The Eye of the Hurricane

I couldn’t bring you in any closer. I couldn’t meld our souls. It was like trying to get close to a slowly exploding bottle or trying to reach the eye of a hurricane.

The whole time, right from the beginning, I had a sense of what it was like at the centre of the hurricane. . Perhaps the first few glimpses, I missed; took for granted, assumed to be part of a standard getting-to-know-you. . I also missed them because my first impulse (still, after all these years) is to experience guilt. Instead of properly seeing the still moments as respite from an ongoing gale, I assumed they were moments of forgiveness for wrongs I hadn’t fully understood I’d committed. I didn’t know enough then to know that any wrong I might possibly have committed paled into insignificance against the circling walls of the hurricane.

We, you and I, frequently found still moments. You were concerned that they weren’t “proper” or “normal” “happy times” as defined by your experience and your pals. One time you woke up with a start in the middle of the night, staring at me in horror. As I awoke you were asking me if I was a werewolf I couldn’t help laughing, but you were trembling, poised, like a deer, ready to spring out of the bed. I tentatively reached toward you and eased you gently back under the covers. You relaxed and I could begin to feel a restored flow of warm energy passing between our embracing bodies. In moments like that I loved you so totally. But I think you thought those moments were too strange

One time I came to see you in my old diesel camper van It was late, and unannounced. I knocked on your darkened door and stood back to look up. You appeared at your window in the moon light in your pyjamas, but you came down and out, arms folded, into the cold to look. We got into the van and under the covers and listened to music on the new sound system until the early hours. You held my head in your arms.

One time you said, “Don’t ever leave me when I’m angry. ”

We didn’t do a lot of verbal. We didn’t talk endlessly and repetitively about which pals were now in or out of favour and for what obscure reasons. We didn’t endlessly and repetitively reminisce about good times past. Sometimes we just lay and communicated through limbs for hours. Sometimes I would just listen to your breathing and feel your body rise and subside. Sometimes I would listen to your heartbeat, even your stomach. But those would be in the close sections of the ellipse along which my mind would be wandering. Sometimes it would be out in the rarefied zone of the eternal question, sometimes a lot more pragmatic and day to day, but inevitably, inescapably, inexorably it would swing back on the long curve of the ellipse, thudding back into the sound of your lungs, the smell of your neck. I would become conscious again of where exactly my limbs were and signal – a squeeze, a puff, a stretch – and wait for a response. You were doing the same thing, but your ellipse would have taken you elsewhere which to me didn’t matter but which to you did. To me what was so good was the synchronicity of the return curves; to you what was so bad was that we were thinking about different things

But the time I remember best, the first time I was certain I was in the eye of the storm and not in some temporary, falsely created lull, was when we stood on the bridge in the park after I’d finally gone and ordered a second ticket to Canada. For twenty or thirty minutes we just stood there, intertwined against the railing, looking at the water and the ducks in the sunshine. You were calm because you knew how much I loved you. I was calm because I felt that at last I had done something completely right and that, at least for the moment, you believed I loved you. By then I knew the consequences were still far from predictable but, for the time being, it was the right thing, and for the time being we stood together in the eye with the distant winds racing on the periphery out of sight and sound and out of mind.

Months later, after Canada had fucked up and passed by, I came by your door, in winter. I wanted to see if you really hated me as much as you seemed to want me to believe We had some angry talk, but as I was leaving to go to a pre-arranged meet, I turned and said, “You want me to come back after?”, and you said, “. Yes. ” And I did, and it became evident that you didn’t hate me at all, and our lust carried us through several unquestioning days and nights, and then, for better or for worse, we began talking about how to find out if we should or should not be living together. And then, over time, for better or for worse, we reckoned we ought to get married.

As you knew, I’m not a great believer in the institution of marriage In economic terms, I consider it to be the base unit of the engine of rationalisation for western greed, surfeit, and exploitation, but I felt ready to make a significant gesture, a fully obligating commitment as a signal to you of the strength of my feelings for you. I wanted to give you an indication of the lengths to which I would go to bring peace and calm to you so that I could bask in the presence for eternity of the peacefulness and calm I know is in you; in the extended moment of that time on the bridge, in the eye of a hopefully dissipating hurricane; in the presence of the warm and loving nature you exude as the walls of the hurricane recede.

