I am a tool. I thought it was love, but I realize now I was used. 

By God.

I explain…

Walking with his arm around her, he silently thanked the wind that bit at both their collars: it had given him excuse to put his arm around her.  And here, strolling along the moonlit Charles half-embracing the woman who had kept him up three nights in anticipation, he felt like he was fifteen.

His heart soared.  He looked down at her, more than a foot shorter, and remembered the buxom figure that had pressed up against him as they waltzed, laughing, in the carnivelesque mosh-pit the first night.  They had then only just met.

A friend of a friend who had long wanted them to meet, the arrival of Natasha had been eclipsed by Crystal, foretold as a model for the yoga catalog who was excited to meet him as well.  For the first hours the group spent together, he barely noticed Natasha.

And she hardly seemed to care.  She was adamant about one thing however: seeing the World Inferno Friendship Society, the circus-punk band who happened to be playing at the club he took them to on their first weekend away from the Ashram in more than a year.  That night, as yawns and Long Island Iced Teas circulated around the bar booth, he got up to move to the soul music coming over the loudspeakers; a few from other tables joined him, to hoots and hollers.  The others plotted how to get home.  Natasha plotted how to get the bouncer to let her into the sold-out show.  At the end of the night, they were simply the last two left with any will to party.

As they cheek-kissed that first night before she boarded the bus, he felt unexpectedly tickled.  The laugh continued to tease his lungs on his walk home, and his brain danced with strange images of innocent love as he laid in bed; he hadn't felt this way since high school!

And as if in high school, it felt like no small triumph to be with her now on her last night – well past midnight, having outlasted the others again – alone, finally, as he had hoped, on the long walk home.

He spoke easily after they smoked something from her bag: "I feel the strangest thing… I feel, like giddy inside.  I feel this pure innocent joy, walking with my arm around you.  I don't remember feeling this way since I was a teenager."  His eyes probably sparkled as he said this, though she wasn't looking up.  Her smile, though, as she looked out over the river, was a good sign.  He hadn't crossed any lines.  "That's really sweet." She was touched.

And looking down at her – the way she carried her head proudly and balanced, like a peacock taking in a conquered world – he was reminded of someone.  He had been seventeen.  On a trip to Holland, he met Catherine.  The accent with which she said her name would resonate in his brain for a lifetime.  She had only spent time with him twice, but he was so enamoured he wrote an eight-page letter on the flight home.  Two weeks later his sentiments were reciprocated by a letter from the Netherlands – also eight pages long.  Love letters sailed across the Atlantic the next four years.  12 years after their initial meeting, he hosted Catherine in New York.

The stardust in his brain and soul now reminded him of that first youthful affair.  How strange!  Just when he thought he had become jaded to love.

"Most guys I meet are more jaded," she said, on queue.  The conversation twisted and turned like the path through the trees along the river.  He basked in the unexpected joy, wondering if she would come home with him. 

Something she said then caught his attention:  "Yeah, I saw a tarot reader once and she told me I have a lot of passion inside to create things, but that its trapped inside this shell or something and I don't do anything with it."

His brain started clicking as it had hours earlier on the dock, when his interpretive-dancing brain cells tried to explain linear algebra to her.  He looked down again and saw clearly now, through the fog of his brain, to her energy body, as sometimes happened.  Her description helped him see it: a fiery core smoldering, as if molten, inside a hardened outer crust.  Suddenly this compelling and unreasonable attraction made sense…  Like gravity, a powerful and dense energy core acts like a tractor beam to energies outside.  Their mutual friend described a similar admiration for Natasha.  It made sense that he would fall so hard for this person, who had no remarkable qualities to speak of – who hadn't engaged him in interesting conversation once or shown signs of interest for that matter, who was attractive but not stunning.  He was being pulled because of his sensitivity to this core, which others might not notice through her thick crust.

A strange realization then dawned on him, like his brain yawning.  This was a pattern: he loved unconditionally, unreasonably, only women who earned it not at all through their qualities or actions.  In fact, most of the women he had fallen completely for in his lifetime had treated him in many ways badly, had been on the surface unremarkable. 

He never noticed their exploitation of his affection; so complete was his rapture with them.  Erin he had loved for three years continuously in high school while she dated others.  Melissa also trapped herself with unworthy men as he relentlessly pursued.   The Catherine of Holland was completely out of reach for their early years, and the reality of her marriage and the birth of her children hardly phased the way he felt.  (Only when she divorced did he begin to feel conflicted). And lastly, though hardly least, his fiancée – another Catherine – had failed to impress his mother and friends… left him for another man and returned after 3 months, in which time his conviction about her never wavered.  He believed in their purpose together long into the rocky months before she cancelled the wedding, just 19 days before it was to happen. 

There was a theme here.  Each of these women did absolutely nothing to earn his absolute affection.  He latched onto them with the conviction of a televangelist and refused to take no for an answer.  And they all shared the same, strange imperviousness to his charms.  (The pattern had actually given him a complex in early years about having only asexual appeal.)  Their minds channeled into prescribed paths, as if they lived out a script to which fate or upbringing had bound them.  Nothing he tried in years of loving them, mostly unrequited, could sway them from the course of life they saw ahead of them.

