The Rainbow’s End

Last night, Her and I talked. I feel she and I are both at a crossroads in our lives. We are traveling blindly, following our hearts. Both of us free to seek new companions, and after all, we are both very sensual people, we’ve both had ‘meaningless’ sex before. We both agreed that sex is never meaningless, but it can feel so empty when the other person you are having it with doesn’t connect with you; you don’t know what they are feeling, in the moment and sometimes even later on. Free of my wife I should be out picking up girls on a nightly basis. But, here I am alone again tonight. In some ways I’m frustrated with myself.

I left work late today after a long video chat with Her. We keep coming down to it, both of us baffled by our feelings for each other, how they can be so strong when we haven’t met.
“I love you baby.”
“Love you,” she smiled a sweet smile that melts my heart every time, I feel so connected to Her when I look into her eyes, even if it is only through a pixelated screen.
“Talk to you later.”
“Ok.”
I started the car and put my playlist on shuffle. This playlist is kind of the playlist of my life, I try not to play it too often, but it is my go-to when I’m not sure what to listen to. I don’t necessarily put songs that I’m entirely in love with on it, just songs with meaning for whatever reason. If my life was the film, these were the soundtracks that were played to punctuate the major events. There’s a bit of my childhood, and high school, and my friends, good times, bad times. I just keep adding to it, there are songs that my wife and I shared, ‘our songs’, songs of love, romance, and plenty of old Swing standards. For example, Polka Dots and Moonbeams is on there.

I pulled out of the parking garage.
“Think I can fly, think I can fly when I’m with you, my arms are wide, catching fire as the wind blows,” came the song over the stereo from my phone, accompanied by a cascading synth melody.
Yes, Sierra is in the playlist too, how could she not be? This was a song that twenty-year-old girl played for me on a particular late night drive, befitting her youthful exuberance. It isn’t a great song per se, Galantis is somewhat too gaudy and overproduced for my tastes, but one particular lyric always sticks with me,
“Even if we’re strangers til we die…”
Sometimes I wonder if Sierra thought about that lyric as I did when we were together. That our relationship was never meant to last, and we would share an intimate physical relationship for a time, and then return to being strangers until we die. Seemed like that was the plan. I have trouble regretting it; it had its time and place.

As I drove, I thought about Sierra for a time, picturing her smiling there beside me. Thinking about her betrayal and how it all ended. Another song came on.
“Can you find the time to let your lover love you? He only wants to show you…” Christina Perri sang.
This was one of Her’s favorites, and it meant a lot to me since she’d sung it to me herself. The song’s infectious idealism of the love of soulmates (and seabirds that mate for life) is almost bordering on the sappy side, but, somehow it works so well, but only if sung with such genuine heart as Christina and Her sing it with. I felt so warm inside hearing it on the drive home, hearing Her’s lovely voice in my head.
“Baby we’re fate, baby it’s fate… not luck.”

After dinner, I walked with my sister and her dog to the liquor store to get her cigarettes and a bottle so we could make some cocktails. I was texting some more with Her, she was watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s, one of my favorite movies, I was a bit sad I was missing it. It made me think of a post I’d made a long time ago now. Her and I talked some more. It was a continuing theme with us, we both never wanted to be trapped again, we wanted to be free, yet we kept coming back to how empty the idea of sex with other people seemed to the both of us at this time, we had become… monogamous, yet we’d never met one another nor were we tied together by any vow or expectation. We admitted our love freely enough to one another, but we were both very much aware it likely wouldn’t be forever.
“‘People don’t belong to people. I won’t be put in a cage…'” She quotes Holly to me in a text.
That final scene in that film, it all comes together so beautifully. Holly has a point, after a manner she is right, no person should ‘own’ another and put them in a cage. She is terrified of commitment, of falling in love, of losing. She won’t even name her own cat and call it hers. In some ways, that’s how Her and I were being, and perhaps it is some wise caution for two people thousands of miles away who’ve never met. But, Paul’s monologue, as he stands out in the rain leaning into the cab, perfectly delivering Capote’s immortal words that cut to the heart:

You know what’s wrong with you, Miss Whoever-you-are? You’re chicken, you’ve got no guts. You’re afraid to stick out your chin and say, ‘Okay, life’s a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that’s the only chance anybody’s got for real happiness.’ You call yourself a free spirit, a ‘wild thing,’ and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

You have to have courage to belong to someone else because that’s life, people do it, they fall in love and sometimes they fall out of love, or they hurt and cheat each other as Her and I have done to others and had done to us. It’s all a risk, it’s scary, and people get hurt, but good still comes of it, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and the memories and music and meaning remain. We’re after the same rainbow’s end, Her and I, why not seek it together?