While I was walking across the UMKC campus on Friday, I was washed over by a wave of old memories. I've become used to this happening over the last 5 or so years, my memories once lost to the trauma of cancer, a bad break up and terminating a pregnancy find their way home. They bubble up in multiples, I'm unable to fight them, nor am I sure I want to. I keep hoping one of those memories will give me something to hold on to...whether it's the chance to push off from the dock again, or a chance to find another finger hold in the mountain of love.
But this batch was incredible. I remembered that every day I waited for Raj outside the Urban Studies building at Cleveland State, everyday he was late for one reason or another. It used to drive me crazy: lateness is rude, especially if it happens all the time. But he said he was sorry every single time he was late. He never once used his persistent tardiness as a way to abuse me waiting for him. And everyday I would squeeze him, breathe him in for a moment. Sometimes that moment was too fast, because I was angry he'd made me wait or I was late for something. But I did it everyday as well. Even when I didn't think he deserved it or I didn't have time.
These actions of friendship, they are the anchors of love. I love Raj. I have always loved him. But love is not born from ritualistic patterns of behaviour. It's not because we did this so many times for each other in consistent ways that we love. No...we did those things because even if at that moment in time love was not in our friendship's vocabulary, it would be some day.
Our destiny is written in our actions.
This is a philosophy. I often write as if I possess some secret truth about life, applicable to everyone who may encounter it. Indeed people have told me I have unique insight into people. But in this case I am quite sure that this is a philosophy. It's not a truth.
I know this because I know one man to whom this does not apply. One is all it takes to undo a theory. There are parts of him which react this way. When someone reaches for his hand, he takes it. Kisses his mouth, he feels it, kisses back. Someone shifts in bed next to him, he reaches for her, holds her as she tries to slip away in the pre-dawn hours.
But he's not aware that his body is still reacting to this truth the way his mind refuses to.
I cannot teach him this.
I do not know how.
And even if I did, he would resist it as he has resisted all change in recent years.
I know he thinks he doesn't care that she loves him. But a part of him does, a part of him aches for her, or maybe for anyone. Life is not like a movie, though. No revelation makes a man run in the rain for three miles to a woman who has pounded on his heart too many times.
It's too easy to say that life is full of painful lessons, only people who have not encountered ones they think they may not survive can say that. Our only job is to survive them, not to build some philosophy about it. It's time to put away the words and just exist. No words will comfort us when these unavoidable life lessons, these truths, encounter us as we walk along our destined paths.
Words are painfully useless in the face of watching what we thought was the story of our lives be incinerated by life itself.