiving, incubation, regrowth, and a bitter battle break, topped again and again.

We road tripped through the wind and snow to New York City. Stories unfolded. Constructions, abstract and ancient, of what we were supposed to be. Who we have been and where and why and what we have now to show. When I was sixteen, I fell in love for the first time with a poet. She was my opposite in every way, but it seems things like that always come around to reinforce tired cliches. She was beautiful, rich, an old aristo type (through my skier-punk eyes at least), glamourous and deliberate. I had a certain raw and blustery approach to the world, hit or miss, forceful and utterly lacking in tact and subtlety. She knew what she was about even then, and maybe that's why it felt like it was everything. I met her at a summer college experience for high schoolers in California and afterwards, I never saw her again. A few letters at first, a talk on the phone, but eventually even that faded away. I lost her contact information and life moved on. One day, I'm not entirely sure how anymore, I got back in touch with her and discovered she now lived in New York, the city I was getting ready to go off to college in. It's understatement to say I was thrilled. Somehow, though, whenever I tried to contact her, she was evasive, either busy or out of town. Soon enough she moved to either LA, Paris, or Brazil and the possibility of seeing her again once more faded into nothingness. The disappointment hurt me so much, I began a courtship, doomed from the beginning with a beautiful NYU student whose prime quality was simply that she looked almost exactly like this first love of mine. To this day, the only short story I have written, editted, and submitted to publishers is one I wrote about courting the NYU girl, the disappointments it inevitably held, and how the whole infatuation had probably less to do with her personally than her as a symbol for all of my past loves (each of whom I saw evinced at least a little in her facade). But time past and the first love was no where to be found, until one day I reconnected with her via Facebook. The specifics of it are lost on me, but the joy of once more having her at my fingertip - the ability to send a message I knew she would receive in most likely less than 24 hours was an incredible feeling indeed. And I took advantage of it. I sent her poems maybe every month or two (not too often because I didn't want to come on too strong), but consistently. One can easily imagine my excitement when she began writing me back. Soon our correspondence became almost regular - it wasn't remotely regular, but I had returned to a position where I could safely expect a response from her, and that is a wonderfully secure feeling indeed. One day, when I was in Alaska, she asked for my phone number, which I promptly gave her and soon enough I received a text message from her that was a photo of herself that I could save on my phone. Some new arena of communication had been breached and I was feeling particularly positive about it. About then I discovered she had returned to New York to live more permanently now (professionally, she is a model - at least I think she still is) which was strange timing because it happened right after I graduated and therefore left the city, but so it goes.
From then on, we began text messaging each other little pleasantries from time to time, but still I didn't dare call her. We had established something beautiful and sacred like snow without footprints in it, and it was so much nicer to only communicate through sent words than feel the profane need to perform a conversation ovr something so impersonal as a telephone. One night while I was in Hawaii, I found myself thinking about her and I wrote a poem. I added Dear _____, to the top and my poem was a love letter. Somewhere in it, I included the line (paraphrased) "Can you write a love letter to the whole world then personalize it to everyone you know and send it to them? Do you believe that that is what I have just done? I haven't. Do you believe me?" - Before I sent it, I considered deleting this part of the poem, but I left it in to inject a certain insecurity into the words, not for me but for her. Knowing the socialite lifestyle she has lived and as a model, the probabaly unreasonable hoards of men who try to hit on her probabaly on a daily basis, I didn't want to be too vulnerable. I wanted to make her doubt me so she wouldn't gain some sort of upper hand and be able to toy around with me to her amusement. In short I wanted to come off as her match - intellectually, experientially, and seductively - and thereby be able to be her match, someday in the idealistic future. Of course the reality of the phrases was that I had written the whole letter only for her and sent it only to her, but who knows if she guessed it. Then I had a brilliant ploy: I asked for her address in New York to mail it to her. She obliged and though she didn't write me back (which she had insinuated she would via text message, but proved to be flaky on that count), she had given up the address of her fortress and so (hopefully everybody can guess where this is leading), I executed the second most romantic move of my entire life: allowing her to believe I was still in Hawaii, I drove across the country with my three favorite allies to New York City and on New Year's Eve, I walked with my crew to her apartment: the first girl I ever truly loved, who I hadn't seen in 6.5 years! Nik had rolled me a cigarette, which I was too nervous to smoke, so I had just sucked on it while we walked. Somewhere around 6th Avenue, I dropped it in a puddle and we had to stop for him to roll me a new one. That drop is very key because as timing would have it, when I had my new cigarette, caught my breath and turned the corner, walking the final block to her apartment, guess who was standing out in the street, alone, with headphones on, getting ready to cross the street? I said her name and she later told me she knew it was me before she'd even laid eyes on me.

