Changing our Ways, Taking Different Roads

Children say the damnedest things, don't they?

I am driving. Mo Chroi is at work, and I have custody of her two children, Echo and Tithonus. I am leaving her driveway after picking them up. Echo, ten, sits in the passenger seat. Tithonus is keeping himself busy in the back with a piece of colouring paper he left there the last time he was in the car, a couple days before.

The ride starts as such rides always do. I ask after them, after their schooling. I make sure they've been taking time to clean up the house, and have made time to spend with their mother who has needed them now as much as ever.

Echo is the darling of my eye, at 10 the age where we can connect and relate better than at any time in the four years I've been blessed with knowing her. She has a very keen intellect, one I encourage and foster. We speak -as best we are able- about world affairs and events, not just the parochial world of her visible surroundings. Echo siezes on what she learns, silent for a time as she digests it before asking for more.

But after my initial battery of questions and easy conversation, I ask them if I might have a few moments of quiet. My heart is heavy in my chest, my breath comes with labour alone, for Mo Chroi and I are dying. The pain of the moment, the reminder of what I have lost, overcomes me, but I hold together long enough to get to our destination, a new store a relative is opening. I am there for some (admittedly limited) computer work.

I distract myself with the busywork before me, and then after that the quick run to the grocery, before I am overcome.

Echo stares at me, pain dimpled in the smooth skin of her youth. "Please don't cry, Saint. Because then I'll cry, too."

Echo knows. She tells me that she has known since they left that they would never return, that her mother had told her so, but she has held on to hope as I have. I am honest with her, although I take pains not to say too much.

But it has been a long week, and despite the passing of days it does not feel any shorter. I grip the wheel tightly, merging onto the main road from the grocery, taking them home. And then... the first rivulet appears. I do not know which eye turned traitor first, but the other immediately joins its mate.

Tithonus, her autistic seven-year-old, is silent in the back. Even his usual battery of questions and interruptions have taken pause in the moment.

"Saint?" she asks quietly, looking at me with her luminous eyes.

"Yeah, baby?" I say, resting my right hand on her knee.

"I'd die for you."

The restraint I'd tried to hold together shatters. I no longer make pretense of covering my face, or looking out my window as we are parked at the light. My eyes, at last, spill forth shamelessly.

"I'd... I'd die for you too, baby," I whisper. In the back, Tithonus raises his hand and signs me I love you with his thumb, pointer, and pinkie outstretched.

The light turns green. I pull ahead.

Children say the damnedest things, don't they?

Farewell, Mo Chroi

1998 (ish)

“Please… please come. I know you two are over, but… she needs you right now. She’s had too much to drink, and… I think she might have taken something.”

Her roommate, normally hostile and evasive, is anxious. This is not a call I was expecting, but even still it has the desired effect. I know in my heart that I have no business going over there, but moments after hanging up the keys are in my hand and I am walking outside my Connecticut home to my car in the drive.

I arrive to find her in rough shape, though not nothing life-threatening. My great, passionate collegiate relationship (now dead due to her drug addiction despite my every faith and effort) is laying on the floor of their living room. I talk to her, and find the worst thing she’s taken that night is one drink too many. I calm the roommate, then help her to her feet and up the stairs to her room.

She staggers into her room, and slumps down in the centre of the floor, curled on her side. I sit down next to her, calming her murmurings, telling her she is going to be fine. A monstrous hangover awaits her, I say, nothing worse. She has nearly passed out, but she calls my name until I lean in and tell her I am right there.

“I want… to tell you…” she begins, almost at the point of losing consciousness. “I have… always loved… you. You’ve always… been here for me. I never… recognised… that.”  

“I know,” I reply, rubbing her shoulder until she passes out. I take the blanket from her bed, and drape it over here. I take the pillow, and place it beneath her troubled head. Then I stand. “I know,” I say again, before I stand up. I look down at her for a moment. So many hopes, so many dreams, so much time wasted achieving neither.

I walk out of the room, and passing by her roommate without a word. It was the last time I ever saw her.

2009

Mo Chroi is tired, and the few drinks we’ve had have not helped matters any. Amelie has just finished playing on the tele, and she is ready for bed.

She makes her own way into her bedroom, not really hers but that of the person she is currently living with who is herself away for the evening. I finish tidying up the living room and gathering my things, before going in to say my goodbye.

I lean in to kiss her on her head, resting on her pillow with the blanket half covering her.

“I love you,” I tell her.

“You’re crazy,” comes her tired reply.

“Why am I crazy?”

“You’re crazy… because you love someone… who’s insane.”

I lean down and kiss her again. There’s a few moments’ quiet.

“I’m head over heels in love with you,” she says.

