An Uncommon Bond

by jeff brown

  But why? Why would the universe bring this love my way, only to crush me into bits? For what possible purpose? Was this my penance for objectifying so many women and breaking so many hearts? For breaking hers in the last life? Whose black magic worked this deal?

  Who was this man, now?

  Hello Abandonment, My Old Friend

  Completely incapacitated, I stayed on my couch for days. I called into the office to tell them that I was too sick to work. By the pathetic sound of my voice, there was no disputing it. While lying there, I found myself looking for Sarah’s spirit to dialogue with, but I could no longer make the connection. The soulular phone line was out of order. The betrayal had seen to that. Now there was an irreparable cut in the cord between our hearts.

  Great love is powerful like an ocean and fragile like a reed.

  Then she called. At first I could barely hear her, she spoke so softly. In a little girl’s voice that I had only heard once before, she whispered, “I can’t do it, Lowen. I can’t handle this depth of connection. It’s too much for me. I was the deluded one, not you. I’m too afraid. I’m so, so sorry. This is just too hard.” The primal self had spoken.

  “But why that way? You know my wounds.”

  Then her voice changed and I heard a stranger, armored and aloof. “I think that must be why. I don’t know. He meant nothing to me. I had just met him. It was a suicidal act. I just had to kill it. I can’t hold this much love in my heart.”

  “I held it,” I whispered.

  For a moment, I felt her soften. We both fell quiet.

  Then my ego stormed in, “And why the fuck was he answering your cell phone?”

  “I asked him to. I’m so sorry.”

  Then the words stopped again. We sat in silence for a long time, feeling into the love below the tension, not quite able to hang up. It was as though there were two entirely different entities taking up space inside us at the same time: the soul’s boundless love and the psyche’s limiting beliefs. How to bring them together?

  We stayed on the phone for the whole evening, wordless but deeply present. Both trying to take this in. Trying to fathom the unfathomable. Could this really be THE END? In the meantime, Light-nin tried to jump on me every few minutes, as though inviting us to remember our love. After midnight, my heavy eyes closing, I told her I had to go, but she wasn’t ready. Neither was I. We fell asleep on our separate couches, phones in hand, momentarily suspending the reality of what had happened.

  I woke up to a dial tone before the sun came up. I lay there shivering in the dark, as the warmth from our phone sharings faded away. I tried to hold on, but reality wouldn’t be denied. Soon the pain from the betrayal rose right back into awareness, and I found myself again enraged. It was just too much to bear—the stark void of her absence, this brutal ending. I railed out loud: How can you abandon this gift? People long for love their whole lives and never find it. Not even a single day of it. And you just walk away without a fight? Cowardice! Do you even have the right to refuse this gift? This shared destiny? Do you?

  In the same way as she couldn’t hold the love, I couldn’t hold the hurt. This love had introduced me to an entirely different universe. How could I abandon its possibilities?

  I fell asleep again before being awakened in a cold clammy sweat. It was a familiar nightmare—all too familiar. I was sitting outside an ex-lovers apartment waiting for her to leave for work in the morning. Fully lodged in my rejection triggers, I was desperate to talk to her, desperate for any form of contact. I woke up, as I always did after dreams like this, just before seeing her. Eternal frustration.

  Throughout my relationship history, this recurring nightmare had always signaled that my abandonment wound was crossing a threshold into madness. My first girlfriend naomi was the original revealer. When separating from naomi activated this wound, it went so earth-shatteringly deep that it was all I could do to stay alive until the pain passed. Completely overcome by heart-ripping anxiety, I couldn’t find my footing anywhere. Time and time again, I plummeted painfully alone into a primal abyss.

  And here I was, back again. Hello abandonment, my old friend.

  How to stay true to the feelings about Sarah’s absence without slipping into a primal woundhole? It didn’t seem possible. Please Goddess, hold me safe.

