God Plays Tetris

(note: this is a much longer post than I have ever included here, and it was not written in the form of a blog. I wrote this a year ago as a therapeutic exercise, a way to suck out the poison, as it were. My friend Cara, whose dearness to me is beyond words, suggested I write this. It is true except for a few small details changed in the interest of privacy. It rambles and gets a bit sentimental at points. It's personal and maybe more revealing than anything else here, and the God stuff in it may not mean much to a lot of readers. I can live with that. I like this. And it did suck out the poison. Maybe if you get all the way to the end, you'll see what I mean, even if you can't relate. Anyway, having given you that little warning, read on, my anonymous friend, and I would love to hear any thoughts or responses you have in response.)

This story begins, in every way except the chronological, with a girl.

I met her for the first time when I was twenty-four and she was twenty. A lot of romantic, wistful things have been said over the centuries about young adulthood, such as that it is a time of blooming, a time of heady thrills and first discoveries. And of course these things are true, as long as one remembers that running out of gas in a crowded intersection while driving a 1978 Volare with two dollars worth of change in your pocket counts in life’s dictionary as a heady thrill. First discoveries include the exquisite feeling of what it’s like to wake up on the day of a first date with the throb of a world-class zit on the tip of your nose. Young adulthood, because it precedes middle-aged adulthood, enjoys a very good PR campaign of selective memory and maudlin sentimentality. In truth, young adulthood is like a mean-spirited but unimaginative prankster. It yanks away all the freedoms of being a kid, but pays out very little of the joys of being an adult. Twenty-four is when life gives growing pains. It’s when everything is awkward at the worst of times and nothing fits quite right at the best of times, not one’s job, not one’s relationships, not one’s living arrangements, not even one’s car (even if it isn’t a 1978 Plymouth Volare with a broken gas gauge and a mouse living under the front seat).

I was skinny, tall, and gave the impression to most observers, including myself, of having a few too many elbows and knees. My dominant clothing style could be summed up by wrestling shoes (although I didn’t wrestle) and a fish-tie with a rhinestone for an eye.
Fortunately not at the same time.

That I can recall.

I can’t remember if I wore either of them to my interview for the job at Service Merchandise (although I suspect not; even then I had an inkling about the fine line between individuality and practicality) but I do remember that was the first time I ever saw her. She worked in the jewelry department, which dominated the center of the showroom floor with its complicated geometric perimeter of showcases and black velvet. She was twenty, which is on the whole a far more magical and enchanting age than twenty-four, especially when worn by a certain kind of young woman in the eyes of a certain kind of young (ish) man. Her name was Bethany.

What can I say that will describe the effect she had on me at that moment? The tidal force that she continued to obliviously and effortlessly exert on me from that moment on? Are there any words left in the English language that have not yet been homogenized, tamed, patented, green-screened and plastered onto cans of Diet Coke? I can only tell you what I saw the moment I looked at her. Maybe that will help.

She was pretty.

Note I didn’t say she was cute. Or sexy. Or hot, or gorgeous, or adorable. She was those things as well sometimes, just by being who she was, and usually without trying. But what she was mostly, when she got up in the morning, before the world had a chance to look her up and down and enforce any shifting editorial predilections, while she was still yawning and stretching, looking at herself in her bathroom mirror and reaching for her toothbrush... was pretty.

Short, light blond hair that bobbed around her face impishly. A ready, fresh smile that made the casual (or, in my case, the less-than-casual) observer wish for a handy field of clover to run giddily through. Eyes that superimposed innocence with knowledge, that looked at the world with a half-concealed smile, as if she saw the humor and adventure behind the mundanity and grayness that surrounded her, and that she was letting you in on that secret. She was impeccable but self-effacing. Funny. Smart. Adventurous. At ease with herself, her future, and the world around her.

But love, as everyone knows, is more than the sum of all its parts. Those things were the reason that the first time I saw Bethany I knew that this was a girl I could, and most likely would (and though I was loathe to admit it, already did) love hopelessly and unabashedly. But they weren’t the only reason. Sometimes it just happens: something inside clicks on, something you hadn’t suspected was even there, a power-surge that you realize, with naked surprise, you had been wired for all your life but hadn’t yet plugged in. You sense the angels nudging each other and hushing, aware of the momentousness of the event, knowing everyone will look back on this someday and say that’s when it all started. Your world goes quiet and (come on, admit it) slow-motion, your heart trips over itself then struggles breathlessly to catch up, and the gravity between the poles of the earth browns out for a few sluggish seconds as your entire universe suddenly, massively, realigns to admit this new, implacable knowledge: that no matter what, for good or bad, like it or not, from this moment on and only because of the sudden introduction of this person into your private world, your life will never, ever be the same again.

It was like that. But maybe a little more so. Really.

