Glowing tree mold photographed after the October 1968 eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

In 2015 I was dating three fellows at once. A mudder, a lawyer, and a prince.

The mudder was Greek and on weekdays he did something with computers in a sealed room where dust meant ruination, and on weekends he’d train to race in this extreme obstacle course where you had to crawl under barbed wire through mud and then jump on a bicycle and wild turkeys attacked you. He kind of looked like a flatworm. The most attractive flatworm on earth: lithely muscular, bendy, slippery. I wanted to lick him. Yet, can you believe it, he said yes to mud and barbed wire and turkey attacks but no to fooling around with me?? And for such a reason! His reason was this: “My judgment regarding our future compatibility is clouded by physical attraction. I don’t want to get broadsided by darkness.”

What the hell! We’re not a hundred years old! It’s not the future! It’s right now. We’re on a date. These are our bodies on earth that we drag around everywhere. I thought getting broadsided by darkness was what everyone longed for … to have the burden of self, the responsibility of existence, temporarily annihilated by tidal wave. To be helpless. I thought (still think?) that’s what sexual love is: the closest you can get to death and still live.

He seemed to want a love both convenient and long-lasting? What?? And I don’t know how he thought he was getting closer to finding such a thing by simultaneously refusing to either accept me or reject me.

His house was absolutely bare, like one of his dustless computer rooms. It was a warehouse, really, with no wares. Except for three giant shallow wooden candle bowls with giant ball candles in them that he said he bought to reassure women that he was human. I felt very comfortable in the house. And yet I said nothing nice about it, and verbally assaulted the candle bowls. His candle bowls were really none of my business, but I could not rein in my ire. The same for when he returned an article of clothing at L.L. Bean and got a refund after a year of wearing it because that is their policy. Even though I, too, am a stickler for holding companies to their fine print. Likewise, he was incensed about my prepper plans for an underground bunker even though he had the same exact dream. Because we did not act physically, we picked on each other metaphorically.

We were quite similar, actually, in our mix of the hyperclean and disjointed (maybe autistic?) and the hyperdirty and animalistic. We spoke the same language: awareness of a broadsiding darkness. I thought when you meet someone who speaks the same language, you have to speak it. I thought we were two halves of one of those flatworms that impregnates itself, and the worm you’re looking at today is the original worm, a million years old, or a clone of it. Every single one of our iterations along the way carried out the contract of replication. Until now, for the first time since the dawn of flatworm, one half worm balked, and refused his destiny. It was pretty shocking! No wonder I picked on his candle bowl.

***

The prince and I picked at each other too, but it was not as fun or hot. He was a German prince. I never did find out what his job was. I think being a prince is a job. I think it carries a lot of responsibilities that I wouldn’t understand. But I am very irresponsible, so …

I made a joke to the prince about his nationality being known, romantically, as prompt, efficient, and frugal, the joke being that that’s not romantic. But he said in fact that is very romantic, very alluring, and Goddamn if he wasn’t right. If someone somehow manages to arrive at the date site at precisely the hour, minute, second designated, it makes you wonder what else they could be precise about, like on your body. Alas … he quickly waved the red flag of “wanting to get to know me better.”

I said to him, “Know what? When did this start?”

People didn’t used to “get to know” anyone. Now everybody’s doing it. I don’t want to know anyone. I certainly did not want this prince to know me!

“It’s not even possible,” I said. “Identity is not static. Plus we all lie, especially on a date.”

“Who’s not romantic now?” the prince countered.

“I’m romantic!” I protested. “Just about life, not any one person.”

But my prince was no mystic, he did not believe anything was beyond his scope of understanding, and was determined to pin everyone and everything down. Whatever I said about something or someone, he put it into his computer mind and came up with a diagnosis. One friend of mine he decided had a personality disorder; another was a grifter. He was right, but so what? What good does being right do?

***

The lawyer, on the other hand, was pretty mystic, surprisingly for one of his profession. He had a science-fiction-y mind. He was very interesting to talk with, alluring even, yet I couldn’t focus on him. Not at the time, and not now while writing this. My mind just keeps slipping to the Greek and his negative attitude and his positively charged body, which, if ever he had allowed me to lick it, I bet would be like sticking your tongue into an electrical outlet.

One time the lawyer canceled our date at the last minute because he came down with the flu and didn’t want to give it to me. If he’d really wanted to see me, I believe his body would have forestalled that flu for one more day. I believe the body gives the yeses and noes that our mind is not stalwart enough to come up with.

Either that or he could have used his flu to make me sick too, and then, as he would have recovered first, he could have taken care of me. Instead, he was considerate, realistic, didn’t make me sick to begin with. Imagine if Heathcliff had said to Catherine, “You’re making yourself ill by not eating for three days. I’m sorry I stressed you out, especially when you’re married to someone else and in your ninth month of pregnancy. I’m going to stop coming around, and I wouldn’t even dream of hanging Isabella’s dog.”

