Colour Supplement

Articles by writers around the world

Sunday 5 August 2007

 

The Story of my love

By Gordon Atkinson

 

 

My love was born at my mother’s breast and in my father’s strong arms. It was a sucking, insatiable, infantile love. I was happily curled in the warm embrace of pure need.

My love was shaped in early days by my need to perform. I worked hard at home, in sports, and at school. I had a first-born child's natural sense that people would love me if I excelled.

My love turned inward and became hidden and personal with a series of best friends. Michael and Mickey and Lance and Steve and Mark and Kenny. We claimed the rights to our own lives and our own loves. We stood together against the world with our secret clubs and inside jokes.

My love thrashed against my arm like a tethered falcon when I discovered the beauty of ponytails and freckled smiles. A series of little girls first turned my head and then turned my guts into jelly. The falcon burst its tether and screeched, circling and diving, causing me to throw myself to the ground in a panic. Bonnie and Carmen and Kathy and Tracy and Diane and Laura and Julie and Elma. How I ached and longed and cried and failed and watched from afar. Waves of feeling rose up in my chest and cast me face-down upon my bed. There was no end to it and no relief because it felt so good and it hurt so bad.

In time I learned the proper words to coax the falcon back to my arm. I slipped the tether around its foot and paraded it about for a few years with an imagined sophistication. Oh yes, I had it all figured out for a time.

And then I went to college and met a woman with a swinging ponytail and brown eyes that were tender and crinkly when she smiled. She sat across from me at the Baylor cafeteria, and when she talked she revealed a certain, indescribable spark of personality that proved irresistible to me. My falcon took one look at her, snapped its tether, and disappeared over the horizon, never to return.

I became foolish again, like a small boy. She carried a basket instead of a backpack. Suddenly I loved baskets, the weave and feel and smell of them. She had pale skin, so pale skin became the loveliest skin in the world as far as I was concerned. Once I was able to pick her out of a crowd of young women in shorts because I recognized her knees. She had a smile that could light up my heart and brown eyes that were too beautiful and powerful for me to understand. I wanted to keep her. I wanted her to be mine. I wanted to hold her and defend her with my life against anything in the world that would harm her.

I had her for a few months, and then I lost her. I was inconsolable and fell into a time of loneliness. I could not feel love for any other woman. I worked. I paid my bills. I prepared to go to seminary.

Then an unexpected letter arrived, causing my heart to thrash about in my chest. There was a near-collision in a supermarket aisle, and then we were sitting on the floor of her apartment, both frightened. She of hurting me and I of being hurt. But our hands moved across the carpet like small creatures with wills of their own. Our fingers entwined, and all the powers of joy and fear and pain and love came together in that moment.

My love became our love. I felt like I had arrived, but the story of my love was only getting started. I now understand that we knew almost nothing of love at that time. For our love had not yet faced the 12 labors of Hercules.

We had to survive financial crisis and the slow loss of the passion of youth. We had to survive the exhaustion of work and responsibilities. And then there came three children, three sucking vortices of need. We had to cling to each other, blue eyes locked on brown, swearing before the heavens that we weren’t going to let these three angelic demons take everything from us. For it is the nature of children to take everything and the duty of parents not to let them.

Years passed, and we aged together. We learned to love our softening bodies with their new demands and needs. Sometimes, when we were very tired, we would say that it was the two of us against the whole world. Friends would change, the children would leave, but our secret club was forever.

Then a tragedy happened. I woke up in a bathtub filled with ice. There were stitches on the left side of my chest and a note that said, “Sorry, but we needed your heart.” I arose, dripping cold water on the floor. I had the face and the look of Gordon, but there was something absent from my eyes. My trademark silliness was gone. And I could not feel any of the happy things. I couldn't feel love or joy. I was numb inside and sometimes angry for no reason.

I carried on by the powers of obligation, duty, and shame. I put one foot in front of the other. I smiled at home and at church. I said the right things to the children. I tried to force myself to be myself, but that never really works. Jeanene learned to live with the zombie version of Gordon, which is its own kind of tragedy.

The doctor called it depression, and he gave me pills. They worked pretty well for a long time. I was happy and my boyish silliness returned. Jeanene and I began reconnecting. Our hands had to crawl across a carpet of fear to find each other, but they did and things were good.

This is so hard to write, but I fear something is wrong again. I’ve slowly lost the ability to feel happiness or love. Once again I have all of the words and none of the feeling. My need to be alone is becoming overpowering. I come home and want to go to bed or sit in a corner. The idea of interacting with people is painful even to think about. Jeanene and the three sisters obviously know something is wrong.

Damn it! I don’t want to do this again. I’m going to have to go back to the doctor and start the process over again. I hate the idea of medication. I hate thinking of myself being dependant on medication.

“Did you remember to pick up your medication?”

“Has anyone seen my medication?”

“Did I take my medicine yet today?”

Medication medication medication medication. F**king medication. MY medication. Like it’s some treasured personal possession. Like it’s now an essential part of me, like a leg or something.

But I'm going to the doctor. Yes sir. I'm not hesitating this time. I already have the appointment. And I'm going to do whatever he tells me to do. If he gives me pills (and he will) I’ll smile and say, "Thank you, sir. May I have another?"

Because this is the story of my love. Do you understand what I'm saying? This is my love. My love for God and for ideas and for truth and for our church and for writing and for my friends and for the three sisters.

And for Jeanene. It's her love too. I have to remember that. I owe her my best effort to be the man she married.

If I am allowed to live a full live, then half of the story of my love is yet to be told. And I definitely want to be present and alert for part two.

Gordon Atkinson is pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio, Texas and has his own outstanding website www.reallivepreacher.com.  We are most grateful to Gordon for his permission to reproduce his essays here.

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