the problem with love
Wake up, my husband said. Wake up.
What, I say.
You were crying in your sleep, he said.
It was 4:00 a.m. I lay there for awhile in the last of the dark. I was tempted to get up and start working but I didn’t. Instead I counted my breaths until I finally fell asleep again.
I haven’t had insomnia since my trip back to Texas to be with A. and B. and M. and T., while we remembered you. It’s a relief to sleep through the night again and not wake up on the couch, wrapped in a blanket facing the window I stared out of until the moon crossed the sky and faded out of sight.
When you love someone and it goes to waste, what could be worse? sings Chris Martin in goddamn Trader Joe’s and I bow my head as I shop and cry quietly to myself. An older woman passes me near the tortillas, and as I step aside, I feel her tiny hand grip my forearm for a moment, and squeeze. She says something in a language I can’t understand and looks me in my tear-blurred eyes with infinite understanding and then continues on her way.
There is a deep irony that the music that I cry over is music people would assign, dismissively, to someone of our generation - hokey, out of touch. It’s okay. They don’t know that you were a genius. They don’t know how your musical tastes stretched north and south and east and west and some mystical place I could never quite get to. The flow of new music into my life was as constant as the Mississippi. Your first two albums were Kiss and Barry Manilow. You listened to Coldplay but also Husker Du and Nine Inch Nails and Tori Amos and Public Image Limited and Marisa Monte and Bela Fleck and Screaming Trees and Khalid and The Sundays even the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar plus stuff I can’t even remember, no way can a top of mind listing do justice to the vastness of your musical interests. You were open to everything, something few people knew, but it’s the same quality that informed your basic kindness, your total acceptance of everyone. Even the hidden them - whether they knew it or not.
I read a poem the other day containing the line “love doesn't die only people do” and that’s pretty much it that is exactly the problem with love.
Grief is love going to waste, love that is dying slowly of neglect at the side of a cold snowy highway in the middle of Alaska in the dead of winter. A dog permanently exiled from its pack.