I want to cry as I hear it. Partly because it has been so long since I’ve heard such words from her. And partly because I know that, in the end, it means nothing. Mo Chroi and I have danced our way to the exit for over two months now, each trying to get away at times only to be drawn back in to something we cannot seem to let go of. I love her as I have loved no other, but I have learned now that sometimes love is just not enough.

In a day or two’s time, Mo Chroi will hate me again. She will be angry with me, and while she has good and compelling reason for some of her anger, she will once more be unable or unwilling to see past it. I have cut the ties a few times myself. And for a short time, I am filled with the exhilaration of the possibility of a life of my own, free of her.

And each time, after awhile, that possibility begins to seem more of the less, and less of the more. Perhaps Mo Chroi and I were never meant to be. I cannot help but think of the maudlin malaise that so overtook me when I think of our time together. The feeling that Mo Chroi was too free a spirit to be satisfied by what I had to offer her.

And then I think, again, how seemingly impossible our love was. Of the conviction that there was something more behind it than the either of us realised, and to turn away from that is to cop out. That at our best, we would build one another up, complement our respective weaknesses, and be what we were meant to.

And then the regret sets in that neither one of us did that, but rather it’s opposite. And that the failure to work things out now represents not a failure of desire, destiny, or capability… but simply a failure of will. We refused so incredible a gift because we simply were unable to do what was needed to keep it, and how shameful a failing that is.

I stood up and left her side, pausing at her darkened door.

“I love you too, a stor mo choi.”

I walked outside her Kentucky home to my car in the drive.

For You I’d Bleed Myself Dry

1. I know you love me, & I love you.

The scent of her lingers, on the fingertips and lips. Mo Chroi sits beside me, hair in ponytails, wearing the red shirt of her trade. I am driving her to work, her left hand clasping my right. The CD player plays ‘Parachutes.’ She is digging through the car.

“I need another pen,” she says.

Mo Chroi and I have been dancing around what should be obvious to either of us for some time now, and indeed it seems plain: we are over. But we’ve said goodbye too many times to one another, wished one another well and farewell too often, for any one to have the finality it was intended. I’d said it again three nights ago. She said it again today. But we are both still flushed from the quick sex we shared in the bathroom of the house she’s staying at. She looks at me, silently. I take my eyes off the road for a moment, and stare into hers.

2. We both know we’re not going to work this out.

Mo Chroi comes up with a pen, buried in the centre console.

“I’m not going to use that pen,” she says with stark finality.

“Why not,” I ask.

“Don’t you know what pen that is?”

“I do know, but she says it for me. “That was the pen from our wedding.” Signs, signs, everywhere signs.

“Don’t you ever listen?” she asks. I am silent, for fear of missing the obvious. “I was ready to give up on you,” she told me the other day. “Walk away. No chance of getting back together.”

“Okay.”

“Then I ran into the girl that did my hair for the wedding.”

I nod silently, a pointless but unconscious gesture on a phone conversation.

“Don’t you get it? Every time I think I’m done with you, ready to walk away, I see a sign that makes me reconsider. But is it really a sign? Does it mean anything, anything at all?”

“Well,” I reply, choosing my words carefully, “I guess if you have faith, faith in your heart, and a true desire to work through this, then yes, it is a sign. Otherwise, it is just coincidence. So which was this? Sign or coincidence, you tell me.”

She says she replied, but all I heard was silence.

Mo Chroi is the spontaneous one, the whimsical one. I have long seen myself as a creature of routine, of habit. I took an extra break at work today, bored of the tedium and my heart heavy. My breaks with my work mates are typically at 8:30, 11:00, and 1:00, and that contents me. But at noon, I excused myself from my desk, gathered one of the lads, and headed outside to clear my head. The noonday weather siren, a ritual of uncertain routine, wailed in the distance.

One of the lads already outside turns to us with a grin. “You ever seen Silent Hill?”

I smile in the affirmative, catching the reference, but my mind imagines Mo Chroi, at my brother’s Hallowe’en party, dressed as a Nurse. I lie to myself and say “coincidence” under my breath as I turn to go, but…

Sign or coincidence?

Mo Chroi looks at the pen in her hand. The Coldplay song that we thought for some time would be our wedding song ends its strains in the background.

Sign or coincidence?

I am on the freeway, driving to pick up Mo Chroi. She texts me some lyrics from “Love You Till the End.” Taking her Pogues cue, I reply with some from “Tuesday Morning,” which happened to be the next song on the mix CD she was listening to that very moment.

Sign or coincidence?

Mo Chroi is now at work. I am writing this piece, and fill another page of the notebook I picked from our office. I turn the page to continue… and the next page is filled with schedule notes from our wedding.

Sign or coincidence?

I am sitting down to type the piece I have written. The CD player in the house has ‘Parachutes’ on full repeat. I fire up MS Word, and “Yellow” begins to play.

