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Permanent Love By Bett 09-04-2204 Staring is my favorite thing, besides all my other favorite things. It’s hard to find someone to stare at. Most people can’t handle it. You have to find a really secure, and a little bit wacky person to stare at. My name is Room. I am a starer. When we are kids we can stare and get away with it. But when we grow up, which none of us should do, we can’t stare anymore. I think repressing our desire just to look long into someone else’s face hurts us emotionally. I wonder what I am looking for. Maybe I am looking for god, or a reason to believe there is a reason we are all here. I do know we need to see someone’s eyes. We long for that primitive communication. I need it. That’s why I stare. Yesterday when I was walking home from work, I saw an old woman with so many wrinkles. I wanted to know her, to know her every crevasse, to search for her being in her gray eyes. She stood and as I passed I stared into her, for a moment we communicated a great deal. Then I was past her and she looked away. Often I’ll catch someone’s eye and for a moment we will be locked. Then they will be gone, yet they will haunt me. Speaking of haunting, I am haunted all the time by one particular person. He is married, and I am not married to him. This is fine, because I do not want to marry him. He is far too stubborn for me to live with. Yesterday, as the day was fading, as the dark of night set in, I nearing my home, when I saw the familiar figure sitting on my stairs. My heart skipped a beat and I speed up because I longed to stare into his brown eyes. But when I got near I could see something was wrong. He stood up and opened his arms. Maybe to normal people this would be normal. But we are far from normal. We never physically touch each other even though we have been friends for a long time. When he touched me my world of carefully constructed lies fell out of their places and crashed onto the concrete. There is no way we are just friends. Realization of what my body was telling me hit me, striking me like the cold water in a belly flop. As his arms reached around me and gathered me in I felt such longing to be one with him. One. One with another. Do you understand what I am talking about? I mean I never wanted to let him go. I wanted him to absorb me. I wanted to be him and him me forever and ever. I wanted to breath with his lungs, think with his mind, feel with his skin. My entire body went limp as he pulled me close and I would have fallen but he tightened his grip. The touch, it woke me up. Suddenly this was real. This wasn’t an abstraction to theorize anymore. This was a real relationship. This was real and he was really really married to someone else, some one who isn’t me. He held my noodle body in his arms looking at my face. This all happened in just a few seconds. “Hey, are you ok?” he said. I couldn’t say anything since my heart had stopped and I couldn’t breath. His eyes were red… from crying? I snapped out of my self-absorbed reveling and realized my best friend needed my comfort. I put away the cords of the eternal bond we had just created and tried to back up so I could think clearly. Physical touch is the most distracting thing in the entire world. When I had pulled my head back he let me go, and I could see that he was greatly perturbed. “What’s wrong?” I realized he hadn’t been feeling the same sexual thrill, well that’s so mundane of a word for the thrill that I had been feeling. He needed my friendship. I need to concentrate and help him. “My wife is cheating on me.” He coughed. Ok, so you have to understand how much he loves his wife. She is a goddess, to him anyway. They have been married for two years. They met at college, and she is brilliant and beautiful. All the wonderful things a smart man like him wants in a woman. She is athletic, well read, cultured, from a nice loving family, with hardly any emotional issues. She is natural and free. She runs and laughs. He sits up at night and watches her sleep. When they make love they both are expressing their love fully. She writes him songs and he writes her poetry. Their love is what of I dream. I lay at night hoping to find someone to write me songs and who will inspire in me the will to write poetry. How do I know so much about their love? I spend a lot of time with him. He shares with me his experiences. He is a writer, and I am his editor. His stories are very personal, that’s why he is a best selling author. Authors need to use their personal stories in their fiction if they want it to be good. He is an amazing writer. He is amazing, and he is standing here crying in front of me. “Tell me what happened.” I said. “I don’t think I can yet. Can I just stay here tonight?” he said. Ok, two things. First he doesn’t think he can tell me what happened. That’s a first. He has never been at a loss for word in his whole life. He must be really really upset. Second he wants to stay at my house, when I suddenly realize that I want him. That’s not a good idea. I don’t feel in control of my emotions. But