They met on a Saturday, in Golden, Colorado, at a patio bar with a blue grass band playing. It was the last days of June, in 2013.
X couldn’t take his eyes off of Z from the time she and her girlfriend walked onto the patio. Once he had placed himself between Z and the herd, deftly approaching and separating her, as if choosing a wild filly from its herd, he asked if he could buy her a drink.
“That’s a long tall drink of water with a short haircut,” she thought. “Sure,” she said. Z motioned her girlfriend over and they sat down with X and his friend. “What are you, six three?” she asked, looking him up and down, more than once, noticing his legs wouldn’t fit under the table. She laughed, “You, sir, have legs right up to your -- neck!”
X almost blushed, but smiled instead, surprised at her ease and friendliness. Then they discoursed over two drinks and a glass of water, everything from the death penalty to religion, including German brakes and transmissions. They had no idea what their friends had discussed. When it was time for Z and her girlfriend to leave, there may as well have been no one else on that patio in Golden but them.
X asked for her number, something Z did not give to guys in bars. She pursed her lips and was smiling by the time the Sharpie came out of her purse. “Do you really want my number? I mean, do you really want my number.”
“I do,” X said. He wanted a lot more than that.
“Okay,” she said and grabbed his arm, and then in indelible black Sharpie she signed her name across the inside of his forearm, along with her number.
Their friends’ mouths fell open. Z smiled, big. Well, I can’t lose that now, can I? I better ride my motorcycle careful on the way home so I don’t lose it.”
Then they laughed together for the first time and said goodbye.
“You really blew it with that guy, Z. You can’t get all serious and heavy with guys when you first meet them. They’re looking for fun at a place like this.” her girlfriend remarked.
Z winced. “You have no idea what you are talking about, A. This is me. And if a man can’t hold a conversation when he’s with me, I don’t want him to call me.”
“I can’t believe you wrote your number on his arm.”
“Me either. It just came to me.” Z laughed. “If he’s married or has a girlfriend, he deserves whatever he has coming … but he didn’t even flinch.”
Her girlfriend laughed. “No, he just grinned at you. I think you fascinate him.”
“Let’s hope so. I haven’t fascinated anyone for a while.” X called within 36 hours. They went to the stock car races on Wednesday night at Jackson Racetrack, off the highway, just good old hometown stock car races.
She had been staying with A for a few weeks because she was about to leave for Vegas to visit her father. A was upstairs with her date with the door closed when X and Z returned. It was July 3rd. They ate a little something, pulled off their boots and lay back on the couch. She fit in his arms as if she came from his own rib. Z slept like a baby in his arms, and aside from some light necking, X never even tried to cop a feel; though, he stroked her hair most of the night.
By the time they woke, the deal was sealed, whether either of them knew it or not. It was in their eyes: mutual twilight blue-eyed brokenness, and they recognized it in one another. Yet there was no apprehension. Instead, there was hope.
It was as though they had each emerged from slumber, and, like a pair of unplanned synchronized swimmers from under water, breathed sweet air at last. As their eyes met that morning, the look was this: “Well now, there you are; you are as wet as I am, for better or for worse.” The deal was sealed before negotiations had even begun. Struck in stone. Forged from steel. For better or for worse.
They had no idea that they were destined to break again each emotional fracture: the simple; the spiraling; the comminuted; even the green-stick fractures of their childhoods, but it was inevitable that they would need to be re-broken, and reset, in order to heal correctly. For the twinship of their heartache was mysteriously conjoined. All they could see for now was that they had fallen in love.
X felt it essential to parade his prowess in a near vainglorious conquest to dominate and shape the relationship, even their pasts, as though he were an angel that could travel dimensions.
In the beginning, the gift they had bathed in was the mirrored image they discovered in one another’s eyes, hearts, and spirits, never dreaming that these gifts born of perfect understanding one day would be forged into weapons.
One day she would ask, “Do you remember when you asked me to buy you a forge? Did you have any idea we’d be doing this with it,” in the solace of their bed.
“I knew I would need it.”
“How?”
“I just knew.”