We talked for maybe an hour and a half - I was astounded at how rapid-fire our conversation was, almost as though it had been scripted 6.5 years earlier, and we, simple actors, nervous, were rushing through our lines. Eventually my crew took off in search of more tobacco and she invited me up to her apartment. Over the course of the conversation, she told me certain details that proved not only had she remembered nearly every little thing I had told her when I was sixteen, but she had been following my adventures on my blog and was therefore able to ask pointed questions about things I had no idea she had any idea had happened to me.
We got to her apartment and there was an unmistakeable tenderness in the air between us. The first thing I noticed was that everything in the apartment was black or white, sleek, tres chic, except her flowing red hair which stood out like a forest fire on a snowy day. Five minutes later, she voiced this exact same observation. Eventually, she got a call from a friend whose New Year's party she was heading to and told me I had to go but she promised to call me. I stood up and went to hug her and there was this massive surge of electricity between us. When I got too close and put my arms around her, something in the air got fuzzy and indistinct, she held the laces hanging from my sweatshirt and played with them softly. We stared into each other's eyes and it was that tired old cliche moment from the movies (and real life too I suppose) where there is no question the characters are about to kiss for the first time. However, I could tell it was all too overwhelming. I had come out of nowhere, barged in on her on New Year's Eve, and was now making as if to kiss her. She has an entire life I don't know about. Who knows, maybe a boyfriend, all sorts of conflicts of the heart, every complication and hesitation that clearly I know nothing about...and I can read all of them in a wild melee across her face. I can see all desires and rational dissuations spilling over all her features, and it soon seems like there will be no kiss. But I was feeling Irish that night and I decided to take a bold move, perhaps push all of it over the tipping point. I went in to kiss her and she tilted her chin back to dodge my kiss. Now it was really time for me to go, but she promised again and again she would call and before she closed the door behind me, we held eye contact for what felt like fifteen minutes.

She never called.

After all that, she never called. My friends told me it was perfect that way, part of a grander scheme I was in no position to try and figure out, and they said it eloquently and so almost convinced me, but in the end, it broke my heart. It's not that I expected anything to come of it either: coffee in a public, neutral place, hugs, goodbye, I hope to see you again someday soon. I wanted nothing more than that, but even that didn't happen. I just never heard back from her. On my way out of town, coming here to Vermont, I sent her a text message saying,

"I'm sure you had your reasons. I just want you to know you've hurt me badly."

It seemed stupid to send it, seeing as the ball remained in her court and the truly dignified response would have been silence, but I think ultimately the impulse to make it clear that I wasn't in New York dropping in on her as a game, it was something deeply important to me and because she blew me off, I wasn't a frustrated strategizer, but just a broken person, lost.

And here I am, still stuck in a similar state. Not just from her, huge amounts more than that: two conversations I had with my friend Carlee, an encounter with a Middlebury student who I have at times been in love with who stared into my eyes and I saw my entire past laid out before me like a long, poorly executed vaudeville. Questions of the ego:
"You give yourself far more credit than you deserve for the things about you that aren't particularly impressive, and you give yourself almost no credit for the things about you that are actually worth noting."

Stories.
Now I'm in refuge, looking at two sides to my Self like the ends of a barbell and trying to string them back together, trying to let them and everything else die so I can be reborn. Trying and knowing that the only way any of this will work is when I finally cease to try at anything. Life and love as a Chinese finger trap.