Originally published in the Hawaii Women’s Journal, Issue 4

Love for me is the drive to Ipswich, the way the road grows sandier the closer we get to the beach, the stop for beer—Ipswich Ale!­­­—at the family mart and the worn gray boards of the bathroom walls. It’s the walk from the parking lot over the dunes onto the crowded beach, which turns empty the farther we amble toward where the land curves and disappears. It’s the water that flows up at high tide and makes sandbars, cutting fast shallow rivers into the ground. It’s your salty lips on mine, it’s my arms around you in the water, it’s looking up from where I lie in the sand, seeing only your outline as you hold yourself over me against the cloudless sky. It’s the silky, tight skin over your ribcage, the first time I bring my hand up to touch you.

            Love for me is the night I get sick, too much calamari and Stella and cigarette smoke in the room. It’s the rain that falls through the bars of the fire escape, the night misty and mottled with streetlights, the slick road thirty feet down. It’s my hair in your hands as I retch. It’s the taxi ride home, leaving the party that had only just begun, and it’s the way when I tell you in the morning I’m starving you smile, take eggs from the fridge, say I bet.

            It’s the cabin you rent in the mountains, one room split in half by a wall you built yourself and painted dark brown. It’s the wicker couch, your only furniture besides the bed, and it’s the cement bathroom with its gray peeling paint. It’s the way you say, I hate my shower, because it is barely big enough for both of us to fit. It’s your VHS collection, and the night we watch Thelma and Louise and start kissing, and when Jimmy screams at Louise, you turn the video off, the sounds too violent as your lips touch mine. It’s the window by your bed, the woods visible through it. Those trees mark every season: lush in summer; crimson in fall; white and silent in winter, the neighbor’s blue tarp over his firewood brilliant. In spring, the trees will bud slowly, the wind’s warm breath bringing them life. You light candles on our first night together; they’ve never been used.

            And it’s when I drive from Boston to Lake Placid after work one night in January, the thought of climbing into bed with you keeping me alert the whole way, my foot hard on the gas. The “empty tank” light comes on forty miles from home, and I call you, panicked. You tell me I’ll make it. There’s no reception through Keene, I remind you. If you aren’t here in thirty minutes, I’ll come, you say, but I make it down the dark, curving road, past the Route 9 junction, the empty Stewarts, the marsh and the mountains beyond. When I get to your house, step out of my car, and feel the cold dryness, I look up and see stars filling the sky. The space between them seems darker, they look so bright; you come out in your sandals and hurry me inside, where the windows are steamy. You’ve got ten years on me, but you always look so young, younger each time I see you, it seems like that first year. Your skin, it’s so soft, your muscles so tight, so tense, your hair and eyes always so light.

            But love is not the way you told me, I love you, that first time. Your voice sounded so thick and drunk on the line. I was at a girlfriend’s place, in her kitchen with the garish yellow walls, and just as you choked out those words I’d waited so long to hear, she walked in and caught my eyes, which were filling with tears. I wished I knew you meant what you said; when I accused you of being drunk, you denied it. I stayed up late that night—long after you’d hung up and passed out, long after the girls and even the cats had crept to bed. When I saw the sky lightening, pink hints appearing on the floor through the window, I finally slept. Love isn’t doubting you, and though it’s the last thing you say before we fall asleep each night, there can only be one first time.

            Love should be the notes you have written to me, the pictures scrawled in the margins, the scribbled x’s for kisses. But the first time I read a note you’d left for me, I realized with a sinking heart that you had never learned grammar, or that maybe you had but didn’t think it mattered. You can’t spell. I knew this before you even went back for your degree, the degree you started more for us, for me, than for yourself. But I didn’t question that either, not at first, not even as your years towards a Bachelors stretched before us. Love is not the awful day I proofread your English paper and made so many corrections to your words that you grew sullen, defensive, even after I tried to explain. You just can’t leave it like this, I had said. Later, while you slept beside me, your temper long cooled, I lay awake, tossing, because I hadn’t known until then that you are uneducated in the way I am, I think, most gifted. Knowing this made me feel guilty, guilty and sick because I couldn’t speak it aloud, so I kept quiet, turned my eyes from yours in the morning. Love isn’t feeling like the wrong kind of critic.

            And love is not the memories, good and bad, tinged with alcohol. It’s not the nights you called me, crying, to admit you’d been arrested. It isn’t you saying to me that in the last decade you took LSD thirty or forty times, or me cringing inside, frightened for us both, for what an intake like that can do to a person. Love isn’t screaming at you after dinner in a South End restaurant because your debit card couldn’t cover your portion of the bill. It isn’t worrying about how you’ll pay off your student loans, though I know it’s not just about the money.

In the end, love shouldn’t be a teacher on how best to bite my tongue. It isn’t waiting for the door to open so that one of us can finally leave. It’s not wishing you are different than you are, or letting this be about desire. It’s not hoping in dark moments that this ends. I think about a future with you, and I am afraid, because lately, each time I look at you I feel something tear a little more, some divide splitting my soul, this loving and hating you both.