Abandon
I ran away from home last weekend. Not far:
just down to
But it wasn’t really the argument—a
silly thing that sprouted when my planned weekend retreat was cancelled. I told Girlfriend of the change in plans early
in the week. And she
looked…disappointed. “Oh, that’s too
bad,” she said, at the prospect of another weekend home with me. “I was planning to get a lot accomplished.”
I gave her much of the week—and
countless hints and opportunities—to make this up, to come up with some things
to do that might reflect a little joy, a wee bit of enthusiasm of a weekend
with her one and only.
She resisted. And so, we started squabbling on Friday
night.
I woke up early Saturday, startled by an
edgy and sharp-toothed desire to have first time sex with
someone—anyone—again. Or really, not
just anyone. I wasn’t hoping to
recapture first bliss with my girlfriend—I was wanting someone, something,
else.
That’s what got me in the car and on the
highway—not a plan to carry out this gnawing, vivid ache behind my eyes, but
the distraction of it, the way this yearning kept me from keeping up my end of
the argument, the myriad and none too flattering emotions that it conjured as I
sat across from Girlfriend at the kitchen table, the itching underneath my
skin, the building thudding beat of it.
I felt like my unconscious had let fly in the night a harpoon of some
sort, and that my guts had been well-snagged, and yanked a good bit closer to the
surface.
As I sped along the bright lit highway,
I considered this. The breathy thrill of
those first kisses, the flush when it comes clear there’ll be no slowing down,
the radiance and weight of that new and unfamiliar, somehow knowing touch. (I feel I should acknowledge here the simple charge
of the first time could make any clod seemed knowing to the all-too-often-oh-so-willing me.) The word that came to mind as I considered
all these senses was abandon.
I longed for abandon, for that feeling
of freedom before you worried about morning breath, how often you should call
(or if you even wanted to), whose turn it is to walk the dog, and whether
Girlfriend rightly needs some time alone.
I missed those moments when everything just seems that it can work out
by itself, when it is simple, shuddering, delightful to just release yourself
into the tide.
I wanted to abandon reason,
rationality—or have them both abandon me.
I wanted not to think of fairness, ego, equity, or what would happen
next. I was, for those 100 miles, simply
sick and tired of “being in relationship.”
I wanted, once again, to just collide.
I took myself down to the river of my
childhood and adolescence, where there is a wooded parkland, trees and
squirrels and trails and on this Saturday, blue skies and a surprising February
warmth. I’ve walked these trails with
lovers in the past, but much more often in the periods between—when I have come
to recollect myself when the abandon didn’t end so well.
John Spong, a
writer and Episcopal bishop, boiled down our call toward godliness to three
simple commandments—only one of which I can recall at will. Looking toward the model Jesus lived, Spong suggests that we are called, each one of us, to
love...and wastefully, at that.
To love, without regard to worthiness or
consequence or reciprocity. To waste our
love on one another—which sounds to me a bit like loving with abandon.
As I watched the river sliding by, I
wondered if I might manage to keep up that kind of love with Girlfriend. If I might summon up the bravery to simply love
her as I do, even if sometimes she wishes me away over the weekend. I wondered if I might simply sink into this
loving her, as I have sunk into embraces in the past. If maybe loving her like that is what I’m
craving, what this fantasy of first time sex is calling me to try.
Loving her like that—really loving her like that—might be a first
for me.
[You can find the works of Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong—as well as
rebuttals to his views of Christianity—through
Amazon.
But please buy from independent bookstores!]
© 2008
Melissa Capers