  That night, I frenetically wrote Sarah a 12-page email, pleading with her to come into therapy with me, to talk things through, to heal. She wrote back without speaking to my request. “Off to Boulder for yoga teacher’s training. Things must be as they are.” Must they?

  I had to take action.

  The next morning, I borrowed Daniel’s credit card—this relationship had cost me in more ways than one—and booked a weekend flight to Denver. Madness, yes, but I had no choice. I was too tortured to sit still. I emailed her to let her know, and she replied, “DON’T COME.” That’s all I got. Certain that it was my job to fight for our little piece of God, I packed my bags, as the stampeding hooves of unrequited longing trampled my spirit whole.

  Trigger Unhappy

  As I flew down to Denver, I couldn’t help but notice how frozen I was emotionally. I could feel the pain surging through my body, but I couldn’t release it. The river was all dammed up again, confused as to its direction, shocked by the rupture to its integrity.

  I rented a car in Denver, and drove toward Boulder. Somehow I ended up outside Rocky Mountain national Park first—the home of our first kiss. I didn’t dare enter, remaining instead in my car outside the entrance, frozen by the searing pain of memories. While I was waiting, an industrious cardinal zipped in and out of view, as though to remind me that our dance wasn’t yet complete.

  When I finally got to my hotel—the same one I had stayed in when we first met—I fell fast asleep until morning. During the night, I had one abandonment dream after another, always involving Sarah and another man. You would think that our healthy defenses would take over in a situation like this, keeping our pain at bay. But it doesn’t work that way. The wounds call out to each other, feeding off the weakness in their host. I awoke in another cold sweat, trigger unhappy, waiting for the next bomb to drop. A woundathon had formally taken root.

  I went to get a coffee. Agitated, I dropped out of the line before ordering. I didn’t need a coffee. I needed a hug. I needed Sarah.

  I went for a walk downtown. Boulder, shit. Here you are again. The place where it all began. You annoying new age pseudo nirvana. I hate you. I pondered my next move. Now what? You’ve chased her to Colorado. What you gonna do now, kidnap her?

  A wave of nausea hit me. What am I going to accomplish here? Can we go back in time even if we want to? Can a profound love relationship re-enter heaven after it has plummeted to the depths of hell? Aren’t I just delaying the inevitable?

  I called her cell—immediately to voicemail. Probably fucking a stranger again. More triggers fired in me. The voice of reason interjected: Go home! Are you not meant for better than this? Stop giving your power away to this ungrateful runner. Just leave.

  Not a chance. The wound insisted I find her to heal it. I held onto the belief—delusional or rooted in the bigger picture—that I had to fight for this love. I wanted to be heroic in its name. God had gone to a lot of trouble to bring our souls together. Surely there was a greater reason than separating? How can I give up without a fight?

  I would soon wish I had.

  Zombie Beloved

  The yoga training was being held at a small Vinyasa studio in downtown Boulder. I walked over and sat on the steps outside, somehow imagining that Sarah would serendipitously appear as she had many times before. My inner world was a jagged wreck, my heart racing, my stomach queasy, my thoughts a mixture of madness and longing. I kept attempting to recreate the inner peace that love brings, but it was long gone.

  After an hour I lost my patience and went inside the building. No one was around. Just a large poster of a chubby Indian guru with an oddly inauthentic smile and dozens of shoes on the ground beneath
it. I stopped to stare at the guru, wondering if he had some piece of ancient-wisdom for me. He stared at me in a stony silence. Oh no, not another soul-gazer! I was tempted to rip the picture from the wall but decided to leave him be. Karma would teach him about soul-gazing with strangers.

  Chant music melodiously drifted down the stairs from above. I felt entranced, as I involuntarily climbed the stairs toward it. When I reached the top, I noticed a door open at the far end of the hallway.

  I gathered myself outside the room. I knew she was in there—I could feel her. When I was ready, I peeked my head inside and spotted her almost instantly. She was right in front of me, dressed in the yoga pants I had bought her, facing to the left in a twist. My heart burst with joy. Then she twisted to her right and I noticed that there was no ring on her finger. My heart sank back into my chest. I stepped back into the hallway.

