Last week in San Diego, scores of people – some dear, old friends, others virtual strangers – came up to me to tell me how happy they were for me. They’d hug me and whisper in my ear, and I’d look in their eyes and see that, indeed, they meant what they were saying.
Many times I’d tear up at their words, and feel a rush of gratitude and fullness. Other times, I’d hear a voice in my head softly counter, “the best case scenario is that someone dies.” Best case.
***
I’ve never been much of a romantic. Often times, even with dear friends, with people I love, I find myself holding back. I’m not sure when it happened precisely, but some part of me is by default closed that used to be open. Often times I find myself cringing at my own vulnerability now – taking refuge in easy pessimism, padding myself with protective doubt - and I can’t help but feel ashamed of the constitutional weakness that suggests.
It is, I suppose, the expected sum of decades worth of hurts and losses, a cumulative, slow grinding down of faith. Life can make you tentative, gun shy, reluctant, disbelieving. Grimly expecting the worst, you stand before the door, fingers tapping the handle, afraid to open it.
But twenty months is a nice, round number. Even I have to concede that. There is an undeniable sense of wholeness to it, a feeling of circularity, constancy. It’s a number worthy of belief.
***
One night a few weeks ago we found ourselves watching a recent BBC production of Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights.” And I – the cynical one, the doubting and questioning one – openly wept at the protagonist Catherine’s words:
My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary… I am Heathcliff. He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.
At any other time in my life those words would have seemed absurdly romantic – too extravagant to be believed or trusted. I might have even laughed at such overblown sentiment and the person expressing it. I likely would have thought something along the lines of: you poor, deluded fool…
Instead, I recognized in those words a rendition of the truth of my own life. And my tears of recognition became tears of almost impossible, inexpressible joy.