But, like I hinted in the first sentence, the story starts a little bit before that. Let me back up.
Three months earlier I was working at Cedar Point, a local amusement park. I worked in the largest gift shop in the park, between the main entrance and the Demon Drop ride. There is a peculiar surreality to working in an atmosphere of giddy tourists, overpriced plastic kitsch, and the mortal screams of one’s fellow humans as they plunged seven storeys just outside the store every sixteen seconds or so. I was one of two men (the other one was gay) working in a crew of about sixteen people, which is, for obvious reasons, a very advantageous arrangement from a romantic probability perspective. I started out dusting ceramic Snowbabies on glass shelves on my first day, and began dating Tracy by the end of the second week.

Tracy was cute (note I didn’t say "pretty") and likeable and had been engaged to a guy named Tom, the proverbial high-school sweetheart, until I came along with my carefully unassuming grin and a sympathetic ear. It turned out Tom was a bit of an insensitive, sloppy oaf (or, in the common parlance, a nineteen year old male), and all I did, in a spate of rather uncharacteristic common sense, was listen. I even (and this was playing it a bit bold, I admit) dared to defend Tom with arguments carefully tailored to be easily and rather pathetically defeated. This led to Tracy and I sitting on the hood of the Volare out by the bay that night, still wearing our Cedar Point work shirts, while she, with eyes downcast, told me she had broken things off with Tom that morning, and... well...

So we had a tumultuous and heady three weeks together, myself floating with the perverse pride of the gallant victor, my ego stuffed so full that bits of it stuck out, like socks and shirt sleeves out of the cracks of a poorly packed suitcase. I didn’t love her. But she was an excellent kisser and she had an amazing, demurely nubile body that she let me explore, a bit inexpertly and tentatively, in the after-hours darkness of my parents basement (no, never All The Way, but far enough around the bases that my mid-west Baptist choir-boy mind reeled for hours afterward like a ... well, like a twenty-four year old guy just beginning to pull back the curtain on the world of feminine delights).

One night, Tracy and I joined the others from our store crew for one of the park’s late-night employee events. From midnight until two, the Mean Streak roller coaster was open for employees only, and even better, they were running it without any lights. The Mean Streak was a ratcheting, bruising, whip-lashing roller coaster under the best of conditions, but at night, with no lights, nesting like a rattlesnake at the very tip of the Lake Erie peninsula upon which Cedar Point is built, the coaster was an unusual and unsettling thrill. A dozen of us made our way through the empty midway at midnight, past the closed stalls and hulking silhouettes of the rides, and I carried Tracy piggyback, her laughing voice both heard and felt on the nape of my neck.

We joined other groups as they moved out of the shadows like refugees in a post-apocalyptic novel, converging upon a dark mass of wooden lattice and coiling track out of which rang the sounds of roaring metal wheels and thin, giddy screams. And at some point, in the whirling blur of that night, after our first ride and before our last, we were stopped for a brief moment in the maze of the Mean Streak’s queue, surrounded by our friends and a sea of familiar faces, laughing, yelling, bobbing like flotsam at the base of a waterfall, and I looked down at her and our eyes met. She was panting slightly, as was I, from the ride and the running and the incessant, intoxicating screaming and laughter. And she smiled at me happily, and I kissed her. It was a quick kiss, salty and breathless and simple. But quick.

And that was, really, our entire relationship in a nutshell.

I came to work one day, a week later, to find out from at least three different concerned and whispering grapevines that Tracy had been seen the night before at Louie’s, a local bar favored by that portion of the Cedar Point employee populace that liked to drink alcohol in a manner that might be described as "excessive". This portion of the populace seemed to comprise, roughly, everybody but myself and, so I had firmly and smugly believed, Tracy. This part of the story unnerved me. The rest of the story, however, sent me hopelessly sprawling, my newly acquired masculine ego shattered like a Cedar Point Snowbaby on a concrete store-room floor. Not only was she seen boogying on the dance floor of this seedy, no-account den of pernicious and petty iniquity, she was seen kissing another man. And not even just any other man, but my personal antithesis, the very soul of everything that could be considered opposite of what I was. Glenn. My dark mirror.

Glenn worked the night shift in the same store, so Tracy and I only ever saw him as we were packing to leave for the afternoon. Glenn used pick-up lines. Confidently. Glenn slicked his hair and wore an ear-ring and called other men things like "chief". If somebody was casting a part for over-confident, sneering, weaselly male machismo, the other actors would see Glenn sitting in the audition room and simply walk out, dropping their scripts in the wastebasket as they went. Glenn had been hitting on Tracy (there is no other term for it; Glenn didn’t know how to flirt, but he had a PhD in hitting-on) since before I even knew her name. He was utterly tireless. He continued to hit on her while I was dating her. He was like the little dog that barks at you relentlessly every time you walk past the fence bordering its yard. You know it can’t bite you, and part of it may know that too, but it just can’t stop. Stopping isn't part of its nature. Tracy and I laughed about Glenn, shaking our heads, and oh how I delighted in the lofty smugness of that laughter, of having her, of winning her. Glenn was not a threat. Glenn was hardly even comedy relief. That wasn’t what I thought. That was what I knew.

