walk the line

I've started to tell this story before but I've stopped short because I don't want this blog to be about feelings as much as it is about thoughts. But I've been reading this book about the art of learning and how that process demands losing so we become less attached to the notion that mastering an idea is about instant understanding -- and more about wrestling with the intersection of intelligence, discipline and intuition. So I realized the reason I haven't told this is more about my ego than it is about losing something I need to keep to myself.

Eight years ago, I met a boy. It was right after I ended a two-year relationship that was the most dramatic and emotional of my younger life. This new guy, he was all charm and humor and intelligence. His smile was a tall drink of water. I was getting my Masters, and he worked in sports at the TV station where I was working one of three jobs, this one as a part-time Webmaster. He'd make up reasons to use the computer next to me. When I recited the first few stanzas of Rapper's Delight to him on a dare he asked me to marry him someday.

One night, after he had a particularly good 11:30 show, he stood up on a chair next to me and said I had to go out drinking with him and his friends or he wouldn't come down. When I told him to get off the chair, he flashed his lopsided grin, threw his hands over his head like a prizefighter and yelled 'yes!' And months later, right before I left for Christmas vacation, he came over to my apartment. We sat on the couch in the half-light of early morning as I said sarcastic things about Titanic until I could tell he wasn't listening. So I looked at him and he turned to me and whispered he was head over heels.

Some relationships just burn through you. There was his birthday when I brought him dinner and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition tied up in a red bow and two packs of cigarettes as presents because he had to work and he kissed me in front of his boss. There was the day he came home from covering the Super Bowl and I stayed late at the station for him and he walked right up to me and slung me over his shoulder and told his friends he'd see them tomorrow and carried me out the door. There was the early morning I thought he was still sleeping and I had to get ready for class and I looked up and he was just watching me comb my hair and told me I was beautiful.

But then I started looking for jobs and got a really good one and he started to get mean because he couldn't find one. We broke up when I told him I loved him and he said I was wrong to think he felt the same way. I skipped my graduation ceremony a few weeks later and drove 20 hours by myself, finally starting to fall asleep behind the wheel in West Virginia, where I pulled off and spent three hours sleeping in a hotel room with cheap sheets and the ghost smell of smoke. A week later, I was in New York City working at the Times.

Not long after I was walking down the Brooklyn street to my apartment and I flipped open my phone and listened to voicemail. His voice made my heart skip. He said he was wrong and he missed me more than he thought he would and he wanted to try again. So we did. We talked for hours into the morning that first night. Then several nights and days a week after that. I sent him care packages of books and mix tapes and expensive chocolate to keep him happy in his worn-out corner of southern Missouri. He sent me long emails about his road trips following high school football teams and about the small-town tragedies his station woke him out of a deep sleep to cover. I met his dad and him at Cooperstown and we fell asleep tangled up in each other on a blanket as his dad left to get a beer and Carlton Fisk wouldn't shut up in what is still, I think, the longest induction speech in history.

On September 11, I was with my parents. He forgot and spent hours trying to get through to me at work. When he finally reached my mom in Virginia, she said his voice was shaking.

I'm not sure when it started. He never had the courage to tell me. I only know he said I was being paranoid when I questioned why a girl at the station wanted to move in with him to save money. A few weeks later, he told me he was in love with her. In fact, more in love with her than he ever was with me. It was two in the morning and I was standing on the cool tile of the kitchen floor and the only light was gold and filtered, coming through the windows from the street lamps. I clicked off the phone when there was no more to be said and hugged in my body and broke down.

My mom visited me a week later. We took long walks on Manhattan sidewalks. She hugged me as much as I would let her. I drove with her in a cab to Penn Station when she had to go home, and told her I didn't want to talk to her for at least a week. She began to cry. And I didn't know it then but all I wanted was someone else to hurt as much as I did so I walked away from her.

But there is only so much hurt you can take before you have to make a decision about who you are going to be. And the thing that made me snap out of it was an angry phone conversation I had with my dad when he almost spit as he asked me, 'I know what you've given him but what has he ever given you?' And when I couldn't give a good answer, when the only thing that came to mind was how wonderful it felt to give to someone that I loved, that's when I realized it wasn't about M. anymore. It was about losing my faith in myself. It was losing the certainty I thought I had in knowing who is worth love and who is not.

Yesterday I was watching the last half of Walk the Line when all of this flashed back. Because Johnny asks June at one point if she is afraid of love and it made me wonder if I am. I know I keep a close watch on my heart. I know that I've made less than intelligent choices in the past of whom to share my heart with. I know that I can now see signs of trouble I used to miss. And when I'm honest with myself, I am a little bit fearful. And it's not because I don't think I can't handle the hurt. I've had the lesson I needed to learn in my own resilience.

My fear isn't love itself. I'll finally know it when I find it, after falling for so many things that felt like love but were something less than it and more like passion. After discovering because of M. how important it is to find someone who wants your best as much as you want theirs. If I'm honest, the thing that makes me pause is the certainty I can and will walk the line for someone who is worth it to me, even knowing there is so much I need to learn about sharing that kind of love.