See, love can be a foul thing because sometimes you can be so sure and you spend, literally, a lifetime sleeping next to this person you chose to love forever. And waking up with them. And fucking them. And planning with them. You can plan a whole life, with kids and trips and dreams and college and homes and you hit the alarm clock at the same time every single morning. And when you do, you look over at her and smile at her just as she’s opening her eyes and you think, “yeah, this is true love. I love her.” So, you get up and shower, then she does, and you go to work and maybe she does or maybe she raises the kid and a half and then you come home, and you eat and put the kids to bed.
And it’s finally “our” time so you silently fuck so the kids don’t hear and everything feels so good because it’s true, real love but you don’t realize it only feels good relative to the anxiety-riddled day at work and what-the-fuck thoughts about how you ended up with kids at 25 instead of traveling the world because you’ve buried it under 20-ft of “true love” that you wake up to every morning at the exact. same. time.
And 5 years goes by, then 10 years goes by and then 20. And then 40 years goes by and one morning you wake up when the house is empty, and the debts are paid, and the kids have kids, and you look at her and she looks at you. And neither of you are smiling anymore because finally you’ve realized, trapped within the infinite silence you’ve built for yourselves, that you have no idea who the other is, if you ever did, and now there is no going back.
And all you want to do is scream and fight and yell and run away but there really isn’t any point because if you leave her or she leaves you, you’ll really be alone. And then what? Only the stone-cold realization that you were wrong, that you chose wrong? She isn’t the one for you and you have no idea what love is and, maybe, you never did.
Maybe that kind of life, that kind of love, is real for some people. Falling into familiar patterns, knowing how, when, and where your partner will be is true love. The comfort and stability a life like that provides must soothe a soul seeking a safe place. But it seemed so unsatisfying, as if settling for a life only half-lived, of boredom and suburban conversations about weather, work, and golf.
In a sense, my parents’ marriage. Reading the morning newspapers in silence, dads gone to work, moms attending the housework, evenings in front of the T.V while mom sipped bottles of white wine and dad drank his bourbon, neat. Friday nights at the legion where they’d dance and be home by 11PM. Weekends were for outdoor chores and through all of this very little was ever said. I mean, God forbid mom had an original thought for herself. But Monday would come and the cycle would always begin again. For years, over and over.
And I always thought that if my life ended up in that place, in that cycle, I’d always thought that I’d rather live a life of single solitude than subject myself to a love like this. I always thought that this wasn’t real. How could it be? Where was the passion, the excitement, the call to adventure? There seemed to be no sharing of pain or hopes or dreams or anything that really mattered. Just making it to the next day and the next. The thought of 40 or 50 years of it always made me a little sick.
And then I met her.
My friend Sam played a video from her phone. A night of drunken revelry and there she was bouncing around like the rules of life just didn’t apply to her. She had vivid green eyes, greener than I had seen before. Her eyelashes were long and pressed on, but they only accentuated her emerald irises. And her hair burned a reddish orange that sat just below her shoulders. Her round chipmunk-like cheeks were separated by her pointed nose. And if she raised an eyebrow, it could probably do some bodily damage. Her thin upper lip sat comfortably between the curves of a full bottom lip. On the surface she looked sweet but she had a glare that made it painfully obvious she didn't suffer fools. Her name was Kayda and Kayda’s smile was a bullet straight to my heart. She winked at the camera and laughed and I melted as I watched. The people in the video gravitated toward her as if she had them on strings. They all seemed to be there for her and felt fortunate to bask in her energy. But between the drinks, dancing, and kissing displayed on video was a woman that conveyed a sense of vulnerable sadness that she was trying to hide. And I very much wanted to know why.
I fell in love with her the first time I saw her, the first time I met her, the first time I felt her smile, the first time we were intimate, the first time I felt like I really knew her and then for all the lasts too. Over and over again. In all the time I knew her, she only grew more beautiful. It was as if her entire being was attuned to some metaphysical space that only she occupied and if anyone else even tried to grasp it, they’d burn up in an instant. Her movements were tied to the planets, and I could feel it in my bones. Her laugh would float along the wind and nestle its way through my ear, resting in the core of my being like a plush rabbit looking to warm itself in its burrow. And in those moments in which I was fortunate to experience her, I was happy. Truly. And miserable. And twisted. And exhilarated. And, for once, fully alive in all of life’s terrible, resplendent glory.