When Tracy came to work that day, I think she understood straight away that there was nothing left to tell me. She pointedly and mercilessly failed to notice me all day long.

And thus it was over. I practiced a brand of mourning rage that became a perceptible pall around me for several feet. The same giddy tourists came in that day as they had every day prior, but the ones that walked away from my counter that day did so with a puzzled, distracted frown, as if, despite the cheery sun shining outside, from anywhere at any moment a crack of thunder might come pealing out of the blue and the air might turn cold as slate. Ah, the righteous, biblical pathos that can be conjured by the hand of a young, wronged lover.

It lasted a few weeks, diminishing gradually as the days went by. I faithfully stirred the stew of my misery, probing it constantly, keeping it alive, like a canker sore. Tracy dated Glenn and mooned over him pathetically and constantly. Glenn got tired of her and dumped her, which gave me the most confusing array of mixed emotions.

And in the meantime, I met Jenna.

Jenna was the manager of a block of several stores, including my own. She was not an unattractive girl, quite, and she had a brand of pathetic, gawky charm that was made all the more appealing to me by the rather obvious fact that she thought I was delightfully amusing. She was completely enamored with my attentions. I began seeing Jenna almost immediately, partly because she was sort of funny and partly because she salvaged some of the pieces of my ego, but mostly because if I stood her right in front of me, I couldn’t see Tracy. That was good enough.

If only I’d had the good sense, in the weeks to come, to go get plastered at Louie’s one night and find some handy anonymous babe to smooch on the dance floor. It had worked for Tracy. Who knows how things might have been different.

I think it could be said without fear of contradiction that Jenna fit me, in the same sense that one might say a remora fits a shark. She was made to cling, and I was made to let her. It was perfectly equal in every sense. I made her just as miserable as she made me.

In all honesty, by the end of our second evening together, I was asking myself how I was going to end it. I tried early on to do just that. We had been together for about ten days, which was just about seven days longer than it took me to realize that she was a little neurotic, needy, and obsessive. I tried, with a wishy-washy blend of subtlety and shmoozing, to tell her we both knew that this was just a summer fling. It wasn’t going to get serious. We should both, her as well as me, feel free to see other people. It was only fair. And it was certainly best to be honest with each other up front, right? I walked away thinking that ‘the little talk’ had gone remarkably well. I continued to think it had gone remarkably well until later that night, when she called me, asking shrilly and haltingly for me to rephrase what I had said. I couldn’t, she insisted, have meant to say that we had no future. No one could know such things. Was there something I wasn’t telling her? Had she done something wrong? How could I say it was all over before it had even begun to happen at all? Her voice rose and splintered, quivering on the tenth-storey ledge of hysteria and threatening to jump off at any point.

I know a little better now how to handle such things. I am a little stronger now. l am a little less concerned about making people like me. I have a much stronger sense of my own boundaries and where, exactly, my responsibilities lie when it comes to other people’s definitions of happiness.
I didn’t know any of that then. I caved, gloriously and with flying banners.

Several minutes later I very slowly hung up the phone, my head gently spinning. I felt I had just slid a hundred feet down a fifty foot slope. Horror began to dawn on me as I replayed the conversation tentatively in my head, examining it the way a man with a burgeoning hangover might look over a previous night’s bar tab. I had placated. I had soothed. I had made lofty promises and bold assurances. I had even, I realized with growing panic, used my understanding-boyfriend voice. All just to end the phone call, at any cost. Only now that the call was over did I begin to tally up what "at any cost" actually cost.

Six weeks later I was still with Jenna. I had abandoned all hope of ever being able to end things with her. Like the elephant that has grown up believing it can be held in place by a tiny hank of rope and a stake, I was trapped by my own self-imposed limitations. It wasn’t Jenna’s fault. She was made to cling. I let myself be made to be clung to.

When Cedar Point closed for the season, Jenna came with me to apply at Service Merchandise. We both got hired.

And it was out of this haggard, tired, weary rut of a life that I looked up, as it were, and saw Bethany for the first time, like a single ray of sunlight stabbing down through a lifetime’s worth of gray cloud-bank, lighting a spot that I knew I was meant, if only circumstances were slightly different, to be standing in.

Bittersweet is a word invented to describe something like what I felt in that moment, knowing I had chained myself to Jenna, and knowing I was being given a glimpse of what real love, the indescribable wow of complete and abject adoration, looked like. Heartache is an even better word for the feelings that consumed me in the weeks to come as I got to know Bethany, carefully and fleetingly, finding that not only did my conviction of her beauty and sweetness sustain itself in the face of constant reality, it grew. Exponentially. Heartache gets closer to the feeling, but it still isn’t perfect. What it felt like to me was much less poetic and endearing. What it felt like to me was a toothache of the soul.

