FJ!! writes very movingly and very directly about himself and his emotional life.
Because I don't know that I'm capable any longer of the kind of honesty -- and was it courage, compulsion, daring, or maybe foolhardiness? -- with which his posting was so redolent, I don't think I can respond fully. But of course I am grateful, and I want to show that, for his sake if for no one else's.
Rather than comment in the usual way, according to his text -- to do so would seem to me some kind of violation -- I'll instead give a few of my own thoughts on some of the feelings and yearnings he talks about.
Since my high-school experiences are so very like his when it comes to the heartbeat that is his metaphor, I won't say much about them here. It's also possible I had that rich, emotionally thrilling and wearing texture in my life a bit earlier than he did -- I was 11 when it all burst forth for me, falling in love for the first time.
And there must be some difference, too, in the happy fact that I did not have to hide or mask my feelings, though at times I thought it prudent to be less than candid about the scale of them, they were that grand.
Instead, I'll talk about what came after I was in college, about what I thought love was then and what I think it is now, from my own perspective. In all of this, you are to understand that the feelings are no one thing; rather, they are a kaleidoscopic jumble of many things, something of many colors, many facets, even of conflicts.
It's awfully hard to be sure what any other person yearns for, since we are bound to filter such things as FJ says through our own prisms. In my case, some of it would be memories of prisms. But nevertheless, the heartbeat he yearns for is one I've heard several times in my life. At the risk of misinterpretation, let me put it this way: no one was ever loved more than I, nor had a richer experience of lavishing love upon another than I have had. Do not take that as anything like a boast, for to do so would be to miss the point. In the first place, love cannot be quantified, so in this context, "not more than" must be seen as qualitative. And by that I mean only: everything I ever wanted, and much more (more than I could ever have imagined, had I not had the opportunities I've had) has come my way.
By the time I was FJ's age, two of them were in the past, one was going on, and nine more (undreamed of then, of course) were to enrich the future. Every time, that person was for me the one, and I was for them as well. In each instance, that one was the best, the best ever, and, I was quite convinced, the best possible. Since in this context we get to define ourselves, for me that was, simply, The Truth.
And each was forever. By this I don't mean I failed to recognize that the past had seen ruptures and that even absent future ruptures (or merely changes, as the case might be), eventually something would happen. No, instead I mean that the moment in each moment was so complete that everything I wanted, everything I ever wanted, everything I could want, was right there, right then.
Indeed, one of the most satisfying things, to me, was the very immediacy of loving and being loved, its fullness and sufficiency in every sense. I know of nothing -- I suspect not even death -- that is so fixed in the present tense as love.
Rather unlike FJ, perhaps, I never had the feeling that there was anything like his "I'll never know, never really know" idea about the thing while it was going on on. Somehow, maybe dumb luck, I was always so fixed on the thing right in front of me that I never had room for doubts or worries or even hypothetical speculations. In short, I knew, I was sure, and I was sure the other person was sure as well.
All that notwithstanding, I had one love affair that was notably insecure. As it has turned out, it was the last one, a six-month terror that turned me completely inside out just ten years ago this fall. I was never so crazy before or since as I was during that half year. I had no prior concept of what anxiety really was, and today I can't really tell you why it was I did that to myself. All I know is that I did, that I went (he says as undramatically as he can) to the brink and very nearly over it.
It was the one and only time I fell in love at first sight, and I mean it literally: as he got out of the car to walk up to my front door (a friend was bringing him over to get rid of him), I was watching out the window and in milliseconds was a complete goner. And mind you, I was 47 years old at the time.
Perhaps it was that I had had no lover for four years at that point, doubling the sum total of all my prior periods of loverlessness since age 11. But I had this powerful sinking feeling, and I knew in an instant that I was lost, completely lost, inevitably drowned.
The closest I can come to understanding this is that it was an aesthetic response, for he was -- still is, I see him every couple days, he works two buildings away -- simply the most good-looking, beautiful man I've known. I have a wonderful photo, in which he looks like what I call a Persian prince: perfect in every regard.
The story of what went wrong, though incredibly complicated, is easily told: nothing went right. But it's quite a comment on love, I think, that none of that lover's story contradicts or compromises what I've said about the others. It was True Love, it was all-encompassing, it was singular, it was forever, and it was fabulous. Disastrous, but fab-u-lous!
To try to bring this to some closure, I guess I will cite FJ's posting after all. He says:
FJ writes: I want puppy-love. I want to know what it is like to have someone as crazy about me as I'm about him, I want the moments racing through my veins, I want those fields of my emotional landscape back but I want to explore the part I know is there but where I've never been.
It is there, I'd say, and after having explored it at very great length, I hope you will be at least as lucky as I've been, for it is like nothing else on the planet, that I can promise you. As befits fabulous things, this being a fable means there must be a moral at the end.
Very well, then. Potential exists to be unlocked. Do so. Don't
wait, do it now. This is the only time there is.