he needs somewhere to sleep and a friend to talk to when he is ready. I am going to help him, so I said, “Of course you can.” I went up the short stairs to the outer door to my apartment building and opened it. He followed me sniffling. chapter 2 He is sleeping on my couch. I long to touch him. I keep reading the last chapter he wrote for his new novel. The passion he has been feeling comes thru very intensely in his words. I am sitting at my desk reading it on my computer. The cold glow of the monitor throws light over the room casting strange shadows on his face. I turned back to the monitor and reread the last section. What was he talking about? The story is about a young man searching for his lost soul. The story was quite good even for him. I shut it off and went to bed to relieve some tension. When I was done I went back and tried rereading it once more. I am a man, a lonely man searching for what I have lost. Why have the faces of those I love turned away from me? Why don’t they smile back at me? Why must each day I be tortured to find myself still alive? There is but one thing I live for, and she is gone. I lie down on her side of the bed to feel her warmth, but only find coldness. All the things that used to bring me joy leave me empty. Why the hell did she leave? What did I do wrong? How could I have let this happen? This was obviously out of character for the character, and I guessed it was he himself trying to deal with his wife’s infidelity. It’s the last line in the story. I turn the monitor off again and this time go sit down next to him. He stirs. I put my hand in his hair and find it wet with sweat. I get up so I don’t make him warmer with my body. I go to bed and try to sleep. Then the presence of another is felt sending a tingle up my spine. I roll over to find him standing in my doorway. He slowly walks over to my bed and crawls in and under the blanket like it’s the most normal thing. Then he snuggles up next to me putting his arm over my body and his head on my pillow. I am feeling all kinds of sexual excitement up and down my body, which he is pressed against. Then he says, “Good night Aqua.” My heart stops again. My name isn’t Aqua. It’s Room. I mentioned that before. Aqua is his wife. He thinks he is sleeping with his wife! Aqua and I don’t look or feel very similar. She is much taller and thinner than I am. He is going to realize in a second that I am not Aqua. But he didn’t he just slept and slept. I lay there stiffly, but slowly I began to relax. I wondered what I should do. He is very sleepy, and if I wake him it will only create havoc. So I’ll let him sleep. I am on my side and he is on his side. We are facing each other. His forehead touches mine. I start to memorize the feel of his hot body. Warm, softness, hardness, heat, skin, breath, hair, nose, lips, chin, neck, ears, shoulders, heaviness of his arm, his knees press against mine, his toes touching mine, his pulse slow and steady beats in his arm. His pulse slow and steady My pulse fast and unsteady His arm heavy on my shoulder My arm absorbing the heat His hand touching my back My back soaking in his fingertips My life so empty till now My life so empty without love Now I am alive But for how long will I live? I write the poem in my head. My first poem. I realize that it doesn’t rhyme, but its good. I know its good. I lay there for so long just gazing at him in the light of the moon, slowly sleepiness overtook me and I fell asleep. “Ohhhh. Hi.” His voice, so familiar, yet so strange, woke me up. I opened my eyes to find eyes brown eyes one inch from mine. I suddenly became self-conscious of my morning breath and turned my head. I sat up putting my feet over the edge of the bed. I turned to look at him with an embarrassed look on my face. “I guess I crawled into bed with you. I am sorry about that.” He said smiling. He too got up and stretched. “I’ll make some tea.” He said. “Sounds good.” I said. After I used the rest room I went out to see him hoping he’d be more talkative this morning since he didn’t say anything last night. He was sitting at the table staring into space. “I read the chapter you sent me. It ends oddly.” “Oh? I don’t remember writing it or sending it. What did it say?” “It said, ‘Where the hell is she? What did I do wrong? How could I have let this happen?’” “Oh.” He said. The water began to boil so he got up and poured it over the tea bags. “Where is she?” I asked. “She called me yesterday afternoon. I knew right away it was over. Her voice was gone. I mean the voice that I love was gone. She sounded like a regular person to me, not Aqua anymore. Aqua was gone. This was a stranger calling me to tell me some unpersonal news she read in the paper and thought that by chance I might be slightly interested and so she was just being a good neighbor or associate in relaying the unimportant news. I could hear airport noises in the background. Someone said over a echoing PA system that all packages left unattended would be confiscated.” I let him continue with the unimportant details, which he always loved to say before