She and He
They had come to a place in their relationship of mutual respect, which was far rarer than love. Love without reverence is merely needy lust, unsubstantial euphoria, childish infatuation, or crippling dependency and even in the beginning, both knew those kinds of attachments weren’t worthy of them. Deep, independent adoration was never the goal either, but it was attainable.
There aren’t names or labels for what they were to each other. They were hard on each other. They both wanted – demanded – more of each other, like mindful and heartful athletes who pushed each other to better and higher goals, trying every means possible to attain what they knew each other were capable of. Knew now. They hadn’t always known.
Hope was ever present but hardly wished for because hopes dashed, or belief in the other shattered, was too much to bear.
In that faltering or fear, they often found themselves mired in horrible discord. They didn’t doubt themselves, they doubted each other. Conditioned by disappointment, they often believed the worst was possible. Not because they wanted to believe the worst, but because it was easier to make the choice to believe than to be forced to. The irony being that somewhere they couldn’t quite grasp, they knew better than to believe the worst when it came to each other. But it was too much to hope that after all the heartache both had endured, all the searching, all the blunders and all the isolation, that the other actually existed. True. And real. And present. And so many times, they assumed or gave into their fears about the worst.
It was mythic. It had to be. If it were anything less, it could be found with anybody. This wasn’t possible with anyone else – and that was a unique blessing and an absolute curse.
Lack of trust that they deserved each other, that they deserved better than what they had already been served, that they had grown from their suffering and had made the choices that brought them to each other was at the core of the curse. Both had endured insurmountable anguish, both had chosen not to kill themselves, not to descend into addiction, not to become bitter or selfish or petty or hurtful to others or all the other things that people do when they use their misfortunes to justify abhorrent behaviour.
Both strove for the harder path with open hearts. A rarity indeed. Their Achilles’ heals existed in how they protected themselves from the people who did kill themselves, descended into addiction, became bitter and self-serving, vein, petty and hurtful to others in utterly insidious and abhorrent ways. Sometimes it was hard to see that they weren’t any of those and never could be that way to each other. Too many others had seemed good, until they weren’t and once they weren’t, the only way out came at a price. The more they discovered each other, the higher the price rose, until they almost made manifest the worst.
The sin both severed the relationship to avoid was bringing out the worst in each other. Being the impetus for the other’s downfall was the worst thing either wanted, and because the other often mattered more than themselves, they often sacrificed their own fulfilment and joy so as not to inflict undue hardship on the other. Trying the best to be noble, often created terrible results.
Their intentions were good and pure, it was their actions and effects on each other that were ill conceived and detrimental. Like a twisted Gift of the Magi, where instead of giving up their most prized assets to give gifts to each other, they sacrificed themselves and endured unnecessary hardship to keep the other from pain. The saddest thing being how useless the sacrifice was because they didn’t need to be saved or protected from each other at all. They merely needed to let the other in – which was the hardest thing in the world for both of them.
She needed to know she mattered to him, and she did matter to him even beyond his imagining. He needed to know she would never leave or abandon him, and she wouldn’t; she was devoted to him from the beginning and would be until the end – no matter how far or wide or treacherous their journey became.
They were like brave warriors, fighting valiantly back to back in a perilous world. They had the courage of lions against the fray, but did they have the courage to face each other, not in combat, for there was a healthy dose of conflict and competition between them, but in acceptance that the other was there for the good and care of both. That together they were a font for each other. That they could seek love and pleasure and excitement and adoration of others, but it was between the two of them that they would always find acceptance and respect, sustenance, a place to rest, a time to let their guard down, and be true, and be whole.
In so many ways, it was almost easier to tempt failure than it was for either of them to conceive of success – possibly because they both knew what failure looked like, felt like, tasted like, but they had no concept that healthy, beautiful, sane success even existed much less what that experience might be – or if they even had the courage to find out.
She thought about Penelope, who waited for Odysseus for 20 years. But Penelope knew what she was waiting for. And what if she were more like Calypso? Or Circe? No, there was treachery and selfishness with those women – and if she wasn’t his Penelope, she would aspire to be his Athena. The Greeks were right in depicting platonic love between goddesses and heroes, because platonic love was divine. In fact, it was the virtue of love, beginning with sex and the beauty of the body and ascending to divinity and beauty of the soul that created the platonic ladder of love in the first place. Modern interpretations be damned, the idea of platonic love now was a bastardisation of the original, and they were on the verge of the original not the current interpretation.
The Greeks knew better than the Christians that love began with sexual attraction – even between the same sexes – and could grow in the direction of truth and beauty as it ascended to divinity or transcended the flesh, but without carnal knowledge, truth and beauty were unattainable. Quite literally, no one could jump up the ladder, skipping over the rungs of sex and lust. Sex and lust don’t always ascend, and it’s much harder to go up than down, but sex and desire never disappear as the ladder goes up, they are in fact the foundation of how the ladder grows if it grows at all.
Pleasure, no matter if it is sexual, emotional or physical, was a necessary manifestation of love and they had never enjoyed true bliss together. Real bliss. Mutual bliss. They had only struggled together, supported each other, championed fulfilment through others, but never joy together or through each other. It was curious that their bond existed mostly in strife and struggle and not in bliss or fulfilment. Was it a testament that they endured or was there something ridiculous about it? Fun is necessary component of any companionship. Fun was a foreign concept to them.
Joy, bliss, pleasure require vulnerability. Shakespeare knew this; it was the key to his success. We cannot laugh through tension, but we can break tension with laughter. The tension between them was often thick and almost crackled with pressure, but laughter was rare and almost always one sided. Could they laugh together? Could they exist together in joy? Could they have fun? Only the fates and muses knew for sure, and she and he would have to overcome the furies to find it, but the gods knew, if he and she were capable of finding the soft, sacred underbelly of vulnerability between them, they would be among those extraordinary mortals who truly knew ecstasy while still breathing air.