Ties That Blind

The biggest lesson I brought out of the conversations and relations at Burning Man ... Well, there were two.

One, that I won’t mess around. I already knew that but thought that going to the big party after having explicitly decided and announced I was moving out would make a difference, and maybe I’d get me a nice playa girlfriend. Lots of people hook up just for the week and I assumed I’d have a chance to as well. And you might say I did if you interpret certain things just so. But I didn’t, really. By the halfway point, when I was nicely acquainted with my campmates and my wife had arrived and I had made an idiot of myself one bright stoned morning, I knew there were going to be no hook-ups for old Donnio. And I was fine with that. It was a decision based on the knowledge that I wasn’t ready.

Two, and much more significant, was the knowledge that the major thing that holds me to my wife -- besides a certain undying love and the fact that there is a part of my heart no one else will ever touch, a part that she will own forever, as is I think the case with every love affair that doesn’t last a lifetime, we just don’t always recognize it, indeed we try to deny it and overwrite that heart-part with the love of someone new, but it never really takes -- the thing that holds me to her above all else is the instinct and desire to protect her from harm. The greatest harm I found myself protecting her from was the experience of seeing me getting involved with other women. As soon as she arrived and underwent her temporary but somewhat destructive freak-out, I pulled back into my shell and pretty much kept to myself. Endured her presence and undertook to enjoy the remaining time without romance and shrugged off the distracting haze of eros that’s nearly as pervasive as the dust. From then on if conversations drifted in that direction I accepted my emotional responses and with tears explained I was finally learning I had to let go, that I could no longer protect her, that if I’m not all in then I really do need to walk away from the table completely, my heart’s flesh ripping as I do. And hers. And the process is far from finished.

And so I’m pretty sure it was a blinding reaction and not an eye-opening moment of truth when last night we found ourselves wrapped tight in one another’s arms bawling our eyes out over not wanting to end this thing. I don’t want to go, I don’t want you to go, etc. Of course it’s to be expected that the emotions will sharpen now that the house is nearly empty, now that I am taking concrete steps to get out. But it was not leaving or ending this thing or thought of living without her that set me to such grief. It was something she said, a simple thing.

We built a big house on a big lot and for years it was filled with light and children and friends and laughter. But when it’s empty, it scares her. When I traveled on business, she would let the dog sleep by her bed, or at least outside the back door (we never had indoor animals). Now that the boys are gone away to school, she looks at the big place, imagines it without me; and her eyes fill with tears, and the little girl I also fell in love with shows on her face, and she is scared and says, tears flowing, in a little voice, “I don’t want to be here by myself.”

And I don’t want her to be there by herself, I don’t want her scared. I want her safe and warm and happy. And that is why we had to cram ourselves together into a tiny space like two small animals hiding from a raging storm and grieve and grieve and grieve. She was the general contractor for the house, and it is a point of pride and accomplishment for her that she did this thing no one else in her family ever did, she designed and built a big house to live in; and now she has to say, “I didn’t build this place to live in it alone.”

And these are the ties that blind, because I still want to protect her, to save her from sadness and pain and grief; but I cannot, because it doesn’t take long for the fear to subside and reality to reassert itself, the reality that I just have to go, that other than as a protector I don’t really want to be near her much; and if there was another protector, some other guy who could love her for who she is today, not for the little girl I fell in love with twenty five years ago but who and what she is today, and protect her and keep her happy, then I would give them my blessing and walk away with a song in my heart; a song whose verses also recall that part of my heart she will always own but which is not all-encompassing, nor can it return her love but in part.