he got to the point. He went on as he started to put honey in the tea, ”So I knew she was calling to tell me she was going away. So, in her disinterested voice she told me Bob, and she were in love and going to Spain to get married, and would I please sign the divorce papers which are sitting on the kitchen table in a manila envelope and give them to the lawyer tomorrow she’d be most grateful. Then she wished me a good life and hung up. And like that she was gone forever. And now my life is over because I cannot go on without her.” He pulled the tea bags out and threw them into the trashcan. I stood there listening to this with a straight face. He didn’t look at me thru the whole discourse till now. He looked up and at me and with earnest eyes said, “I cannot go on.” I knew better than tell him he could, because he probably couldn’t. So I did what I could. I sat down and took the cup of tea he made for me and sipped in carefully. “Didn’t you notice that she had packed up her stuff? Or her putting the papers on the table? What did she say in the morning before she left for work?” I asked, not bothering to be nice, we aren’t bothered with such things. “She packed her stuff because tomorrow she was suppose to visit her sister upstate. I didn’t notice the papers. She said, ‘Good bye.’ I didn’t notice her taking the bag with her. I was sitting in my office typing because I was on a roll. I was so into my story I hadn’t noticed that she was acting distant in the last few weeks. I didn’t notice that she stopped telling me she loved me. I didn’t notice we had stopped making love. I didn’t notice she yelled at me three times last week for forgetting things. I didn’t notice that she stopped coming home for dinner. I didn’t notice that she stopped calling me during the day to see how I was doing. I lost her because I didn’t notice.” He said this all very passionately but didn’t start crying again, thankfully. I can’t bare the sight of a crying man. Nothing is more heart wrenching, probably because we don’t see it very often, and I had most certainly never seen him cry. I wanted to comfort him, but knew nothing I could say could make this better. He had to work through the pain and get it off his chest. “Who is Bob?” “Bob is an anonymous name for Joe Blow. He is no one to me, or maybe he is my best friend. In any case his name isn’t Bob. She just used the name Bob to tell me that she is going with some and she isn’t going to tell me who because I don’t count enough to know. I cannot go on.” He said, but he was getting stronger. I could tell from the way he was breathing. “Isn’t three weeks a little short for her to decide to end a happy two year marriage?” I asked. “Things have been cold for two months since she and I had that fight. I had used the fight as a springboard for my current story. The young man trying to recapture his lost passion. She told me she had lost her passion and we had a huge fight about it. I told her that passion is an act of the will and she can’t be a victim of emotions. I now realize I did the wrong thing. She needed me to be loving and supportive. I needed to be there as her friend not as her teacher. She just needed love, not a lesson. But I was a fool and I yelled at her, because I was disgusted with her weakness. Well she got mad because she had been open with me and I didn’t respect that, so she yelled at me in return telling me I was a cold hearted bastard. We sorta made up after that but roots were planted and we started to grow cold towards each other. I turned my heart to my writing to try to explain how my young man could find his passion again, hoping she would read it and realize I was apologizing. But she refused to read it saying she was too busy grading papers. And thus the wonderful love we had unraveled before our eyes with us standing by allowing it. I cannot go on.” “So she lost her passion for you, you yelled at her, she lost even more passion and probably the will to have passion and she found someone else right away.” I said, recapping so he could hear what he had said. “I just keep thinking about how close we were. She’d sit next to me when I wrote so she could watch and make comments. I would ask her advice and it was always dead on. She’d sit there with her guitar or piano writing a new song and I’d listen and make suggestions. She’d gladly use them. Then in the middle of the night we’d find ourselves making love while we were still sleeping. We’d wake up and laugh and kiss. Sometimes at night we’d drive out to the countryside and just drive for hours going nowhere and just holding hands. When we got somewhere we both liked we’d stop and make love under the stars then sleep. I never got tired of touching her hair and skin. I never got bored of listening to her rambling stories. She’d love to listen to people talking at tables around us and we’d just sit there listening to the most amazing stories. She’d turn them into songs, and I’d put them into my stories. We’d read together and discuss the stories in detail. She’d write an essay on something and I’d read it and write one she would read. