Who would have thought that I would find a little bit of joy during the never-ending pandemic?  After huge disappointments, one then another and another.  A canceled wedding, a job crisis, an emotional reckoning.

And a lost love. Yet again.  This time, with me letting go of the one who got away.

All these months of isolated, sanitary behaviors!  Tapping on computers behind closed doors with hands dry from over-washing. Freeing our faces from masks only to discover adolescent-worthy acne.  Carrying damp Purell wipes in our pockets as mini-security blankets. As these behaviors have worn on us, they’ve also become familiar.  Habitual. Acceptable as the way forward.

You abide with something long enough, and amazing things can happen.  The odd, the strange in your life, starts to seem normal.  And when you adjust, when your past catches up to your present, it is possible to feel good.  Better than good, actually.

It surprises me, I must admit, the happiness I feel right now, sitting on my balcony.  A fresh afternoon breeze blows in from the river a few blocks away; I imagine it blowing through Fairfax’s backyard before mine.  The clean air tangles my hair and, I hope, casts any potential COVID to the wind.

Chum sleeps at my feet, drugged by the scraps of turkey I fed him earlier.  I’m equally full from the pan of dressing I’ve been snacking on all day.  My mother Ruth’s recipe: cornbread with plenty of onions and sage.  Our meal consists of that and the smallest turkey I could find, roasted in the condo’s oven.  First time I’ve prepared a turkey, and at age 49, I am long overdue for learning this skill. Amazingly simple to do, it turns out.

The briskness of the day, the homey smells of cooking, the comfort of a full stomach and my furred boy at my feet…I haven’t felt this content in ages.  Well, not since those perfect visits with Adam in Atlanta, which seem like an eternity ago.  Yet the memories of that time remain strong: the adventure of being with him, the ease of being a pair, a certainty that we were writing the next chapter of a love story a long time in the making.

Conversation and passion, scrambled eggs and sunshine through the kitchen window.

Oh, the memory of Adam’s kitchen! Pure amber captured in my mind.  A golden moment I can never forget. Chum licking salty bologna from his chops, me biting into crunchy toast.  Adam looking up at me from the cast iron skillet, talking about God’s plans for him.  For us.

That tableau—boy, girl, dog—is ageless and unforgettable.  A theme in my life, whether it be at age fourteen, or forty-nine.

Chum whimpers in his sleep, and I stroke him carefully with the sole of my bare foot.  He sighs and quiets down and is soon snoring. I feel like I’m taking care of him and me pretty well right now.  I’m on good footing, sure and secure in this place and time.

I am not headed for an emotional boil-over any time soon.

Thank you, Lord.

For almost a year, I worried about how I had been blind to the uptick in Adam’s animation every day, his gentle push forward to frenzy.  All I saw was a thousand-watt grin and inspiring energy and unadulterated sex appeal.  He took me along on his mania, and God forgive me, I had no idea.

I enjoyed the ride, for sure.  I can see now that I was swept up in some kind of middle-aged hormone storm which hogtied me just as surely as bipolar disorder did him. The trip to the grocery store for four dozen cookies and balloons, the wild midnight walks around Cabbagetown looking for stray dogs, the magnolia tree killed by sprinkler freeze. And, of course, the lust, the likes of which I’d never experienced before.  Those surely should have been red flags to me, but they weren’t.

If I had known about Adam’s illness earlier, what would I have done? I often wonder.  I would have Insisted he see a doctor, surely. But maybe not.  Maybe I would have denied anything was wrong, so right did he feel to me.

Still, now I know.  How far he fell into that depression, and how scared I was to see someone plummet so quickly, turn sick and lethargic. Become a ghost of the person I knew.  His descent, the imprint of sallow skin and bruised eyes, still haunts me.

I will never forget the shock of seeing a stranger in place of a soulmate.  And neither can I ignore what I’ve come to realize just might be the truth, the glint of a key dug from the dirt.  Clumpy with soil which falls away and slips gleaming into a keyhole.

Maybe you never knew him at all.

My soul feeds on this irony—to be absolutely in love with and known by the wrong version of a person.

In another twist of fate I never expected, it has been Peter Redmond who has eased my worry over my role—culpability or stupidity—and the what ifs of the whole Adam Ainsley story.  He helped me see the bigger picture of mental illness and has made it possible for me to let my heartache go.

One day while walking Chum and Lana, I told him the entire story of Adam and me, from high school to present.  It was easy to let the details out, give voice to narrative, while we progressed through the neighborhood streets.  I focused on the sidewalk beneath my sneakers, never looking at Peter, and the words just flowed out.  There was a comfort level between us now that hadn’t been there before, due to a lot of things, but mostly to Peter saving my job.

