16

Dead Path

Maybe Dude was right. Maybe I hadn’t truly grieved her absence. I knew I hadn’t truly let her go. But how does one let go of their beloved? How does one extricate themselves from their very breath? Where does one live after their soul-home has been demolished? How does one return to aloneness after swimming in the sea of oneness? How many more fucking metaphors for the same tortured memories?

Oh Sarah.

I wish I could say that this was a co-dependency issue, but it was so much more than that. It was entirely existential. Reality had taken on a whole new meaning in the heart of this love experience. Where to find meaning now? If my life’s purpose isn’t to love my beloved, then why on earth am I here?

Bewildered, I went back into my head to find my answers. No luck. Dude was right again: excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis. I briefly returned to therapy. No luck there, either. I just talked around the issues. I created space in my work week to process the feelings, but found it difficult to go deep in my daily life. My trial law practice was growing fast and it was increasingly more difficult to extricate myself from the masks that I wore in the courtroom. Vulnerability and armor make strange bedfellows. And perhaps most difficult of all was trying to let go of Sarah in the apartment we had shared. The scent of my lost beloved was everywhere.

And then she called one day at the beginning of spring. It had been a long time since I had last heard from her.

“I want to say goodbye, Lowen.”

“You already did, loud and clear. Where you going now?” I asked, afraid to hear her answer.

“I’m just taking the car. Gonna drive to Austin, Texas, to start over,” she said softly, as though some part of her knew it was avoidant.

“You could drive to Canada...” I said, immediately hooked back into my longing.

“No, honey, I can’t. I need to start over…”

“You’re just running…”

She hung up the phone.

Lightnin’ Foot in action. Fuck.

I fell to the couch in an excruciating mess, lying there for hours in my tiresome hopelessness. Lightnin came over to comfort me and just made it worse. The last thing I needed was a reminder of Sarah. There was something about this hang up that felt almost worse than the betrayal. As soon as I heard the dial tone, I knew she wasn’t coming back. My delusions and fantasies were exposed. This was the real deal. There was nowhere to go from here. This was a dead path.

I could hear myself say it, again and again…

This is a dead path. This is a dead path. This is a dead path.

As I said it with more conviction—for the first time, I began to believe it.

Shame Shackles

When I got back on my feet, I plunged to a place so dark, so barren, that I began to consider suicide as a means of escape. The hope of death felt better than the death of hope. Perhaps the way out of this crushing darkness is absolute darkness, itself.

Oddly metabolized grief became my earnest companion as I fumbled through my days pained and confused. When I wasn’t working, I was back to hiding in the house, reluctant to connect with a world that had nothing to offer me. I lay there on the couch, spun out on my victimhood, waiting for the cosmic guillotine to sever me whole. I hated everything, most of all myself.

One day, the pain leeched out in the heart of a trial. I was defending a man charged with sexual improprieties, when I broke from tradition and attacked his female accuser on the witness stand. Until now, I had become known for my subtle cross-examinations in sexual assault trials. But not today. This time I wanted blood—Sarah’s blood.

“And your history didn’t include seducing men as an act of revenge?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s not the feeling I get from you. You feel like a woman who knows how to get what you want with your body,” I snarled accusingly.

I went after the witness all afternoon—so nasty that the trial judge had to rein me in on numerous occasions. And then we lost the trial, a trial I could easily have won. Sarah had defeated me yet again.

That night, the intensity of my desperation escalated. On the way back from court, I stopped in at a bar I used to go to when I was in law school. I got a table in the corner and ordered some gin. After about an hour, I became uproariously drunk, almost to the point of collapse. Fuck love—booze was my path home.

I left the bar and took a taxi to Lake Ontario. I needed something vast to swallow my pain. I stumbled along the boardwalk until dizziness landed me on my ass on the beach. I surrendered to it, lying down on my back looking up. The night was dark and ominous, as heavy clouds cloaked the full moon. I scanned the entire sky for a little bit of light, but none could be found. Closing my eyes, looking inside, no light there either. Something worse than madness—complete and utter existential hopelessness. A soular eclipse of the heart.