The light bounced between those mirrors in their souls and bodies, bathing the lovers, illuminating the best in themselves and each other. It was a kaleidoscopic beginning. If it were more intense, it would have been hallucinogenic. They were producing enough dopamine for it. In that way, it was prismatic – no pun intended -- and because of circumstances – especially the depth and breadth of their previous states of pain – for the first year, they were together swaddled in bliss, the ethereal bliss children have when reveling in miracles, fairy circles, or the Northern Lights.
Their bliss was double rainbow enigma, a gift that had extended God’s bow of peace for over a year, and only for them. These mysteries pervaded even the various stages of adjustment that all love affairs should and must encounter in order to transcend and become everlasting love.
So it was deep, hot, and good between them for an unnatural time period. A wonderous kaleidoscope of ethereal, rich, and translucent colors painted and permeated their atmosphere. It was as good, or better, than it sounds.
“Remember what it was like, Z? Remember when we devoured each other and gave ourselves over abjectly to each other when it was just you and me?”
He smiled in his soul with the prowess of a conqueror, “I still love you the same way.”
“Shhh … Please don’t do that, don’t hurt me like that. Stop lying to me. Please. Stop saying things I know aren’t true anymore. You stopped loving me that way when you started watching your back with me.”
“I never stopped loving you.”
The dichotomy of his words and his behavior juxtaposed were painful for her.
Their double rainbow skies grew dark, and storms gathered, as they are want to do, especially with wounded people. They had cocooned themselves from their first night at the stock car races, their first date. Because of this, those irregular and yet average disturbances of all successful relationships seemed not only more ominous but darker and more dangerous.
Lightning began to shoot across the once impermeable beautiful canapé of the nearly adolescent sleeping-bag of affection, illuminating their defects. The rainbows in the once beautiful transcendent mirrors, the once pure and pretty reflections, now bore reflections of weapons. The once intoxicating dance of light transformed, and became, instead, lasers, dissecting, cutting, and cauterizing, even vivisecting, one another, themselves, and in the end, the relationship itself.
“It will be that good again. You are my woman; I am your man. I can fix anything.”
“I know. I just wish …”
“Shh,” his hushed breath caressed her breast, “Things are going to get better.”
The symmetry between their relationship and what was happening in the world was remarkable. The litmus test is whether one finds meaning in that symmetry. Nevertheless, the symmetry was real, actual, and substantial.
She sighed, “I didn’t know I loved you this much. Is that at least a part of why you did it, like, maybe trying to get back at me?”
“I love you. I know that. You should know it. I don’t come 900-some miles, just to get laid.”
“I know, but Z –“
“Oh, baby, shhh. Close your eyes. Shhh --”
In this manner, the lovers rested, as the desert skies above them roiled, thundering, blazing with discharges, hot, dry, electric, and bright enough to blind them both. They rested, as though they were awaiting the next disaster, closing their eyes and catching their breath … in love. They would need the rest. They were going to need a lot more than rest. Just as they did, the government, too, and a young man named Snowden in Hong Kong attempted to catch his breath.
The lovers, as well as their country, were steeped in great dis-ease and fear, and like their countrymen, they expressed this dis-ease and fear in their own way. When individuals realize, whether privately or collectively, that they cannot control or affect their outcome, it terrifies and paralyzes them.
When Americans are threatened with floods, tornados, hurricanes, fires, tsunamis, or fascist coups, and when lovers are threatened with jealousy, calculated retribution, destruction, as well, the same sinking-gut, holy-shit feelings brew.
That was what was brewing in the bellies of the lovers I speak of, as it soon would in the bellies of other Americans. All, the Lovers and the Nation, would, in horror, soon comprehend that History had unfolded her ancient, Tetradactylies wings, spreading them over all vainglorious notions and nations, casting her terrible shadow. The couple was paralyzed, as the great terror of who they were in their humanity crawled out of the cocoon they had secreted themselves within, and without their permission, revealed itself as, Their Reality.
“I want you.”
“Then take me.”
Desire was the only answer to the lovers’ dilemma.
“Come here, can you feel that? You like it when I do that to you?”
“Yeah. I miss feeling you.”
“I want you right now.”
“Then take me.”