He had come to my rescue in September, when Mr. Capper demanded I meet with HR, a request I was sure signaled the end of my time at NFMS. It turns out Dr. Redmond is someone you want on your side.   He managed to convince key people on the Board of Directors that it would be foolish to let me go when one Education Department staffer had just given notice (Cara).  Not only did he persuade the other doctors, but I understand they came down pretty hard on Capper for even considering such a move at the time.  Needless to say, HR “postponed” my exit indefinitely.

Though I’m beyond grateful for Peter’s intervention, I’m not a fool.  Capper barely speaks to me right now, which, thankfully, is less obvious since we’re virtual and not in the office.  It’s only a matter of time before I lose this job—and no one can save me from unemployment but myself.  So I’m dutifully searching for different employment.  The demand for meeting planners is still basically nil during COVID, but I have hopes.  Peter gently suggested that I might consider moving to a convention city.  Like Orlando.

Or Atlanta.

He said the city name almost in a whisper, glancing sideways at me as we walked.  His kindness to me dissolved any reticence—it was then that I pulled down my mask and told Peter Redmond why I would not be moving to Atlanta any time soon.  I spilled out my guilt, fear, worry, and yes, fury, about Adam and me and his illness.

I hadn’t realized how angry I’d been at myself, and at Adam.  Why would he not have told me he had bipolar disorder right from the very beginning?  Withholding such crucial information from the one you are skin to skin with strikes me as a sin.

But Peter’s answer helped.  “Maybe he was ashamed—there is still a powerful stigma to mental illness.” He had removed his mask, stuffed it in his pocket.  “Furthermore, mania has its own rules, Nancy,” he’d said.  “What you’ve told me about his focus on God and religion, synchs with the manic state.”  He had stopped walking then, as first Lana, then Chum, sniffed some fallen magnolia leaves.  “Could be Adam didn’t think he was sick anymore.  Maybe he thought he’d been healed. So don’t blame him.”

I hadn’t realized my eyes were watering until I felt a warm tear on my cheek.

“Hey,” Peter had continued, “don’t blame yourself either.  You were in love with him.”

Were.  The past tense.  When Peter said it, I knew it was true.  I didn’t love Adam Ainsley as I had in the beginning.  We had gone through something so intense, so rare in its fire, that it couldn’t sustain.  It would’ve burned out sooner or later. In fact, I saw then that it was already in cinders when I agreed to marry him last December.  I should have said no when he showed up in Jacksonville, knocking on my door.  But Adam had sworn he was on the mend, his meds were working, God was healing him.  The Holy Spirit had led him to me in a non-stop drive from Cabbagetown to Avondale straight to me.  I was his treasure at the end of a soul-scorching journey. The shadows under Adam’s eyes had faded, there was scattering of tan freckles on his nose. He was so handsome.  With that old hunger, I wanted back what had been mine.  I wanted my treasure.

So how could I say no to him?

And then the ring—the gorgeous ring that was my grandmother’s! It felt so right to wear it on my left hand.  It cemented my shaky sentiments—it felt meant to be that I would wear the family engagement ring.  Someone had proposed and I had accepted. Better late than never. I was to be married after all. I had said yes to being one half of a whole.

I should have known that it was safer and saner to be a singleton. My own father had told me that no relationship goes unscathed: all face hardships. Any dummy could see that a partnership with Adam would have a huge hurdle right from the get-go.  And Adam’s father had known all along that a relationship with his son would have more downs than ups.

And (bear with me here), if you are lucky enough to save yourself those terrible downs, you are saving the other person, the person you love (or used to), doubly.  No matter how much it hurts him at the time. I know this reasoning sounds convoluted, but I fully believe (key-clicking-into-keyhole-sure) that it’s the truth.

Fairfax had told me the very same thing.  “You are acting in everyone’s best interests,” she’d said last month when she let me know the Garden Club reservation refund was in the mail. However, Fairfax had insisted I take action—officially end it with Adam.  Even though I think it’s pretty apparent to me (and him) that we are over.  It’s been a month now with no communication—no texts, nothing.

“Nancy, you cannot just slip away from him, from an engagement! You’ve got to say something to him.” Fairfax voice rang clear, not muffled at all by her heavily quilted mask.  “You need to close this chapter. Trust me, it’s the kind thing to do!  You are saving him from not knowing, from wondering.”

