“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
— Zelda Fitzgerald
Parked outside of her house, leaning back on the dull gray Plymouth Volare I had bought from my mom for $700, I was to the dusk what the dusk is to space. Miniscule. Unimportant. A pin dot of transient dust on his way to the impossible glory I have always been imagining. The story of me as a high school kid falling for the first girl (we’ll call her K) who I ever fell for is neither a story of lasting romance nor one of lost chances.
Underneath a barreling ocean that I’ve never come up from, my life has been a mess since then. In high school I was close to something extraordinary, I suspect, because I was uninterested in what the world at large expected or wanted or even needed from me. But back then: I would smoke Marloboros and there was no texting K; no cell phones to let her know I was out front. There was the edgy slapping of the bottom of the pack/ the sensation of the cellophane/ the crinkly flatness/ the cupping of trapped air against my clammy palm/ and the blurry understanding that something had indeed shifted — both out there in the universe and right here on this sleepy suburban road — as a cigarette slid up out of the pack, singled itself out to die.
The way I lit it then was the stuff of legend except that no one has ever heard the tale and that has proven to be a pain in the ass as far as getting this thing made in to a major motion picture and all. It was like: I would slyly eyeball her windows to see if he was maybe hiding behind one of the thick drapes. If I would see one move a bit, then I would know that she was there/ peering out at me/ watching only me in the world at that moment/ a feeling that I must admit, I still long for even now. My every cell of life was riveted by the notion, the lingering if remote possibility, that K was looking out at me before we actually laid eyes on each other simultaneously. To be spied upon, to be ingested prior to allowing me to ingest as well, was enough to fray my every nerve to the point of electricalia. I was supercharged from dark places deep inside. I was lit up on the outside by the volting currents of something more than I could understand back then.
Playing cool, arching my back awkwardly even so that my body shape-shifted to the curves of the side of my car, I rocked the balls of my sneakers on the well made curb, pivoting my husky frame to appear, I imagined, both aloof and available. Curious and uninterested. Present and gone. All at once/ the long haired smoker boy/ mutton chop sideburns/ sensitive/ damaged/ resilient/ sharp/ creative/ smart/ and also very, very dumb as fuck/ all at once/ please just come outside now/ please/ because I don’t know how to be here before you are real once more.
The door opening, K easing down her one step onto the porch at yard level. Her oversized late ’80s light denim jacket. Her mess of hair/ her spilling locks/ the way she moved/ the way someone walks when you really want them/ not just in the old ways/ but also want them in these new ways that bring no language to mind. No words, I guess, for the 4:40 afternoon sun, the October gauze pulled tight across the face of the land. Thinnest layer of ancient smoke to look through. Indescribable construct of ages like some kind of curtain made of thickish time dangling from the brisk tough sky.
The silent approach and the shyest sudden smile. The holding back look on her unmakeup’d face. The pale skin around her eyes as they move with the grin.
Underneath this development of homes, the gods go to war, slashing each other open with cleavers made of ice and bone. The war for my existence has begun. I am smitten. I am weak. Everywhere you’d look these days, I am exhaling smoke out through my eyeballs.
For me, first love is suspect. It might be for you too, I don’t know. That’s not my cross to bear. But this idea of having a personalized look back on my teenage years as I’m sitting here a month from 53 is already rife with potential failures. I mean, what sad-eyed middle-aged American dude hasn’t stared hard into the sun of the past trying, pathetically, to catch a glimpse of the old times? I struggle with the poetics I perceive as singular to my own distinct story held up next to the so-called masterpieces of a billion other people like me. What makes me even think even for a split second that I might have wandered through various love stories in my life that transcend the mega oceans of love stories that are already out there washing the world away?
This, I can’t answer. I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around the reasoning behind any of it, to be perfectly honest. I only know that lately I have felt as if if my days here on Earth were bookended by two love stories. There is the one I had with K when I was just a kid running from manhood closing in. And there is the one with Arle, my wife, who emerged from a fever dream I was having right as I was fading once. Neither tale is defined by my chivalry or my standoutishness, I assure you. But each of them does find me at my very best, I imagine, simply because there was someone I developed impossibly deep feelings for stood opposite me both times. Others would enter my world ultimately and I am not for a moment claiming I didn’t love any of them at points. To state anything of the sort would be modernly cruel and probably untrue. It’s just that I keep recognizing this immense sense of very unique love, a feeling of absolute powerlessness in the face of such revelry.
It has come in the form of moonlight. Two streaks of it beaming through the cabin walls. They are both identifiable and they are both explainable, I think. But what does that even mean? Truth is they are both also composed of stardust and black holes, the kind of thing nobody anywhere will ever come anywhere close to capturing with words. I’m dying inside to get this out. But all I can manage is this low level English that I call my own. I search and long and try, but how? And with what? With these newsletter blog things without any writing degrees behind them? With these desperate attempts at bottling magic without a single Rick Bass memoir workshop in Montana under my Walmart belt?
I bash my head into this wall by my desk, man. I bash my head over and over again into the crumbling dust of the lathe and the horsehair plaster. You see, I want so badly to talk about what love really feels like but I just don’t think I have the skill. And that really hurts. It just really, really sucks so bad.
Watching the one person you want to want you the most in this world is such a fleeting sad feeling more often than not. And recognizing the moment never comes until much later, I’m afraid. Yet, even now I can begin to sense that I felt like this only two times across all of my days. The first was back then, watching K moving down her front path towards me. The other time was now, watching Arle walking towards her van out back/ the dried fallen autumn leaves she cuts into/ the distant shesh of her boots moving through them/ the subtle poise/ her body floats/ so unaware I’m looking/ so removed from the places we inhabit when we suspect we are seen. When we are who we are because we’re stuck inside this singular prompt/ rather than over there/ by the slobbering dogs/ lost in the daydream that has plucked us from this world.
To read the rest of this essay and more from Serge Bielanko, subscribe to his Substack feed HERE.
• • •
Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