  And what did you expect, Lowen? Do you really want me to wear the ring now, after everything? Would that really work for you? How much more pain do you need?

  More. Still more.

  I went back outside and sat on the steps waiting for the class to end. After an hour, the door to the building opened and dozens of sweaty yoginis poured out. Sarah wasn’t one of them. I waited a few more minutes, then went inside the building. There she sat, alone on the couch, staring off into space. I was pretty sure she saw me, but she continued to stare off to the side of the room. Was this high school? After a few minutes, she slipped on her shoes and walked around me toward the door.

  “Sar...,” I pleaded.

  Halfway out the door, she replied, “I told you not to come. It’s all been said.”

  Who was this woman? She didn’t even sound like the same person. Glazed over, heartless eyes. She was like a zombie. I raced out the door and chased her down the street.

  “It’s all been said?... ALL of it?... That’s it?”

  She kept walking fast and furious, while I struggled to keep pace. I kept at her with desperate words and pleas, but she ignored every one of them.

  Just as I was about to grab her arm and stop her, a woman stepped out from a small café in front of us, and called, “Sarah, we’re in here. They’re waiting for you to order.”

  Sarah stepped in. I kept walking. Clearly I wasn’t invited for lunch.

  I stopped around the next corner and sat down on a city bench. A muttering, homeless man wandered by with a grocery store cart filled with beer bottles. Where is Dude when I need him? And who the hell is that woman standing in as Sarah? How can someone be so evolved on so many levels, yet be a reactive infant on so many others? Wait, am I talking about her or me? What the fuck is going on here?

  Insatiable No-Point

  I felt crazy enough to do something stupid—stupider than flying to Boulder to stalk my beloved. Instead, I made a wiser decision. I walked to the cab stand across the street.

  “Take me to the entrance of Insatiable Point,” I said to the Indian man leaning against his taxi. Funny, he looked an awful lot like the guru in the poster.

  After fifteen minutes half-listening to his diatribe about US immigration, he pulled up to the trail.

  “Come back in two hours, okay?”

  “Yes, Sir, I will,” he obediently replied, like a devotee to the cause.

  I had only been here once, but the trail felt so familiar, like I had walked it forever. With great determination, I walked toward the river where we had first seen our shared reflection. As I walked, everything felt gray and tiresome. I was back on the miserable earth, as I once knew it. And it fucking sucked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live here anymore.

  I soon found the riverbank. Our riverbank. Rivers had always been a comfort to us. But what God giveth, God can taketh away. I looked out over the water, and now saw nothing but peril. Where before there had been a river of essence, I now saw a freezing cold torrent that would swallow me whole if given the chance. It really is amazing how hopeless everything looks when our heart is closed.

  Ouch.

  I sat down at the river’s edge. Closing my eyes, wandering inside, remembering many of the steps we had taken between then and now. So many dance steps, so many ballrooms.

  I kept returning to a particular memory for comfort. It was the moment we first kissed in Rocky Mountain Park. I had kissed dozens of women, but this was my first real kiss. I felt like I had died and gone to earth: the real earth, the loving earth that is our birthright. The afterglow of that moment warmed my frozen core. And somehow, I sensed it always would. It was the kind of timeless memory that could not be impacted by changes to the flesh, nor undermined by the conflicts between us. Is it possible to embed a memory so deeply that it becomes eternally etched in soulstone?

  After some time, I began to shiver. After all, it was winter in Boulder. I left the river of haunting memories and walked hurriedly back to the trailhead where my devoted Indian cabbie was waiting to return me to town. The universe does send us support at the most difficult moments, if only we can lift our head out of our stuff and notice.