“Well, Fair, I think he’s on the same page as I am.  We both know it’s…” I couldn’t finish my sentence for some reason. It’s like saying it out loud crystallized the loss.

““It’s what? Over?”  She had emphasized the last word with finger quotes. “I bet he hasn’t realized it yet.  What were his last words to you?”

“I don’t know. I deleted the texts. I was running out of space on my phone.” I had thought at the time that Fairfax just didn’t understand how modern relationships worked.  How could Adam not realize we were not engaged anymore?  Six months since our postposed wedding date had slipped by.  We didn’t communicate at all.  Wouldn’t it be obvious to anybody in such a love desert that there would be no wedding?

“Well, think back.  This is the man you were engaged to.”  Her voice softened then.  “I remember you mentioning he had texted you he’d applied for a job. Maybe in the summer?”

Fairfax was right. Adam had let me know he’d been applying for jobs online.  Quite a few. “I think he said something about…”

“A job! In a different field, healthcare.  I remember you telling me.”

“It was more than one. I think he’d applied for something like fifty jobs online.  And…“

“What?” Fairfax had lifted her mask and casually scratched her chin, then patted it back into place.  I remember thinking she looked like she’d been wearing face coverings her whole life, so at ease was she in hers.

Above the fabric, Fairfax’s aqua eyes beamed gentle rebukes at me. I squirmed. “I was worried that he was a little manic, going overboard. I mean, come on, fifty jobs!”

She had shrugged, as if fifty job applications were no big deal, and maybe she was right.

What I didn’t say to Fairfax at the time was something I had just remembered, another message Adam had texted sometime after our wedding date came and went.  One which I may not have replied to.  How he wanted to be employed before we tied the knot.  His remark had struck a nerve, specifically one concentrated on our vulnerability.  Adam’s not working and will find it difficult to find employment.  I’m in a low demand field, on shaky ground with my employer.  I remember thinking how ridiculous it would be if I was out of a job too. What a joke that would be, two unemployed people starting a life together! What in the world were we doing getting married?

Now I recognize that Adam’s impulse was commendable, honorable.  That it represented level-headed, responsible thinking.

“Well, finding a job now is hard, you know that,” Fairfax had continued.  We were in Willowbranch Park that day, resting on a bench before walking back home. “Fifty applications may not be enough.  In any case, did you reply to him?”

“Of course,” I huffed.  “I’m not a bitch.  I said something like, just keep trying or something like that. You know, it’ll all work out, that kind of thing.”

Her eyes crinkled in a smile I couldn’t see.  “Okay, listen to what you just said.”  She repeated my words back to me.  Fairfax lifted her gaze to the sky.  “I bet you fifty bucks Adam Ainsley does not know this engagement is off.”

I looked down at my feet. Chum’s tongue was hanging out.  I splashed water from my bottle into his panting mouth as I mulled over her strident words.  Could she be right?  There was a chance, maybe. But my experience with modern love is that time drives the truth home. Inevitable, inexorable time. After all, it’s the oldest ending in the world: gradual estrangement, drifting away from each other.

We grew apart.

She leaned closer to me. “You’ve got to call him.  It’s what your mother would have wanted,” Fairfax said evenly.  I could hear a touch of exasperation there. “She really liked Adam, remember?  And trust me, Ruth was all about treating people fairly.”

I decided not to take umbrage at that comment, that I was not being fair…because, well…Fairfax had personal experience with my mother’s decency; of course, Ruth would have insisted that I behave honorably with all people, especially Adam.

And…maybe I wasn’t being fair, meaning completely forthright, by not having an “engagement termination” conversation with Adam. But he hadn’t treated me fairly either.  I think I deserved to know his past.  I had assumed there was transparency between us.  I had never been that open, that…well…intimate with anyone before.

Never.

Maybe my lack of transparency since the pandemic hasn’t been fair to Adam, but it certainly isn’t evil—Peter Redmond assured me my behavior is understandable, defensible—but I can certainly say now that I haven’t been one hundred percent honorable as far as Adam is concerned.  And the reason for that is, I am coming to see, is that I am a mixed-up human being just like many people in the world today.

COVID has scattered all our social obligations to the wind. Distance is the prescribed modality.   Maybe I have let it, the isolated pandemic way of life, cloud my judgement.  I have so fully embraced remoteness that I’ve lost touch with my own sense of compassion.

Maybe I had let “virus living” infect my sense of right and wrong.  My empathy.

My heart.

