by
C.J. Hauser
View all notes
You visit your hometown. You are driving aimlessly when you see the wall. You stop and slowly back up to the right-hand turn. It is built. There it is, all real and caked together with stones, and you feel a pang. You can get rid of everything else, the phone numbers and the photos, and still you will have these stories banging around inside you.
This is the first time you understand that, when people talk about moving on, they don’t mean that you won’t remember or bleed anymore. Just that you’ll go on to do other things. Meet other people. And yet, in the middle of a normal day, something as simple as a stone wall can still suddenly and invisibly destroy you. And because it’s too much to explain, most days, when this happens, you’ll just keep driving along. You won’t mention the wall or what it summons to anyone. And it’s this silence, more than anything else, that defines moving on.
What was most compelling to me was the way the movie allowed the three men to pitch Tracy versions of her future by pitching her versions of herself. My friend Olivia once perfectly described The PS as: “Men explain Katharine Hepburn to Katharine Hepburn,” and, indeed, this is the whole bag. She is described as a goddess, a queen, and a golden girl over the course of the movie, and we come to understand that if Tracy chooses one man over another, she will not only have a different life, she will be a different version of herself. She will become a different person. And so, in this way, Tracy can choose who she wants to be…insomuch as she can choose her husband. The range of options for her identity is limited to those presented by the men. And as a result, the options are less than ideal.
To conflate the choice of a romantic partner with the choice of one’s own identity might strike you as retrograde, but as a fourteen-year-old girl trying on various identities of my own, it made total sense. Who was I, anyway? I was looking for someone to tell me. I was used to a limited range of accessible identities being presented to me—this was how the other teen-girl things I liked worked: mood ring shades and astrology signs and nail-polish colors and birthstone earrings and personality quizzes. I accepted these cheap placeholders for any kind of realer, deeper understanding of who I was or might be. You never got to choose freely. All you could do was pick from the options presented to you. Why should love be any different?
I would like to tell you I stopped the relationship because I realized this wasn’t what love was supposed to look like. But even as I decided to stick with graduate school, and not move across the country to be with Arlo, and in so doing caused one more grievous hurt to this person I’d hurt before, I told myself this was another failure on my part. That I was just too weak to be with a person who saw me truly. And here I was, hurting him again. One more bad thing.
In the year leading up to calling off my wedding, I often cried or yelled or reasoned or pleaded with my fiancé to tell me that he loved me. To be nice to me. To notice things about how I was living.
One particular time it was because I had put on a favorite red dress for a wedding. I exploded from the bathroom to show him. He stared at his phone. I wanted him to tell me I looked nice, so I shimmied and squeezed his shoulders and said: “You look nice! Tell me I look nice!” He said: “I told you that you looked nice when you wore that dress last summer. It’s reasonable to assume I still think you look nice in it now.”
Another time he gave me a birthday card with a sticky note inside that said BIRTHDAY. After giving it to me, he explained that because he hadn’t written in it, the card was still in good condition. He took off the sticky and put the unblemished card into our filing cabinet.
I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.
You must be logged in to see this comment.
Here is what I learned once I began studying whooping cranes: only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds. Instead we counted berries. Counted crabs. Measured water salinity. Stood in the mud. Measured the speed of the wind.
It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive?
Wading through the muck of the Aransas reserve, I understood that every chance for food matters. Every pool of drinkable water matters. Every wolfberry dangling from a twig, in Texas, in January, matters. The difference between sustaining life and not having enough was that small.
If there were a kind of rehab for people ashamed to have needs, maybe this was it. You will go to the Gulf. You will count every wolfberry. You will measure the depth of each puddle.
More than once I’d said to my fiancé, “How am I supposed to know you love me if you’re never affectionate or say nice things to me or say that you love me?”
He reminded me that he’d said “I love you” once or twice before. Why couldn’t I just know that he did in perpetuity?
I told him this was like us going on a hiking trip and his telling me he had water in his backpack but not ever giving it to me and then wondering why I was still thirsty.
He told me water wasn’t like love, and he was right.
There are worse things than not receiving love. There are sadder stories than this. There are species going extinct, and a planet warming. I told myself: Who are you to complain, you with these frivolous extracurricular needs?
In the mornings we made one another sandwiches and in the evenings we laughed and lent one another fresh socks. We gave one another space in the bathroom. Forgave one another for telling the same stories over and over again. We helped Warren when he had trouble walking. What I am saying is that we took care of one another. What I am saying is we took pleasure in doing so. It’s hard to confess, but in the time after I called off my wedding, the week I spent dirty and tired on the Gulf, I was happy.
He hadn’t said one specific thing about me or us during the proposal, and on the long trail walk out of the park I felt robbed of the kind of special declaration I’d hoped a proposal would entail, and, in spite of hating myself for wanting this, hating myself more for fishing for it, I asked him: “Why do you love me? Why do you think we should get married? Really?”
He said he wanted to be with me because I wasn’t annoying or needy. Because I liked beer. Because I was low-maintenance.
I didn’t say anything. A little farther down the road he added that he thought I’d make a good mother.
This wasn’t what I hoped he would say. But it was what was being offered. And who was I to want more?
This is a sad story only inasmuch as stories about people like me, who delude themselves, are sad. So maybe it’s not so sad at all.
I tried to help Joey because I thought that without the distraction of all his miseries—which seemed to me so easily solvable—he would finally love me properly. He would take care of me the way I’d been taking care of him. I would fix and fix and fix until he was able to notice that I was standing there, hoping to be loved. But of course it doesn’t work that way.
Would a good person be deterred by these things? I asked myself. Was it ethical to disqualify a person as a partner for any of these reasons? How would someone, most people, react to these profiles?
I told myself that someone, most people, would be fine with them. Excited, even. They would go on dates with these men. They would enjoy these dates. And so I forced myself to hover outside my own mind, and override my own, true, human reactions with what I thought a good and ethical and generally less-strange person would do.
lol, sob