This Woman Who I Loved

I’ve had trouble letting go of love; of the love I’ve felt which I shouldn’t have felt. Of the longing which kept throbbing inside my chest after every other piece of my heart had been broken. I longed for the woman who scarred the most intimate chambers of my individual soul, and I longed for her while she did it, and I longed for her while she walked away.

I always found it difficult to describe why I felt this way; to myself, to my family and friends. All of the people who cared about me were horrified or deeply saddened at seeing what I’d become, at seeing what had been done to me in the broad daylight of my youth. Nothing, in their eyes, could be worth all this pain. Nothing to love about this girl could ever be irreplaceable enough to cut apart myself the way I did, at her psychological duress, in front of the people and life I had always seemed to adore. Ultimately, these rational people were right, it had not been worth it. Yet I always found myself at a loss for words to explain precisely why. There was always more to the story than I had told them, more to the story than I had ever been able to explain even to my closest friend.

That’s because I was in love with more than this one girl. I was in love with more than her melliferous voice which I’ve blocked out from all but the most painfully nostalgic of nightmares. More than the particular way she pursed her lips when she was amused, the glaze over her eyes when she was afraid, and the oscillation of her head when she was excited. I was in love with more than the lushness of her hair, the fullness of her tongue, the sway of her hips, and the velvet of her thighs. More than the slant of her eyelashes, the point of her fingers, the caress of her chest, and the unique guile of her style. I was in love with more than the blanket of safety I felt within her room, swathed under her covers and staring deep into the windows of her soul. More than the architecture of the house where she lived, a beautiful church whose memories you could hear creaking through the floorboards, stretching back through centuries of urbanity. No, it was so much more than that. I loved her mother, the both of them. The woman who had given birth to her and the woman who had raised her since she was a little girl. I loved her dog, a chocolaty black lab whose affections had not been easy to earn, but had been obtained through months of attention and genuine care.

It was so hard to let go of my love for her because I was not in love with only with one girl and the curvature of her smile. I was in love with the breadth of her life; quite literally with the contours of the world she inhabited which stretched from the rolling continents of the exotic beyond to the familiar cafe which I’d never bothered to enter, but was more homely to her than the lines which ran across her palm. I was in love with the teeming metropolitan block upon which she lived, and the countless lives one could watch streaming past from its shore. I was in love with the Chinese restaurant which opened across the street, the taco place only a few minutes walk away, and the movie theater which I fondly remembered frequenting with my grandmother as a little boy, which became the site of our first date. I was in the love with the way streetlights bounced from the moistened concrete of her barrio when it rained, and the myriad glistening reflections these lights illuminated with their tropical colors, pressing stubbornly against the inky blackness of night.

More than that I was in love with all the magical doors which opened with her as their key. The meditative quiet outside her therapist’s office, the towering sophistication one glimpsed from the window outside her dentist’s. The walk along the water on the west side highway, where I could watch the sun set against the Jersey skyline in her longing eyes. The walk to this place may have been the thing I enjoyed most of all, a journey through a corner of the city which sang to me in my mother’s memories and yet I had never truly known for my own, until this girl waded into my life. I was in love with the wind which nipped my cheeks, even the seaside chill which allowed me to wrap my jacket over her gingerbread shoulders. With her at my side, the black and white city where I lived came alive in coruscating color. The Chinatown I had adored as a little boy became our Chinatown. I was in love with what she did to my palate. The divine smell of sauce sodden chicken which sparked our eyes as one, the delicious taste of dumplings which I brought to her door to woo her, and the novel allure of perfect mozzarella over bread which we sunk our teeth into at the same time. With her I tried Ethiopian food for the first time and welcomed its flavors into my heart. The iconic savor of injera, the delicious prick of berbere, the soft goodness of shiro, and the meaty tenderness of tibs. As much as I try to push it away, her memory hangs like a phantom over these varied flavors bringing a near unbearable sentiment of forfeiture over my soul every time their scents waft across my nose. I brought her into my childhood home and slept beside her in my childhood bed. I took her to the pizzeria where I made some of my fondest memories, the park where I frolicked as a little boy, and the pier which I remember staring off from before I had any clue what lay at the other side. I kissed her on the old bridge spanning my beloved befouled canal, and I locked her lips with mine under the shadow of the Brooklyn bridge’s spires, with the skyline looming in the distance above my favorite view of the harbor. I allowed her caramel colored fingers to touch every crevice of my disembodied existence and when they were gone, I could barely remember my sentimental skin without them.

I cried a river at her betrayal because our time together had been so profound. I had filed a multitude of my most precious memories under her name in the annals of my soul, and could not imagine how I could reach them without her beside me. She had been the key to those magical doors, which inflamed and flung open the most passionate corners of my heart. I had not loved only this one girl, I had loved her entire life. I had loved every chapter of her story from the first page. From the moment she was welcomed into the world far away in Ethiopia to the moment I laid eyes on her, to every chapter I speculated would come after. My love for her was not hinged upon my presence in her life, much of it existed entirely outside of it. I loved everything that she had been and everything I dreamed she would become. The woman who began to sprout before my eyes from the ardor of her desires, the artifice of her parlance, and the zeal of her convictions.

And yet, this woman who had become my closest friend betrayed me. She cast aside what I thought had been our love for each other and spoke of it as if it had been nothing more than a brief mistake. She hurt me, again and again, and she farmed my insecurities to turn them against me when I was at my lowest low. She treated this chapter of my life, where black and white had turned to color, like nothing more than a daydream. In the face of her disbelief, I was no longer sure what was real. My very definition of the genuine was perverted by her gaze into a mirage, and as my oasis turned to sand before my eyes, I could think of nowhere else to go.

That is the place at which she left me. That hole is the darkness from which I rescued myself.