🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
PROMPT:
– Write about your soulmate
– Your soulmate can be anybody – a platonic friend, a family member, your spouse, or an animal ..
– Where did you meet, do you remember what you did and how you felt?
– Are there things you would like this person to know? Write them down.
– How does your soulmate make you feel, when you think about or hear from them?
– If you do not have a person like that in your life, feel free to cook up your perfect one!
To know love is to know pain. In knowing the depth of despair, hopeless disregard, and existential nothingness that I have faced, I came to cling desperately to the love I was able to find. A necessary consequence of that desperation is an ultimate narrowing of focus, as a drowning person knows only the struggle for breath or the starving wretch can only strive to fill their hunger. As a man drowning in isolation and starving for acknowledgment and affection, my focus narrowed to the love of one person.
Denay.
We were young when we met. I was 16 years old and she was 15. She was a friend of my younger sister and the first time I met her she despised me. I barely even noticed her because I was busy beating the crap out of an older boy who was convincing my younger sister to run away from home. It was a typical situation where everyone around me was so wrong it was hard to fault me for my own flaws. So, her first impression of me was an act of violence and my first time seeing her found me preoccupied too much to notice her. At 16 I didn’t live at home anymore and was on my own. I had a landscaping job and lived with a friend, but my life was an emotional misery. I was drunk a lot, that was what the alcohol and marijuana did. Into the gap, then, stepped Denay.
They say that ignorance is bliss, so I am profoundly thankful that neither one of us knew what was happening because it was the most… Shit, I don’t even know. Words fail me in this description. In Denay, I found another person into whom I immersed my self. I fell so deeply into her that I lost myself. In losing myself I, for the first time in my life, knew what it was to not feel the pain of emotional stress, trauma, misery. In her I was free.
I could tell stories about places we went or things we did, but none of that was important. None of it is important. Sitting in front of the TV with her was no less satisfying than going to a high-school football game or a party. All that mattered was us.
Yes: Us. Not her, not me. us.
In that unification there was no embarrassment, no guilt, no shame. In her acceptance of me I learned to accept myself. The materialistic and capitalistic indoctrination of my upbringing lost the struggle against a simple happiness and joy that was found in just existing. After the hyper-vigilance of incessantly competing for position, power, wealth, and image this ability to stop and breath was divine. It was my finding of religion through the actual discovery of my soul.
Having more experience in life now, I can recognize the overripe tang of the risk of toxicity. The recipe for a codependency was there and all of my criminality was already baked in. in my current distance from that life I can see a bit more objectively, and in that objectivity I can see the American cultural infatuation with characters such as Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma and Louise. Codependent but unified. I knew that my soul has always been broken, like these characters portray. Romeo and Juliet could not exist apart, yet together they are a more true fiction than our own lives.
As each one of these characters found a part of themselves in another and only through that discovery became whole: So I found completion in such a merger.
Perhaps this is why nearly every culture throughout human history has had some version of marriage. Two become one. I was half a man and Denay made me whole.
I don’t want to imply that this love was redeeming in any sense other than sparking in me a new idea of value. It changed what I wanted out of life because it showed me something more than I knew was possible. Yes, it changed me. No, it did not change me fast enough to save me from my past. Like any are refined through tempering, it becomes more difficult to mold the refined product. The crucible in which I was smelted is not from which a phoenix arises: It is more likely one from which cremated remains are removed from. In those fires of my childhood something within me died. It was sparked back into existence through Denay’s love of my and my love of her, but any newborn coming into this world needs to be given time to grow.
Back then it never seemed like I had enough time.
Love is pain because of our desperate need of it. The potential loss breeds fear that we react to viscerally. The tragedy of what our instinctual reactions to that fear may cause is evident in Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, Romeo and Juliet, and so many others. Even in the Greek stories of Denae’s conception of Perseus by Zeus is tragedy found, and this is where my love received her name of Denay. No less of a tragic end is found for my love, yet more tragic in its unclear demise through lengthy throes of death.
We never fell out of love. We never came to have each other as passionately as we loved. We didn’t even agree to an amicable parting of ways because we had grown in different directions long enough to no longer feel the distance. None of that. We were pulled apart, with her quite literally kicking and screaming, by the police when I was being arrested for an assault charge. We both knew I wasn’t innocent and that this arrest was coming, but I think we both knew that our need for love was too desperate to be ignored. We knew, deep down and acknowledged, that if we were apart our love would not survive. How many things can you cut in half and still have them live? Once our soul was so cleaved, both halves withered.
Denay needed my love just as agonizingly as I needed hers. I was 18 when I was arrested and she was 362 days younger: 17. That made her a juvenile and myself and adult, so I went to prison and she went to a juvenile detention center. Her release was within months while I was sentences to 14 years. Her need for love could be filled because I could be replaced. My position left me significantly more confined in my options. Her life passed me by as I stagnated.
Years later Denay wrote me. She was married and had two children. She wasn’t happy with her life and professed her love for me still. I was saddened that she was not satisfied with her life but I would be lying to say I didn’t feel a shadow of a twinge of satisfaction that our love still survived. Not too long after that, Denay committed suicide.
Knowing love is also knowing pain because one defines and contrasts the other. I cherish this pain because in it I know the love was real. It’s in the bottle of poison that Romeo shows his love. And it’s in the death that love lives on.