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Commitment Issues
by Christine Marie Dixon She is excruciatingly beautiful. It is the kind of beauty that can cut you with its tenderness. It burns you and buries you and resurrects you to love you all over again. Passion is evident in her eyes, but it is not obscene. Her lust is delicate. Enviable. It is obvious, her beauty-relentless and unavoidable. When they first meet, she has dark hair that trails down her back in red-tinted strands. He imagines that her hair smells delicious, edible even. Girls like that always use some sort of fruit-scented shampoo. Strawberry, he guesses. Possibly peach. One night, he has a dream where he ties her wrists above her head using her hair and he teases her slowly, rapturously, driving her half-mad with lust. He knows he could fall in love with a girl like that. He wants to. He doesn’t care how many deadly sins he commits by wanting her. When she walks out of the room and the tips of her hair brush back and forth over her waist he pictures his hands there instead, pulling her into him, aligning their hips, her hands running up his arms and squeezing his biceps. He wants to cradle her, coddle her, ravish her, night after night after breathtaking night. He wants to build her a diamond-studded castle with floors carpeted with braided gold. He wants to weave her a dress out of rose petals. He wants to make love to her infinitely and indefinitely, gently and slowly and smoothly and violently… But he cannot speak to her. He is crippled by apprehension, by the terror of imminent heartbreak. She is critically vibrant, desperately necessary. The crush of rejection would be fatal and he cannot risk it. And her? She wants him too. She knows he is watching her-she always knows when men are watching her. There is something divinely, serenely inquisitive in his eyes, a simmering intelligence mixed with abject longing and devotion. She pities him and envies him. She wonders how his lips taste. She wants to have mercy on him and speak to him but she cannot do this, cannot concede to her heart. Because she knows, instinctively, that for him, she would break her heart over and over again in a circle of shattered devotion. She would follow him anywhere, do anything he asked. For him, she would be a fool. For him, she would slowly let friendships fade, ignore her mother’s phone calls, find a respectable, well-paying job in an office with no windows, wear sensible shoes, keep her hair perfectly trimmed and her nails perfectly manicured. For him, she would cook dinner every night, make pancakes from scratch, mend the holes in his clothes, raise his children to be productive members of society, pretend to like his parents. Oh it will be nice, at first. He will open doors for her while telling her how much he admires her independence. He will kiss her on the third date and they will take things slowly. They will discover a mutual love for black and white films and Belgian chocolate and they will drink red wine in a park on a picnic blanket. Their first fight will be meaningless, tentative. They will make up quickly and promise never to fight again and to always be honest with each other. After a few months they will move in together and he will remember to put down the lid of the toilet seat and she will keep the refrigerator stocked with beer-Guinness, never Budweiser-and they will make love nearly every night and giggle under the covers when the tenants in the next apartment pound on the wall and tell them to shut up. But then he will lose his job or her father will die or his brother will move in with them (temporarily, he says) and he will stop kissing her goodbye in the morning. One afternoon she will come home early from work and the pregnancy test will be positive and he will propose and they will plan a wedding and by the time they realize it was a false positive and there is no baby they’ll tell each other that of course they still want to get married and they will smile down the aisle. The little quirks he has will start to grate, slowly wearing down any remaining semblance of affection she has for him. One day, she will wake up and have thirty-seven grey hairs and an ache in her lower back and she will realize youth has gone and she never did anything memorable. One of them will have an affair with someone younger. It will probably be him. She will be too busy making sure Girl Scout cookies get sold and science projects win at least third place. He will wear a suit and a tie while she wears baggy circles under her eyes and dried oatmeal in her hair. At some point, she will rediscover some long-lost passion and throw herself into it. Maybe it’s painting, or singing or horseback riding. She will be vibrant again. He will rediscover the woman he fell in love with and for two, three, four years it will be blissful again but good things don’t last, they never last, and she will discover a lump in her breast or he will have a heart attack and by then they’ll be old enough and sick enough that they will no longer know if they are together for love or if their relationship is merely a desperate attempt at survival because after all, two is better than one and neither one wants to die alone. They will become weary comrades, trudging through the rest of their lives in a stagnant march of mutual exhaustion. They will have traded youth and beauty for a contract of codependent complacency. They will be satisfied in the way mediocrity brings contentment. She is young but she knows that love is ephemeral. Her heart is too precious to break and this is the inevitable consequence of love and so she will not capitulate, will not allow herself to be tempted by this boy because even if soul mates exist and he is hers, he will one day break her. |
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