Bethany was an artist and a voracious reader. She was funny, with a penchant for oddball, absurd humor. She was one of those extremely rare persons who is a thinker as well as a feeler, and knows it, with the result that she engages either her brain or her heart deliberately, depending on which best suits any given situation. The instance in which a half-desperate man made what the rest of us thought was a half-serious attempt to rob the jewelry department stands out in my mind.

He approached Bethany late one morning, asking to look at some watches on the side of the jewelry counter closest to the door. While examining the watches, according to what Bethany told the rest of us later, he inclined to tell her quietly that she should put all the money from her register, as well as an assortment of jewelry, in a store bag, pretend to ring him up and hand him the bag, and not act at all out of the ordinary or someone (rather unnecessary threatening leer) would get hurt. He claimed to have a weapon in his pocket. The rest of us became aware of what was happening when, a few minutes later, Bethany stuck her head out of the employee break room to quietly ask someone to call the police. A few of us had the opportunity to see the would-be perpetrator sitting meekly in the break room, "guarded" by the store manager (a shrill and angry former rich-girl by the name of Sophia) as he awaited the police. Nobody knew what Bethany had told him. She dismissed the incident, saying she had just reasoned with the man and that she had been confident he was harmless.

Later that evening, as I sat in the break room eating a tiny bag of chips and drinking a soda with Wheel of Fortune droning away on a bracket up in the corner, I found what appeared to be a very old straight-razor under a pile of napkins. It had what I assumed was rust on the blade. I puzzled over it for a minute before I recalled that this was the table the would-be stick-up man had been sitting at before the cops came and carted his scruffy and watery-eyed mug away.

It turned out he had committed at least two robberies before. In one of them, he had cut the employee bad enough to need almost sixty stitches on his right cheek and neck.

Bethany and I were both artists, which gave us an immediate connection. We became friends while talking about our projects, what mediums we preferred, arranging ways in which we could show each other our works. She was a painter, while I was pen and ink. I respected painters because, as good as I was at sketching and illustration, I couldn’t paint. This made her, on top of everything, professionally intriguing. It also gave us license to hang out in the break room talking animatedly and effortlessly, without arousing suspicions that either one of us had any other interest in the other than the purely professional and, at the very least, politely platonic. Jenna, who worked at the main checkouts near the store exit, and who was given to regular bouts of paranoid jealousies, never said a word about Bethany. I was that good at maintaining the illusion.

In a universe parallel to ours, one thin page of reality away, I finally realized the foolishness of my self-imposed imprisonment with Jenna. I recognized that, regardless of what actually happened with Bethany, I was only hurting Jenna and myself by wearily maintaining the illusion of my ongoing affections out of fear of her imminent emotional collapse. I broke it off with her. It went like this: One night after work, I walked her out to her car (which we had shared to work; sharing a car was a symbolic gesture of the sort of constant, relentless interdependence Jenna and I had enmeshed ourselves in) and stood facing her with the open front door between us. With no preamble, I told her it was over, and that really, as we both knew deep down, it had been over for quite a while. I didn’t give any details other than to sincerely (if briefly) apologize to her for letting the illusion spin out as long as it had, and to wish her happiness with whatever she did next and whomever she did it with. She was shocked speechless, and before she had the chance to rally her natural defenses against being left alone, I walked away. I didn’t know where I was going. I simply walked out of the pool of light the car was sitting in and kept going. I thought she would come after me. I was prepared for it if she did. I was prepared to run away.

It was a very big parking lot.

She didn’t come after me. She probably would have if I hadn’t at that moment passed Bethany who, in one of those undeniable quirks of fate that implies God is just ducking into the nearest doorway, humming and trying to look unobtrusive, was having some trouble with her car and was just getting out to have a look under the hood. I joined her as she raised the hood, aware of Jenna’s eyes burning on the back of my neck like laser sights, and together we stood there in the dim blue night and stared at the engine of her car, as if, at any moment, one of us might say something like "Well there’s the trouble right there," or "Yeah, that’s an engine all right."

I was not, nor am I now, a "car" guy. I could generally get gas in mine. Theoretically, I could change the oil and maybe a tire. Standing there, trying to look knowledgeably into the engine of Bethany’s car, my hands stuffed in my pockets to keep them from plucking at random mechanical doo-dads and possibly making a minor problem a bit more major, I felt the subtle, pervasive tremor of worlds quietly but massively moving, rearranging, destinies cycling like locomotives in a roundhouse. I cast my eyes sideways, helplessly and slightly giddily. Bethany stood next to me and blew her bangs out of her face in a characteristically female gesture, then smiled up at me. "Any chance a girl can get a ride with a big tall guy that obviously doesn’t know beans about fixing cars?" She asked brightly. I glanced back at the big white Olds ‘88 sitting thirty yards away, its engine idling, its windows mute reflections of the parking lot floodlights. It began to roll as I watched, steering away and drifting out of the pool of light. "I was thinking of asking you the same thing." I said, turning back to Bethany’s easy, sardonic smile.

