Last week I was sitting in my office when suddenly I started to experience something so vividly I didn’t even quite understand that it was a memory at first. The sensation was akin to a heaving in the chest—something like choking on a wave of water, only it was something I could tell my body wanted. There was a taste to it but not like anything I’d ever eaten or drank before, a kind of sweetness, something almost metallic, like clear, cold water from the tap, only this was warm. It was so strange and exquisite that I was wrenched far from where I was and into an attitude my body knew I’d held before—standing, my chin tilted back, my throat exposed—but my mind could not place where I’d been, or when I’d been there, or any of the other details necessary to populate a complete recollection. Inexplicably I began to cry, sensing a kind of loss, but the cause of it all was lost to language for several bewildering moments until I was struck, plainly, all at once, with the startling truth.
It’s ugly. I was recalling a moment from last year, when I stood in the kitchen of the man I had fallen headlong in need of, just a few short days after Easter Sunday, and he was—God forgive me—shotgunning a hit of a joint from my lips before we went for a long drive into the Blue Ridge Mountains. In that moment, I was a little tired, a little stoned, and completely in love with the man whose mouth I tasted through the smoke.
A moment from a few weeks before this memory comes to mind as I write. I was sitting in Confession with a priest whom I’d come to know a little by then. I don’t like kneeling for Confession, and as a matter of principle I force myself to speak my faults clearly, and face-to-face.
“I’ve been having sex with the man I’m seeing,” I said. I try not to stammer when I accuse myself of what I know I’ve done wrong.
“I see,” the priest said to me. “And you know that this is not how things are intended to be, that this is something protected by marriage.”
“Yes,” I said. I paused. “In my head I know that. Yeah.”
“You know what to do.”
“Father,” I said slowly, after thinking for a moment, “I don’t know if you would be within bounds to absolve me of this.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I can’t sit here and truthfully say that I won’t do it anymore. I’m going to see him in a few weeks and I know in my heart I’ll sleep with him again.”
“But you know it is wrong,” the priest said.
“Yes.”
“So why do it?”
“Because,” I said carefully, “when I’m with him I don’t feel like his girlfriend. I feel like his wife. And it’s hard for me to see why I should wait.”
Okay, one final memory: I was by myself, walking along a remote trail somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley. It was mid-morning and the air was damp and warm. I’d just come from sitting on the edge of a mountainside, again in the Blue Ridges. I’d gotten to the sleepy off-season skiing town the day before and had been so choked up with fear over some things that are too complicated to explain that before I left for the trip, I texted a friend, “This might be insane, but I’m afraid of what’s going to happen.” It turned out that those fears were irrational. I was going to see the man I loved, with whom things had been unsteady and tumultuous for the last few months. I worried he wouldn’t show up. But the weather report had said rain for the last forty-eight hours straight, and here it was, sunny. “It’s mountain weather, Joan,” the man I was with had explained. “You can’t rely on the weather report for it.” There had been lapses in all of the predictive gauges that forecasted the various aspects of the trip: the weather report said rain, but the storm always seemed to miss us; we’d see it just a few miles away, on some other mountainside. My intuition told me things between myself and this man were irreparable, but I was there and back in the most radiant kind of love I’d ever been in. This trail hadn’t looked like much from its head—and we were about to turn around my beloved said, “I just have a feeling about this,” and ducked off the side of the trail to where the trees grew thick. I followed him, ducking under branches and pushing leaves out of the way, and there, suddenly, sprawling it seemed for eternity out from us, was the entire Shenandoah Valley, a seemingly uninterrupted flank of green rising from the rift between peaks. We stayed there for a while, quietly soaking it in, and then turned around to go back to our car—we’d seen what we’d wanted to see, something magnificent. He picked up his speed, leaving me alone for most of the walk back. So there I was, walking along, the moment where this memory starts. I didn’t mind being alone at first. It was peaceful. But then my head started to buzz with a small panic: what if I was on the wrong trail? Where was my beloved? What if I took a wrong turn and was lost? To calm myself I began to sing the hymn “How Great Thou Art” to myself, because it truly had been a great sight to see, God’s creation stretching so insistently out before our feet. If I was going to die, at least I’d have that vision to sustain me. But I was being dramatic: of course I hadn’t taken a wrong turn. There was only on trail, and therefore there was no way I could have taken a wrong one. In a few moments, I reassured myself, I’d be back at the car with this man who’d driven so far to see me. Besides, the fear of mine, the one about which I’d texted my friend, had also been disproved: I’d been afraid that I’d show up to this cabin, the one we’d agreed to rent together the month before and paid for together, and he’d never come. But just a few minutes after getting there, I saw his car—a deep orange color—driving up the hill at the top of which our cabin stood. That night, after we’d made love, I lay in his arms, feeling a kind of terrible aloneness, deep down in some dark pit of myself, miserably far from where he was. He’d asked me, “Do you really feel open to this?”
