I Need You To Believe In Love

All of us were young once and perhaps that is our primary curse. I used to think that we had only one curse to deal with, but as it turns out, we have secondary and tertiary curses.

I first fell out of love with John when we were twenty six. Well, I was twenty six. He’d just turned twenty seven. We had our whole lives ahead of us but considered ourselves amongst the elderly and were already talking about our plans for retirement. (Community in Boca Raton. Walks along the beach. Spare bedroom for the grand kids.) We were in a taxi cab on our way back to our apartment - we had just seen Phantom - and I looked over at him and really looked at him and then thought about other things. Let me be clear, I had really looked at him and thought about other things many times before this cold November night, but this time it was different. If life were but ones and zeros, absolute truths and pitiful lies, God might have looked down on me that night and told me I was wrong.

“This night isn’t any different from any other night. You still love him because this has happened before.” I wasn’t wrong, though. It was as if everything had shifted five degrees to the left. A seismic shift had taken place and thankfully nobody else had noticed.

I don’t know why I didn’t stop the taxi and tell him that I wanted a divorce and that I was going to go spend the night with “Wayne, from accounting.” I’m pretty sure that Wayne had no idea that I was attracted to him, and at times I was skeptical myself, but when push comes to shove you sometimes have to make hard choices. Of course I didn’t jump out of the taxi at a red light. “The actress playing Christine was really good. I have no idea how she hits all of those high notes. I could never do that.”

When we got back to our apartment we briefly tried to have sex and then were much more successful at getting ready for bed. I remember staring at myself in the bathroom mirror and promising myself that John would not find out.

“This has been working. Don’t to anything too rash. Don’t fuck this up. You could wake up tomorrow morning and love him again. Hopefully that’s what happens.”

When you’ve been doing something for long enough it’s harder to stop. My grandfather used to say that he wasn’t afraid of heights, he was afraid of falling from heights and colliding with the ground. I look back on my twenty six year old self and realize that the fall wasn’t that far. I’m sure I would have made it. “Wayne, from accounting” probably would have slept with me (he died from an aneurysm two weeks later so I never found out if he was even capable of speech) and I, bruised and maybe with a dislocated shoulder, would have moved out and moved on. And John would have moved on too.

I kept my promise to myself and days dragged into weeks and eventually I forgot that I had ever been honest with my feelings. I would kiss John and tell him that I loved him and he would apologize and say that it wasn’t about me but that he had had a very long day and really just needed to get some sleep. John loved sleeping. He slept a lot around that time. Probably stress at work.

Eventually I fell back in love, of course. There’s a certain indescribable pain that comes with the transition from pretending to have feelings to actually having feelings, and that first time I went through it it almost killed me. And of course there’s relief too, like when you can finally feel yourself starting to get better after a long and miserable cold.

I’ve been thinking a lot about curses and a lot about demons recently, for obvious reasons. When I was twenty six years old I might have asked John what his were. I can’t now. I don’t want to know how many times he’s looked in the mirror in our master bathroom and made promises to himself.