Only in hindsight – ten years later in some cases – did they reach back out to him, perhaps realizing how rare and precious the kind of devotion he offered had been.  So long after his utter infatuation had dissolved back into the fabric of life, he had something different to offer them: something of the energy he had been channeling all along – perhaps a wisdom, a bright spirit, an electricity – only now divorced from the attachments and expectations of love.

He saw this as funny.  Why him?  Why always this kind of person?  Why so much raw passion with no root?  Spying again his bubbliness and the beauty in his arm, he sensed that she was affected; his innocent excitement had flattered her, opened her mind a little bit. 

…Perhaps there was a reason behind all of this unreasonable love?

And dawning on him was a huge open mouth, a roar the shape of the milky way, the whole universe laughing in a cosmic joke:

This had not been love.  This had been God using him to reach someone unreachable.

It was a character type in all of them, which he could not verbalize so much as feel the energy of.  And just now, God had revealed to him that it was not personal.  His undampened capacity for passion, for caprice, for conviction over the unproven made him a unique tool.  The power of his mind focused energy on those he obsessed over, like a magnifying glass etching concentrated sunlight onto paper.  God was using him to burn holes into hard shells.  This is why he had come to idealize the strong, steely woman, self-possessed and without need of outside gratification.  That image of strength always turned out to yield to soft cores underneath: his conviction was unshakable about the beauty he fixated on finding inside of them.  But perhaps such strength was not ideal; it was rather the barrier God was using him to burn a hole through.

But now he saw he did not have to attach to these people.  He could just be honest to his heart, enjoy this flow.  He didn't have to interpret it as fate, or a love "meant to be."  Perhaps this had been his mistake for a long time. 

Perhaps we don't have to love the way hollywood, disney tells us to.  Maybe soulmates is not what its all about.  If you are the recipient of unearned admiration, perhaps just soaking it in - as these women did from me - is precisely the right response.  God telling us we need to let ourselves be loved a little bit more.  Accepting that energy deeper into our self-concepts, our souls.

Maybe he did not have to turn the power of these feelings into projections of futures together.  Just as physical attraction - when we are brave enough to follow it with openness - often leads us to greater outcomes than physical union.  Maybe more love than we think is designed for this: to open us more, to move energy inside of us - the same as healing.  Is this why so often love stagnates after this healing love has been accomplished? 

Is this why we are warned to enter a life of marriage only with God's blessing, and with God's ongoing guidance?  Otherwise, the initial healing is soon accomplished, and we are left wondering what to make of the rest of our lives together.

Perhaps instead he could love, in submission, just that he was God's.  That love would come through him as it did now – just as any other fortune or pain – without warning or explanation.  That there was a grander design than God would reveal.  And yet this small revelation liberated him from years of pining that had fermented to crusts of failure.  In this liberation, love flowed through him more strongly; he did not fight to channel his feelings or her responses toward any target.  He let God take it forward.

He walked on, now joy encased in bigger joy.  Not only did he feel carbonated inside, he could allow this to flow now without guilt or fear of missteps or repercussion.  God wanted this to come through him. 

On the street where she was staying, he asked if she wanted to come back to his place again.  Her answer, that it would ruin tomorrow's plans, rang false.  He dug. 

"Well, ok.  The thing is, I kind of might be seeing somebody.  I'm not sure really, but I might be."  And then, the affirmation.  "I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice…"

Animated by the flow coming through him, he persisted.  "Well, if you're not coming over, we could at least kiss.  See what it feels like.  No commitment." 

Some more demurring, gestures toward the apartment.  "Well at least I can walk you to the corner."  And there, they did kiss.  Their tongues danced without pretense.  As fresh and new as a first.

Abruptly, she started back down the block. Not looking back.  He danced to the corner, looked up and down the block.  Finding the streets empty, he wheeled and shouted down the 2am street, "There ain't no cabs…"

She turned.  Louder, this time: "I'm just sayin, I'm here and there ain't no cabs."  She stared.  From the distance, he could not tell if her look was incredulous. Annoyed?  But she did start back toward him.  Approaching each other mid-street, under streetlights through trees newly bloomed, he announced.  "This feels like a movie, right!  Meeting in this wide street in the middle of the night?  Don't you expect the credits to roll or something?"

"My coming back doesn't mean anything," her hushed voice insisted.  "I just came back to keep you from waking the whole neighborhood up."  And yet he detected a tone of thrill underlying her shell.  Together they walked back to a desolate Mass Ave.  She slunk back against the lamppost, hands jammed in pockets, sternness barely covering bemusement.

"Well, we got time to kill, what should we do?"  He moved in and they kissed some more.

"My, you are persistent, aren't you?"

As his mouth chased her around the pole, she announced from his shoulder. "Oops, looks like a cabJ" 

He lingered, moved toward the cab, kissed her more in the open door.  She declined to join him.  He settled at last, entered and directed the cabbie.  As they 360'd, he looked out the window for her. 

This time, she was watching after him.  Smiling.  And waving. 

And that, he had to admit, was all he had needed.

andy varyu, 2007

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