  I went back to the hotel, too exhausted for words. Back in the room, I fell into a dead sleep. I was soon woken up by the ringing phone. It was Daniel, “Bro, come home. She doesn’t want to see you right now. Seriously, you’ve got people here that love you. Don’t give your power away. Now get your ass home.” I slammed down the phone in denial. Drifting back to sleep, another abandonment nightmare soon woke me up. Sarah hungrily indulging in an animalistic ménage a trois with a woman and a strange man. I switched on the television to distract me. Scanning the movie network, I ordered a romance film, because I just had to suffer some more. After tormenting myself for ninety minutes, I drifted off before being awakened by another nightmare—again with Sarah. In this one, I was chasing her down an icy Toronto street. I shot up in bed, seized by the desperate need to find her.

  Nightmares do come true.

  This is Not Yoga

  I bolted awake the moment the sun peered in, and threw on the same crinkled clothes I had been wearing for two days. I left the hotel and made way for the yoga studio in a frenzy. I couldn’t leave it like this. I had to connect with her! We just had to!

  Isn’t it amazing how often in life we feel so sure that we are going to miss the key moment if we don’t act now? And isn’t it equally as amazing how often those moments prove not to be key at all?

  This was one of those moments.

  I arrived and went straight upstairs. The door to the studio was closed. As I opened it, I spotted Sarah near the front of the room. The whole class was lying peacefully in savasana, corpse pose. Poor sops. Most of their eyes opened as they turned their heads to see a wildman stepping over them on the way to his zombie beloved. I was clearly insane—it’s a miracle I didn’t crush heads.

  When I got to her, I sat down on my knees beside her and reached for her face. She turned away, again cold as ice. Now even more triggered, I leaned in to kiss her cheek. When she didn’t respond, I began to speak: “I love you so much, Sar. I can’t live without you. How do we fix this?”

  She turned to look at me with vacant eyes. “We don’t, Ogdo. We move on.” Then, with a voice that sounded momentarily familiar, she softly mumbled, “You look gaunt. You need to eat.”

  Before I could respond, the yoga teacher interrupted us by chanting “Ohm,” signaling the end of the class. The whole group chimed in with her, and then quickly got on their feet to leave. This seemed to turn Sarah cold again, as she also got on her feet and walked toward the door.

  I got up and followed her, but the teacher blocked my path. She had a large purple water bottle in her hands with the word “Chakra” written on it in neon lettering. I wasn’t sure whether to namaste, or jump through the window in embarrassment.

  “Yoga is about union. This is not yoga. Stop chasing her. She clearly doesn’t want to be caught,” she said in perfect yoga-teacher speak, with a credibility that stopped me dead in my tracks. She wasn’t nasty, she was just clear. In an unexpected way, I actually ap
preciated her groundedness. With only a few words, she had given me the gift of boundaries.

  Without even looking for Sarah, I left the building and walked back to my hotel. It was time to leave Boulder, before I did any more damage. Not just to the union, or whatever was left of it, but to my own self-concept as well. It’s enough to be abandoned by your beloved—it is quite another thing to abandon your dignity. Pride does indeed goeth before a fall.

  I immediately checked out of the hotel and went standby at Denver airport. I was calm until I got on the plane, where I fell apart again. Resolved to accept the ending, there was no way to stay calm—I was a blithering, sniveling mess. Sarah didn’t fool me either with her routine. My zombie beloved was a cold mess, but a mess nonetheless. For someone as warm as her to turn that hard meant she was out of control, grabbing onto any mechanism she could find to hold her head above water. We were both in the same capsized boat, too drunk on pain to pull each other to safety.

  Sarah would often say, “We are explorers. We are exploring the outer reaches of the love universe.” As I flew back to Canada, I wondered, had we reached the outer edges of this exploration? Or, does love continue to expand our consciousness, even after our beloved is gone?

  What is this love, now?

  14

  Broken Closed

  Once I stepped off the plane, my determination to detach began to wilt. It was one thing to say goodbye in her presence, quite another to accept goodbye in her absence. Waves of darkness began closing in around me. Stripped of the magical shroud of enchantment worn by lovers, I came crashing back to earth as I had known it. The world felt like an empty, meaningless place.