An Aries and a Pisces walk into a hot tub.
Reckoning or reconciliation?
“Mourning is a way of consciously integrating the fact that circumstances have changed; what was, is no longer, and it is not possible to have things as they once were. As a ritual, mourning assists necessary changes for development throughout life. If one has not sacrificed the idealization of childhood, for instance, and lived a period of mourning to accept its loss, one remains a constant seeker of protection and security, unprepared for the risk and danger of the external world.
When there is a breakup of a relationship, if one attempts to replace the deep pain of mourning with fantasies of the partner’s return, then life comes to a standstill. Even within a partnership that endures, old expectations must be sacrificed if each individual is to develop psychologically. This can result in much discontent, upheaval and sadness, again a mourning time. The death and mourning at least have a purpose, that of allowing regeneration in the relationship. Without the process of confronting old assumptions, regardless of how painful, the relationship is dead in any case.”
Nancy Qualls Corbett
Who am I now? Lying there in the lukewarm bath, my heavy head perched on the lip of the tub, I stared blankly for what must have been hours at the stark white walls I’d experimented with over the months, changing them from white to cheerful mint to a bold coral that went on more like orange sherbet than the warm terracotta I was going for, and back to white again. I had spent the summer absorbed in a damp haze of deception and dissolution after the whirlwind romance that was my marriage went south. Suddenly, I wasn’t laughing anymore, our life as newlyweds drained of its sanguine colors.
Beginning with that first kiss enveloped in vintage tees in a tidy closet just beneath the ticking time bomb of a hot water tank, our courtship had been a firestorm from the start. Please, somebody tell me a story more fitting for the steamy coming together of an Aries (the first and most explosive fire sign of the zodiac) and a Pisces (the last and perhaps most sodden of the water signs). Once following a fight, I retreated to the detached garage that had mostly only been used as an open-air, beer-pong room during house parties, carrying a blank canvas and only two tubes of acrylic paint - red and blue - to paint my feelings into an abstract portrayal of the balmy, muddled clash of anger’s heat with sopping oversensitivity. Tell me you’re a Pisces without telling me you’re a Pisces. Per my last post, if the raging hellfires don’t take you, then you’ll surely drown in a flash flood of damnation.
Did I mention we called the fire department amidst our shock and stupor when the hot water tank went belly-up in the middle of the night? When the firemen walked in, it hadn’t even occurred to me until then to get dressed and, I shit you not, I was wearing black boy-short underwear with an all-over design of red and orange flames, nearly identical to that of any given car in the Hot Wheels Flames™ lineup and its predecessor, Heat Fleet™. I’m not proud of it; I’m just trying to give you an accurate scene description, even if regrettably it sounds like the setup to a really bad adult film. From the time we made the distress call to the moment the firefighters arrived, I had mostly only managed to pace along a repeated path from the end of the hall to the bedroom to helplessly witness the inadvertent hot tub forming in the corner.
As I’m recalling this memory now, I sorely regret the missed comedic opportunity to reenact Eddie Murphy’s classic SNL skit James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party.
If a hot tub time machine were a real thing, I’d pack a purple, plush velvet robe with a sequined collar to pair with my hot rod panties and travel back to that moment to inquire of our noble first responders:
“Should I get in the hot tub? Will it make me sweat? Should I get in the hot tub? Will it make me wet? Well, well, well…”
But for all the pain that followed, in this fictional hot tub time travel, I wouldn’t have delivered a word of it to that younger version of me. Because looking back, I don’t regret a thing. Neither our love, nor its loss.
“That’s the way love goes.”
Janet Jackson
It is a universal human truth that, at one time or another, we are all forged in the inferno of love, each of us uniquely shaped by its inextricable, archetypal companion: loss.
As Francis Weller writes in the Wild Edge of Sorrow of the first of his Five Gates of Grief:
“Everything we love, we will lose.”
It is the harshest fact of life - we don’t get to take anything with us when we go - and so many of our modern, psychic constructs are built to guard against this truth. But there’s something so freeing about surrender if we can manage it in moments when we are called. We are not in control. We are only called to live and to love as fully as possible in the moments we are given. And I’m certain that’s what we did.
“I have come to have a deep faith in grief, have come to see the way its moods call us back to soul. It is, in fact, one of the voices of the soul, asking us to face life’s most difficult but essential teaching: everything is a gift, and nothing lasts.”
Francis Weller
We didn’t make it ‘til death do us part. We made it thirteen years, a sacred number symbolizing upheaval and the introduction of something new and unforeseen upon completion of the full cycle of twelve that seems to be woven into the fabric of this mysterious existence (i.e. twelve months of the year, twelve signs of the zodiac, etc.).
I don’t know the origins of those words we all know and are mostly trained to strive for: ‘til death do us part. But I’ve learned through experience that it becomes a far more generous and generative conception when we are able to acknowledge that this life is littered with so many deaths, both literal and metaphorical, mountainous and miniscule. And that to be fully alive and in love with life means making space for it all.
As everyone who has ever tended a garden knows, in order to produce life, we must first offer it death, the decaying matter of that which is no longer sustainable.
The lively emcee at our wedding was one of the last bachelors standing in our group of friends. His infectious joviality ignited the mood at our reception alongside the gourmet hot dog bar (bride’s request) and an array of chocolate truffles made from scratch by the best man (a gifted chef) and his mother. Oh, and lest you forget, Edna’s famous Lunchboxes. At the end of the night of so much dancing in my hot pink, pointy-toed, satin shoes, just before we made our way to the getaway car through a tunnel of electric pink sparklers formed by our nearest and dearest, the man with the mic gathered all the groomsmen around my new husband to serenade me with You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ by the Righteous Brothers.
Despite being utterly charmed into a full-on swoon from grown men on their knees belting out a broody classic on my behalf, I remember thinking at the time it was a curious selection for having just celebrated our nuptials. But as it turned out, it was just another of life’s strange synchronicities that seemed to exist outside of time, foreshadowing a truth not yet told.
In the end, I was the one who walked away, that loving feeling so far gone and lost along the way, the last bits of it scattered somewhere between here and Santa Fe during that last summer we spent together.
But lying there in the tub, in the house we shared at the end of that summer to end all summers, our first as a married couple, something in me decided to stay. It was the maiden in me, no doubt, not yet ready to let my fairytale slip away.
But it was also something in him, what exactly I can’t say. The aching silence between us was broken that day with a hesitant knock on the door and the sound of aged brass turning in the latch. I struggled to catch my breath as I watched the slow, kaleidoscopic spin of the antique glass knob and caught sight of his bare foot faltering onto the cold, cracked, black-and-white basketweave tile. Every time he came near me, I couldn’t breathe. But imagining my life without him, I felt I would drown.
Unable to look at him as he crouched on the floor beside me, my eyes fell instead on the black, velvet letters spelling out ‘Leave Me Lone’ across the chest of his paper-thin, yellow cotton tee, a favorite among the eBay mystery hauls. Between our broken glances, his somber reflection haunted my periphery. However strange it sounds, there was immense, indescribable beauty in the way he held both my pain and his shame simultaneously amidst the fallout of his infidelity.
There, on the threshold of cold cast iron tucked into an arched, plaster alcove, we allowed the heavy silence to hold our shattered hearts as time took to its mending. I labored to lift my listless wrist, pulling tear-soaked fingers from the water and forcing them to rest in his trembling, open palm. Compelling my downcast eyes upward to meet his expectant gaze, I sobbed and choked my first words to him in days: “You were supposed to save me.”