Thursday, July 10, 2014
To My Dearest,
I’m sorry I haven’t written to you in so long, but I’ve been so absorbed in the joys of life that it never even occurred to me that I should pause them for the sake of recording such treasures. You’re still as important to me as ever, but when a simple and far-reaching happiness colors every other thought, savoring such rare exuberance seems like the best way to honor it.
Indeed, this has been the first time in my life that I’ve actually taken a real vacation. I spent the last week with Julien, and this must be what it’s like to be on a honeymoon. Our time together began on the fourth of July, when we watched the fireworks from his penthouse balcony, which offered a marvelous sixty-third-floor view of the patriotic city spectacle. The next morning, we took a helicopter flight to the Hamptons, where we’ve been ever since.
It’s felt wonderful just to disconnect completely from all of life’s pressures and the problems of the world. I’ve felt so renewed by this oasis of time in which I’ve been aware of nothing outside of our little universe full of starry nights, ice cream by the pool, and couple’s bliss.
I felt guilty not working for the MCA for the last week, but Michael was very understanding about it and gave me the time off. I’ll try to make it up to him by putting in some extra hours when he needs the time for his dissertation or just to see Maria outside of the MCA. They seem to be quite happy together, which warms my heart even more and seems to validate my decision to be with Julien in the end. The fact that Maria is now not only safe, but apparently falling in love, contributes even more to my general contentment. When I described to Julien how wonderful the last week has felt, he thought that being away from the stress of the city, and indulging a delightfully slower pace – surrounded by green, pastoral beauty, near the gentle waves of the beach – might have contributed to my state, which he compared to what Italians call “Essere in stato di grazia.” I looked up the term online and it literally means to be in a state of grace – to feel a deep connection with the divine and/or nature that produces inspiration or love that heals and protects. That sounds about right.
As a kind of mental or psychological exercise, I tried to amplify my newfound happiness by avoiding all negative thoughts about my past, the people no longer with me, and the world at large. I tried just to be. I lived simply to savor the moment, with my love, Julien.
Our increasing closeness became apparent in so many small ways – from completing each other’s thoughts, to finding humor or beauty in the same moments, to expanding each other’s cultural horizons in ways that symbolically bridged our different worlds. I introduced Julien to one of the greatest Arab-American poets, Khalil Gibran, and Julien truly cherished his writing. While reading his masterpiece The Prophet, Julien highlighted this section from Gibran’s poem on love that we read aloud together:
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love. When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, I am in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course of love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
At the same time, Julien introduced me to Octavio Paz, one of Mexico’s greatest poets of the twentieth century and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature. I especially enjoyed the delightfully imaginative story My Life with the Wave, a surrealist prose poem (from his 1951 collection Eagle or Sun?) about a man who falls in love with a wave and tries to have a relationship with it. Julien and I read this part out loud together:
Love was a game, a perpetual creation. All was beach, sand, a bed of sheets that were always fresh. If I embraced her, she swelled with pride, incredibly tall, like the liquid stalk of a poplar; and soon that thinness flowered into a fountain of white feathers, into a plume of smiles that fell over my head and back and covered me with whiteness. Or she stretched out in front of me, infinite as the horizon, until I too became horizon and silence. Full and sinuous, it enveloped me like music or some giant lips. Her present was a going and coming of caresses, of murmurs, of kisses. Entered in her waters, I was drenched to the socks and in a wink of an eye I found myself up above, at the height of vertigo, mysteriously suspended, to fall like a stone and feel myself gently deposited on the dryness, like a feather. Nothing is comparable to sleeping in those waters, to wake pounded by a thousand happy light lashes, by a thousand assaults that withdrew laughing.
With every day that passes, Julien and I have grown closer and more comfortable with each other, and I’m sure that he will open up to me about his childhood, and the source of his nightmares, within the timeframe that he promised. In the meantime, I’ve come to learn some rather endearing little details about him, including a quirk that I would call “hedonistic hyper focus”: whenever possible, he tries to indulge in just one pleasure at a time, so as to maximize the enjoyment of whichever senses are involved. For example, if he’s about to eat some delicious vegetarian meal, he prefers that any music playing be barely audible, so that he can concentrate as much as possible on the pleasure in his mouth. If we’re watching a movie, and there’s any interruption – me trying to speak to him, the food delivery arriving, someone sneezing – he’ll insist on rewinding the film to a few minutes before the disruption, so that he can “get back into the moment” and feel as moved or swept away by the experience as he would have been had there been no interference. Similarly, when we’re having sex, he prefers to keep all auditory distractions to a minimum, so that he can hear my gasping and moaning, and the noise that two bodies make when they intimately meet. To my surprised delight, the sound of me climaxing seems to bring him the greatest joy of all. Yes, thanks to Julien, I finally have been able to enjoy sex that much.