Valuable Objects

It's an autumn night. He is on his knees in front of me. "I'm sorry. I just don't love you," I say. And I wish I could.

"Why?" He spent months nurturing a friendship with an aim. Mistaking careful predation for kindness, I had trusted him to be honest.

"I was lonely." He already knew. Studied me like an entomologist with long metal pins sticking in my vulnerable points. "I shouldn't have." He made a decoy from the sawdust scraps of things I wrote. "I'm sorry."

We pass time. The usual trappings. Movies and late nights. His is the tenderness of people petting feral things. He tries to indebt me with guilt and pleasure. I'm not a buyable girl. None of it is sincere. Giving to get back. And all the time passes.

My friends get upset at me for tiring of my endless vigils for something authentic. I'm tired. What is the point of all this loneliness? My twenties gone waiting for a love that would never come back. An iron maiden devotion. Alicia calls; Gabe protests. "If you don't believe in love, Cristina… It's not in you to settle." I'm not here to be lonely as some figurehead of impossible things. I want to be taken up. What if it never comes again?

My attempt at compromise comes to a breaking point.

"I could love you," he says. A Trojan horse of poison gifts. For a cost. Instead of loving me for all my mosaic parts and crushed tiles, he will break me so that I can be made again with his hands. I've done this before.

"No. You need me. But you give me nothing of your self to love." We never talk. He contrives who he thinks I want, avoiding arguments and always hiding insecurities in transparent disguises. There is no point. No way to read beyond his pretenses.

"How can I show you myself if I don't feel safe?" He accuses.

"I'm not sure what you expect me to love if you're just pretending to be something you think I want." I defend. No guilt.

He wants my insecurity. I want someone that isn't trying to knock me down. His love is about returns. And I know that he doesn't love me unless he can gain.

We break up and there is nothing to miss. No one that was ever present. All feelings contrived. Actions of manipulation. Love is not a Machiavellian concept.

It isn't any different than times before. My current chastity is only an end-point of my fatigue and disappointment. Dull interests. Wealthy men that mistake romance for ownership. Poor men that mistake entitlement for romance. Jealousy. Lies. Dissemblance. Who am I to love from if I am not my own?

It takes me back.

He was my transition from abusive love to loveless sex. Orchids and expensive dinners. Good drugs. Mind-blowing orgasms. He had washed my hair like I was a china doll and touted me through parties like a talisman. It was my first taste of reverence. And it was narcotic compared to the constant stream of insults and punishment. But I still felt lonely next to him. Or when I opened my mouth. Always telling me how to dress and what to say. Constantly trying to dominate me, like we are enemies.

Eleven years ago:

"I'm falling in love with you," he says.

I feel guilty, but this feels wrong. "I strongly don't recommend that." I can't be present next to him. He wanted to replace every dream and opinion that wasn't his own. Men make figures of gods, so that they can feel the power of creating what they pretend to worship. Never humble. Never apolgizing. No compassion when you are only a possession. All these surfaces will fail with time.

The following year, we come together at a party.

He walks me to my car, "It's good to see you."

"It's good to see you, too." I mean this sincerely.

"You know, I still think about you all the time."

"Then why did you always put me down? You said you love me, but why?"

"I've never met anyone like you." I feel like one of the Sultan of Brunei's custom vehicles, thumbless and ugly pretty.

"There are lots of people you have never met anyone like. You'll find someone else." His fiance is watching us from the door to the VIP tent, chewing on her fingers. "You don't really love me…" I say goodbye.

We connect over the years. A random email here. A conversation there. Maybe he will learn why and stop trying to quash it. I go to parties occasionally, check out his art. Love me despite myself.

Ten years later we lean against the stove in my apartment. A pomegranate and some absinthe open on the counter next to us. We stand there watching people, talking. I am happy to see him. He was, afterall, the first man that treated me well in bed. I feel thankful for this. I had thought before that I wasn't made for sex, just as I secretly wonder if I am made for love.

"I'm surprised you came by yourself." I tell him. "I thought you would be married by now."

"Why would you think that?" He chuckles with that funny indignation he gets.

"I don't know. Every time I've seen you over the years, you've been engaged or in a serious relationship. I just thought…"

"I've only been engaged twice." But he is never single. "The last time, was five years ago."

"Oh, well that was the last time I saw you."

"I know. I broke off the engagement after seeing you." We're back in that parking lot. And I am angry that he claims to want rare things while keeping women like horses waiting in the eves. I feel his fiance watching me. He only wants me because he can't understand.

"Why?"

"Because I love you, Christina. I always have."

That night, I have to explain to him that I've never loved him again, pushing him off of me with unappreciated force. No longer willing to feed my deprivation with ersatz affection. And I do feel bad, because this is what he knows of love.

We go to lunch. I try and find words. "Nothing's changed," I tell him.

"You said I would find someone else that was nothing like anyone else, but I haven't."

"I'm sorry. But I don't want to be something strange. That's lonely. You've never understood me..."

"But I think you're amazing. I don't understand Sanskrit, but I think it's beautiful." And this is exactly the point. I don't want to be Sanskrit or beautiful in this mummified veneration. I want to be alive. My passion met. An equal full unto themself, churing with emotion. I want a language that can be spoken mouth to mouth and through hands. I want to touch and not just be some reliquary box to be plundered and put in a museum. "I would take care of you."

"I don't want to be taken care of that way."

And these moments go through my head.

I think of my apartment in Oakland and the small notes written into books and on scraps of paper, "Te iubesc, dragosta mia." This place I trust myself in. Waking up and getting us juice and his oversweet coffee and awfully bad croissants to surprise him.

More than blacksand beaches promised by other men, I think of a plate of cut up fruit and the glass of water my ex would get me while I slept. My cold feet on his legs as I curled into him. The soft smile randomly as we worked separately on different tasks. Sharing space. Playing video games. The bemused understanding when I would wake up full of thoughts and not have him tell me to come back to bed. Or how he would patiently kiss me when I woke him to say "I love you" as I left for work. And all my language made sense. No way to lie. I held every secret and observation like a last breath in my heart. How infinite we felt.

And even today, we argue a little in that way he has of calming me when I don't think I need to be calm. I have done something wrong. Hurt someone. Overstepped and damaged another that I was supposed to love.

"Breathe," he says, telling me I am not my fears or the demons I dread. Never need more than you love. A tight fist kills gentle things. Let go.

I am calm, dredging the deeps where my carelessness seeds.

I don't understand love that tries to eradicate what it claims to exalt. It should humble rather than destroy its muse. Artful, nurturing, and egoless love. Sometimes apologies are not enough and you have to say goodbye for the good of the other. Unconditional. Full of growth. Love whether near or afar. I want to feel my skin stretch. And learn. Every action an integration. It makes sense that love and sex overlap so much. There is nothing quite as vulnerable, or easily corrupted. Making or taking. Is it a conspiracy or a coup that carries in this openness?

We must be careful what we love and what we allow love to become.