Aaron
You keep asking me about my relationships. I don’t know what to tell you – I have never really loved anyone. Well, I loved Meher and Anya. More than I will ever be able to tell you. Anya’s face was the last thing I saw when I lost consciousness. She was the face I wanted to leave with, the one gift I wanted to carry with me to wherever I was going too. Do you know that story? My Mother could barely talk by the time she told it to me; I think that’s why she felt like she had to. She told me that when we left, we couldn’t take anything with us and that’s why so little of this world mattered. But she believed that her God would let her carry one thing with her, one of anything she wanted. The one most precious thing she had been given here. As a gift to him. A memory, a prayer, a face. I remember asking her how I would carry my collector’s edition Neruda folio with me. She wasn’t amused. It was leather bound! With gold leafing! And have you heard any Neruda? Don’t come in. Go away. Go back south with your umbrella, go back north with your serpent’s teeth. A poet lives here. No sadness may cross this threshold. That was probably the closest I came to prayer. She said she would take my hands with her, she said they were the most precious things she had been given here. I can still feel her lips on my palms, they felt so dry. So brittle. Anyways, that’s why I tried to carry Anya’s face with me – I don’t think I could have lived without her, especially not in death. But in the spirit of this little game you are playing – sure. Which one would you specifically like to break down. Aaron? He was my favourite. Completely pliable, completely inarticulate in his need for me. I don’t think he ever really wanted me, but I know that he needed me desperately. He liked to think he could fix me. He would hold me and say clever things like – I know there are two of you, a very good girl and a very bad one, I’m here to keep the bad one in check. I used to wish reality came in very tall shot glasses. If he thought that he could control anything about me, I really wonder if I was truly the crazy one. But he did love me. And he stood by me, when I didn’t really know what it meant to be stood by. He was always there, at the bottom of each mountain of pain I flung myself off of. I mean, I would look up – relatively bloodied and hoping for some sort of epiphany about life and the meaning of everything around me, and all I would find, without fail, was Aarons face, his hands. I was never fair to him. I was barely nice to him. I knew all the words though. I walked into that relationship completely scripted. Pre-wired. It’s like how babies can swim at birth. And then they learn to be afraid of drowning, afraid of death. I was like that with Aaron – I knew how to swim through him. I don’t think he ever realized just how little he really had of me. I think I always thought I was better than him, better than he would ever be. I know that’s not true. I was just a lot more fucked up. Love was simple for him. It was trust and faith and friendship. It was something tangible. Love was wrapping me up in his arms and promising never to let go. And meaning it. He had a beautiful smile. Did I love him? Wait, this is your day-job, right? No. I didn’t love him. I didn’t love him for four years. I think I missed the entire gamut of emotions that you are supposed to feel in a relationship – I was wonderfully numb. No love. Love was just never in that equation. Do you know what the funniest thing was. I think I used to push him to punish me. I wanted him to walk away from me, I wanted to feel something for him, even if it was pain. I craved to be angry with him, because that would have meant I cared. Or something. The worst came towards the end, when I cheated. When I told him that I cheated. When I waited for him to hit me, to walk away from me, to tell me I was the most pathetic creature (or “bad person”, he wasn’t the most eloquent child I knew) that he had ever met. Do you know what he did. He hugged me. He asked me if I was hurting. He told me he would take care of me. That I shouldn’t worry. I think I might have slapped him. Or wanted to. Aaron was incredible. I wonder what he must have done in his last life to have to deal with me in this one. Do you believe in Karma? I didn’t. Not really, not in the way that I believed in poetry or my Mother – I kind of accepted the notion of what goes around comes around and consequently floated in a guilt-free zone, self-exempt from the rule. Until I met Jai. Wow. Meher said it best. We were sitting by the riverside, next to that damned half-fish, half-lion statue that keeps vomiting bile colored water into a bile-colored river. We were down half a bottle of wine in about twenty-five minutes and were starting to lose what little coherence we managed to function on as a unit. If Anya was my soul, Meher was very much my heart. And right now, my heart was spewing the vilest similes about love, particularly about a certain conspicuously absent semi-boyfriend. She slammed her wine goblet on the table emphatically and gestured wildly towards the sky – mumbling something about credentials. I remember asking her to shut up and pass me my smokes. She did. And then went into the longest answer for a non-existent question known to man. He was perfect on paper. She was right. I never told her that, I don’t think I ever told her how many times she was right. I think my nasty temperament and my complete disdain for most of humanity gave me some morbid license to pass insanely bad judgment that no one really called me on. But Meher was what I could never hope to be. A genuinely sweet person. And she was right, more than even she believed. She had called this one. He was beautiful, tall, intelligent, from a “good” family and (ohmyGOD) could sing pretty much professionally. But he was also insecure, distant and a complete commitment- phobe. Which I only discovered after falling in like with him. And trust me, that was a lot for me. To care for someone who could possibly – actually more than probably hurt me? That was classic. It was true bravery on my part. Medal-worthy. Really.
So, long story short – it didn’t work. What do you mean what else? It didn’t work. I stopped feeling what little I had felt at an amazingly rapid rate and then I left. You try conducting a conversation with a corpse. I wasn’t being “closed up” or “non-communicative” or whatever other bullshit term you want to slap on my silence. I was just very dead on the inside and I think that is the scariest thing for another human being to see. To witness someone decompose right before you eyes.
Loved him? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think the attraction was in the fact that he didn’t love me – that he was the anti-thesis of Aaron. Practical, dramatic, absent. It made me feel completely insecure and I adored it. If he had let me in, if he had told me he loved me – I think I would have run, well – I think I would have walked screaming. Did I mention I’m not good with people?