But, it was not to be. Very soon after the ceremony, at which I wept like a loon as I heard the words of commitment spill forth from my flapping mouth calling on the people there assembled to witness the measure and extent of my resolve, you said, “Well, that was only one day. ”

I guess I knew it was a gamble. Either the formal commitment would bring us peace and tranquillity, or it wouldn’t. I felt, at that point in my life, I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. We got married and went away and lived in the hills of southern Spain for three months.

How good could that be? Who would not have looked upon us and said, “Those two are blessed with good fortune to get such a start to their life together” And we were, blessed and off to a good start, but it wasn’t enough. Somehow or other, the formal commitment and the idyllic start were unable to provide the assurances you required The hurricane, gone for some weeks, began to return, whirling at first on the periphery of our lives and then, periodically, closing in and wreaking havoc.

Gradually, I knew the game was up, even before we left Spain. The overland journey home was tortuous and joyless. Back home, we maintained a periodic balance but the hurricane was never far and I knew it was only a matter of time before it blew up in our faces.

For me, the big learning curve at that stage had to do with the recognition of the limitations of my supposed neutrality. As the walls of the hurricane closed in, as I could see the clouding signs in your eyes, my vanity was such that I thought I could resist. I thought I could remain my usual calm and detached self as the winds hurtled past my shoulders. Your perceptions and your anger were not mine. I stood outside them. But such was the force of the hurricane and, perhaps, of your natural genius, that I became drawn in, dragged into the vortex and dealing with your perceptions and your anger on your terms and within your context such that I began to lose my bearings and no longer knew which way to turn to find either my own calm and detachment or the stillness of the eye. In those terrifying moments the hurricane ripped through me and I began to find myself hollering as loud as you and almost as bereft of inhibition and social restraint. And, meta-infuriatingly, as the raging counter anger welled up in me I could see you begin to calm down. Through my tunnelled, clouded, raging eyes I could see you begin to smile. For you the storm had now passed. It passed, like a possession, from you to me, escalating even, as I witnessed your now growing serenity. I would be left in the grip of the whirling hurricane as you stepped calmly back into the eye and watched me twisting and turning and hollering.

A few sessions like this and I began to realise that my supposed detachment, my supposed neutrality and balance, were fast eroding. I was being drawn into something much bigger than I could handle As the storms blew and receded and then blew stronger again, and the police and the lawyers became involved, I began to feel out-manoeuvred. I began to feel a force in you blossoming as the very rights and institutions I normally campaign for, and for which you bitterly resented my time away, swung to your support. Eventually, the time came when I had to grab myself by the fucking throat and drag myself away through the raging winds, back towards the outer periphery, away from the allure of the stillness in the eye of the hurricane, away through the frenzied charging of the circling windstorm, buffeted, wracked, and pummelled every step of the cursed way, beyond the spill and tumult and chaos of the outer edges to again stand outside and to then look back to see you standing there in the eye, calm and alone, as the furious battering gusts hurtled around you, now between us, separating you from me.

As I looked back, across the chasm, across the violent raging torrent, I could see you now weren’t smiling. I could see how hurt you were I could see you feeling, perhaps not for the first time, abandoned. I could see you watching me betray you as I bailed out.

As I looked back, through the shattering tempests, obscuring our vision with the flotsam and jetsam of our lives together, I could still see how beautiful you were. I could still see your confined, wounded, demented loveliness. As I backed away, as the last vestiges of the gales ripped and tugged at me, I could see, completely and perfectly, at one and the same time, the crystal essence of the complete and perfect case for both why I should and why I should not be there with you.

I had to abandon ship because I wasn’t strong enough. I had to bail out because the ramparts of my neutrality were too fragile.
But don’t ever think
that I didn’t
or don’t
love you…

.

© 2004 Deacon Martin