Ornoth

Twenty-five years ago was my wedding day. I wasn’t going to write anything about it, but I suppose a few off-the-cuff thoughts would be appropriate.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times: our relationship was the proverbial two-edged knife. I’ve always tried to treasure the amazing joys it provided; and these days I look back on the intense pain it ended in with a lot more compassion, both for myself and for the woman who accompanied me.

Lord knows neither of us were emotionally mature enough to manage that relationship very well. In that sense, the marriage was a crucible of self-learning. There’s nothing that will reveal your own faults more starkly than sharing your life with another person. But it also showed us our potential and our worth, as well.

Marriage caused us both to experience a lot of growth… it’s just sad that so much of it came as a result of our relationship’s unforeseen and rapid collapse.

For me, one of those lessons was that some questions will never have adequate answers. Why did it fail? How much was my fault? How much hers? How much was real and how much was fake? After the divorce, I found it difficult to deal with not having any answers; as a child I had wanted to live forever just so that I could see and know “how it all turned out”. With my marriage, I saw it and lived it, but I will never fully know what happened.

Another lesson has been that you can’t go back. I daresay we both lost a lot of our innocence when we separated. Many years have passed since then, but although time heals, deep wounds also leave enduring scars. The simple, complete faith I had in her—and she in I—isn’t something that I could ever extend again. You never love as deeply and vulnerably as you do before you’ve had your first heartbreak.

Looking back, the flaws we never saw seem obvious now, and trivial when compared to the connection and potential that we shared. If I were to remarry (an extremely unlikely event), would I make better choices now and avoid the mistakes that destroyed the most precious thing I ever had? I’m wise enough now to know that, no matter how much I’ve matured emotionally, it’s impossible to say. But certainly I’ve stopped believing that any woman is Snow White, and no man—even me—is Prince Charming.

The joys… they were amazing, fulfilling, and I will treasure them every day of my life. They haven’t invented words to describe how happy I was on that day 25 years ago. But those few years of joy came at the price of many more years spent bearing the pain of the breakup.

You might find it unsatisfying that I can’t resolve those two extremes and synthesize them into a single emotional state—positive, negative, or neutral—but that too is the complex nature of marriage and divorce. There is no unambiguous “bottom line”. It was what it was: the most amazing, the most painful, and possibly the most educational experience I’ve ever been through.

And that’s really all I can leave you with.

I stare out the window at the passersby on Newbury Street, or sneak peeks at the anonymous bodies crowding a Green Line car and wonder. It’s easy to categorize people. Suits. Computer geeks. Asian students. Red Sox tourists. Construction workers. Counterculture rebels. So many thousands of people, all fitting neatly into a mental model that categorizes and reduces all those individuals into no more than a couple dozen stereotypical profiles, with no more depth than a cardboard cutout. We rarely even grant them the status of fellow humans; to us, they’re more like obstacles.

And yet, I cannot reconcile this with my own sense of individuality. Not because I think I’m so different or special, but because there’s no one out there who shares my experiences.

Those of you who have long-term partners probably won’t remember the terrible loneliness of knowing that no one knows your story, your history. You’ve made enough shared history together that your distant past doesn’t seem so pertinent to who you are anymore. You have today, something immediate that you share with another person, and you can tell stories about the rest. That’s nice, and in some ways I envy you.

Alone—and without summertime distractions like cycling—I can’t help but reflect on my life and its past events. Every place, every experience left some detritus on my memory and in my heart. Sure, I can tell you endless stories about my past. Sitting on the big granite boulder in front of our camp on Moxie Pond, trying to draw Mosquito Mountain. Watching endless cars stop-then-go on the hill in front of our house, which was part of the Maine driver’s test course (a particular treat in winter, when the road was slick and cars often slid backwards onto our front lawn). Playing wargames with 1/700 scale warship models on a gymnasium floor with the owner of Kennebec Books. Swimming in the quarry outside the town we jokingly called “Haiioweii” based on the poorly-designed sign of a friend’s dad’s hardware store. Nights driving home from Jean’s, traipsing around New York City with Linda, racing my new car down the slalom of a Westborough office park, the abandon of being at the edge of the stage for a Concussion Ensemble or Bentmen show… Sorry, I won’t continue. It would, indeed, take a lifetime to write down half the memories I cherish from this wonderful, blessed, broad and wandering life I’ve led. God help me if I’m ever impelled to write an autobiography!

The memory of these experiences is what I most wish to share with someone. In some cases I’m fortunate enough to still be friends with people who were there (probably including you, since you’re reading this). Just recently, three of my… well, three former girlfriends mentioned how much they value the times we shared, that I alone retain and preserve that memory of who they were, and how important that is to them. That’s endlessly gratifying for me, for those common memories are like jewels to me as well, locked away where few will ever see, yet they are the true treasures of my life.

The melancholy comes from the fact that there are people I’ve lost and memories I cannot share, and ultimately there’s no one person who shared and keeps it all, other than myself. People have come and gone throughout my life, and although I’ve been graced to share that path with some truly wonderful people, there’s been no one person who has remained, stayed to be part of it all, who can help me hold all those treasures… It takes more than my two hands, believe me!

I’m not bemoaning life as a bachelor, which (speaking from experience) suits me better than the alternative. It’s just that these memories are such a large part of who I am, and I derived (and still derive) so much enjoyment from them that I wish I could share them. If only I could stay close with the people I shared them with at the time, or find some way to effectively share those experiences with the people who weren’t. So that somehow there’d be a way for someone else to experience the full sum of who I am, who I have been, what I’ve done, and what I’ve seen. And that can never happen.

Bringing this back to where I started, it’s hard for me to reconcile the richness I sense in my own life with our natural inclination to categorize, summarize, and genericize the mass of people around us. I have seen so many things that no one else has, and I feel so attached to those memories… but hasn’t every person out there got the same kind of complex, meaningful, and completely unique history and set of experiences?

And I imagine that, like me, they’re seeking to preserve and share their unique stories. Perhaps the desire to somehow communicate and share that accumulation of memories is why our grandparents spent so much time sitting around telling stories.