We went to dinner instead. The strip that Service Merchandise occupied was a long, garish panoply of mini-malls, gas stations and franchise restaurants, which meant we had our choice of a dozen places to get essentially the same burgers and wings. She called her step-mother from the payphone, I called my dad. While we waited for them to come and get us, we drank sodas and ate appetizers and I told her about what had happened with Jenna. The entire story, from beginning to recent end. I felt freer and lighter than I had in, well, in longer than I had the capacity to recall at the moment, and in that moment I didn’t care what happened between Bethany and me in the future, if anything. All I cared about was that she was sitting there now, across from me, listening with interest and nodding in all the right places, and occasionally sipping her Coke in a distractingly wonderful way through a blue- and white-striped bendy straw. She merely listened. And at the end, as we stood outside in the cooling night air watching the busy road for our respective rides (her step-mom arrived first, which I was mysteriously glad of), she smiled at me with a quiet, thoughtful smile. And before she got in the car, she took my hand, lacing her fingers through mine briefly, and squeezing. She didn’t say anything at all, and that seemed, for that moment, exactly right.

The next day Jenna didn’t show up for work and Bethany and I sat openly and unapologetically together in the break room and had lunch, and this time we didn’t talk about art at all.

And what the hell, maybe we even went to dinner again that night.

But that never happened in this page of reality. In this world, I stayed weak. In this universe, I walked with Jenna out to the car that night, got in, and went back to her apartment (where I virtually lived) and ate spaghetti or grilled cheese with her and watched a movie on the VCR with her and at some point, I’m sure, I sighed an enormous, silent, aching sigh of regret.
The definition of pathetic, I might submit from my own personal experience, is regretting a choice even as one is making it.

I stayed with Jenna, stupidly and pathetically, until two years later she had used up everything that I had to give her to make life with herself something she could bear, then she dumped me. Quickly and surgically.

Before that happened, however, I quit my job at Service Merchandise to move away with her to Indiana, where her father and sister lived. She went on a few weeks before me, getting herself settled in and patting down a nice, manageable niche for me as well. I dutifully put in my notice, and when the day came, I said goodbye to everyone in the store. Throughout the entire day, l avoided catching Bethany’s eye, but I studied her secretly when I knew she wouldn’t notice. I saw her happily and easily waiting on customers, studied her laughing silently in the distance with her coworkers, glimpsed her at a table with friends through the slowly closing door of the break room. And when I sensed her looking in my general direction, I involved myself instantly doing the same sorts of things: laughing infectiously with my own crew, industriously performing the duties of my last day’s work, being efficient, being fun, trying to look, in short, as if my life was perfect and complete and not helplessly orbiting hers, desperately trying not to say notice me, notice me, please, please notice me, give me a reason, give me a thread, anything, give me that one tiny push that will make it okay for me to launch myself out of this penitentiary life and join you in the streaming sunlight that you inhabit as easily as a butterfly inhabits air, as a bee inhabits flowers...

But the end of the shift came and I found myself walking to the exit without even saying goodbye to her. I hated myself in that moment, hated the life I had chosen. If I had been even slightly the sort of man to think introspectively, I might have marveled about how often we come to the saddest and bleakest moments of our lives by just stubbornly putting one foot in front of the other and refusing to change direction out of sheer, stupid bloody-mindedness. But I wasn’t that sort of introspective man back then, and I didn’t think that. I trudged toward the exit, trying even then not to look like I was trudging, hoping still that she would notice me, call me back, help me somehow salvage the end of this thing that had never even really happened.

And she did.

She called my name, and when I looked back, she was coming through the discreet little half doorway that separated the jewelry department from the rest of the store. She approached me and we met just to the side of the main entrance, in the dim Stonehenge of the luggage and travel section. She told me, if I remember right, that she wasn’t going to let me leave without saying goodbye. I don’t remember what else we said. The words were probably unimportant and silly. I just remember looking down at her, with that careful, deliberate distance between us, and watching her lips make the words, watching the way the sun streamed in from the doorway and lay over her cheek and hair, painting her with surreal, heartbreaking clarity. She was smiling that easy little smile, the one that said ain’t life just a big ol’ fuzzy peach, even if sometimes you do just get a bite of the pit? For a few seconds, I was aware that I would most likely never see her again, and I soaked her up: the perfect circle of her face, her unguarded blue eyes, the white gold of her hair, her aura of happiness and light and quiet, oblivious strength and secret good things yet to come. The moment bled away quietly and unremarkably until it was gone, and then fate stood back, waited a moment, and cleared its throat discreetly, like a bellhop waiting for a tip

And then I shook her hand and left.

I shook.