For months, I’d felt “on the boil”—first in lust and love with Adam, then devastated by his illness, my concern over marrying him, all these feelings rollicking around in an environment of constant uncertainty.  It has just been lately that my resolution and understanding, with time and talking, had evolved into something approaching peace.  My heart was moving into calm waters after tempest upon tempest.

Finding joy in a cool breeze, a bite of turkey, and settling of mind.

Could it be that I was now ready to act, to step onto the stage of apology, instead of hiding behind the curtain of missed messages?  That I was willing to talk to Adam, to untangle the last knot of our relationship and set us both free?  Until now, I had dreaded calling him, confessing what a mess I’d made, asking his forgiveness for agreeing to be with him, when I had not the vaguest idea what I was agreeing to.

A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

Max had DMd me that Carl Jung quote through Instagram yesterday.  The words made me think of Adam, of course.  Burning with a mania which made him irresistible to me.

Don’t blame yourself, you were in love with him.

Dear Peter Redmond, offering me common sense absolution. His words round up my worries into the calm clutch of love.

Which, of course, with time, yields to gentle responsibility. A necessary task of mercy built upon Fairfax’s reminder about my mother’s goodness.

Which brings me to the main reason I am so happy today.  This morning I chatted with Dad via Zoom while he sat at the kitchen table, Blanche bustling in and out of camera range carrying a pale turkey.  At one point, my father shifted his chair and laptop to get out of her way, and it was then that I saw a framed piece of needlework hanging on the wall.  It was instantly familiar to me—the background faded yellow with pale pink blotches, the wavery words dun-colored.  I remembered getting in trouble for flinging cherry Jello in its direction in our old Riverside house.   My mother almost cried when she saw the rose gel staining the letters she’d hand-stitched. I must have been about ten years old—too old to be slinging gelatin around.

“Dad, hold on, what’s that picture on the wall there, behind you?” I asked.

My father turned slowly, noted the square object. “Oh, yes! Blanche was helping me unpack some boxes, and she found that.  She just loves it!  Your mother made it, you know.” He reached up and gently unhooked the picture from the wall.  My father’s smiling face was soon eclipsed by thready brown script floating in front of the camera.

“Blanche doesn’t mind how dingy it looks.” I could hear his voice, but I didn’t answer.  I was too caught up in reading the words my mother had so painstakingly sewn into a small canvas a million years ago.

 

My heart, a kettle,

You, the stove.

My only heat

will be Your love.

  

You, the glow

My soul needs.

Simmer or steep,

On You I feed.

 

The words clicked into my mind like a missing puzzle piece, and I had a vivid memory of the sampler framed in brown resting on our kitchen’s yellow walls.

I asked my father to hold the cross-stitch still for a moment so I could take a screen shot.  After our call ended, I studied the image.

As a child, I had never paid much attention to the message stitched into the canvas, but I recognize now that the words are typical of my mother’s common-sense approach, her simple shortcut to wisdom.  Sometimes cross-stitch is just the sum-up you need for those longer conversations with your daughter.

It’s important to let the things that fire your heart be worthy, I can just hear my mother saying.  Don’t let every little whim and worry, yours or anybody else’s, be your energy source.  You’ll burn yourself out that way, Nancy girl! There’s only one source that’s true and renewable and will last you your whole life.  If He powers your heart and mind, you will never burn out.

Now it’s as if she is sitting next to me on the balcony, and I’m ready to listen to her. Finally.  Without the burden of misunderstandings and disappointment and guilt.  The flesh and blood mother/daughter relationship transformed by death and time into something deeper, something soul-bound.  It’s a bit of a miracle, I realize, as motherly wisdom emerges from my memory.

Do not let the hurly burly of a pandemic world, health worries, career messes feed your soul!  And, Lord have Mercy, never let hormones or lust or the ‘one who got away’ be what gets you out of bed in the morning! 

That’s the sort of fuel that fizzles, leaving you with nothing to light your way.

Of course, she’s right.  I had been looking in all the wrong directions for any kind of meaning.  And I’d worried myself silly over the wrong things, getting myself nowhere in the end.

Chum snuffles at my feet, lifts his head.  I can tell he’s ready for more turkey.  I realize I am too, and the hunger feels good because I know there are Thanksgiving leftovers to satisfy it.  But not yet.  I need to make a phone call.  I must make the call, and it’s got to be now.

After all, it’s past time.

I need to wish him a happy Thanksgiving, to offer a virtual turkey leg to our past together, which will always shine brightest in that particular memory of sunshine and scrambled eggs and a shared smile which, for a while, had been the holiest thing I’d ever known.

Until today.