Stepping Backward
It’s strange how this has come about: since I got married, I have stopped writing about love. It is as if as if having found it — having obtained the object of my affection and said object has reciprocated by calling me his own — the need to express love other than through the three usual words, to write about it, describe it and how it feels to be in its throes (or the opposite — to be abandoned by it) — the need and compulsion to write about it has disappeared.
Actually it hasn’t.
Only the object of affection is not to sort to rhapsodize. He is not syrupy sweet, he is not romantic, he will not take a symbolic dagger to his heart should I turn away and give him the cold shoulder. Flowers, he says, are cliched, and chocolates cause cavities.
Instead he will send me an SMS later in the day — just when I’ve begun to feel most unwanted and neglected and unloved after a whole morning of silence and seeming indifference — to tell me that he will buy me a blender so we can stay at home and make banana shakes. Then when I come home, he tells me to sit on the couch where he will take off my shoes and socks, then rub my feet until I feel almost sleepy but happy.This is how he loves.
When I was still single, I used to write volumes and volumes in my journals. Journals because I kept more than one; often two or three at time, each with a different cover, texture of paper, reflecting different aspects of my nature and how I viewed the world and my life at the time I picked up my pen and poured my confusion/happiness/anger/frustration/mushiness out.
I also wrote letters. Some of them I sent, many I kept hidden. Others I tore up but couldn’t throw away because of how alive (even if sad and despairing) I felt when I wrote the words they contained.
Now, well, all my journals contain now are generic entries: gave my dog a bath. Ate a donut and finished this or that novel. Cleaned the house and am so exhausted.
I send email, and they’re short and abrupt. Expressions of affection are in the form of generic emoticons.
I am suddenly worried that I have let go of some piece of what made me me before I got married: a part of me that fell in love and felt woozy and tingly and corny inside. The part of me that was touched to the quick by Adrienne Rich’s ‘Stepping Backward’ and whose heart was impatient with longing for the sight of the beloved (unlike now when my heart is impatient with annoyance when the beloved is late for dinner).
Resolved to bring back poetry into my life, and to not take for granted the moments I spend with the object of my affection just because there’s an endless number of them. I will also learn to appreciate how he expresses his affection (stepping away from his math problems to make me tea when I’m downstairs watching tv; the sudden bear hug and I am lifted off my feet slightly scared but laughing all the same), and not hope for more showy displays. I too love quietly and in secret, but perhaps once again I can love loudly and in color, if only in words (am more expressive on paper than in person).
____
And when we come into each other’s rooms
Once in awhile, encumbered and self-conscious,
We hover awkwardly about the threshold
And usually regret the visit later.
Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers–
And once in a while two with the grace of lovers–
Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion
And let each other freely come and go.
Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards
The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium,
The penny horoscope, letters never mailed.
The door may open, but the room is altered;
Not the same room we look from night and day.
-From Stepping Backward.
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