against narrative

a love story, or an essay about love stories, or the opposite of both

Perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

— Joan Didion, On Keeping A Notebook

There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. 

— Gillian Rose, Love’s Work

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It’s been autumn for longer than usual. Most years, for most people, autumn lasts a few weeks at most; in Toronto, where I used to live with a boy who loved me, it gets cold suddenly, violently. Autumn is always over before you’ve even realized it’s properly begun. But I moved out of our shared apartment at the end of August, and I started writing the essay that would eventually become this one, and it’s been autumn ever since. If this were a story — which, of course, it is — that would mean something. 

I spent almost three years with David. We had a good story. (We met when we were fourteen; I loved him immediately; he loved me much later but with such voracity that I didn’t feel bad about it.) He got me into communism and in return I got him into being in love. He used to tell me nearly every day that I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen — he’d pause the movie whenever an actress came on screen and say, god, it’s crazy how no one else is as beautiful as you, no one even gets close — and I never felt patronized by it, not even a little, not even back when I felt patronized by nearly everything. He was the smartest person I’d ever met and he still thought I was smarter than him. He hurt me very badly sometimes, but really it’s okay. I hurt him too, I think. 

We used to say we never fought, we just made each other sad. Here’s a list of the things we made each other sad about: Music. Parties. School. His family. My friends. The suburbs. Toronto, Vancouver, New York City. (We were always sad about New York City.) The idea of breaking up. The idea of being together forever. Pleasure, and whether or not we deserved to feel it. Work. Our conflicting desires. Desire in general — his lack of it, my abundance. All the things I wanted and all the things he didn’t want. The pit in my stomach that never left even when I loved him so fiercely it made me cry to watch him sleep. (It felt scary to love someone that much, sometimes; like someone had taken one of my more precious organs out of my body and let it walk around outside, raw and pink and writhing in the open air where anything could happen to it.)

I told him about the pit in my stomach all the time. We were very communicative. I never cried more than I did one morning in the summer, when I asked him something like, does any of this ever feel off to you? Do you ever feel like something’s wrong, like we could be happier? And he looked at me, eyes big and black like an animal, and said, no. You make me so, so happy, and I can’t imagine what I would do without you. I started crying — the kind of sobs that make your body heave like you’re going to throw up, that turn you into something other than yourself — and I didn’t stop for four hours. Nine months later, I told him I had to go. 

Our breakup was so protracted, in part, because our story was so, so good, and I wanted so badly for the story of our relationship to be the story of my life — doing the dishes in the nighttime, his hands over my eyes when we watched horror movies, the love songs I wrote him on our anniversary. A math prodigy and a writer. Our children would have my eyes and his bone structure, my laugh, his freckles. 

I used to press my palms into the hollow under my browbone while I cried silently in bed next to him and tell myself those stories again and again, praying to believe them, trying to convince my body to feel something different than what it did. Desire, I realize again and again, is like death and taxes — certain and inescapable and constantly reaffirming of your smallness and powerlessness inside mechanisms much larger than yourself. When I was little, my father used to deal blackjack for me on the kitchen table while I gambled with M&Ms, knocking on the table as he flipped the cards over in front of me, doing the math but pushing my luck. I won, sometimes, but never stayed winning for long. In the end, the game always made a fool out of me. He meant it as a lesson: you can play the tables as long as you want, telling yourself another kind of story about how you’re the one in control, but the house always wins. Desire always wins. Isn’t that embarrassing? 

When we first realized we would have to break up — it was my decision, but we made it together, just like we did everything else — David talked about the idea of us ending up with each other again sometime in the future. He said, it just seems like it doesn’t make sense to get rid of all of — he paused — this. He was gesturing vaguely to something like our love, or our history, or the life we had built together, and I’m not sure if even he knew exactly what he was talking about, but I knew what he meant. Some people spend their whole lives looking for a good story. 

After the breakup, I took the train up to Montreal, where autumn was beginning to take hold even in the earliest days of September. I spent hours every day walking aimlessly around the city, watching the leaves curdle on the trees and trying to weave the loose threads of our relationship into a story that made sense. I felt gasps of loneliness so foreign and deep in my body that they left me bedridden. I scared my friends and family; I’d call them in the middle of the night and say, I think God is talking to me, I can feel his hands on my neck. I tried going to church, and then I tried skipping church, and neither left me feeling any more or less in control. (To have total control over my life would be a miracle; to have none at all would at the very least offer me a kind of entropic relief. I was, as usual, stuck in the perilous middle.) It got cold. I had to start wearing a jacket. I couldn’t make up my mind about anything. 

Was I a good partner, or was I a bad partner? Did I hurt him, or did he hurt me? Was the great tragedy of our relationship that we’d been doomed from the start, or that we veered off track somewhere, quietly, imperceptibly, and were too far gone by the time we’d realized it? On some days, I was certain that he hadn’t loved me enough; on others, I was sure that he’d loved me too much, that to stay would have meant being mummified in the marsh of his constant, wonderful, suffocating love. I never cried except for all the times that I did. I missed him desperately except for how often I felt grateful to be alone. I kept thinking I will never have a relationship like that again and couldn’t tell, even as I whispered the words out loud to myself on the long walk home from the fountain park, if I meant them as an expression of grief or as a kind of promise. I longed for absolutes and found that the realities of love had none to offer me. In the absence of knowledge, I made myself dizzy with stories. 

Everyone seemed to want a story from me, too — a neat, simple sentence or two that distilled our inconceivable relationship into a digestible anecdote, perhaps from which we might all learn a valuable lesson. Correlation, causation. Beginning, middle, satisfying end. I’d run into friends I hadn’t seen in a while and they’d all say the same things, like someone had briefed them ahead of time: kind, smart lines about heartbreak and feminism and masculinity and the signs they saw or didn’t see, tearful apologies, strange, taut hugs laden with meaning, reassurances about the role this experience would play in the wide and beautiful arc of my life. I could feel around me the construction of endless competing narratives. I was either a blighted, woeful woman-victim for whom comfortable life had just come to an end, or a triumphant, autonomous heroine freed from the shackles of heterosexual monogamy, or an endlessly generous and long-suffering martyr, or a flight risk, cruel and self-interested and never satisfied. None of these felt true, or, at least, none felt complete, but each pole had a powerful gravitational pull — they offered a balm of simplicity, a promise of meaning, a reprieve from the search for an answer. They offered interpretation, which is to say they offered an end to the endless work (and the endless humiliation) of muddling through feeling in fruitless search of fact. 

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In her essay Victims and Losers, A Love Story, Mary Gaitskill writes about the utility of narrative¹: