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When I moved to Brooklyn, I brought next to nothing with me—my clothes, some favorite belongings, a broken heart, an ache, and some hope. I was looking for healing. I was hurt and halved and angry and afraid and high-tailing it out of there. I was lonely, but I was in one piece. I had two friends who had listened to me and heard me and held me in their hearts as my wife and I separated. They lived 3,000 and 300 miles away, and I thought at that moment that those distances, and those two friends, were enough. I didn’t realize at that moment that it was possible for me to have, or deserve, a life. In Brooklyn, all I wanted to do was to retreat.
I was a contractor; I could build things. I rented an apartment in a building that looked forlorn to me. I was afraid it was a roach- and vermin-infested shithole, but in a moment of courage and plunge-taking, I signed the lease and proceeded to spend a small fortune of what seemed like play-money—a symptom, among others, of the dream-world I was living in at the time, for another story—from my contracting business to make it livable, cozy, and useful for my needs.
From that shitty, slanted, depressing four-room flat in an unprepossessing brick rowhouse that contained one other apartment and a 24-hour deli, I created my retreat. I rewired old electrical work and I dropped ceilings, I re-piped rotting plumbing in the kitchen, I installed tile and Ikea cabinets and stone countertops left over from two different jobs, and a sink from a third and a ridiculously expensive bathroom light fixture from a fourth; I bought the cheapest possible knotty pine flooring and installed it over the plastic laminate fake wood-grain flooring that someone had put in before me, I plastered and reconfigured openings and moved doorways and painted everything in a luscious, clean, innocent, forgiving and forgiven white to create a nice living space, light streaming through the east- and west-facing windows, a bedroom for my soon-to-be college-aged daughter, and a studio for me to paint in.
I bought new sets of pans, and dishes, and knives, and glasses, I bought linens and a Japanese teapot, napkins, and cheap candlesticks—things I took without asking that I had bought during our marriage that she had never liked—and rededicated them to usefulness. I installed shelving from the studio I would soon give up, and stone counters and medicine cabinets and closet shelving from different jobs, and a French door missing one pane that I found on the street, and eventually, after I had exhausted my money and every possible reason for delaying the move, I trucked over every stick of extra furniture we had and some other things I had found discarded on the street and had been collecting for months, and then I loaded my car with black garbage bags filled with clothes and a dozen boxes filled with books and favorite pieces of old cracked pottery and the seashells and scumbled, unexceptional rocks and scraps of wood that have always found their way into my hands like bits of iron pulled by a magnet, and I moved in.
It was spring, and I felt peaceful. I loved waking up in the morning. I felt safe, and I wanted to stay in. I made myself breakfast, I made myself dinner, I watched old movies, I masturbated without guilt. I drank wine. I slept on my own sheets and pillows. I re-read a dozen favorite books. I was in full retreat, and in retreat I sought only that which comforted. I cooked the food I used to make: stew, soup, muffins, banana bread, chili, lemon-poppyseed tea loaf. I watched movies I’d watched as a kid, listened to songs I’d sung a million times. I didn’t want anything new in my life. I just wanted to be alone; and being alone, I could let myself slip into the deep end of the feelings that I had been trying to keep from drowning in for the last several years of living with my wife: loss, bewilderment, betrayal, deep disappointment, failure, spite, worthlessness, uselessness, rejection, self-righteousness. I cried a lot.
I felt afraid. I would fall asleep on the couch in the afternoon watching old black and white movies, and when I awoke, I would think that I was in my old living room, and would weep anew to realize that I was alone, and that my daughter wouldn’t be coming in the door, and that my wife wasn’t somewhere else in the apartment. I was really, truly, alone. There was no hand coming to stroke my hair, no smile, no brushing of lips on skin like there had been for so many years. No heartbeat, no breath but my own. My life was full of emptiness, and empty of anything else.
In the full paradox of endings and new beginnings, I loved the endless hours that were mine alone to spend as I chose. I loved going grocery shopping. I loved coming home, opening the door and stepping into the apartment after having been away for the day at work. I absolutely adored being at home. I loved the light streaming in through my window in the morning when I woke, and I loved the sunset that I saw through my kitchen window at night. I loved sitting on my couch when I came home, a couch that I actually hated and that was the ugliest and most uncomfortable piece of furniture in the apartment. I loved taking baths. I loved the hideous green tile and clashing green tub in the bathroom. I loved cooking, shopping, hanging pictures and hanging hooks for clothing here and there. I loved looking out the windows. I loved sitting on the fire escape watching the sun go down with a glass of wine. I loved rediscovering myself, and I think I that I began to understand at that time that I could really learn to love myself.
Along with all of that I also spent a lot of time with tears in my eyes or with the dried trails of tears on my cheeks, or with hooded, red eyes and a sullen wounded demeanor, the hood of my sweatshirt (which she had bought me as a Christmas present a few years ago—if only she could have known that I would end up using it to protect myself from the pain that accompanied our parting!) pulled up so that I felt like I was in a safe, protective cocoon, all the world blocked out except for what was right before of my eyes. My daughter hated it when I pulled up my hood, either for all that it signified or because I looked ridiculous; I don’t know which, nor does it matter.
As much as I loved being home, I felt like something had been amputated, that I was nothing and that I belonged nowhere as far as the world was concerned. In my diminished state—the state of being a man without a family, a rejected man—I longed to belong somewhere. I longed for someone to know my name. One night I went into a neighborhood wine bar, and made some friends. The owners, a couple, were related to a contracting customer of mine. The bartender became my buddy. I felt immense gratitude after that night because whenever I walked in someone said hello to me, and I was able to pass a sweet hour or two talking among people who treated me kindly, even if it was just the kindness bestowed on a customer-friend. The people at that bar were the first people who knew me as myself, not part of a couple, and not part of a failed couple. Not a loser, not a failure.
They only knew of my story what I shared, which to be honest was plenty—I don’t know how to moderate myself, nor do I care to, and I enjoyed seeing how it felt to be my flawed, defenseless self; I enjoyed walking in when I wanted and leaving when I wanted, and only a small part of me wondered if they thought I was pathetic, an old single guy with no prospects. The truth is I was friendless—my 300-mile friend and I had fallen out, and my 3,000-mile friend, who had moved to California five years before, died suddenly on the other side of the continent before he could visit me in my new apartment. I was even more alone than when I had moved to Brooklyn, and I felt like I just wanted to belong somewhere, and if it was only for an hour or two a couple of times a week that was okay.
When, eventually, I started to date I believed I was an invisible man, and my wish was simple: I just wanted to be seen, to register in someone else’s eyesight. I wanted to know that someone could find me worthwhile, desirable. Attractive. I know now that I set the bar low, but at the time it was what I needed, and it was all I could muster. Baby steps. I needed to be held, and I’m grateful to the women I met at that time who saw something in me that they wanted to hold, which at the time I couldn’t see in myself.
After a while I knew that it wasn’t enough merely to be seen and held, and to merely see and hold, but that there was the possibility, and the invitation, to live more fully again, to be whole. I felt a yearning to be alive again, and in the perfectly unexpected grace that can make life feel so flawless, I met someone whose existence changed my life. I love her. She bids me to go where I feared, and to treat myself and the world with kindness, to embrace my best and my weakest selves and to recognize that they’re the same self, and to love with all my heart.
She said last night that she loves herself when she sees herself reflected in my eyes, and I understand her, for I love myself when I see myself reflected in her eyes. How is that possible, given that when I came to Brooklyn three years ago, I was in full retreat?
It must be that we grow, and grow, and grow. We love. We become. It takes a long time, and we never stop becoming. I read the other day in a novel that it takes Jupiter twenty-nine years to come back to the spot in the sky that it occupied on the day that you were born, and that this trajectory is a cycle of sorts, a life-cycle. I don’t know if it’s really true, but as I try to recall the universe on the brilliant September day that I got married—twenty-nine years ago, when I was twenty-nine years old—I imagine Jupiter veiled by sunlight, slipping quietly into place among the spheres and whispering this celestial thought to me across the cosmos: Kent, Kent, life begins, life begins, life begins.
And oddly I’ve been noticing Jupiter in the sky all year long—it’s in the night sky that I see from my fire escape in Brooklyn, and it’s there in the sky in my beloved’s back yard too, it was there in the deep sky in Florida earlier this year as she and her parents and I gazed heavenward, and it’s also in the same deep sky that settles over the cottage in the mountains that we share. And as I look at Jupiter in all of the skies that I see, I hear myself, at fifty-eight, whispering to myself, in surprise, in peace, in acceptance: I’m here, and I’m ready for what comes next—let it begin.
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Photo credit: NeONBRAND