visions through a screen door

Em on breaking up

2 weeks before we met, I saw it written in the stars.

A friend asked if I wanted last-minute tickets to an astronomy tour of the Sorbonne - I obliged, drawn implicitly to anything celestial. Mora tagged along.

The tour stretched from one hour into three - culminating in views from their astronomy tower over Paris and a peek through a massive telescope. We all stifled yawns as the hours crept on in anticipation of a great sight. The tour guide apologized - only one thing was visible in the sky that night.

A double star.

A pair of stars so close that they appear to be nearly touching - a new term for me. Two tiny freckles of light just a smidge apart. I filed this new knowledge away, sensing it would mean something.

star-crossed

We stumbled back into the streets of Saint Germain past midnight, plans of a catch-up dinner derailed. Late-night McDonald’s it was. On our walk there, I told Mora that I secretly always thought I’d meet someone during this heightened moment of my life - counterintuitive, really. Always the brilliant pragmatist, she responded that it was a lot to ask of someone - to meet and fall in love while I was having major surgery (a story for another letter). Is it even possible? Or smart?

It sounded farfetched. But I think it’s important to pick someone who has held you through darker nights and proves they’re capable of it.

It was a kismet first encounter - the way you see in old cinema. The building we met in by chance was the setting of his favorite movie. I lingered an hour longer than I planned after we were pulled together - enjoying our conversation firing away, surprising myself. All these strange similarities, invisibly strung across continents and decades, tugging us by the sleeve into this room. Later we would say it was fate.

On his cheek, a constellation of two freckles. Double star. 

I stepped out into the brisk Paris air while it still felt bubbling - I always pride myself on knowing when to leave.

A couple of weeks later, he laid next to me while I was stitched up - blood dripping out of my body into tubes, a bit sweaty and loopy from painkillers - completely unphased. We watched my favorite movie, he asked thoughtful questions - we hadn’t even so much as held hands yet. The person I dreamt up was real.

It felt like getting to know a long-lost piece of myself. Two usually guarded people, disarmed by our own inexplicable connectivity. Optimists on roads side by side, proclaiming how lucky we were yet able to acknowledge how thorny the path was to get there. Attuned to each other in a way that almost superseded communication. My friends were enthralled, high on this curious story of hope, encouraged that partners like this could exist.

We built this beautiful world together - the gentlest one I’ve known. Exchanging hundreds of deep, sweet messages while he was traveling through Italy and I was in bed-ridden recovery mode. Kissing in his childhood room like high schoolers, his name carved in the door still from back then. I felt my heart start to thaw after years of hurt and misuse. My body and spirit were healing simultaneously, a twist I wasn’t expecting. I had never felt more safe around another person.

“You know when people start falling in love and somehow immediately wonder if they should end it? The wound of not feeling worthy of that can run so deep and ruin everything. I’m glad we know how good we have it,” I posited during a night out at dinner. He nodded, seeming to agree. Looking back, perhaps it was foreshadowing.

signs of life

As June rolled in, the winds started to shift. I had done enough therapy, reading, analysis to know how this was gonna go.

He began to see the invisible string of fate connecting us as a web trying to entangle him.

It started with “let’s stay in touch” instead of concrete plans. Streams of compliments drying up. A talk on the couch with arms crossed firmly. Long delays in responding. Self-protection. I became a problem to solve - a distraction not part of his carefully laid plan.

I watched this gentle person try to masquerade as an asshole, silently begging me to put him out of his misery. To end it myself. To yell at him. To walk down the only path he’d known before. He had trouble facing himself in the mirror lately - and said I deserved better.

Normally, I’d walk away. But I saw a younger version of myself - so lucid and crisp. The one who always romanticized the wrong people while deftly avoiding love from the ones who were ready. Locked into some quiet mental battle with unconscious beliefs. For once, after all this work, I was secure. Strong yet intentionally tender. I could see things clearly - and knew I did nothing to deserve this. That it wasn’t about me at all. I thought about what I would’ve wanted to learn back then.

There’s a reason why we bonded so intensely - we’re mirrors for each other. For better or worse. His hurt was so parallel to my own.

I decided to become marble this time. I let my heart harden back to stone, but my skin stayed smooth - a Mona Lisa smile frozen in place. He would remark on how calm I was. I didn’t react or raise my voice. I gave him space, asked questions to see if he could dig back up the tenderness I was starting to fall for. I was kind, supportive, difficult to detest. He dug in his heels, disappearing more with each passing day. The girl who knew when to leave - this time, determined to stay.

rodin / spotted in the mairie de 19eme / rodin

It ended on the phone. I was out of town at a wedding - one I had been excited about for the entire time we’d known each other. After lunch the following afternoon, I slipped out to rest and rang to catch up - babbling about how emotional I was feeling, the inertia of life shifting, kids growing up, things feeling odd and different.

He thought it was a good time to have this conversation. He thought we weren’t laughing enough - it stopped feeling light. He had never felt this connected to another person, this emotionally aligned, yet couldn’t figure out why it didn’t feel right. When the only love you’ve known has been a grueling marathon, the first rest in a plush patch of grass is not going to feel natural. 

He had to lace up his shoes, ignore the twisted ankle, and keep running.

He wondered if I thought about where we’d be in 6 months, how complicated it would become. I told him I was focused on the moment, but really, I think much larger than that. How would we feel in 10 years remembering how we let this feeling we’d never felt before pass without exploring it? I’d rather be hurt down the road after seeing it through than filled with regret for a summer in Paris with stones unturned, emotions unfelt, people unloved.

