Soul Mates aren’t always what we assume. Sometimes two people can share everything and nothing at all.
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We were in grad school when we met, and Robert tells the story, how he saw God in my eyes, no mask or refracted speech, just raw, unharnessed energy. I knew him also as an immediate spirit, someone I wouldn’t have to explain things to, someone who understood the wonder that was my open secret. Here was a compadre I would not have to convince of the world of Original Perception.
But we were far from whole, each bearing his own fracture for surviving narcissistic parents and each sputtering and steaming at the need to be of this world. Both of us were addicts; internally addicted to the Absolute Nature of Things, and externally addicted to whatever could soothe our pain at living in the world. For Robert it was drinking. He is recovering. For me it was making. I am a make-aholic. He was driven to drink to flee a relentless sense of never measuring up, while I was driven to make and achieve to alleviate the oppressive nothingness of
not being loved. But these are common maladies, which is why I bother to address them.
There were many thrilling moments, including the warm spring afternoon he introduced me to the poetry of Pablo Neruda. We were sitting on a grassy hill at the edge of the university when he began to read the rhythms of a voice I’d never heard but always known. I took the book, which he had borrowed, and wouldn’t let it go for over a year. In those days, we gathered in the name of poetry, not yet ready to throw away the costume of art and simply be in God, though Robert was always closer to simply being than me.
These were the most desperate times because we had no idea that we were desperate.
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But always at the end of our triumphs, in the glow of our pirated moments of the Infinite, he would trudge up his driveway in the dark as I dropped him off, wait till I was out of sight, and
slink back out to the nearest bar. Likewise, I would simmer my way home and sit in the dark at my desk, as my wife slept, trying to capture where we’d been, scribbling furiously, making, making, making, as if the words could keep the threshold open a bit longer.
Once out of each other’s sight, we were drinking and making. He would twist lit butts in tablecloths and want to eat lightning. I would pound coffee and write all night long. These were the most desperate times because we had no idea that we were desperate.
It was late in May of ’87 that we embarked on grand explorations that would forever crack our world. I was going for seventeen days to Rome and Florence, the final trip of making after working ten years on an epic poem. Ironically, though I’d tried to go for years, I was only able to go when the book was finished. I asked Robert to join me, but he balked and wound up fishing for a week in Canada with all his high school drinking buddies. Neither of us could know we were saturating our addictive selves with adventures that would change everything and which we had to undertake alone.
We were all naked, raw, fighting for our lives, and the costume of art became cumbersome and weighty.
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Robert entered a nothingness darker than he’d ever known, sitting in a fishing shack in the woods, drinking whatever was handy, eating nothing, dreaming nothing, hating nothing; while I began to surface in the ruins of the Roman Forum as if waking from a ten-year binge of making. On his way home, driving the thruway, Robert lost feeling in his hands and feet. It was the beginning of neuropathy, nerve damage that affects the extremities of long-term alcoholics. As he drove the highway, feeling draining from his limbs, I was sitting on the Spanish Steps in Rome, a lump forming on my head that I was unaware of, while, also unknown to me, my former wife was being diagnosed across the Atlantic with cervical cancer.
As my wife and I went through months of diagnosis and testing, discovering we had cancer at the same time, Robert was going through intensive detox, getting sober to his core. We were all naked, raw, fighting for our lives, and the costume of art became cumbersome and weighty.
The very cords of my body were saying, “No more.”
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About two years into his sobriety, my cancer had festered in a rib in my back, and after surgery to remove that rib, I was faced with months of chemo. In my last treatment, when I was hairless and pale, my veins had gone stiff, resisting the needles. The very cords of my body were saying, “No more.” The dearest nurse had tried four times, and none of my darkened limbs would receive the injection well. I was sweating way inside, could feel a distant uncontrollable terror starting up like a scream on horseback galloping for me, its voice honing in before it could be seen. Robert took my hand and began to rub my forearm as they tried again. This time it took, though it felt raw and prickly like a stinger left in its wound. They began to drip the chemicals, and I felt that this was purgatory, neither dead nor alive but perversely forced by a cornered choice to take in drops of poison to cleanse a sickness that was growing, though it couldn’t be seen.
Within days, I lost feeling in my hands and toes. Ironically, the chemo had started to eat at my nerves, leaving me with the numbness of my brother. We both now had neuropathy. This
brought an end to the chemo. It was summer, and in the weeks that followed, Robert and I would pick at sandwiches in the sun on a bench in downtown Albany, letting the light warm our
nerveless hands.
It was there that suddenly, beyond the crisis, he looked into my very core and said, “I have your cancer,” and I realized he had cut all boundary between us, so great was his love. We gripped each other’s weary hands, the ends tingling with a new aura of numbness, and I said, “And I’m an alcoholic.”
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Adapted from Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness by Mark Nepo. Copyright © 2015 by Mark Nepo. To be published in November 2015 by Sounds True.
Photo Credit: Leticia Bertin /flickr