There's a piece of string I play with every time you run away. You know this. It’s not a fancy string. White and tightly rolled, about five inches long, it reminds me of you, and of you and me, and of you and me and a thousand lost opportunities.
Remember the lake? Dancing on the beach with water to our ankles. Bonfires dotted the distant shore. Their flames licked the water's surface like the devil’s tentacles come to interrupt our own private rapture. We were well beyond the grasp of demons and gods. We splashed and made love in the sand. Remember? You kissed me and forgot the discomfort, and the gentle rhythm of ripples was lost to the passionate thumping of careless hearts on a summer night.
As we lay there, staring at the pink orange perfection of sunset, you asked how many other women I’d brought to that spot, how many other women I’d groped in the sand. Did you want me to lie? You didn’t like my answer, and you rolled away, and the tentacles on the water edged closer.
You rode home with a friend, and I spent three hours lost behind the wheel of a heartless machine careeing through a fog of frustration and loneliness. I sat up that night playing with my string, staring at its fibers, thinking of you, and twisting the path of my life with less than nimble fingers.
That’s what a string is, you know. A life. A beginning and an end and an infinity of bends. At any point, it can twist or bend, dive toward destruction or rise up to the loftiest pinnacles of achievement, all without warning, all without intention. People often prefer a straight, predictable string, which rarely exist in nature. Regardless of what I prefer, mine is always wrapped around the invisible fingers of misfortune.
I’ve played with this string too many times already. It’s beginning to fray. Do you remember that first night? Do you remember how pristine it was? We were sitting with your friends at the bar, not yet lovers, reminiscing about your college days, your college boyfriends, and that night you tore open your left ass cheek streaking the Quad naked and drunk after a dare. I marveled at your smile, at your feistiness, at your storytelling. I shifted in my seat each time you leaned into me. I was awestruck and aroused. You ordered fajitas, and they were messy, and that tiny little string held your napkin captive. You untied it and tossed it in my beer and we both laughed. You had that devilish look in your eye, that look of clever mischievousness for which I quickly learned to lust.
Later that night when you yanked off my jeans the first time, you never guessed I had the string in my pocket. You never guessed I rescued it from the froth of a foamy beer. When I was home the next morning, still wearing those same clothes, I discovered it in my pocket and tossed it on the dresser. It stayed there for a month as we spent more time together. Eventually it became a memory not easily ignored, and so I set it on my bookshelf, the place where I kept all my favorite things.
In a lot of ways, books are like strings. A beginning and an end and a myriad of bends. Such is the path of a novel. And so the two share the shelves peacefully. Each time I would add a book to the shelf or remove one, I would see your string and smile. I would imagine your face wet in the shower, your eyes green and bright as the water trickled down your cheeks. Isn’t it strange how we remember certain images more than others? Almost like a book, where large plots will vanish from memory, but the image of a child hiding in a closet from nighttime demons will be as vivid twenty years later as it was the moment we first read it. Life is like that. And so I would remember your wet face every time I saw that string, but I have no memory of us having showered together.
Still, what good are shelves and books and strings when you need them most? They cannot help. Memory will not save. What good does twisting a knot around my fingers do when love burns in a foreign bed and the muse makes poetry in a different lover’s head? What good is it? I’m asking you. I want your answer. I want the truth. But I don’t expect you’ll offer it.
You’ve run away again. It’s been two weeks now. I saw your car at his house. I saw the lights go dim and I watched for hours. You never made it home that night, and I lost myself in sleepless nightmares. I had no need for demons and gods when the vision of you and him burned my eyes worse than a thousand years spent in the fiery underworlds of Hell. You told me the next day you needed a break. You told me you needed space. You never mentioned how little space. You never mentioned it was really a different space you needed, not more of the same space. I almost told you to fuck off, but by then you were already gone, because I only get brave after you leave.
I nearly burned the string. I grabbed a lighter and held the two in separate hands. I imagined a world without that string, a world without the ties it represented. I imagined fate without a purpose, life without direction, free to bend and twist and dive without offering heed to the whims and needs of others. Such a world became my utopia, my paradise, my escape from pain and jealousy and heartbreak.
But I couldn’t burn the string. I couldn’t destroy that life. I couldn’t say goodbye to you.
And so your string sits on my bookshelf. I take it down from time to time to wrap it around my finger. It reminds me daily that strings are not mere trifles to be discarded or burned whenever we arrive at a frayed end. Like memories, they can only twist about our fingers so many times and in so many directions, but they can also be unwound, played with, and wrapped around us again. We might collect a million strings during our lives. Some will stretch across decades, and some will have a beginning and end separated by the invisible distance of a breath. Each is valuable in its own way. Each has taught us something about the world.
Like those books beside it on the shelf, we can return to the string on a distant day and relive those lost adventures. Authors sometimes write sequels. Strings sometimes grow unexpectedly longer. And so next time the string might bend in a new direction, away from beaches and beer, away from other lovers, and perhaps, twisting in the hopeful dreams of loneliness, years and years and miles and miles away, your string might bend back toward me.
As long as I don’t burn down the bookshelf.
originally written July 27, 2008