Sign or coincidence?

3. You were really great in bed. I’m going to miss that wonderful connection we had.

I am driving on the freeway, to go meet my brother on the near side of town to help him move a desk. A coworker has offered it to him, and he hates to see good wood go to waste. My phone chirps at me, a new text message has arrived.

“Sex?” it reads.

It is Mo Chroi. Mo Chroi with her gracious and elegant goodbye to me four hours prior. Mo Chroi, whom I’d given up on not three nights ago. Mo Chroi, who’d consumed my thoughts on my stolen noonday break.

I am tempted to reply “no,” or, more specifically, “won’t this make it harder for us to finally let go of one another? To grant us the peace we so desperately seek?” I briefly wonder if she’d intended to send it to another but some quirk of error or accident sent it to me insead, before dismissing such a thought as unworthy of Mo Chroi. I make light of it instead. And through it all, the twining strands of surprise and desire. She is Mo Chroi. I may never again get the chance to touch her body, her beautiful carriage. Goodbyes or no goodbyes, I feel it would be the action of a fool to decline her. I smile, and hit ‘Reply’ on my cell phone.

4. I’m sorry things have to end. Just know that I will always love you, Papa Bear.

“You are obsessed with me,” Mo Chroi declares matter-of-factly. “And I am addicted to you.”

Must it end? I wonder to myself. I am at points of varying minds. I am despondent at the thought of the loss of her. A life without Mo Chroi is but the air in an empty vessel. I am confused as to why things must be as they are. We were in this together, would have died a thousand times over to spare one another the merest hint of pain. Is all hope now lost? I am dismissive, layering my heart in rime frost. This is truly for the better, and you must let go. I am hopeful that destiny will prevail over the fickle and shifting mortal minds. Sign or coincidence?

What I am not is angry.

I tell myself that if Mo Chroi truly ever loved me, she would let me go, with a grim and irrefutable finality. I tell myself that if I ever truly loved Mo Chroi, I would do the same.

Then I wonder if it is, perhaps, because we do truly love one another, it is that which renders us powerless to do precisely so.

I have felt from the start that the destinies of Mo Chroi and myself were bound up in one another. And that, somehow, we lost sight of this. That we let life get in the way, the ordinary, the humdrum of existence so far beneath us both.

I flash back to the closet, Mo Chroi rummaging for her apron minutes after the consummation of our mutual desire.

“Drop me off in the back,” she says.

The scent of her lingers, on the fingertips and the lips.

All Over Now

I stand outside my door, staring up at the cold Kentucky sky for a moment before turning around and coming back in. My heart is heavy, and I cannot quite seem to draw breath enough so that breathing itself remains an unconscious act. The house, despite the best efforts of my two cats, is still and empty. My once-beloved has been gone for three weeks.

Last weekend I finally let go, but in letting go it seemed to jar her, and she laboured to place me back on her hook. It worked, too well. The longing for her returned, the sense that life without her was in some great way diminished somehow, no matter how toxic we were for one another. We had even pledged to attend couples' counseling in the hope of somehow not merely salvaging, but rather rebuilding what we had let decay.

I spent some time today organising the rest of our things, culling hers into a couple boxes for easy removal. I saved a few pictures and letters, not quite able to scrub every last trace of her from my home. And in doing so, I came across an old letter I had written her over two years ago, and what caught me most of it was that... I could have written this very letter today:

I Miss You...

Mo Chroi stands there, talking to a friend. She hasn't looked at me, not once, coming down the ramp inside, ordering a beer at the bar, making time with a few I know, walking over behind her. But she doesn't have to. We always knew when the other entered the room.

Mo Chroi is animated. Telling a story, sharing a laugh. She holds a Smirnoff in her right hand. She is wearing a flowing blouse, the tight hug on her body, her spilling breasts, giving way to a draped flaring at the wrists. Something new, perhaps, or something borrowed. Her jeans snug against her broad hips, tight in the back. She smiles, and at that moment I see nothing else.

Mo Chroi is bold. She marches towards me, direct, intent. The waves of her nut-brown hair pulled behind her head, she is wearing the regulation-issue red shirt and apron identifying her as a server in the restaurant. My shift is done, I lean against the server line. She confronts me, pulling me from my thoughts and weariness. She thrusts out a hand. Never having met her, I regard her coolly. "Hi," she says, "I'm Mo Chroi." A smile takes hold of me as I take hold of her, my hand in hers.