But love is never a straight goddamned line no matter how much it looks like it and I wouldn’t know it until years later but the banality of love is what I ended up missing the most about Kayda once she was gone. Our first date happened at 2 AM at an all-night diner after she had called me out of the blue. I had never spoken to her prior but Sam told her I was interested which intrigued her and there we were sipping caffeine in the early morning hours. She tapped her heel and her nails in synchronicity as she sipped an espresso with four sugars. She asked me about the books I read and the albums I loved, the girls I had been with, and what my childhood was like. She told me all about herself. She was alive and full of an intensity I did not possess but wanted. “I like you, boy. We’re going to see each other again.” And from then on, we were constantly together.
A year later we were living together and traveling together. We would go to concerts and live poetry readings. Plays and musicals. We would have long conversations about what we were experiencing and how it affected us. We would stay up all night debating things you debate: God, love, politics, the meaning of things. She would push me and I would push her back. Sometimes it was difficult because she would want to grow one way and I another and we couldn’t deny each other that. She always said she didn’t believe in love and I would laugh because she was in love with me. The quiet moments in the morning in bed before the day started always gave her away. The notes in my work bag gave her away. The quick public kisses when we thought no one was looking always gave her away. And the sacrifices we made for each other always gave her away.
By the fifth year we were married with a little one and we had settled into a nice routine. She gave up her job as a hairstylist. I’d get up in the morning just before her and then we’d shower together. It was a ritual we demanded to keep even after the baby came. She would then attend to our daughter. I would get ready for work. And we would go about the day living our lives as many people often do. And we would have hard conversations and plan for the future. What are we going to do about college tuition? Our mortgage is a priority. Are we going to stay here when we retire or are we going to the Mediterranean? These conversations were different from the ones we had when we first fell in love and I always felt like a bit of a hypocrite. I love Kayda, I love my daughter, I love my life but I was so opposed to it not only 6 or 7 years ago? I’ve turned into my parents, I had thought. On paper, Kayda and I had planned out our lives for the next 30 years.
Until that damn cough
It was shortly after our 15-year anniversary. We were camping in the Rockies with my brother and his wife. Kayda had had a cough for a couple weeks but she thought nothing of it, a cold or something, until she started coughing up blood and her face swelled up. We made appointments and had tests done and I don’t remember much from this time. I just remember the doctor saying LUNG CANCER and INOPERABLE and STAGE 4. I wanted to jump across his desk and hit him but Kayda grabbed my hand and squeezed it. It brought me back to her. She was in tears but sitting up straight. And that would define her until the day she died.
She faced everything with grace and humility. I was a stressed-out mess but I did my best caring for her. I bathed her, fed her when she was too weak, I tried special diets, I gave her meds when the pain was too much, I played her favorite albums, I wouldn’t sleep until she fell asleep, and I had hoped that the more I did maybe it might change the inevitable. She would laugh and call me a fool. And she was right because it didn’t change anything. It took the cancer 6 months to change Kayda from the exuberant, outgoing and flamboyant woman I fell in love with to a hollowed-out shell I loved more than I could possibly love anyone again.
It’s been two years since Kayda had passed away and I had been a fool. We were building a life together. She gave me a giant life with the curiosity and adventure that I had always wanted. That is why I fell in love with her in the first place but, once she was gone, this wasn’t what I found to miss the most. It was the moments in bed before the day started, it was me mowing the lawn while she watched sipping lemonade yelling how I missed a spot. It was laughing hysterically in a grocery store because a ham looked like one of our friends, it was potty-training our daughter together. It was all the things that I thought never really mattered or had somehow been too boring to make life interesting. But I now realize that it was those small, boring moments where our love grew the most. It was the repetition of our days that brought us comfort, and it became how we knew each other and how we understood each other. There was excitement in those quiet moments because sometimes we wouldn’t even need to speak at all. We just knew what the other needed. It was as if we had a language that only the two of us spoke.
I can’t help but think that maybe my parents had a similar language and maybe that is why it was so quiet in the house growing up. Maybe their love, and love in general, was similar to what I shared with Kayda and I never should have been afraid of it in the first place. Enduring love, real love isn’t always pretty and fast. It can be frustrating and difficult and sad and requires sacrifice but what makes it last is the moments in between the highs and lows. And I was a damn fool for not taking a breath and realizing that it really is the little things that provide the colour of our lives. I was a fool for not realizing, while she was here, that the banality of love is what makes it entirely worthwhile.
And now all I’m left with are the memories.
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