What Happened (?)

Dear Kate,

What's the worst that could happen?

I mean anything: to your career, your relationship, your life.

Say a relationship, a love affair, the worst that could happen, what would it be?

Affection unrequited?  That wouldn't exactly be a "love affair" to begin with.  Love interrupted?  But there you're still left with a longing to feed on, and probably does you good too to keep goodness unsoiled.  Betrayal?  Yes, bad enough, as all of us would no doubt experience one way or another, but that also makes it a shared human experience, not easier to swallow for sure, but very palpable and almost made digestible with experience.

I think the worst is when at the end your lover tells you, "Well, I've never really meant it."  It being I to you, we to us, none of such could ever mean what we said we meant it to be.

It isn't a lie that your lover is talking about--that would make it a betrayal and you can conveniently call him the asshole that he is.  But a lie is not what he told you.  He did love you.  He did love you as if there is an eternity to test the claim that his love for you is eternal.  Only that there is no eternity to test it.

And there is no up-the-mountain or across-the-sea either; mostly you two walked in the shopping mall, travelled a bit (more than you could afford), lived sun after moon, and that has been the extent of your adventure together, taking it, the I and You, to the limit of what We could mean.

We couldn't possibly mean what we said we meant.

"Up the mountain," what do you mean by that?  Which mountain?  It sounds grand and touching, but what does going up a mountain hand in hand do to our destiny together?  One of us will die---first.  Lucky if We die together; no one left to face, alone, a false promise.  When the lie is mutual, it is called a conspiracy, to feel bitter about it the true betrayal of a game agreed on.

Now imagine a homemaker, a parent, a community builder, a hands-on man, a woman of faith and devotion, carving out a corner of meaning in a world that seems to offer not much of it, working at it day after day, task after task, goal after goal, just to shut up the whisper that "You couldn't possibly mean it to be meaning-full."  If there is no meaning "out there," now and finally, then there can never be any meaning in your it, the little corner you carved out, a hideout for your willing refugees of make-believe.

We get used to it, the grand conspiracy, to equivocate with utmost conviction.  We hear a song of love lost but couldn't imagine ourselves ever crying over it, a loss that we too will all need to bear but bear we refuse today.  No tears for you, we say, and likewise expect none for ourselves when we take our turn.  You were doing lunch when the song played, a manufactured sentiment like everything else in life, to speak about the real in an unreal way, sincerely disrespectful of truth.  I was taking out the garbage when pulling away from the line about love dying, as if, when the voice faded away like everything else, used and disposed of, a lostness built into how it all works.

What's the worst that could happen?

That nothing actually happened.

Yours, Alex