Her hand.

And I left.

The most obnoxious thing about reality is that, unlike what one might expect from having grown up watching movies and MTV, it doesn’t pay any attention whatsoever when one’s personal circumstances turn bleak and hopeless. Nothing stops. The sun rather infuriatingly continues to shine. People still honk at you if you don’t hit the gas less than half a second after the light turns green. Telemarketer still call and try to sell you magazine subscriptions and aluminum siding. Statistically, grief only has the opportunity to really sink in for about forty minutes before the constant, relentless blur of reality strips it away in sad little shreds, leaving you disconcertingly distracted, confused, and a little punch-drunk, until three hours later you finally find yourself sitting by the light of the TV surrounded by beer cans and empty cartons of Ben and Jerry’s and trying to remember where you left your pants.

Ideally, after a major life devastation, reality would pause for a little while out of respect. It would at least turn bleak and grey for everybody else as well, with lots of dark thunderings and moody rainstorms that one could walk pathetically and aimlessly through, without an umbrella. In a perfect world, one’s environment would know what was expected of it.

But this isn’t a perfect world. That’s why God made heavy metal ballads.

Later that week, as I drove a carload of my worldly goods over the border from Ohio to Indiana (which is, in a sense, like quitting Marlboros to take up Camels) I listened to a lot of heavy metal ballads. I railed against my own weakness and the cruelties of fate and mourned the completely unromantic end of what was, apart from the whole "unrequited love" thing (which is wildly over-rated), a sadly unromantic little chapter in my life. As I progressed along the turnpike, getting gradually closer to what I thought of as my destiny (the way a prison inmate thinks of his cell as home) I slowly, inexorably reconciled myself to my future. The words "unremarkable" and "unromantic" continued to float through my mind at regular intervals, and I trained myself to get used to them. l introduced the idea to myself that real love was duty, not devotion. I slowly accepted the idea that passion was the rarity and prosaic was the reality. I sighed and settled myself, grudgingly but deliberately, into the bed I had made for myself. The one thing I consoled myself with was the melodramatic but undoubtedly true fact that, really, I had only failed myself. Bethany hadn’t needed me. She was art, and the world loved art. While I was heading off into a lifetime of grey doldrums and passionless relationships, Bethany was sailing into brightness and hope. Bethany didn’t need my love. Bethany breathed love. The world was full of men who would trip over themselves to tell her how amazing and lovely and breathtaking she was. She would choose well and in the end she would be better off without me. It was probably best I hadn’t had the guts to pour my love out to her.
Bethany was going to be well taken care of. It was a small and half-hearted consolation, but I knew it was true. Of course it was true.

The word "ironic" enjoys a liberal and fantastic joyride in the English language, based on the fact that very few people know precisely what it actually means. This is an understandable and perfectly acceptable occurrence, and language being the necessarily evolving thing that it is, there will no doubt eventually be a small and little-noticed change in the dictionary to account for it. As it is, the dictionary currently defines "irony" as "the use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning." The dictionary offers a secondary definition which most people would probably find a bit more familiar: "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs, often with poignant results." For instance, a man leaving a ballpark saddened that he hadn’t caught the winning home-run baseball would experience irony when he saw that the home-run baseball had in fact soared right out of the actual stadium and shattered his windshield.

I experienced one kind of irony when, a year after walking away from the possibility of real love in order to dutifully fulfill my role in the banal little play that was my life with Jenna, Jenna herself decided I was no longer the right man for her. Shock, rather than sadness or rejection, was probably a better description of what I felt following that event. Interestingly, however, l experienced a completely different, and altogether brilliant kind of irony when my forced re-introduction to the dating marketplace left me suddenly in the presence of a woman named Jael.

Jael had been one of my best friends for almost ten years. Before there was Bethany, before there was Jenna and Tracy, before anyone, there had been Jael. I had always loved Jael, and the love I felt for her was singular, enormous, and well known, like a national monument that everyone is familiar with and likes to occasionally go and have picnics in front of. Both of our parents knew about it. All of our friends knew about it. People who drove by in their cars while Jael and I happened to be standing on the street eating ice cream cones knew about it. My love for her was so thick and helplessly apparent that hiding it from her had never, realistically, even been an option. The only reason there had ever even been a Tracy and a Jenna and yes, even a Bethany was the simple fact that, on the annual rendezvous in which I stood in front of Jael and once again proclaimed my affections for her, helplessly and almost perfunctorily, she always lovingly but firmly said, in essence, "Get a life".

Which was generally really good advice, considering.

When Jenna dumped me, I began to examine myself much more critically than I ever had before. I began to see a pattern of self-defeating choices, of self-imposed weakness. Jael walked with me through those revelations, sometimes using the truth like a scalpel, and sometimes like a balm, but never like a hammer. Jael cared enough about me to hold a mirror up to me when I was ready to really look at myself. And gradually, I did begin to get a life. I picked up my art again. I spent some time alone. I wrote.

