Plaid is a orderly jumble. Lines intersect with varying increments of space between, always at angles or running in parallel, never to co-habitate on the same plane or merge together. Fitting that I should be so attired when contemplating my misguided turn off on an emotional road. Those lines hold within them some metaphor for our story.
It was morning that day when I laid half awake, half dreaming. In my mind, I was slogging through an arduous journey toward a reconciliation between us on terms I didn’t recognize. I could feel my brows beginning to knit together, my closed eyelids squinting. I was trying to hold on to the moment that I’d made in my mind, busily trying to figure it out, but I couldn’t understand it or make it come together in a way to make sense. It never did. That was my revelation on waking.
I looked up a photo of you, a very flattering one incidentally, in the hopes that I would see in it what I had been longing for. But there was very little there of the man I’d dreamed of beside me that morning to be awakened with a kiss. There was no pinch, no squeeze, nothing hard or sharp to make my heart jolt. There was only warmth and recognition. In that moment, studying the lines of your face, I realized my miscalculation.
In the picture I found, you were at rest after some effort. The sunshine fell against your face, warming your cheeks. You were caught looking ahead toward something that made your eyes vaguely crinkle. Anticipating a welcome surprise you weren’t sure was coming perhaps? Soaking in some praise that you didn’t want to fully acknowledge? Or simply appraising, with that ambivalent smile? In any case, that moment, that expression suited you beautifully. You looked terribly handsome, and I was surprised by that. I had guessed in the past that you were made truly lovely by the way my heart had long moved over the curving planes of you. But that isn’t it. You are handsome. For all the times I saw you and thought of how good to looked to me, I can now appreciate that you are an attractive man without having to claim any ownership of it.
I looked at your picture and I made myself consider that what you were looking was a woman unknown to me and that the expectant half-raised the corners of your mouth were directed toward her approach. Somehow, thinking of that didn’t hurt. I then imagined that she proceeded right up to you and your head tilted up to see her face above yours. You watched her as she moved to sit beside you, that anticipatory smirk ever present. Once seated, she leaned toward you and set her head against your shoulder and I imagined your arm moving to drape around her waist. Then that same face, looking out in pleasant anticipation returned, only with her hair faintly tickling your neck in a soft breeze and her profile outlined on your chest. I tried to make it as visceral as I could and asked myself if I could bear it.
And I could.
Moreover, what I discovered was that instead of grief there was a sense of calm and contentment. This is how it should be. This is how it should have always been.
All the struggle and strife, the twisting and wrangling to tie you and I together were-not only fruitless of course-but also unnecessary. I realized that when I found myself desperate not to lose you, what I wanted to keep was the off-centered sight of how you would grow and achieve and mature, how you would parse out the ways in which your life could be fashioned to your own pleasure, and how you would take that vision and make it into reality. I wanted to know you; I never needed to have you.
It has been in the trying to create a lover from a friend that things fall apart. I foolishly understood that such a transformation was what you wanted. I certainly was not in a place to give it to you when I thought that expectation was coming due and I didn’t take the time to recognize it. It is only in the recognition of our true role to one another when things can stand firm. That’s what I have wanted all this time.
Do I still love you? Of course. Do I still want to see how what form you’ll have taken by the time you’re fifty? Yes. Do I still hope to see you on an eventual wedding day? Absolutely, but from the gallery.
With any luck, I still can.
Dress Confessions 