It had all come down to one fundamental question: What is life without love?

Before her, I could ride on the hope that one day it would come. After her, there was nothing left to hope for. No light of understanding, no reason to believe, nothing. I had tasted the sweet fruits of divinity and then was cruelly banished from the garden. Perhaps my parents were right all along—I’m not welcome on mother earth.

I fell asleep on the beach and awoke to the glaring sun. For a moment I was disoriented and confused. My darkened soul didn’t know what to do with the light. I walked up to Lakeshore Blvd., and waited an hour for a taxi to take me back to my crypt. When we arrived, I realized I had neither money, nor keys. They must have fallen out of my pocket onto the beach. I woke my neighbor at 7:30 to borrow the $25 I needed to avoid a criminal charge. After the driver left, I broke in through my back door. Sleep came easily, until the abandonment wound woke me up with a screeching howl. Again, you would think that our worst wounds would go to sleep along with us, especially when we are most overcome with hopelessness. But not a chance. The little bastards never miss a pity party.

The nightmare related to my mother. I was catapulted back in time to an early childhood episode that never left me, often returning to haunt me during difficult times. I was five years old and my mother was standing at the foot of my childhood bed, reminding me I was unworthy: “You worthless little brat. You’ll never amount to anything. Me and your Father wanted a daughter—not you! You were just a mistake!” I heard her shrill voice cutting through me, determinedly imprinting her shaming mantras in my cells. I lay there, frozen in time, unable to defend myself, taking in her demeaning message as true. She was my mother after all.

Given the weight of my shame shackles, it’s little wonder I had spent so much time alone in my life. Imprisoned by self-hatred, the bad boy’s sentence was to wander the cosmos alone, forever prohibited from connecting to anything nourishing outside himself. A separate universe felt both safer and the limit of his entitlement.

I then began a campaign of self-hatred that lasted for months. I had never cared for serious drugs, but they now became my bypass of choice, as I finally took the cocaine plunge. If I couldn’t find ecstasy with a woman, I was going to find it with a substance. I snorted some every evening with my tacos and spent weekends lying on my couch in yet another ecstatic nightmare. Why do we turn against ourselves when we most need to give ourselves comfort? What will it take before we learn how to hold ourselves in our own arms?

One night, it all came to a head, as I found myself struggling to breathe in the middle of the night. When I finally got to my feet to call an ambulance, I threw up all over the bed. And the floor. And the hallway that led to the bathroom. On my way through the door, I looked up to see Sarah staring down at me from the ceiling. How did she get up there?

I couldn’t make it to the toilet, preferring to make the tiles my home instead. I lay on the cold floor, looking up at my beloved, speaking to her in tongues. Now and then I threw up still more, before returning to my disoriented soliloquy.

After running out of steam, I fell asleep on the floor. When my eyes reopened, half my face crusted in vomit, I looked back up at the ceiling. Sarah was gone. Staring at the empty ceiling, I felt into the pain that enveloped my heart. It was like an unending tsunami, a torrent of torment that transcends time. Oh Goddess. You have left so much pain in your oceanic wake. Do you know? Really, was there no other way? Harshly severed from the breastmilk of eternity, what on this earth will nourish me now?

Lying there, I knew I had shifted from self-distraction to self-destruction. I was now in a full-blown life-and-death struggle. I was intimately aware of the decision before me: close down and die, or open up and live. If I continued to avoid my pain, it would surely kill me, one way or the other. As desperate as I was to not feel the pain, I wanted to die just a little less. I somehow knew that dying in this condition would ultimately provide no relief anyway—my soul would wander heaven’s corridors for all eternity, searching for Sarah. I had to find a way to stay here.

It was time for something to change.

Do, or die.