And then, to my complete bewildered amazement, Jael and I were dating. And it was marvelous. My life so far had not prepared me for the speechless pleasures, the sudden joys, the heady passions and the blinding hope of being with someone like her. She was my muse and my delight. Even more amazingly, almost a decade later, she still is.

Irony. Incongruity between what might be expected... and what actually occurs. With poignant results.

I am thirty-six now, and being thirty-six, on the whole, is universally better than being twenty-four. A few weeks ago I was ruminating on the path my life has taken, the surprising, completely unexpected twisting road that has gotten me here, and I began thinking about some of the faces and names from that long-ago land of the nineties. Thinking back on the person I was then is a strange experience. The memories don’t feel like my own, but more like things I read in a book. Except for the memories of Bethany. I had thought of her occasionally over the last several years, and when I did it was always happily and hopefully. Somehow, for no apparent reason, I always suspected that we would meet up again someday. We would introduce each other to our spouses and children and, in some way, I would find myself officially closing the book on a chapter that had, until then, never felt completely written.

On a whim, I looked her up on the internet. This is hardly a foolproof or reliable method of gaining information about individual people. Names change, addresses change, records are old or incomplete. One might stumble on a promising listing on one of those people search sites, which would probably list references to eight or nine individuals with the same basic name living in as many different states. Or the person might have accomplished something noteworthy and had articles written about them. The person might even have his or her own personal website. Lots of possibilities. Hardly reliable, but you never know. I did a quick search for Bethany by her full, maiden name. I thought I might be lucky to get an ambiguous reference or two. I was really lucky. I got two entire paragraphs, and they weren’t ambiguous at all.

Bethany had died the previous July. The obituary didn’t say how, but offered an address for donations to a kidney foundation. She left only her father and her stepmother. She died unmarried.

A person can’t know how a shock like that will affect them. It is uncannily like falling suddenly down a flight of stairs that you had traversed without thinking a hundred times before. At first, there is just a creepy, numb calm as you lay blinking in the aftermath, trying without moving to take stock of your immediate responses, trying to see what will hurt most when you attempt to move again. But you can't really know the extent of the injury until you do get back up, if you can, and try to catch back up to the flow of life again.

I was surprised and dismayed at how deeply Bethany’s death affected me in the days following. Grief is not the knowledge of the death of a dear person. The knowledge of a death, when it becomes solid and implacable, is what makes the loss bearable, what helps us all, eventually, go on with life and find that, despite it all (even if a bit guiltily) we can be happy again. Grief, on the other hand, is the result of that moment- that innocent, waking lull- between thinking of a dear one and remembering, with a sudden, sickening jolt, that they are no more. Grief is, in effect, death-lag.

I found myself thinking of Bethany over and over throughout the week after finding her obituary, and being struck repeatedly a moment later by the awful lead weight of her death. My memories of her came back slowly but perfectly, like leaves coming to the ground in fall. The sadness and loss I felt was, at first, mysterious and nearly unbearable. I found myself unwilling and unable to sleep at night, and lethargic and disengaged during the day. Confused and unsure of who to share my grief with, I mourned in the humming silence of night and in every moment of daylight solitude. Tears were necessarily brief, stifled, but relentlessly fierce. I railed against God, pleaded with Him, challenged and berated Him, uselessly and inconsolably. In my rage and my strange, ferocious grief, I accepted no relief because I believed there was none to be had. My grief was a fist I shook in the face of God.

Irony. In 1994, I left Bethany without sharing my feelings for her, telling myself that she hadn’t needed me, that the world was full of men who would recognize her heartbreakingly rare beauty and loveliness. I was meant for the grey, mundane life of duty and routine, nailed to the wall with my own spikes and by my own hand. But Bethany was sunlight and roaring ocean surf, irresistible, breathtaking, priceless. Bethany would be all right. Bethany would be taken care of. And now here I was, in the science-fiction year of 2005, fulfilled, doing what I love, living with inexplicable love and surprising, daily joy, and Bethany... Bethany was alone. Single. And oh yeah, she was dead.

Irony.

Capricious, hateful irony.

In a universe parallel to ours, one thin page of reality away, I was with her when she found out about the illness that was going to gradually take her life away. I helped her make a list of the things she most wanted to do with her remaining time and I went with her as she checked each one off, walking with her and perhaps sometimes carrying her. I soothed her as much as I knew how as her days got fewer and harder. I made her laugh. I was generally pretty good at that. And in the end I held her hand and she left knowing that she was loved.

And what the hell. Maybe she didn’t even die. Maybe I gave her a kidney or something.

