Finding Nicholas, #1

HOW TO STAY, 1/2020

I was nearly 50 years old the day I fell howling to my knees on the sheepskin rug in the guest room of my friend’s house and decided to stay in my body.

I’d been reading When Things Fall Apart by the Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron. It was dog-eared and bloated from falling into the bathtub. Three times I got to the end, and three times I opened it up and started at the beginning again. She was steadying my soul in the peaks and valleys of my long distance, international, obsessional romance, which had probably been ending ever since it began, but it ended officially, abruptly and electronically, and unfortunately coincided with the selling off all my belongings and agreeing to move with him to England — poor timing.

On that day when a gut-jab of grief knocked me slowly to my knees I remembered Pema’s very practical advice about falling apart: be curious, especially when it comes to suffering, and stay in your body, even though all your instincts tell you to run like hell. There is no way out, but only a way through, so stay in your body, and most importantly: DROP THE PLOT!

Drop the plot?! My whole life was a plot! My whole life as an actress, a writer, an interviewer, a storyteller I had been trained to intensify the plot! Without plot I might not even exist! And how exactly was I supposed to drop it?

Without thinking too much — after all I had fallen to my knees slo mo, just like you see in the movies, but never think will happen to you; and even when you are doing it you think: this is way too cliche — I just simply dropped the plot.

I stayed with my searing grief, and every second I wanted to run back into the he-said-she-said of my fascinating suffering, I brought myself back into my heaving belly — drop the plot — the soft rug under my knees — drop the plot — the adrenaline coursing through my blood — drop the plot — my throat raw from crying.

STAY.

Before I even knew how to resist I was on a rapid journey through a strange time tunnel that picked me up and — whoooshhhh! — deposited me back to the original scene of the crime, way back into a place in childhood where all of this hysteria started, and landed me — boom!

I was 7 and had lost my father to divorce, my mother to her new love; my dog was gone and even my room had been taken away by the new live-in babysitter. I slept in the den off the garage on the couch, and left the TV on all night even when it turned into a test pattern. It was 1969 and I must have been truly afraid for my life.

Suddenly I saw clearly that each romance had only been a tawdry re-telling of a simple ancient grievance; my current hysteria using borrowed players as fill-ins, carrying my primal fear into every relationship I had chosen. I had never seen the core of it because I had been mesmerized by my beautiful and fascinating plots.

Of course that afternoon on the sheepskin rug I didn’t realize the magnitude of what had happened. I still didn’t know that my perfect person was quietly waiting for me. It would take me another five years to see the result. Only now do I know that with that split second crack came the possibility of finding my destination, and making everything on it’s way the journey.

But I did realize that I had had more than my share of love, sex, and infatuation — much more than most people had had in the entire lifetimes, and I determined to be done. It was such freedom!

Fast forward five years…

I want to tell you how exploration and transformation make you stronger than you ever imagined, how two explorers came to meet and fall into ecstatic love without our even knowing it. How we danced on every restaurant take-out line, and pushed each others’ cars back and forth on the long icy driveway that first winter. How the lingerie he ordered for valentines day ended up at the wrong house on my street. I want to tell you about the power of storytelling, and dropping the story, radio, and the full moon on a certain day of the Epiphany. And I want to talk about Persephone and her traveling papers between Hades and here-and-now. I want to tell you how it is possible to keep exploring without leaving the house in the middle of evidence to the contrary of a future in our lives right now. But I’ll just tell you this…

*

My person and my destination, Nicholas, and I are explorers, even though these days we barely leave the house. Two years ago he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. No symptoms, no warning.

In 2015 we were just friends, until one day I said: “I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to say ‘Yes’.

And just like that he said: “Yes.”

I was going up to Hudson in frozen January to study oral history and radio, and I needed an interview subject to make an audio piece to put on air at the local station.

Although he is the bravest, soundest and smartest person I know, although he is an intrepid explorer of the internal the last thing he is inclined to do is let others in on it, or really leave his house or garden unless he has to.

But I am a talented curator of genius — I can smell it — and so I insisted.

He came to my rented room on Copeces Lane and we sat side by side on a rather broken couch and he told me the story of his life; how his mother had dressed him in crinoline skirts as a girl and how he still loved dressing up, how at the age of 40 when his mother passed he decided all at once to be the person he had known he was as a child, but had forgotten; how he started his transformation from female to male, how he secretly hoped he might be able to sing like Dean Martin after his hormonal change, and how the journey took 20 years to season.

I told you he was an intrepid explorer!

What I discovered listening to one of our interviews horrified me! Our voices, the cadence, the comfort and laughter, the obvious L-O-V-E between us on the recording was electrifying and terrible.

Why hadn’t we known this? Who else knew this? Why didn’t everyone know? Surely his wife knew!

Nicholas’ favorite prayer is “Surprise me,” but I had had enough of long shots and surprises in my life. I was poor. I was moving from rented room to rented room every nine months, I drove a hand-me-down car with no muffler and pieces of rust falling off. I was a mess, a 52 year old woman, overeducated and underemployed and definitely damaged. I was not interested in leaping over another romantic cliff!

I decided to keep this under my hat. No-one else but me needed to know. The whole thing would blow over quietly if I pushed it under the rug. It didn’t last for long.

I didn’t know that our epiphany was to be on the full moon on the night of the The Epiphany, Little Christmas, January 6th 2015, but that’s when Nicholas insisted I tell him why I had changed. I burst with the truth that in fact we were in love with each other! It was right there on the tape! There was no doubt about it, and that I felt extremely sorry for him! So sorry in fact that I started to cry because I told him I knew how much it was going to hurt for him to let me go.

“Oh, my dear girl…” was all I remembered. I was too busy crying that night about losing my best friend to check my email, where Nicholas verified the facts with a terse: “Everything you say is true, and I am stupid.”

We had stumbled into being severely in love without letting ourselves in on it!

*

We’ve experienced more than our share of surprises and miracles in the last five years, brand new cancer drug trials, and even cures. Now we are experiencing the joys of chemo and radiation.

We hardly ever mention love or death inside our house that Nick’s great grandfather built on Pleasant Lane. It’s too big a thing to discuss and then close and place back on the shelf. We run the patterns from hall to bath to kitchen sink to attic and basement stairs. This is our map. It’s what we’re doing when we’re not paying attention, just tending the fires, loving happily whether here or in other fabrics like time and eternity.

I tell him blood to blood, my hand to his, or sometimes we say, ”You know, I am rather fond of you,“ as if we are in a Noel Coward play.

I didn’t really know what boundless was until I saw Nicholas shrinking. We don’t have the kind of space for abstract concepts. Love is buoyant and elastic in our tiny cottage, re-invented, second by second; it goes around corners like a cat, rubbing its side against the wall, nestling up to a heater vent, curling up in a lap. I am still surprised to see my love move like that, always adaptable to our states, quickened in small spats, or talking in the dark, head to head on the carpet, planning to meet in dreams to see our hands and know them to be ours.

This fabric is the destination of my life. This destination is the fabric of my life.

If we both arrive out of here we will need signals to find each other. We may need hand gestures and winks and special knocks.

I bought Nicholas a gold coin for Christmas with Persephone on one side and her chariot to the underworld on the other. It’s a reproduction of an ancient coin that he carries wherever he goes, so he can navigate whatever world he lands in, so he can show his coin at whatever gate he approaches and come back.

Come Back!

But for now we stay in our bodies, no matter what, greeting each new terror with the curiosity of explorers, spatting and sparking depending on the day, because there is nowhere else to go, only through. We’ve met our destinations.