“I’m not sure,” I’d responded. I was doing a good job hiding it, but I was biting back tears. “Do you?”
“You’re not sure? Joan, we just had sex. That makes me feel weird that you might not be open to this.”
“Yeah. I know. I’m trying.”
“Do you trust me?”
“I want to trust you.”
“Then stay open to this.”
“Okay,” I’d said. “I’m open to this.”
After just a few more minutes of walking back, still singing the hymn, I started recognizing more of my surroundings. Right, I thought. This is where the trail seemed to part, but didn’t. This is the rough patch of rocks I almost sprained my ankle on. Here the grass is flat and the soil is particularly soft. We walked this before. And after just a few more moments, there was the clearing to the road, and there was the parked car, and there he was, waiting for me.
For years, I didn’t care about music. In fact, I still don’t, not really, not in any way that can get any artistically or intellectually inclined man to deem me “cool” or “knowledgeable” in any way. I gravitate toward loudmouthed angst-anthems: I can’t get enough of My Chemical Romance, with their growling, resplendent theatrics of agony and antipathy, or Patsy Cline and her sort of heaving, always unabashed and often unrequited love. And I still like, sadly, the Mountain Goats, though it’s such a damn shame to me that John Darnielle turned out to be the sorry fool he is.
My most robust theory as to why I never developed any fully realized taste in music has to do with my decade of regularly taking oral contraceptives: some speculate that because you render yourself sterile and castrate yourself of a fertility cycle, of course you wouldn’t be sensitive to music, which has undercurrents of a mating signal; another set of studies indicates that it’s possible that women’s taste in music changes depending on their fertility levels.
I began taking birth control for “health” reasons in my early-ish teens, but later it became a social crutch that allowed me to have a completely joyless sex life. Because of the reason I started taking contraceptives, it was easy for me not to recognize my abuse of them, and to write off that abuse as a choice for my physical wellbeing. I got off of them because of a divinely ordained moment of sheer laziness on my part. My prescription ran out when I was nearing the end of graduate school, and my at-home gynecologist refused to renew the prescription because I had not seen him for an appointment in so long. It seemed like too much of a hassle to find a gynecologist in the Midwest town in which I found myself, and anyway, I was already planning on breaking up with my boyfriend, so I figured, what the hell: why not see what life is like without these pills?
I stopped taking it. I dumped the dude. The next year or so was full of revelations: there were a few months of feelings that I hadn’t felt in years (the insecure angst in the days leading up to my period, and the sort of vibrancy of spirit—but also the fragility—when I was fertile). I had never had a love life off of birth control. I had to be more careful now: I couldn’t just sleep with the first person who asked.
Besides, I found that I didn’t want to. My sexual and romantic taste changed overnight. Or, more precisely, I discovered that I actually had sexual and romantic taste, and that I knew it by gut alone. In my years on birth control, I had dated people out of some cognitive desire to do so. The one man I fell in any kind of significant love with over the course of that decade made me feel a kind of embarrassment, because when somebody asked me, “Why do you love him?” I couldn’t articulate an answer, and I didn’t recognize that that was actually the mark of a true intuitive affection: for all the rest of my partners, I’d been able to formulate an answer easily in language. Conversely, I didn’t see that this was the mark of poor integration, and a lack of what you might call, um, organic chemistry (sorry).
This revelation came to me in a way that was in turns joyful, exasperating, and devastating. I fell in love with the last man I fell in love with. He wasn’t good to me. I don’t want to explain all of why. How exhausting that would be for us all. One night, he dropped the ball, big time, on something he’d promised me. I can be really melancholy, yes, but I’m also sort of a fire-spitting bitch: I was so mad I could have flipped my frickin’ lid. He called me.
