anything you want to do

Yesterday’s perfect moment happened just after dinner. I had to run to the local pharmacy for allergy meds, and on the way I reverently slid Conor Oberst and The Mystic Valley Band’s brand-new release, Outer South, into the player. I had listened to the first eight tracks on the way home from Borders where I went to pick it up, so I skipped to the ninth, and as I waved to my mother and pulled off the curb, “White Shoes” started playing and the rest of the world ceased its own meaning and became instead a simple, achingly lovely backdrop to the song.

I pulled into the pharmacy and finished listening to the first run-through with my eyes fixed on the trees across the street. It had rained all afternoon, and the air held a watery shimmer whose clarity blurred in my eyes with their buildup of tears. A washed scent rolled in through the car window – the smell of wet flowers, wet grass, wet leaves, the freshness of a lushness renewed. I put the song on repeat when I returned to the car after my errand, and instead of turning down Main Street to go home, I took North Mill Street and drove down through Paper Mill Hollow where the wild turkeys hide like fey folk and the denseness of the close-twined trees lend the grass glades a secretive sense of almost-unveiled mystery. I let my car climb the far end of the hollow slowly, breathing in the early fern spice, and took Route 5 the last quarter mile to Freeport Beach, listening.

As far as beaches go, Freeport isn’t much to speak of. You wouldn’t put it on postcards to sting far-off relatives with jealousy. Visibly as ancient as the lake itself, the beach crowds the water, its rough sand littered with driftwood, smooth brown rocks, fish carcasses and shattered shale. Farther to the west, the cliffs push the broken stretch of land into the shallow waves, their ribs hazy with the distance. It’s easier to imagine an Eriez woman pounding clothes clean than to envision frolicking summer swimmers, even when the swimmers shriek and splash right in front of you. Something about that particular place holds the past more closely than the present, strips your awareness down to the bare elements of rock, water and sky, and makes time disappear.

For those reasons, at least in part, when some big emotion overtakes me and I need to shroud myself in isolation to process it, I long more than anywhere else for Freeport. As I pulled up to the end of the small parking lot and parked my car facing the water, I let out my first free breath all day, silenced the engine and left a window partially down, “White Shoes” still playing. While Conor whispered, “Anything you want to do,” his guitar and his voice creating an intimate simplicity that bore the same quality as the rainwashed air, I leaned my head back against the seat and watched the sun lay a shivering path on the water. The haze swallowed the ricochet of light, and the clouds folded blue over the beach. Nothing moved but a few gulls; the water lay all but quiet; the only sound was the music; and my soul was still.

I reflected on that moment this morning en route to the office. While I thought of the peace, and noted that my car is my greatest sanctuary, the only place where I can listen to my music, think, breathe, cry or yell without restraint, I decided that Conor’s love songs appeal to me as strongly as they do because they express a way of loving that is like to mine. Simultaneously my brain reprocessed a conversation I held the other night with my sister. I heard my question, and her answer, in an echo of remembered sound: “Does having Keith help?” “No. They’re different things. He understands me better than anyone else, but there’s a part of me that’s always alone.” “I thought maybe that was the case,” I said; “I’m sorry. Being alone all the time sucks.” “Well, it bothers you more than it bothers me,” she said.

Her statement brought me up short. Till that moment, I’d always assumed that everyone’s loneliness was alike, that mine was no different from the next person’s; there were only varying degrees of coping. But what she said made me wonder if I was wrong, at least partly. She’s a Rational on the Myers-Briggs scale, a thinker, not a feeler. Other friends who seem less pained by their aloneness are also Rationals (my friends all tend to be Rationals and Idealists), while those whose hurt matches mine are fellow Idealists.

As “White Shoes” cycled into its third stanza, I synthesized my trains of thought and realized, “Oh. Conor is a feeler. I love the way his songs express love because that’s how I love.” For me, love is absolute. It has its moments of waxing and waning in intensity, its moments of hardship, but hardships are for working on, for strengthening the relationship, for deepening the love. Love also, to me, is synonymous with union -- mental, emotional, physical, spiritual. Through love, the two disparate selves become, not dissolute, but semi-permeable to each other: distinct but fluid, understood and assailable uniquely by the other.

