entry four (final entry): love’s discovery

the following summer i traveled to versailles, france for a month to live with another student before she would come back to the states with me. this was when j gave me one of my most favorite books: walden. he had divided the number of pages in the book by the number of days i’d spend there and after each section of daily reading, he’d inscribed a message at the top margin of the page. by day i was lost in chateaux, food, the museums of paris, the quaint feel of normandy, and discovery of my own self, and by night i swam in the self-taught sauntering words of henry david thoreau.

last summer one of my sisters got married in boston and my husband and i took the kids for a day drive to see walden pond. the site of the cabin, the connection i felt to that place gave me chills. i silently confirmed what i’d assumed all along: that j was thoreau’s kindred spirit; self taught, self-sufficient, and self-absorbed in a way that insisted on a need to know one's insides in order to be of any use to the outside world.

the following months would see the slow deterioration of our relationship, spear-headed by j’s parents. my slutty portrayal of a character in a school play pushed them right over the edge. the time we were allowed together seemed to fit into smaller and smaller windows until it simply wasn’t allowed. the battle was hard fought by j who, at the peak of rebellion against his parents’ wishes, shattered a plate and carved the words,


but i love her


in the tiled kitchen floor.

we suffocated, the oxygen of each other cut off before our very eyes. and i watched as if i were virginia woolf, walking right into a river and drowning myself, surrendering to inevitable tragedy. in my heart i felt that it was bound to happen, a confirmation of the fact that i simply wasn’t meant to be loved that intensely.

and looking back now i can clearly see so many things.

i see the beginning of what would become a decade-long binge into self-destruction.

i see the pattern of disappointment from the men in my life.

i see the end of my innocence.

i see what was one of the sweetest loves that ever existed.

i see what i know and hope to be true about love; that as two people we do not complete one another. we are not half-beings to begin with and we do not need each other to make us feel whole. rather we are one another’s mirror, a constant lesson-to-be-learned as the effect of each tiny word, motion, glance is reflected back to us-a reminder of how hateful, hurtful, hopeless, or grace-filled we can be.

“ We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
- Aldous Huxley

entry three

entry two

entry one