The air is apple crisp this October night. Clear and moonlit starry skies evoke a sense of occult magic in the mystery traditions of old as I await your arrival like a righteous adept. A fruitless endeavor, I know, but hope is a zealot, and she keeps my spirits afloat. Two years ago, about this time, we were planning our future—a dream made manifest in some parallel reality, maybe. Not in this one; not yet; probably not ever. But stranger things have happened. It's said we should live in the present. So, I wait, and I pray, and I remember the day you made my heart skip to the ethereal beat of your honey-tongued trap. Love is a peculiar drug. It defies reason and makes promises it can't keep. But in the moment—in that standstill, dumbstruck, internal holy frenzy—nothing is sweeter. Everything looks a little brighter as if the palette has shifted from sepia to technicolor, giving life new purpose. It's an ecstatic experience, to be sure, not easily replicated. Reality feels like a purgatory without it, yet eros is not the only love there is.
Philia and agape yield fruit of near equal measure. Apples to oranges, you might say, but whereas you're all butterflies and longing, they produce steadfast stability. Like my sweet tortoiseshell cat who greets me upon my return home, snuggling up with me on the couch or in bed after a hard day; or the friends and family who sit and commune, finding comfort and companionship in the remains of eros' chaos.
"You want to try that new restaurant at Pullman?" Renee asks as we plan our evening outing. Nothing otherworldly—no promises of a grandiose future adventure that will likely never come to pass. Just a friend providing a pleasurable peace that stills rather than stirs the soul. Reliability may not be exciting, but its steadfast assuredness is more magical than the sweet nothings you supplied. Its actuality is more nourishing to the soul.
Speaking of nourishment, our first experience of it came from mother's womb—what's more meaningful than the primordial, biological first love, even if not all mothers continue their matronly duties after gestation?
"You should call your mom," I say. But you dismiss me the same way you always do, with a smile and a nod and a redirection of conversation to a topic that's as stoic as you pretend to be. You never seemed to care much for your mother, which should have been a red flag. Your father's ghost, however, clings to you like an eternal All Hallows' Eve. Instead of offerings of carved pumpkins and candy, you try to earn his love through pandering to men you use as patronly placeholders, such as your Masonic Brothers—if their admiration and respect are earned, maybe you can symbolically gain daddy's approval, huh?
I heard your mother died last year. I wonder if you ever called her. Though, I'm sure her last thoughts about you were enabling justifications for her baby boy's absence.
Call me a misandrist (or maybe, more aptly, a subjectivist), but I dare you to show me a love that is equal to what a woman is capable of. I'll wait. I'm sure you'd show up here with renewed vows and sentiments before you could produce the better to the best a woman can love. You know the defining factor? She says less and means more, and her love is not conditional on phone calls in your mother's case or words aligning with actions in mine.
Maybe I'm just projecting, as you accused me of. So, I'll concede: while the greater capacity to love may not be true of every woman, it certainly was with me in regard to you.
"You can't love me and do this," I say, the recollection of your year-long placation mulling over in my mind like a bad Lifetime movie that just won't end.
"I'll show you," you reassure. Your deep brown eyes emit a sincerity that I'm still unsure as to how you feigned for so long.
"I love you more today than I did yesterday," you say on eternal repeat in my reverie. I didn't believe you then, and unfortunately, it seems as though I was right since it was the following day that you denied ever loving me. In my delusion, I like to think that maybe you did love me—enough to let me go.
Venus, you used to call me—your Pearl of Great Price. Little did I know then that I would be both the creditor and the debtor. Karma is a hell of a collector. Don't worry about me, though. I gave him your forwarding address.
Renee sits as I reiterate the situation to her for the umpteenth time. I already know what she'll say.
She looks at me with the knowing eyes of a woman over ten years older than me who has heard it all before.
"You would have been miserable," she assures me in between bites. "You're beautiful and young and deserve to be happy."
Friends like her make life worth living when Disney dreams die. There's a sisterhood of women who have been through it, advising those of us new to the game. This experience has been a journey in self-love that I wish could have been reciprocated. At least it's not an entirely solo adventure—the abandoned find solace together in a coven of comfort and reprieve, offering wisdom to the newly initiated.
I take my own advice and call my mom on the way home. She's one of the fortunate few who have not experienced the one-sided love women like Renee and I have—she is a granter rather than a recipient of heartbreaks. (How I wish I could have inherited whatever gene is responsible for that level of badassery.) I don't bother to talk to her much about this, since she has trouble relating. But she grants comfort in her own way, buying me some nice compensation gifts and planning our next visit.
Even in these mundane magical moments with Renee and my mom that shouldn't be taken for granted, on nights like tonight with the moon so bright, I sit outside and stare at the sky, recounting our tales to Luna. She is a generous confidant. If, in her quiet stillness, you listen hard and long enough, she answers back. It's a faint echo of a whisper, to be sure, but it permeates the heart.
"The love you seek will one day also seek you, child. One worthy of you—one true. Yield not to the thoughts of despair that I know have consumed you, for greater things are sure to come. Until then, love yourself."
A part of me is happy that you're gone. If you had not left, I would have followed your dreams rather than my own. I am more myself without you, destined to live a life that you could never provide. Venus may have loved Mars, but she didn't rely on him. Neither do I rely on you. The true magic of our connection was made manifest when I learned to love myself more than I loved you.
Yet even in makeshift discourse of better-offs and yet-to-comes, my thoughts turn to what could have been. I'm unsure as to what avail. Maybe it's just October—Mars' month—when Venus can't help but contemplate her clandestine love for him. Or maybe it's the human hope that you, too, might be outside on this brisk evening, gazing up at Luna's luminescence—soon to wane into shadow with tomorrow's new moon—remembering the equally fleeting phase of our love, a moment that comes only once in a blue moon.