Too, a previous date with the lawyer had been canceled by me, due to my babysitter becoming unavailable. But just as I believe the body creates or annihilates obstacles according to its true desire, so, I believe, does life itself. If the fates had wanted me to see the lawyer that night, the babysitter would have showed up. I think it’s egotistical and disconnected, late-stage capitalistic, to believe we decide our course all by ourselves.

***

I was dating those three to distract myself from my true love, the combustible businessman Mr. Wrong.

While looking up psychological definitions of all the diabolical things Mr. Wrong may have been doing to me at the time, I came across a list of the characteristics of love-bombing. It soon became clear that the love-bomber was me! Shit. I had too much energy, an obsessive personality, and a job with flexible hours, which allowed me to overwhelm Mr. Wrong with my roller-coaster texts and to overwhelm myself with moods. Thus the need to dilute my huge obsession with many little obsessions with my various dates. I loved Mr. Wrong so much I hated him. And he me. One time we left a Bob Dylan concert I’d invited him to before Dylan could perform even one song because my businessman had worked himself up all day into believing I’d been in a porno. The actress was Mexican and had a mole over her lip, which my true love claimed was a prosthetic (and that I’d gotten a spray tan). He made his accusations during Dylan’s opening act (Elvis Costello) and my denials sent him into such a frenzy he rushed me out of there to drive me home and on the way threatened to drive our car over the rail into the river and kill us both. I knew he wouldn’t, but the stomach-dropping thrill of finding someone as messed up as me in the same way was just … I mean, it was a delight. I knew how stupid it was. I was trying not to be thrilled. I was trying desperately not to marry him. But in 2016 I gave up on my dates and he became American Husband No. Two.

My therapists think my love troubles come from a childhood wherein I was trapped with a violent psychopath and had to learn how to find that charming if I wanted to be a happy little person at all. And I did want to be happy. And now that’s my big skill: finding ways to be happy in spite of the psycho I’m yoked with.

That’s probably more accurate than the theory I’d come up with, that my preference for racing toward the railings at the edge of the road over sitting through a concert I’d paid good money for developed from reading Georges Bataille at too impressionable an age. Still—be careful.

I don’t think advice works, ever. So no one—not a friend, not a book—could have saved me all those years of chaos and energy wasted. I don’t think any action comes from knowledge. I think knowledge comes from action repeated enough times to where you finally get bored with it and for the first time can see what it really is. There is no shortcut! Action is instinct. You can’t mess with instinct. You can only let it play out. That’s the one way I’ve seen abusive relationships end—with people, with food, with substances, with work, with money. It’s when it gets boring. For me, the end of the destructive romances that dominated my life was hastened by menopause. What a release! What a blessing! It should be called pause-o’-men.

And what do you know but Mr. Wrong—we divorced years ago—is here in my house this very minute, friendly and reasonable, building me a bathroom downstairs? He has been released from the darkness, too. I’m leaving my dog to him in my will should I go first. That’s how steady and kind a person he has become.

But now what? Now that I, too, am steady and kind? What do I do with that? I’ve only got one gear in love—downhill. I don’t know how else to do it! I don’t speak the psychodrama language anymore, but I don’t know any others, so I say nothing.

It sure is quiet.

In the middle of Pilates, someone asked the instructor how her mother was. While we followed a series of instructions to put our legs behind our head and all sorts of other places, she told her mother’s story: After a traumatic childhood, the mother tried all her life to heal. It was pretty chaotic, according to our Pilates instructor. In her sixth decade, the mother finally felt she was better and able to enjoy herself out there in the regular world. Then she got dementia. She became combative with her caregiver and had to be given medication that subdued her. She begged to be taken off the medication, so they tapered it slowly, but by the time she was herself again, the dementia had advanced to where she thought she was a little girl again, and all the things that happened to her then were happening again, in her mind. But this time she was not okay with it, she did not know anymore how to be happy within such travesties of love. She became violent, and after a few agonizing meetings, the decision was made to put her back on the subduing medication, full-strength until she dies.

This feels like a warning that there may be a narrow window indeed for me to put down my darkness-surfing boogie board and actually walk the earth, be where I am, before dementia or just regular old age brings me down. All my life I’ve been in love on fire. Being in love felt like lava, or that I’d swallowed light, or had eaten something that didn’t agree with me. And I was always in love.

Now I’m not. Not with any men, not with new places, not even with writing anymore (!). Functioning day to day with lava or light or rotten food jostling around in you may sound difficult, but it was just how I lived, it was how I knew to live. I don’t know what people do with feeling okay, with just being human. Not a god or an alien or a villain or a sacrifice. No role. I have renounced my delusions of grandeur and come home, to my wee, destructible, lava-less body that gets tired, that gets its feelings hurt, and I have not learned how to steward it or enjoy it or … I don’t know what people do with their day. With my dating trio, I was distracting myself from Mr. Wrong (and so on with other dates and other husbands before and after), but with Mr. Wrong I was distracting myself from life itself, the heavy responsibility of living. Now I’m not distracted. I’m just living. And I don’t know how! Do you? Can you tell me?

Lisa Carver published the nineties zine Rollerderby. Her latest book is Lover of Leaving, and her Patreon is called Philosophy Hour.