The End of the End

I'm still caught off-guard by my fantasies of her. I don't indulge them, so they come sneaking around when I'm not expecting them. They're like guerillas, an insurgency in my own mind, explosive, debilitating, hidden in the commonplace.

Last week I was walking to my office when one of these car-bombs of the heart went off. There's a footbridge spanning the foyer of my building. As I walk along it, my eyes are naturally drawn to the glass wall of the main entrance-it's three stories tall, the next best thing to having no wall at all. And she walked through its doors, instantly catching my gaze, stopping short the way one does after having found something expected to be sought for a much longer time. She said, "Hey," the way she always had, with the same unquestioned intimacy.

And then I came to my senses. The actual girl who had entered passed below me, unseeing and oblivious to my hallucination, as I gripped the rail of the bridge. It was shockingly real to me, fantasy trailing into reality, some dream that was not so quick to fade once my eyes were open.

And like a dream too long remembered into day, her image plagued me. As I sat in my office struggling with statistics, I daydreamed of her. I heard her familiar "Hey" from the open door behind me. I spun in my chair to find her with that familiar glee in her eyes, having sneaked up on me and seeing how easily she had distracted me from my work. Beautiful in her typical dishevelment, collapsing as if exhausted into a nearby chair, inches from snaking her loving arms around my neck.

Before I can invite her to do so, someone passes by my open door, intruding on the dream; an interloper here where I am happy, Search and Rescue from reality. Damn him. This happened several times that day, and though I try to convince myself it is merely because statistical problem-solving is so mind-numbingly boring that anything would be better to think about, I know in my gut that there are other reasons.

Being in love is wonderful. It is a moment that seems endless, an all-encompassing now, the eternal present. It seems to know no bounds, the thought of love continuing into the vast infinite future like the cosmos itself. It's big, unimaginably vast, irreconcilably ongoing, stretching out forever and ever, and unlike those impassable voids between the stars, it makes life feel less lonely.

But that's the illusion. The time we spend together is finite, fleeting, and once gone, as uncatchable as Atalanta ever was. I lack any golden apples to tempt her into slowing. She's gone, faded, diffused like the morning's mist in the noon-day sun.

And there's the rub-this paradox of love, a catch-22 more damnable than any army stipulation, just as insensible but twice as cruel, this lingering memory of what was and what is no more. Because there is no end to the end, as there was to the beginning. The beginning of our love passed into the present of our togetherness. And then that present ended. Our relationship ended, my time with her ended. But the end of all that goes on and on.

Just the other day, a song came on over the radio as I drove home. It's a long drive, an hour's commute from there to here. The song reminded me of her, and for a few sweet moments I felt her presence. While we had been together, I felt connected to her, psychically, almost a telepathic rapport. I never felt alone.

As the song played, I sang-loudly. I raised my voice above the noise of the open window, the din of its sixty-mile-an-hour wind. I sang to her. As I did so, I felt her in my mind, the familiar and welcome presence of her spirit snaking around my soul. I knew she was thinking about me at that exact moment, all the miles between us gone, all the time passed since us swallowed up in the now of that moment. I told her I missed her.

Of course, that's silly. It's my own longing just resurfacing, the flotsam on the river of my mind distracting me from my concentration, my zen. The art of zen is not mystical, but practical, and that is why no one really understands it. Zen tells us not to take any bullshit, especially from oneself. And so I redoubled my efforts, I said my koan, I counted my breaths. Zen asks, "who's in charge of you? You, or something else?"

And I answer that I am in charge, I won't take no bullshit off myself. It's unproductive to dwell on the past. You can't change the past. Zen is the eternal now-yesterday is gone: forget it. Tomorrow never comes: don't worry about it. Today, you can make a difference.

Shakespeare's play is a misnomer. Everyday I suffer the labor of love lost. It's like being in Alcoholics Anonymous. I won't think about her today. I don't know about tomorrow, but I am not going to think about being in love with her today.

"My name's Joaquin, and I'm in love."

(Hi, Joaquin!)

"It's been 829 days since I was with her."

 

Joaquin Torrans