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons we’d both be working, she grading student’s papers, and me writing and we’d be listening to music when she’d come over and take my hand. Guiding me up, she’d lead me into a dance and right there in our apartment we’d dance around in the living room. I cannot go on.” Chapter 3 He had finished washing the dishes. I wondered how I had never noticed how beautiful he was and was going to deal with this new attraction to an emotionally unstable man. “Well I need to get to work. You can stay here if it makes you feel better.” I said. “Thank you. I can’t stay at my apartment. Her spirit is there, and it doesn’t love me anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever go back.” “Then I’ll go pick up the divorce papers and some clothes for you on my lunch break.” I said. If he wants to be irrational, there’s no reason to debate with him. The apartment was quite different today when I walked in. He was right, her spirit was still there. I saw her moving about the apartment just like she always did when I came over for dinner or a party. She was smiling with that charm which made all who met her love her so dearly. His spirit was there also. He was watching her with love. I stood still and watched the past play out till I was filled with sadness, then I went into their bedroom and found a suitcase. After filling it with some of his favorite clothes I went into the kitchen to find the papers. I wasn’t going to look, but at the last moment temptation took me and I sat down at the table and took the papers out of the manila envelope. The words, “The end“ crushed me like I never expected. Tears streamed down my cheeks. How could a piece of paper declare that their love had ended, the love, which they had created and nourished for so long? How could it just end like this, so easily? How could black ink on white paper change reality so drastically. I tried to make myself realize that this was only a reflection of reality, not reality itself. But I still couldn’t get the sick feeling out of my stomach. I reread it again and a big tear dropped on the paper smearing the ink. I became self-conscious and I whipped my tears off. I looked around this apartment full of the past yet so empty. Why does love die? How can passion cool? If I don’t know the answers to these questions then I’ll never allow myself to love. I can’t allow someone in who might not be there forever. If this could happen to them, what was my lot in this world? I am not even half as talented as Aqua, not half as good looking, not half as passionate. Yet I too want love like she had. If there is no hope for love, for if there is such a thing as true love theirs was it yet and it failed, what are the chances of any other love survive. What hope do I have? My heart emptied of hope and excitement. No longer was I looking forward to going back to my apartment where he was. In fact I wanted to kick him out right now. Room has no room for rent. This life isn’t worth the pain. Chapter 4 Well, what can I say? My depression didn’t last long. On my way back to my office I noticed how beautiful the world was. My spirit began refill with hope. Life is worth living. At the office I reviewed two new manuscripts from two of my writers. I marked the errors and gave them to my assistant to send back. No matter how good a writer is she or he always has errors. When I had finished the two manuscripts from my current writers, I stared at the pile of new ones from unknown authors. Writers, who record this life, who record their feelings and emotions, their stories, are important for society. But are they really humans, or are they just observers? Are they real or are they just experiencing things so they can write about them? If their whole purpose is to be different and view life from a different angle, if they purpose is to see and feel what the rest of us feel, are they less human? Are they sick humans? Why are they so in love with themselves that they want to tell us what they think and feel? Why do they think we care? Yet we do care. We want to know that we aren’t alone in this human experience. We want to know that others go thru the same trials. Or we want to hear about different trials, from far off places, but they are all the same. Humans are the same. We all need love and acceptance. And yet why do we try to deny it thinking we can get by alone, or can we and is society just deluding us? I picked up one of the unknowns and began to read. At five, I left work with the suitcase full of his stuff. On the way I thought about the story I just read. The story was woven around a central theme of love. Our idea of love as a society drives us to jump from relationship to relationship looking for a spark of excitement. If the excitement dries up then we jump to another one to re-ignite our passion, never thinking we should work on maintaining a level even passion. And does the thought even cross our minds we humans aren’t suppose to be constantly on edge with passion and excitement brimming over? Is thrill seeking even healthy?
