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<\/p>\nBecause I am pretty much dense as fog when it comes to certain things – it has taken me a year or so to realize that three men I love (I always thought of them as a triumvirate) are really no longer in my life.<\/p>\n
These were men who, although we were pretty much always separated from each other – by time zones, and other factors – always maintained some semblance of contact with me.<\/p>\n
None of them know each other. They have nothing to do with each other. And yet – they go together in my mind. I didn’t really date any of them, strangely enough – at least not in anything resembling a conventional way.<\/p>\n
However, love affairs most certainly happened. Profound things most certainly happened. Deep connections were made. Stuff you can never erase, and stuff you can barely describe. (Or – let me be clear – stuff I can barely describe.)<\/p>\n
One of them took the following photo of me:<\/p>\n
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I shared with him what remains, in my memory, one of the happiest and freest days<\/a> of my entire life and I love that photo because it completely captures what that entire day was about. Photos so rarely do that. And I love it, too, because that was, in general, how I always looked at that guy. That was how I looked at him, that was how I felt about him. Pain-in-my-ass though he was.<\/p>\n Anyway, over the past couple of years – slowly but surely – my contact with these three men, men who I have always thought of as somewhat essential to me, has almost completely disappeared.<\/p>\n There are very good reasons for this, reasons which I will not go into.<\/p>\n I want to say, too, that I never had conventional communication with ANY of these men, either. What do I mean by that? I never called any of them on the phone to say, “Hey, how’ve you been?” None of them ever called me to chit-chat. Chit-chat would be impossible with any of them. I think I only had the phone number of one of them.<\/p>\n I was never used to hearing from them all the time, or getting calls from them, or exchanging emails – No. It was never like that. It was more like: my experience with each one of them came to an end, and that was that. No question of being in touch with them in a normal way. Maybe I knew something was just too powerful or something, that it could never morph into a normal post-relationship friendship. Must walk away completely. And that’s fine. That’s as it should be. I am friends with one of my ex-es in a “I send you Christmas cards” kind of way. I’m very glad of that – he’s too great a guy to cut myself off from him completely – but I’m able to see him at parties, etc., and say, “Hey how are you? How’s the wife? The kids? How you doin’???” I would never be able to be casual with any of the triumvirate.<\/p>\n None of them could be casual with me, either.<\/p>\n And so – when our time was up, our time was up.<\/p>\n But then – throughout the following years – I would randomly re-connect with one of them, or another one of them … I would randomly receive a phone call, sometimes at 1 in the morning, and there one of them would be – laughing uproariously about something and launching right into a story he wanted to tell me, with no preamble, even though I hadn’t spoken to him in 2 years.<\/p>\n Or, I would randomly open my mailbox, and there would be an envelope with familiar handwriting – and boom – I would be treated to a rambling monologue about his life, even though we hadn’t been in regular communication for 5 years.<\/p>\n Weirder things happened, too. Stuff which might sound insane. But they happened so repeatedly that I can only say that it has become a pattern. The pattern is this: I would randomly dream about one of them, and the next day I would get a letter from that same guy. This has happened to me more times than I can count. It’s become a bit like a game.<\/p>\n I so rarely dream of any of them, so now – when I do, it’s like a game. “Okay. I give him 5 days to contact me.” Usually contact arrives the next day. I’ll open the mailbox, see the envelope, and burst out laughing. Here it is, I knew it would come!!<\/i><\/p>\n One day last year, all three of them called me on the same day. Two of them called me to say, “Hey, I’m in New York for the week, let’s get together!”<\/p>\n There is nothing casual about any of this. I am obviously not casual about any of them. I also can honestly say that I am not in love with any of them either – and yet I have definitely come to rely on them, in some way. I don’t NEED to hear from them – I do not bombard them with letters – I do not ache by the phone – No, it is all just the opposite. I move along, basically forgetting them completely, and then randomly – one of them will emerge from the deep – and I am reminded all over again of how lucky I am, and how blessed I am that – these guys are in my life.<\/p>\n One of them wrote me a letter once – a snail-mail letter (that’s another thing – I communicated with these three guys in almost 19th century ways – in old-fashioned pen-to-paper epistolary ways … we might as well have used smoke signals for how technologically backward it was – But I loved that, too. It seemed to fit) Anyway – One of them wrote me a letter, and said, after maintaining a completely goofball hilarious tone for the entire letter – “I’m really glad that you’re out there. I like to know you exist. I even just like knowing that the IDEA of you exists.”<\/p>\n I guess that’s what I’m trying to get at.<\/p>\n I like to know they’re out there. I like to know they exist. I even just like knowing that the IDEA of them exists.<\/p>\n My communication with these men from my past were filled with poignant and piercing moments such as that. It had a sweetness that hurt. It gave glimpses of a love that was never fulfilled, and so there were a lot of “what if’s” – and actually, there are still are a lot of “what if’s” that come up when I see the triumvirate and we reminisce about the past – and yet also – I was always extremely grateful that I knew these men.<\/p>\n Anyway.<\/p>\n Like I said, I would go on for months at a time never thinking about the triumvirate, or missing their presence.<\/p>\n I had a dream about one of them last night.<\/p>\n He had a handlebar mustache in the dream, and looked completely different.<\/p>\n I woke up, remembered the dream, and immediately thought, matter-of-factly, (welcome to my nutso world), “Oh, I’ll probably hear from him tomorrow or the next day.”<\/p>\n And then in the next moment, I became overwhelmed with what I can only call consciousness.<\/p>\n I moved from out of unconsciousness into consciousness with alarming velocity.<\/p>\n And it suddenly occurred to me, out of the blue:<\/p>\n It’s over. I no longer feel that they are “out there”. They’ve moved on. Whatever needs were fulfilled for each one of them by maintaining intermittent contact with me no longer exist. Or their needs are fulfilled elsewhere. Or maybe they are no longer comfortable looking at the “what if’s” in their lives.<\/p>\n I have to admit I agree. I am sick of “what if’s”. “What if’s” will eat you alive. They will break your back. They will break your back.<\/p>\n And yet I miss them. I do miss them all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Because I am pretty much dense as fog when it comes to certain things – it has taken me a year or so to realize that three men I love (I always thought of them as a triumvirate) are really … Continue reading