In a nonerotic sense, I have this kind of union with all of my close friends, most of whom, again, don't share my personality types. Perhaps I'm not quite as semi-permeable to them, but I find these friendships profoundly satisfying, because the love is deep and mutual, organic, living, thrilling and yet safe. These friendships are what hold me together most of the time, what keep at bay the darkness I rarely discuss, what stave off The Nothing. I tend to view everything in terms of oneness, and so I see in the mutual love of my friends the love of God, and that mutual love preserves, protects, heals, encourages, redeems and gives life.

Yet, even with such good friendships, I always feel the absence of the one significant Other. Since my personality types (I’m equal parts INFJ and INFP) are designed for unity, aloneness causes a deep existential anguish because a huge part of who I am involves loving – involves not being alone in a metaphysical sense. However much I need a private space to decompress, and however much I value my personal independence and that of others, without that sense of deep communion unbound by time and space, life is not only frustrating and flat, but a source of inexpressible and intolerable pain. Trapped within my self, beauty and truth lose their savor, because experiencing them without the ability to share them brings no joy -- and because the experience of truth and beauty often comes from the being of the Other. Age and maturity bring better degrees of coping, a greater calm, a more responsible way of getting through life and living in society (listen to the progression of Conor's music from Letting off the Happiness to Outer South), but the agony never diminishes.

It’s a nice touch of irony that these personality types, which long so strongly for human love, have the hardest time finding it. As easily as I love people, I'm really damn picky, apparently, when it comes to that one other person. It's nothing over which I have any control -- breaking up with Dustin marked the end of a three-year attempt, through my various dating endeavors in the Midwest, to create spark ex nihilo. I thought it would behoove me to be practical (I was oblivious to the arrogance); but practicality, in the end, isn't that important to me. What I treasure most are harmony, mutuality and understanding, the joy I take in the other, and the freedom to be myself -- in all of my idiosyncracies, passions, flaws, strengths, intensity and the strange combination of egocentrism and selflessness that I haven't yet catalogued -- to give of myself, and to receive of the other, both of us simply to be.

I love listening to Conor because I get that same sense of longing in his music. "White Shoes" expresses the unspoken absolute focus upon the other, the unconditional regard, the contraction of all the universe to the other person's smile, the other person's heartbeat, the other person's being, an awareness which informs and describes my own way of loving -- loving all people, but especially that particular person. Absorbing this beautiful, wrenching song, I felt worlds better even as I cried, because, somewhere out there, someone else gets it; and, weirdly, the shared unfulfilled yearning gives me hope. The methods of searching may differ, but the quest is the same as the anguish is the same, and I still believe that the quest will be fulfilled, even if it takes a lifetime to get there.

I'm grateful, though, that I've decided to stop killing my dreams in favor of practicality. A life alone, even with the pain of it, is better than a life lived with someone with whom the kind of love I give, and the kind of love I want, isn't possible. I'm not desperate for marriage itself; with a not-quite-right person the loss isn't worth the gain; and I'm not willing to settle. So I have opted to keep dreaming, and to keep holding out for the dream; and I find a great deal of peace in knowing that the pain of aloneness, as cosmic as my awareness of another, is part of the circumstances in which my temperament finds itself, which makes it easier (today, anyway) to address -- because I don't have to feel the need to get rid of it or apologize for it; I only need to manage it, and I can stop feeling guilty for never being able to root it out. It's a constant in my reality, like the gray of the Erie skies, like the lapping of the waves on Freeport Beach, and some days it will ebb nearly altogether, and some days it will swamp me; but it will pass, and pass again, and I can still know different kinds of love, and I can still know joy, and hurting doesn't mean that my faith is weaker or that I trust God less. Sorrow isn't a sin, and I am learning how to live with it instead of in it.

All in all, very good things. Even on the days when my soul twists and I want to curl up and weep, at least I know why, and I know the strength of the dream, and I'll still look forward to the day I can say, or hear, "Anything you want to do -- lover, anything you want to do."