Circling the Drain: A Love Story

In my lap she laid, gasping for breathe through blood-filled lungs, staring into my soul with that cold, dead gaze I had come to know intimately. I loved her more than I ever loved myself. In many ways she was the beginning of me. Had my life stayed its course she would have been the end of me as well. It’s the details we remember afterward that come to define our experiences. It’s the sensations we can’t forget that determine who we’ll be when all is said and done. There is a reality that sets in when the handcuffs click into place.

In the days since I have had ample time to scrutinize my life. What I found was logic similar to M. C. Escher’s Relativity. The embarrassment boils my guts like sap in a maple log fire. Our long-term, public romance ended as dramatically as it began. I disappeared before word got out to avoid the squinting eyes of judgment locking down on my every move. A once prolific and fiery love affair became my misery and shame, my poverty and grief. My only choice was to become a shadow in the town’s memory, the discolored paint where a picture had hung for years.

My first true love was a slow-drip of poison and I stood by her all the while. Weightless in the gravity of my consequences, I circled the drain nightly convinced it would never run out of water. No one ever said she was wrong for me except my mother. Damn… why didn’t I listen to my mother? We always think we know better than our parents. Now I eat humble pie at the table quietly. It is filled with my words, every last one of them used to praise my former lover, topped in dollops of regret for embracing a life that relied too heavily on her and barely on me.

What’s lost in the controversy of our relationship is what she meant to me. We were never really partners of a committed sort. She was an escape from reality meant to ease the sting of shortcomings I eventually came to realize she enabled. Every night I found myself wrapped in her arms and intoxicated by the warmth and acceptance; a mosaic of comforts massaging my body and mind until I awoke to the emptiness of my bed and existence.

More and more I looked forward to my nightly respite in paradise. The anticipation of her inside my every cell grew to become a necessity. I could have normality by day and liberation by night: a functional, unassuming day followed by an evening of hijinks and debauchery. Each day ended in bliss, having reveled with my comrades and thoroughly enjoyed my sweetheart.

The truth of it is, I loved her but I didn’t respect her. Not enough, anyway. She was my beloved but never really my friend. Our relationship was killing me and I knew it in my heart. She spent all my money, toyed with my emotions, and led me so far down a dark path I lost my identity and all sense of right and wrong. I’ll never fault her, though. I blame myself for being so goddamned foolish.

Weakness is hard for any man to admit, though I can honestly say I was never addicted to her. Now that she’s gone I barely think about her. The lust to have her in control of me has subsided completely. But when I held her… I was my frailest. I loved the escape more than any day of reality I could remember. It was never her substance I was attracted to; I was drawn to the environment in which she dwelled and the fantasy I entered the instant we touched.

Deep down I knew I would never quit her until something larger than me forced my hand. Guess I always imagined it would be a doctor stepping into an examination room, a furled brow with various colored papers on his clipboard, setting his hand gently on my shoulder and telling me with certainty that if I continued on this way I would be dead by forty. This would set forth an astonishing reversal of lifestyle, first by marrying the only woman who stuck by me through the worst, and ending with nice kids and retirement from a mid-level career. An Oscar-worthy role, no doubt, but this was no movie and the reality was that a judge would be handing down my ultimatum instead.

There is a reality that sets in when the handcuffs click into place. For me, I was finally free. I could never leave her willingly so I killed her with the very negligence she instilled in me. A coward’s path, I know, but one never knows how they will react when trapped on a hamster wheel and suddenly aware of it. The bravest souls walk away and wash their hands of the cycle. The rest of us pull the plug and pray the strainer keeps us from disappearing.