“Do you have anything you’d like to say to me right now, you stupid asshole?” I said when I picked up the phone (I had nearly not picked up the phone).
“Sorry, Joan,” he said to me, his tone sheepish. He had laid on his southern accent thicker than usual, because he knew I found it so charming it almost made me sick.
“Yeah,” I said, “you’re sorry. And what else?”
Anyway, I’m not going to tell the bulk of the exchange, because it doesn’t paint me in an extremely flattering light, and you must know by now that wheresoe’er go I remain entirely without blame (kidding, obviously). But after a minute or two of me really raking him over the coals, he just dropped the topic. “How was your day?” he said, out of the blue, mid-fight, when I still had my gloves up.
“How was my day?” I said. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? You’re retarded. That’s my day.”
“Uh huh,” he said, “I’m retarded. Anything else?”
“Yeah. You’re a stupid asshole.”
“Okay,” he said, “uh huh. I’m retarded, and I’m a stupid asshole. I’ll write that down.”
“And you kept me waiting.”
“Kept you waiting. Got it.”
“For a long time, asshole!”
“Right.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Uh huh. When do you think you’ll do that?”
This exchange made me want to rip my hair out, scream at the top of my lungs, cast my body from the tallest tower of a castle at the precipice of a treacherous cliff, and die in shrieking anguish. Nonetheless, by the end of it, I was smiling in spite of myself, and laughing, and I did end up telling him about my day, and asking him about his. We hadn’t resolved the conflict. In fact, I still felt very injured about it, and he never made a true apology, not one that demonstrated that he understood why I was so hurt—because I was hurt, really; I’d felt abandoned and disregarded; that was at the root of all my hellish fury.
It occurred to me after hanging up the phone with him, as it had a million times over, quietly, how helplessly in love I was with him. What else could be the explanation? All of my reasoning faculties wanted to be angry with him. I should have been angry with him. But I wasn’t angry with him. In fact I was looking forward to speaking to him again. I didn’t stop smiling for the rest of the night. I couldn’t wrap my head around the dissonance, but it didn’t matter: there was the brute fact of how I felt, plain as day.
I’ve spoken before about my deep love of the Book of Tobit, which you won’t find in Protestant editions of the Bible. You will get tired of me saying so, but the first time I read it, I was moved to tears: it is one of only a few stories in which the Archangel Raphael plays a crucial narrative role. Tobit, having been struck blind by a series of almost comedic blunders, ultimately has his sight restored by his son, Tobias—but not before Raphael visits him and replaces not the whole ability to see, but only his sensitivity to light. Rejecting birth control was, however accidentally, the restoration of my own sensitivity to light, so to speak. I was not yet back to God, and I could not recognize His love fully—but I could recognize love when I felt it, after almost an entire lifetime away from it. And it is in many ways the love that I felt for this man, who was ultimately just a flickering in my lifetime, that led me straight back to God Himself, who has always been there, regardless of my own limited vision.
This past Sunday, at Mass, the opening hymn was the one I sang to myself as I walked myself back from the edge of panic as I reversed my course on that Shenandoah mountainside to where my beloved and I had set off together: “How Great Thou Art.” Soon after, we sang the “Kyrie”: “Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.” “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” I cry at Mass often, for a multitude of reasons, and I cried then, partly out of grief for this ecstatic love that was not ordained for me permanently. I sing loudly at Mass because now, despite my lack of refined taste, I can feel it acutely, as if my spirit takes shape within the notes. Later, we sang another song that reminds me, for reasons I don’t have time to articulate here, of that man I loved last year. One of the lyrics is, “Oh, how strange and divine: I can sing, ‘All is mine,’ yet not I, but through Christ in me.” Deep within me, in spite of the sorrow, I know the heartbreak was a mercy: it was one of the prices asked of me for what will ultimately be my great relief, my necessary drink of air, when I struggle through the thicket of this life, and there He is, the Lord of my heart, who stands ready to fling the world open in a torrent of glory.
Hi Joan! I'm not entirely sure if I'm coming to an underatanding that is not intended and probably out in left field, but is it accurate that you are equating the feeling of love in this memory to that of God? (Forgive me if this is one of my brain dead moments that cause complete confusion, just tell me to let this go if I'm way off base here)