I have a two-and-a-half year old son named Zane, and he is the bright, solar center of my joy in life at the moment. He is all boy, which means that he is constantly giving himself minor owies, hurts, boo-boos and bonks. I think I am a good papa to him, and one of the ways I gauge that is by noticing how often he comes to me, alongside mama, to have his assorted bumps and bruises attended to. "Kiss it," he instructs gravely, nodding urgently and proffering up the necessary body part, "Kiss it, rub it." His confidence in my ability to make it better is unwavering, but that’s not what makes me deeply happy and proud to be his papa. Of course Zane knows papa can fix it- that’s elementary stuff for a two year old. What is primary is that he knows papa loves him enough to want to fix it. That is almost as good as the fixing itself.

One midnight, a week after I had found Bethany’s obit on the internet, I fell exhausted and depressed into bed. The bed in question was a futon in the guest bedroom, where I was sleeping for the night because I had a cold and didn’t want my coughing to wake Jael. The futon was open, which made it, in the most fundamental ways, more or less like a bed. One of the ways it was not like a bed, however, was in the fact that it had wooden armrests bracketing the top half of the mattress, just slightly higher than the mattress itself. The room was dark and I wasn’t, precisely, careful about how I fell full-length onto the mattress. The very loud and surprising clonk I heard was my forehead connecting heavily with the left armrest of the futon. It hurt for one bright, starbursting second, then I rolled over onto my back, covered my forehead with my hand gingerly, and laughing weakly at my own stupidity, said aloud the first words that came to my mind. "Kiss it," I said. I heard my own words in the closeness of the dark room and realized two things that made my heart break. I hadn’t said the words to the room, but to God. And I wasn’t talking about my forehead.

Tears streamed down my face as I lay staring at the ceiling, realizing that all my life I had thought I’d had a father in heaven, when what I really wanted, in the aching core of my heart, was a Papa. The father was busy, hard-nosed, rule-following, only peripherally interested, and because he was God, cruel. But the Papa cried my tears with me. The Papa not only knew why I had loved Bethany, but had loved her Himself as well. The Papa cared about what hurt me. The Papa wanted to make it better.

That night, I was finally able to let go- a little- of my grief and give it up to Papa. He didn’t make it all better at once, but He kissed it.

The next morning I went for a walk. It was a beautiful morning, early summer, with the sun streaming down like something you could catch in bowls and save for later. I thought some more about Bethany, about the loss of her, about the sadness of the words "what might have been". I replayed old memories and stirred just a bit more the stew of loss and regret. I felt different. Not better, quite, but... scrubbed. Exfoliated. Heading back, I turned onto a street near our house and started up the gentle hill to the next corner. There were some people on the sidewalk ahead of me, just a bit too far away for me to make out. One was a woman, the other was a little boy on a tricycle. As I watched them, it was as if a dusty haze in my head was suddenly blown away, as if God himself had taken my head gently between his hands and urged me to really look. The woman was Jael, my love and my treasure, my pearl of great price. The child was my Zane, studiously trying to unravel the mystery of pedal-power.

And this is the part where, were I an uber-Christian or a preacher, I‘d say that God spoke to me. I am not an uber-Christian or a preacher, so I won’t say that. But if I did say that, I’d say that what God whispered to me then, as I watched my sweet people in that moment before they looked up, and saw me, and smiled, and waved, was something like this: How often are you living in the past and not seeing the present I am giving you? How often are you mourning the faded gamble of a "what if" and missing the vibrant, wondrous reality of the right now? Do you forget that the past enjoys a very good PR campaign of selective memory and maudlin sentimentality? Do you still have to berate yourself for the faults you have shown as you’ve grown up? Do you still, really not understand what I mean when I say ALL things work together for good for my people?

Those were rhetorical questions. The answers were obvious, to both God and I. But if, in that moment, God did ask me those things, he also knelt down in front of me, looked me in the eye, smiled broadly and lovingly, then put his arm around me and walked with me to meet my Jael and Zane.

I guess the most remarkable irony of all is that life is like Tetris, with God managing the joystick. That’s funny, isn’t it? There he is, working with the crazily shaped blocks of all our bad choices and myriad, clumsy failures, and yet, if we let him do the work, he still finds a way to make something good for us. It wasn’t right that I let the days slip by without ever telling Bethany how wonderful she was, how I delighted in her presence. It was weakness on my part, and it shames me deeply. But God took that failure and used it, miraculously, to build a completely thrilling life with Jael, my true first love and most perfect companion. I am sad that Bethany may have never heard what I wanted to say to her back then. But I have this as my balm now: that the God who loves me like a Papa loved her just like I did, and more so. And unlike me, he was perfectly willing and able to show his love to her. He was not only able to make her heart happy; he loved her enough to want to. And since he is God, that is a quietly reassuring thought.

To Bethany, a beam of warmth and happiness and joy that the rest of us lost far too soon: I content myself in the knowledge that I may know you again in perfection.

To Jael, my living daydream, my indescribable wow: I vow to pursue you always, missing no more of the thrill of every moment with you.

To God, my Papa ... Kiss it. Rub it.