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“You don’t need to apologize to me,” I assembled, my heart and my head both racing, my fingers trembling over the keys.
How different it all might have been, I thought. But what a gift to understand.
“The memory of you stayed with me for a very long time,” I added, and thought of a Zen teaching about monks I once learned.I left the girl there,said one monk to the other,are you still carrying her?
LISS
Iflipped onthe screen in front of me, checked how much time was left until we reached our destination. 02:13. Of all the crazy things I had done in my life…but there was no sense mining that territory again. I tried to calculate how many hours I had been traveling, what time it was at home, but my brain was soft, and the questions not pressing.
My mind went back instead to the thread it had picked until it was frayed, yet still I could not leave it be. How did this happen? Through the hills and the valleys of life, I had prided myself on my ability to simply power through. My mantra in life was to never back away from a challenge. But now it was my own mind that challenged me, or specifically the stubborn holes that remained, no matter how zealously I sought to fill them. To my great chagrin, thinking longer or harder brought me no closer to the answers I sought.
In the midst of the 2001 holiday season, I began a new journal. I opened it simply enough.
A fresh start. That is what this blank book represents, and God knows I need nothing right now if not a fresh start – clean, white pages free of previous days and previous pains.
I was making lots of fresh starts then. I set aside my particularities to accept a job at the University of Chicago. It was a purely administrative role managing grants, and with not a shred of international work, the type of job that only weeks earlier I had sworn to Nao Kao I would never accept. Circumstances change, the planets spin, and we find we are grateful for that which we may have previously disdained. I boxed up my memories of a lifetime in Ann Arbor and signed a lease on a new, sun-dappled apartment in Chicago. I adopted a cat, Penny, the first pet I’d had since my beloved childhood Labrador retriever expired of old age as I began high school. It wasn’t like I would be traveling. I packed Penny and a few suitcases of belongings into my Civic and pointed my car west toward a brand-new life.
The one fresh start I did not make was Jake. It was so easy, too easy, to return to him. Our split had not been acrimonious and our time together blissfully uncomplicated, especially when compared to what I had recently known. I liked Jake then. He was smart. He was funny. And perhaps most of all, he was safe and familiar company. A week after I moved to the city, he showed up with cartons of ice cream and a toy for my cat. What he offered was no less than a lifeline. When I accepted, I sealed our fates.
Impossible though it seems for a girl from Michigan, I had no other friends in the city at the time. And so, it was also so easy, too easy, to spend Saturdays gawping at the giant rabbits at the Lincoln Park Zoo together or riding the Navy Pier Ferris wheel or the escalators at the Crate and Barrel on Michigan Avenue where I could only dream about owning the creamy velvet sofas or buttery leather chairs that occupied floor-upon-floor of that great, glass flagship store. Jake was smitten – still or again – and whether I wanted to have lunch at Gino’s or get half-priced tickets to a show, he was always available.
As a bonus, he never asked any questions, not one, though I had steeled myself for the old Ross and Rachel routine: we were on a breakup. A nice boy with a steady job who knew me and loved me and posed no awkward questions. It should have been more than enough. I tried to remind myself to be grateful.
What Jake thought or suspected, I never knew, though my intuition – again, that blasted and blessed sixth sense – is that he presumed the time we were apart was no more than a big, blank space. And I cannot and will not lie. It made it easier for me to move forward that way, erasing all the space in between, until eventually I believed it myself, thoroughly convinced we had hardly broken up at all.
Until the first step, quicksand looks solid, too.
My parents’ delight –my mother’s delight– that I was back with that nice boy Jake Larkin, the one whose parents were also professors, the politest boy I had ever brought home, only sealed the deal. How could I have explained to Rachael Zick that the nice boy with the faculty parents lacked intellectual curiosity and ambition, that our conversations never delved beyond the headlines, that after the initial shock of breaking up with him wore off, all I felt was relief?
I couldn’t have, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. Jake and I were not the only ones for whom the gap in time sealed shut, for whom the space where Nao Kao had existed simply disappeared. By returning to Jake, I satisfied my mother so completely that she never again mentioned my unfortunate lapse in judgment, that ill-advised affair that temporarily marred her opinion of me. Probably, she didn’t even remember it.
After we decided to get married – a subject I say he raised, but Jake claims I broached, and a state of affairs which encapsulates our entire relationship – I wrote vows.
Because you see me for both who I am and who I could be
I choose you
Because you lift me up when I am down
I choose you
Because you love me
I choose you
I choose you to stroll the ancient streets of lands both near and far
To face one million dawns
To share my chores, my sorrows, and my joys
To dance in the glint of the moon and build sandcastles in our dreams
I choose you
I never delivered them. On the morning of our wedding, Jake’s best man delivered the news that writer’s block precluded him from doing the same. Could we just recite the traditional vows? Relief triumphed over annoyance.
When I stood at the altar paralyzed by what I was doing, the warnings that I was making a mistake echoing through my mind from the far reaches like a ship’s horn through a bank of fog – the repeated blasts reminding me that there was more to life, more to a relationship, than stability, security, and serenity – I merely repeated the bland words of the officiant, detached, as though watching a drama unfold in a play. But at least I would take a new name, erasing not only the gap of time in which I had known Nao Kao, but covering my trail so thoroughly that I could at least be certain he would never find me, at least not in this lifetime.
