What to do when the wheels come off.

I was surprised that she said that she still loved me. It had been many six long years since we had been together. I was not surprised that she still hated me too, fostered bad memories of the neglect and torture she had suffered at my hands. It was a good night. Drinks and good music, friends and an open channel to her heart. I admitted everything, that night, offered her my love, my life and heart, without any expectation that they might be accepted, never mind returned. Lately, I have been trying to figure out what that kiss she gave me meant. I moved between theories like a moth in a lighting shop. Was she saying, I want to remember that time, when we were good? Was she saying, I love you but I’m in love with the man I’ve been dating for five years? Was she carried forth on the current of my enthusiasm, my half drunken careening conversation, all attention centred upon her? I did manage to be courteous to him when he arrived and hit the road immediately. Probably wise in retrospect but it felt like another surrender at the time. In the morning it solidified. What I had said, what I still mean, was just that. A wild juggernaut of feelings and words. It existed for a span of hours and then was gone. I had no plan, no leverage, nothing real to present if asked the dread question. What now?

Later the answer came to me. That kiss had been the bitter-sweet goodbye so long delayed by animosity and denial and revenge. I purse my lips as I write this and taste again the vodka and cigarettes on her lips, smell again her sweet, smoky breath lingering. Memory swirls, regardless of time, regardless of reality. As sobriety sets in and I struggle again to sleep, to maintain the patina of disregard, I wonder whether I deserve a chance. So much has begun and ended and begun again that it is a wonder that we still share that lightning spark of understanding, that I can still make her laugh so hard she has to leap from her barstool and clutch at her stomach for fear of screaming.

A plan for forgiveness, a plan for redemption and a plan for being all the things I was going to be besides the base thing I was given at birth. This is the voyage that lies before my son and I now. Now we find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.