Things meant to hurt me tumbled out of his mouth - he seemed amused at his own perceived honesty. So careful with my physical wounds, so harsh with my mental ones. People are cruel when they’re afraid.

I laid in bed, listening to the sound of his voice melding with the countryside chatter downstairs, numb, staring at the ceiling. Watching a fire blaze through the garden we planted. Not the least bit surprised, but disappointed. Baby peonies and clovers ripped up at the root, not given the chance to bloom.

“That’s where we’re different,” I said. “We both know that this is a beautiful, rare thing. Life doesn’t grant you those very often. I choose to enjoy it. You can decide to overthink it to pieces, come up with flimsy reasons why it won’t work, and let it fall apart.” He replied that he’d have to live with the consequences - as if this was a report card to be repeated next semester, not our one and only shot at being alive.

I think about the boy who carved his name on that bedroom door, who grew into a man that talks about pushing himself and enduring through pain. I wish him so much more softness, the good things he deserves - and hope it doesn’t take him years to figure that out for himself.

You can’t save anyone from their own destructive patterns until they’re ready. Something I conveniently allowed myself to forget, even though I was the girl who self-sabotaged for ages. I can analyze the entire human species, yet not save myself from its pain. 

The sad thing is - this is a lesson I’ve been presented a handful of times in the last year. People closest to me disappearing.

The first case, a dear friend who was my favorite for a 6-hour-long philosophical conversation. We’d meet up in New York and Paris - dissecting our parallel paths, society, city life for hours, until the restaurants would close down for the night. One evening, we had made plans to see some live music with friends - she never showed up. It took me a month to assume something was wrong, noticing the string of blue texts. Finally, I asked if I had hurt her in some way - after hours of mental churning and coming up with nothing out of the ordinary.

That was last summer - I never heard from her again.

gazing up, always

The second, a best friend of many years. A small misunderstanding spiraled into months of not speaking, apologies, remedies, and eventually no responses. Someone who’d call me in their darkest moments - gone for the most intense of mine.

Knowing the reasons people run - difficult childhoods, avoidance, crushing responsibilities, unprocessed emotions - doesn’t make it any less painful when they do.

“Can I ask you something?” My therapist queried last week. 

“I’m curious where your rage goes. Sometimes when you tell me things happening in your life, I feel angry on your behalf, and you manage to be so casual about it. Where do you think that feeling is going?”

Friends had been echoing the same sentiment for years - remarking on my impenetrable nonchalance.

This brought to mind the fire I channeled at 15 - confronting boys in front of the class who said disturbing things, standing up for injustice constantly, discovering some twisted pleasure in being disagreeable. That blood-thumping adrenaline rush, foreign to me now.

I learned the lesson all women are forced to learn at some point - calm is power. All people ever want is a reaction. If you give it to them, you’ve lost in some imaginary game we all signed up for unknowingly.

That fiery girl was crushed so many times until she became a marble woman - the one to whom you hand your phone to rephrase a tricky work email or mediate a roommate conflict peacefully. A picture of diplomacy. 

I see myself in the mirror lately and feel surprised - smiling and dressed up while my soul feels bloodied and bruised - as if it took a swift tumble down the stairs.

My therapist is right.

I’m so, so tired of being the girl with the thread - the one to mend everything. The one to reach out, buy the birthday card, offer positive and hopeful words, empathize with people treating me like shit while I’m going through my own personal hell and somehow manage to avoid behaving like that. I’m exhausted.

I found myself on another operating table this week, woozy from anesthesia, falling in and out of sleep. Coffee arrived, and tears dripped down my face while I sipped it. I sat alone in the hospital room, suddenly remembering he wouldn’t be there to lie next to me this time. 

Now my body was black and blue, matching my insides. A contrast from 2 months before - healing at rapid speed, bathed in his light.

Isolated sans distraction for hours in this sterile cell, I remembered the abandoned worlds, co-created with these people who remain somehow dear to me despite their Irish exits. The tranquil cloudy sanctuary, the corner booth at Chez Jeannette, the dorm room plastered with collages. Once shining, now dusty with time passed by - purely saccharine things left to rot. I wander them alone often in my mind, reflecting on how things were and how I have done everything I could do. The type of endings that feel so unsatisfying - like a cable pulled from the TV 45 minutes into a film. Characters you still wonder about and yearn for.

Perhaps we all have our screen door people - the ones watching from afar that we hope one day will sheepishly appear with flowers or a handwritten note, claiming they forgot something, apologizing, nestling into conversation like things never shifted - polishing our sacred worlds, inhabiting them again together.

I fantasize about someone else being the person with the thread for once - reaching out first, acknowledging my importance and worth to them, determined to mend things. Seeing the benevolence I’ve fought tooth and nail to nourish as something to cherish, not test or take advantage of.

screenshotted

I deserve all the warmth I’m dishing out into the world. You do, too.

And if you’re the one screen-dooring someone - they want to hear from you. Just reach out - life is way too short and a little ego death is good for you. It’s never too late to fix things - your own anxiety is the only thing holding you back from the relationships you miss and crave.

Months later, I’d wander into a stationery shop in Le Marais and see it on the shelf - directly at my eyeline. A simple yet distinctive card - sketches of double stars. I took it home, hung it on my fridge - and never told him. I still think of my deep conversations with her fondly - her intelligence, drive, comforting lack of judgment. I can hear the collegiate laughs we shared echoing in my mind - the women we were before we grew up and apart. Things once shared between two, now simply my own.

All we have is this present moment. Be good to one another this summer. 

With a heart full of love for you all,

Em

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