MISERY

An ex-lover once told me, “My whole life, I’ve been attracted to misery. Drawn to it like some stupid fly buzzing around a light.”

It was the day we met and he would soon love me. Or he would think he did, the same way he thought that he would quit smoking and quit the factory and become something better.  He wanted to be better for me, to fill up the empty spaces I’d carved into myself throughout a despondent adolescence. We both had these fissures, could trace them through each other’s stories: childhood, death, drugs, life, loss, ache. But my cracks, he was certain, he could mend. And by mending me, he would subtly cover the gaping hole in his own chest.

He was prince charming all in black and I was desperate to feel more than nothing.

I can say for certain that he did not love me in spite of my misery, but because of it. This young man loved the mirror he saw in me; he smiled when he made me smile, he came when I came, and he believed that he had made something in the world okay for once).

He loved me and I was misery. I was misery and I loved nothing. I can say that some days we were happy, but most days we simply were.  He didn’t quit smoking and I didn’t smile for long, but somewhere along the line I learned that love does not make us whole. Love makes us small enough that we can create a whole with someone else. And when that whole is broken, enough is left behind, stuck on door frames and pillow cases and lodged in throats, to leave us bleeding as we turn and walk away.

December 2011