Marriage is an institution created by God to raise healthy children, healthy children who grown into strong leaders of the community. The emotional high of “love” doesn’t sustain the foundation of a family. The community then falls apart with out commitment to marriage. The story focused on a young woman trying to discover what love was, and realizing the images of love she had watched from Hollywood for so many years were all lies. She finds her self in a ‘boring’ marriage after 5 years. She longs to be wooed again and sought after by men. She complains to her fat husband, but he doesn’t understand what she is longing for. After several affairs she finally gives up on marriage, and divorces her husband. Then she meets a pastor in a park. She has just divorced her third husband and is crying bitterly. The pastor tells her about the love of God. The unconditional love that he pours out on his children. Then he explains that Jesus died on the cross for her sins, and that Jesus’s love is an example of what a true marriage should be. Jesus loved the church so much he laid down his life for her. She is amazed at the love she hears. After all she has been through, she almost feels hope. She begins to attend the pastor’s church and begins to trust in Jesus’s love to save her from her retched life. Then she meets a man their, and he becomes her friend. He shows her a Godly life and she seeks to understand him better. After a few years, they get married and she finally is happy for the first time in her whole life. And that is the end of the story. I think about it now, I don’t usually go for the religious stuff, but it is really amazing. I wonder if I should start attending church? Maybe all my loneliness can’t be solved by my friend back at my apartment, maybe I am looking to the wrong sources for love.
Oh, all the sudden I feel new life filling my body. I won’t be alone anymore. I walk the 1 mile to my apartment. I just feel happy. This is the truth, the reason I have been searching for. As I near my apartment I can see him sitting on the front steps smoking. I wonder when he picked up that nasty habit again. Chapter 5 “Hi.” He says. He doesn’t look like he has been crying anymore. “How are you feeling?” I ask. “Like I just lost my best friend and also like I need to change into something clean.” “Well you are in luck. I have clean clothes right here.” “Nice.” He said. Taking the suitcase, we headed up stairs. “Did you sit out here all day?” I asked. “Yes. People make me happy. I needed to see them. You have lots of people here.” “Yeah, I do. Did you talk to any of them or just watch?” I asked. “Just watched. Said, ‘hello’ to a
few. It’s interesting that so many people don’t say anything back. I am going
to take a shower now. Do you want to go out for dinner?” “You have the papers?” he asks. My heart drops. Those papers. “Yeah. They are in the flap of the suitcase.” He goes back into the bathroom to find them. He goes to the table and opens them. I wonder how he will react? He reads it quickly and takes out a pen and signs it. Then puts it into the envelope and seals it. “Do you have some stamps?” he asks. “I need a lot of them.” “You can bring it to the post office in the morning.” “Ok, lets go.” He says leaving the envelope on the table. We walk down the street till we find a place we both like. I tell him about God’s love. I think he feels it too. I think he is as ready as I am to be open to something new to give us a reason to live. He reaches his hand across the table and takes my hand gently squeezing it with a little smile. Maybe he and I can start a new life together, but put God as our focus. Only with Jesus as our focus can we have a permanent love. |