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May 24, 2005
The Fire That Burns Bright
hen she was 13 years old, my first wife was thrown into a bathtub by her father, breaking both of her arms. At night, she would sleep on a ping pong table located in an enclosed back porch, so that she had easy getaway when she heard him coming. She'd never tell me much more than that.
I met the man before I knew this. Seemed like a nice enough guy.
She and I were married only a little over 3 months before it all ended. It was one of those vortex-sucking relationships that burned bright and burned out within a year. Let me tell you about it, and why it was worth it.
I'd seen her from a distance at a couple of conferences, but it was at a Writer's Conference in Los Angeles (Orange County, really, near Disneyland) where we first met. She would describe herself as a small mousy blonde. She claimed to remember a past life as a big man, a convict on a ship to Australia, and couldn't really stand being in such a mousy body.
There was something about her. A kind of light or radiance that shined that I never could explain. I just knew I was attracted to her. The catch was, she lived in Minnesota and I lived in California. So I didn't think about it too much. We did talk on the phone for several weeks. Then one night I was in Seattle at a Pacific Institute training. I called her from my hotel, we talked, and I don't remember what was said or how it happened, but several inner switches got flipped and we were both immediatley, intensely IN LOVE.
It was amazing. I felt controlled by it, wrapped in an intense warm radiance.
We had a mutual acquantance near Stockton, California, a guy who she would visit and go camping with in Yosemite. He was attached to another woman, but not yet married. For some odd reason, when he heard about us he wanted to fly her out so we could be together. The plan was for her to camp with him for a few days and then stay with me for about 10 days. (Later, she said he did it because we were all Japanese in a past life, we were married, I was the female, and I had been captured. He had been a ninja who led a raid to rescue me and I was killed. He stlil carried that guilt, so he was driven to help bring us together. I don't remember any such thing, but it was interesting. His behavior was very unusual. He didn't know me that well at the time.)
Cool! His flying her out, that is. I was teaching at a business college in Sacramento and didn't make enough money to make that happen, so I was agreeable. She had a job that didn't pay too much more than mine. We stayed at my house, but also stayed a few days on a sailboat in San Francisco Bay. It was owned by her ex-husband, a very wealthy man who was living in New York. Apparently, they were still friends.
I remember how we slept deeply together on that sailboat, how we could spoon and sleep for 8-10 hours without waking up. We began talking about me moving to Minnesota. I had actually been thinking in that direction already, either going back to graduate school or something. It was weird how everything seemed to point in that direction. Fortune cookies began saying things like "Now's the time to consider making your move," "Don't let this opportunity pass you by," and "Take love when it's placed in your hands." I never put stock in fortune cookies, but it was just plain weird how I got fortunes unlike any I'd had before.
Also, it seemed like there was a good teaching opportunity in Minnesota. I'd been wanting to get out of Sacramento for many years. This seemed made to order.
So I gave notice, liquidated a lot of my furniture and other accumulations, shipping a bunch of stuff to her condo in Minnetonka, including a birch desk and nice birch dresser cabinets handmade by a talented friend of mine.
I had saved money to fly her out so we could have a 2-day drive back to Minnesota, leaving 4 am one morning, spending the first night in Laredo, and arriving about midnight the second day.
I think it was in Nebraska on the U.S. 80 straightaway that I first realized this heavenly bliss was going to be much harder than I thought.
We were blissfully cruisin' down the highway that went straight for dozens of miles, I happened to glance in the mirror, and a cop was almost literally on my tail but no light flashing. I looked at my speedometer: 80 mph. I knew I was had, so I pulled over.
He was a straight shootin' good ol' boy who explained that he had been following me for 17 miles wondering when I would notice. I explained my blissed out state, but I still had to pull out my credit card and pay the fine right there in the cop car. He had the electrionic swiper and everything. The alternative was jail until the judge was ready. I paid.
I began driving again, more moderately, and I decided to reveal a secret truth about me to my new love. And she immediately squashed it. I assumed we had some deep connection that allowed for deep sharing. I've since come to see that the deep connection can be real, but that doesn't always mean you must share deeply.
After we started living together, I noticed that she would go through unpredictable shifts. At first I thought it was me. She said it was me. I would think she wanted one thing, but then it would shift to something else. She would have one expectation, but later claim, no, it was really something else instead, and why wasn't I getting it?
I put the pieces together slowly, but inevitably. She was rewriting reality as she went along. The abuse she suffered as a child forced her to create and recreate reality to avoid pain and punishment. And it was so deep, there was simply nothing I could do about it. Any attempt to point to it forced her to shift. I decided not to bother.
When she was bright, she was totally illuminated. I almost literally saw a yellow-gold glow around her. The radiance was inspiring and intoxicating. I still, ridiculously, thought things could work out. So I hung in there through a typical Minnesota winter where it's dark when you go to work, dark when you leave work, and sometimes you have to chip off a glacier that had appeared on your car during the day at work.
We arrived in Minnesota in late September. We married just after Christmas. We had our marriage annulled in March and I left Minnesota on April 1st, April Fool's Day, back to California.
I had started in California with a good job, a house full of furniture and personal items, two sets of keys to handle all my personal and business related locks. I returned to California with a car full of boxes, a single car key, and a friend's couch. She found another husband and moved to Missouri. Last I heard, after a couple of years, they were still in love.
That was 12 years ago. For the next ten years, I never had a real Mon-Fri job. I met my second wife, the REAL one, about 18 months later, and I ended up being a writing consultant in Silicon Valley, moving out of Sacramento, finally, for good. It's been good.
And I will always treasure that first marriage for two reasons:
1) No matter what anyone says, it's worth the experience of love that burns so bright that it flames out in months. The intensity and recklessness are a real rollercoaster ride. Yeah, it hurt. There were days I was laying on the carpet suffering. But I got over it.
2) While I was with her, I picked up, almost like sympathetic resonance, one of her character traits, one that was not strong enough in me: Remaining true to yourself.
I realized after returning to California that I acted differently, I was less accommodating and more assertive in what was deeply true to me. I drew more boundaries so that others, especially those I love, understand that there were lines I wouldn't cross, compromises I wouldn't make, because they were not ME.
I am very happy these days.
UPDATE: Weird! I just found out that the Tuesday topic for the Divas and Men's Club is " Which is worse: a lonely heart or a broken heart?" I guess we are kinda on the same page here. Christina, Sadie, Silk, Kathy, Lollygaggin, The Wizard, Phin, Naked Villainy, Puffy.
*** I will always love the false image I had of you. Ashleigh Brilliant
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Posted by witnit at May 24, 2005 4:30 PM
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