Mo Chroi is reverent. She sits in church, her eyes rapt upon the elder delivering the sermon from the pulpit. She wears a long, black skirt and a faded blue sweater. It has a slight tear in the shoulder. Her hands, ever weathered and beaten, clutch the Bible in her lap. I've never understood this strange faith of hers, never tried to, the object of passing derision. But it pulls her, compels her. She has already been disfellowshipped, but the rules of man deter not her love of God. A married woman, albeit estranged, she cannot show openly the affection she holds in her heart for me, but when time arrives for prayer, she takes hold of my hand in hers, and squeezes it.

Mo Chroi is entranced. We are sitting together in the audience of the Kentucky Center. The Black Watch, their pipes and drums; the Band of the Welsh Guard, their brass, takes hold of our spirits and casts them ever upward, one song after the next, until she, noticing the tears in my eyes, falls silent. She wears a black dress, she's made herself up for the occasion, and every look from those eyes catches my breath in my chest. She wears heels- an unspoken, unarticulated sacrifice on my behalf, the break in her back from an old lover's battery screaming from the strain until it overcomes her, possesses her. I shepherd her out through the throng at the end of the show, elderly women in silk and mink passing us by in some perverse reversal of age. But my arm is out, she clutches it like a peregrine, and God Himself could not command me from her side, the echoes of the bagpipes fading from our ears.

Mo Chroi is exhausted. She collapses against my bedsheets, the echoes of her cries fading from the room. My soul weeps at the sight of her, for now she is wearing nothing at all. A lifetime of sex as an object of shame, a prurient burden, has ended with her. I am on my back. My hand reaches down, takes hold of hers, our fingers entwine. She laughs, a rich, ecstatic laugh which heaves her bare breasts in the silhouetted darkness and celebrates the very act of life's creation. Still panting, she pulls my face towards hers and kisses my lips all too briefly. "I have to shower now," she says, relinquishing my hand and sitting up. A forbidden thought crosses my mind. "No... lay back down." And she is gone from me.

Mo Chroi is inflamed. Hurt. I have let her go for the third time. The final time. It is done in a flash of anger, but its necessity no less for the sea of red and yellow the act is nestled in. She has asked me to accept much, and with her latest revelation, much has once more become 'too much.' I am incapable of loving this woman in moderation, and the highest pedestals yield the hardest falls. My eyes are drawn to the ruddy complect of her chest and face, the telltale badges of a habit of overindulgence. Balm for the deepest of hurts in a life seeming more filled with hurt than joy. Joy which I tried, and failed, to give her.

"How can you just sit there and judge me?" Mo Chroi shouts. "Who the fuck are you to judge me? I've always resented how you think you are better than me!"

I try to disagree, but she is in no mood for the hearing of it. How can I tell her that I don't think I'm better than her, but that I just simply feel that sometimes I deserve better than what she gives me? That I don't trust easily as once I used to, and that trust, once spent, is a coin so rarely recovered. Couldn't I have tried harder? Couldn't I have overlooked the occasional detour knowing her path was, in the end, headed in the direction she so passionately swore she wanted for herself? Couldn't she have tried harder to understand my fragilities, to steady the wavering of faith I had in her at even the worst of times?

In the end, we both stopped trying. The outcome- my hand in hers, and hers in mine- just wasn't worth the effort we both knew it would take. Perhaps with life as thread on a very finite spool, we became too focused on how much of it we were using, and lost sight on what we together were weaving.

And so the next day after the end found us both in the same bar, both one injured by the other, not exchanging one word, even one look, to one another, before I realised my folly in coming and left. She simply looked too beautiful for me to long regard without giving way to feeling, of longing and loss. Of the vaunted recognition of one another's strengths, but the poisonous fixation on one another's weaknesses. Beautiful in her flowing blouse, and her tight jeans, and beautiful so for anyone but me, for I was not meant to be there that night. Beautiful as one who is accepting the need to move on.

Mo Chroi was ever beautiful. The curves of her body, the weaves of her hair. The fixed stare as she regarded her blessed children, the darting gaze from one of my eyes to the other that told of the depth of her passion for me, a darting she was unaware of but told me the look came from the deepest recess of her oft-bruised heart. But she could never see it, never admit to it or even understand it. "If you say so," she'd say.

Mo Chroi called me that night, on my way home. She tried to play casual, a harmless lie in the crib of the darker ones, that she hadn't noticed me, but broke down and told me that seeing me was too great an ache to bear. I felt the same.

"You looked really beautiful tonight," I told her at the end of the brief, painful conversation, the third time I'd said it. Beautiful as one who is ready to move on, even as she may deny it. As one who needs to forget me.

"Don't waste your time on me you're already

the voice inside my head.

I miss you..."

...but I have to let go, too...

All is Quiet

Hope the New Year has shown at least a glimmer of promise for what's in store ahead. My exile from Xanga shows sings of ending. So I'm told, at least. To mark the occasion, here's a rarity: pics. In this case, me getting ready for the 'Eve.

Slainte!

-PM