Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Why Guinness Makes My Heart Hurt.

Downtown, in a pub alone, fingering the scratched wood table. At the front of the room, a longhaired man sets up a wobbly microphone, drags cords to the amp.  I’m having a Guinness and waiting to play.  And, like the nerdiest blogger on the planet, I’m drafting this by hand.

The Guinness tastes thin and sour. All winter I’ve been holed up at little breweries drinking thick, creamy stouts fresh from the barrel, and this just isn’t cutting it. What’s funny is I never liked Guinness to begin with. It’s something I’ve trained myself to get through; something that does, I admit, taste good on its own from time to time now. But that’s not how it started.


My first Guinness was in Golden, about a year ago, at a pizza place on the main drag with a big wood rail out front. Erik and I’d stopped there on our way home from Colorado Springs, hoping to redeem a trip that had been (frankly) not fun at all.  Settled into our table, we were discussing drinks when he figured it out. “Never?” he said. “You’ve never tried one?” His eyes were huge. “That’s it. I’m buying you your first Guinness. You’ll love it.”

At that point we’d been together just over a year and a half, and things were rocky. He was traveling too much. I’d been unemployed too long. That weekend, we’d gone down to take care of a workaholic friend in the Springs, but en route discovered Erik was in arguably worse shape: a pink eye full of crust, explosive sinuses, and some resulting heart palpitations. (What an underappreciated joy it is to not feel your own heartbeats!  He was fine, but it never stopped being scary.) We stayed the weekend anyway, thinking I could take care of two patients at once, but the weekend wound up soggy with whining and Kleenex; the gas was hardly worth its cost. Erik barely left bed and Makendra wrote endless press releases, and at one point I took the cat outside and put my head against the house and wept.

So do I even have to tell you the Guinness tasted sour and thin to me then, too?  Without thinking, I made a face—and watched Erik’s fall.

For whatever ways he drove me crazy, Erik loved nothing better than to share with me. Picture the two of us propped in bed like twin bookends, reading.  Picture us running errands, hand in hand; picture us chopping endless vegetables for curry. Whether or not I wanted to share something (you should probably laugh here), I usually ended up trying. He was the king of cajoling, impatient and excited, insistent upon my presence. We’d go to fancy dinners and eat half our plate, then pass it across the table to the other. We even shared a towel.

One was always enough: one schedule, one meal, one heart.

Except when it wasn’t. The problem was, we were terrifically different people.  Sharing an organic chicken was one thing. Sharing everything else—evening hours, tight quarters, vacation time, friends—was quite another.  Over time, our needs backed up. So few were being met.  But we held each other and pretended it wasn’t true.

All that spring the pressure built and hissed out the jagged edges. There was never enough time. There was never enough energy to do everything we wanted.  The night of the Guinness, we fought in the restaurant. He hadn’t even wanted to go, he told me. I hadn’t made him, I said. We loved each other too much to just say it:  we were desperate to do things together, but we didn’t want to do the same things. 

What he was ecstatic to share with me, I snubbed. And when I pulled at him--well, he got anxiety.


A long time ago I told myself, Nobody else is going to live in your body with you.  That didn’t stop me from trying.  Only when he left did my body know its own limits again. It cried out. The bed was cold. The kitchen was blank where his pans had hung.  I missed my third and fourth hands.

And yet, I was obligated to nothing. I never had to pretend to be excited. I spent my evenings wandering the neighborhood as dusk fell, ate meals without production, saw only the friends I cared most about. To be desperately lonely was actually to be free.
           

In the dim pub, I drink my Guinness. I watch skinny men lean against posts, staring at the baseball game. I watch the hodge-podge musicians show up with their long cases. It is somewhat incredible to me that I can drink a Guinness at all. That I can ignore, even for a moment, the worst sadness I’ve known: to love and fail. 

We would have done anything for one another. But the anything we picked would always be wrong.

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