31- Comes from within

31- Comes from within

But then I’d had a revelatory conversation with my mother, not long before I’d left for Rome. She’d come into New York to have one last lunch with me, and she’d asked me frankly—breaking all the rules of communication in our family’s history—what had happened between me and David. Further disregarding the Gilbert Family Standard Communications Rule-book, I actually told her. I told her everything. I told her how much I loved David, but how lonely and heartsick it made me to be with this person who was always disappearing from the room, from the bed, from the planet.
“He sounds kind of like your father,” she said. A brave and generous admission.
“The problem is,” I said, “I’m not like my mother. I’m not as tough as you, Mom. There’s a constant level of closeness that I really need from the person I love. I wish I could be more like you, then I could have this love story with David. But it just destroys me to not be able to count on that affection when I need it.”
Then my mother shocked me. She said, “All those things that you want from your relation- ship, Mary? I have always wanted those things, too.”
In that moment, it was as if my strong mother reached across the table, opened her fist and finally showed me the handful of bullets she’d had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she is happily married, all considerations weighed) to my father. I had never seen this side of her before, not ever. I had never imagined what she might have wanted, what she might have been missing, what she might have decided not to fight for in the larger scheme of things. Seeing all this, I could feel my worldview start to make a radical shift.

If even she wants what I want, then . . .?

Continuing with this unprecedented string of intimacies, my mother said, “You have to un- derstand how little I was raised to expect that I deserved in life, honey. Remember—I come from a different time and place than you do.”
I closed my eyes and saw my mother, ten years old on the family farm in Minnesota, work- ing like a hired hand, raising her younger brothers, wearing the clothes of her older sister, saving dimes to get herself out of there . . .

“And you have to understand how much I love your father,” she concluded.
My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices are massive—a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has ex- tended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength. Maybe some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too—but who amongst us lives without sacrifice?
And the question now for me is, What are my choices to be? What do I believe that I de- serve in this life? Where can I accept sacrifice, and where can I not? It has been so hard for me to imagine living a life without David in it. Even just to imagine that there will never be an- other road trip with my favorite traveling companion, that I will never again pull up at his curb with the windows down and Springsteen playing on the radio, a lifetime supply of banter and snacks between us, and an ocean destination looming down the highway. But how can I ac- cept that bliss when it comes with this dark underside—bone-crushing isolation, corrosive in- security, insidious resentment and, of course, the complete dismantling of self that inevitably occurs when David ceases to giveth, and commences to taketh away. I can’t do it anymore. Something about my recent joy in Naples has made me certain that I not only can find happi- ness without David, but must. No matter how much I love him (and I do love him, in stupid ex- cess), I have to say goodbye to this person now. And I have to make it stick.

So I write him an e-mail.
It’s November. We haven’t had any communication since July. I’d asked him not to get in touch with me while I was traveling, knowing that my attachment to him was so strong it would be impossible for me to focus on my journey if I were also tracking his. But now I’m entering his life again with this e-mail.
I tell him that I hope he’s well, and I report that I am well. I make a few jokes. We always were good with the jokes. Then I explain that I think we need to put an end to this relationship for good. That maybe it’s time to admit that it will never happen, that it should never happen. The note isn’t overly dramatic. Lord knows we’ve had enough drama together already. I keep it short and simple. But there’s one more thing I need to add. Holding my breath, I type, “If you want to look for another partner in your life, of course you have nothing but my blessings.” My hands are shaking. I sign off with love, trying to keep as cheerful a tone as possible.
I feel like I just got hit in the chest with a stick.

I don’t sleep much that night, imagining him reading my words. I run back to the Internet café a few times throughout the next day, looking for a response. I’m trying to ignore the part of me that is dying to find that he has replied: “COME BACK! DON’T GO! I’LL CHANGE!” I’m trying to disregard the girl in me who would happily drop this whole grand idea of traveling

around the world in simple exchange for the keys to David’s apartment. But around ten o’clock that night, I finally get my answer. A wonderfully written e-mail, of course. David al- ways wrote wonderfully. He agrees that, yes, it’s time we really said good-bye forever. He’s been thinking along the same lines himself, he says. He couldn’t be more gracious in his re- sponse, and he shares his own feelings of loss and regret with that high tenderness he was sometimes so achingly capable of reaching. He hopes that I know how much he adores me, beyond even his ability to find words to express it. “But we are not what the other one needs,” he says. Still, he is certain that I will find great love in my life someday. He’s sure of it. After all, he says, “beauty attracts beauty.”