The Work

If I remember right, which I often don’t, the first relationship I ever fucked up, I mean really ruined, was the first girl I ever told I loved. Granted, I was thirteen, awkward, and she was popular, known in certain circles for having filled in early and for putting out. When I consider the ways I’ve used the word since then, the rigorous struggle and pure reward of the relationships I’ve been a party to throughout the years, the sentiment I felt as a nascent teen was likely closer to confusion. Love was something I wanted to believe and feel because it meant I got to get my hands dirty without being like the rest of the boys, the kids who gathered in the lull between classes to brag about it to each other in the halls of school. In hindsight, I was hardly any different, just quieter and less assured of my position in the pecking order, though, to my credit, whatever the feeling was, at the time I felt it with all the terror and ferocity of which my virgin heart was capable.

Ultimately, her name is not important. I say this not as an insult or as a means to diminish someone who obviously is an actual person with an actual history and life, but because I doubt she needs me speaking of her in public, which I am doing. Plus, I imagine she is married now, with children and the rest, and though she’ll never read this, I feel I owe her, at the very least, a gesture of anonymity. What is important, though, and what continues to bother me about the way I so spontaneously bailed on a person who cared about me and who was, for the most part, good to me, is the extent to which I wonder why it seems to keep on happening.

With her, it was a matter of my leg, my left knee specifically, which I shattered in the center of Hobbes Ice Arena playing hockey the summer 0f 1993, just before High School. This meant two things—I couldn’t walk, and I couldn’t see my friends. That summer was the first real amount of time I didn’t spend with the people I had been playing hockey with since I learned to skate at the age of six. Mostly, I laid in my room, read books and listened to Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. By the time I could move around again I was a different boy altogether.

Those three months engrossed in Kurt Cobain lyrics changed everything for me, not only because I started putting people into categories and painting myself as somehow other than the rest, more alternative, and thus, more authentically alive than other people, but, for the first time, language became the center of my life. I poured through those lyric books. I knew every song by heart, what every song meant, or what I thought it meant, what the reasons were he wrote them and what he must have felt to sing like that, that sad growl growing violent in the chest and making sense. Lying in my bed alone, with my girlfriend and former friendships far away, with the person I was before and that I would never be again also far away, I understood that he needed those words specifically and no others. I wrote my first bad poems that summer, lyrics really, to a music I couldn’t make and that I’ve been chasing ever since.

In hindsight, she didn’t have a chance. I desired a different kind of person, someone who I could walk around with and people could look at us and be disgusted. And we, the next girl and I, we would relish in that disgust, knowing that we would never be like them, would never wallow in the mediocrity of being normal or waste our energy pursuing a way of life that didn't really matter. I wanted to be alternative, then punk. I wanted to be in a band, and then, when that didn't happen, I wanted to be a poet. And she was neither of those things. She could be other things, but she could never be those things. And so I left her, shallow as I was, without an explanation.

So much of the business of leaving, it seems, is like that, without an explanation. Or rather, the explanations I arrive at never really seem to encompass totally the experience of pulling one life from another life, especially from nowhere, the way it feels so equally the right thing and the wrong thing all at once. The parting feels impossible, I think, and even permanent, because, being necessary and simultaneously not so, or, at least necessary and undesired, it approaches a place of indeterminacy where, ultimately, it approaches nothing. And maybe this, this absence at the end of what I’ve worked and struggled for with so many people and for so much of my adult life, this work that is the work of love and the failure of love, maybe this is what is accurate and true, the thing that makes us human, here in the wake of our departures. I can't be certain if this is right or not, but if it is, or even if it only partially is, what can I say to her, to anyone, to make the parting worth it? How do she and I continue trying in a world where that which waits for us is not what we were trying for? Maybe that is the work of poetry, to fail sometimes and fall a little short, to continue trying to remember and to write it down when there doesn't seem a reason to, perhaps precisely because there doesn't seem a reason; and in that open space carved out by language and by thought, the music exactly there.