The Invisible Atlantic
If we start to notice our bodies changing and feeling new and pleasurable sensations in our teens, during our twenties we start to understand what causes them. In our thirties, we put it all together and hope for the best.
I spent the duration of my twenties living out a version of my first dream career between Italy and France. When I turned thirty, I realized that I wanted more of a career, and less of a dream, so I moved back to the United States and settled in New York City, the greatest city on Earth. Almost.
My apartment was packed and shipped, and I spent the last few days in Paris. My sole desire was to say goodbye to my favorite city and my dear friends that lived there. What conspired over those three days shocked and unsettled me, and changed my life forever.
I was on my way out. I’d spent the last weeks detaching myself from the places and people that had been my truest context for so long. I avoided goodbyes and took long walks at night hoping to capture memories and turn my present into my past. It wasn’t easy, but it was working. Paris felt like a lovely last stop en route to a new life in New York that I couldn’t wait to begin.
A friend of friends had offered to host me for the duration of my visit. He was trustworthy and kind, and I’d even met him briefly at their wedding the past May. We’d wound up in a series of unflattering photographs laughing with our mouths open wide.
I planned to spend my mornings in cafés, my afternoons in the park, and my evenings in the company of friends drinking what would be the last of good cheap wine for a long time.
Instead, I fell (against my most pragmatic of intentions) in love.
How did it happen? Maybe it was destiny or magic. Or maybe we knew our time was limited and so we let ourselves feel instantly without the usual routine or rules.
It happened so suddenly that there was no time to realize, analyze, or react. When I emerged from the subway, I saw him waiting at the exit across the street looking from side to side with a concerned expression. I strode across the street and called out to him, and the moment he saw me his whole body brightened. We kissed on both cheeks and walked home together, our only awkwardness the language, and my trolley suitcase on too-narrow sidewalks
I had insisted that he not go out of his way or change his routine during my stay, but he offered to keep me company and take me anywhere I wanted to go. And so we spent the rest of the afternoon walking up the back of Montmartre, drinking (he beer, me a steely Sauvignon Blanc) at the rusty tables of unpretentious cafés. As we walked, we talked, stumbling only around words we didn’t know in each others’ language, but never once afraid to look in each others’ eyes, or reach across the table to grab a hand or slap a shoulder during emphatic swells of conversation.
Later, we cooked dinner, and when I was still wearing a makeshift apron, he told me I was very sensual and pulled me close. We kissed.
From that moment we couldn’t share enough! Stories gushed from our mouths and we exchanged music with urgency, changing CD tracks and perching in our chairs to watch the other as he listened, to see if the Requiem gave him goose bumps too, or if the aria made his chest feel like it might explode. And then, when neither one could resist, we danced.
We couldn’t wait to know one another. We spent our next and only full day with an itinerary that formed itself as we went along, and incorporated his favorite places and my curiosities. We cooked again that night, and finally forced ourselves to sleep, smothering our laughter into pillows like children.
When we woke up face to face, I felt like I’d woken up at his side for my whole life. We ate a late lunch and he walked me to the Metro and told me to wait and kissed me. Once through the turnstile, he told me again to wait, and kissed me again. When I stood at the top of the steps I looked back. Just once. He was there. And then that last look back, the one that never ends in movies.
And that was it. I left. It felt wrong and ridiculous, but yet it was the right thing to do. My throat goes hollow now as it did that day when I defied my body and my instincts and walked down the stairs to catch the train.
Objectively it was the right move. Three months later I am doing exactly what I want to do with my professional life, and I can feel the distinctive shape of an extraordinary woman forming in me. I’m close to the people I love most in the world. I am happy.
And yet, for days, weeks (yesterday afternoon even), I couldn’t get this man’s face out of my mind. The connection we’d felt and forged had been splintered as suddenly as it had formed.
Two weeks after Paris, in the throes of utter love sickness I wrote a three-page letter in English and French in which I detailed the magnitude and impossibility of the love I was feeling. I didn’t expect any particular response (although I wished it in a number of fantastical ways), but as I wrote to him in the final paragraph, I simply didn’t want to live my life with these feelings and never share them with him. What if he felt the same way? We might be missing something extraordinary.
I addressed the letter and sent it off to Paris, and the severity of love pangs noticeably subsided.
It’s been three months and I still sometimes ache. But I know that I am aching for something mostly hypothetical, and have in essence, lost nothing. My heart’s conscious is clean, and when it swells to bursting, I know that I’ve done all I can to indulge it. I’m prepared to fall in love again, and hopefully with someone a little closer.
When a dear friend left his love on the other side of the Atlantic, he told me he felt amputated. I think that’s about right, and you don’t need the Atlantic between you to feel it.
Here in New York, and I would venture to say in all of America, people walk around with a sort of self-inflicted Atlantic between them. An invisible wall divides us. You cannot look too long or stand too close. A passing smile on the street actually goes noticed.
Which brings me back to the invisible Atlantic. My decade in the Mediterranean taught me to shamelessly exchange glances and even words with men who intrigued me. There was no fear of reproach, no assumption of freakishness in an honest expression of interest. Here, all too often I sit down on the subway and catch a glimpse of the man seated to my left or right, who has also caught a glimpse of me. For a moment interest, attraction, or intrigue flickers in his eyes. I can feel it because I have learned not to fear it.
And then, as if nothing has happened, he taps his ipod to the next song and stares straight ahead.
In clubs it’s the same. We brush shoulders at the bar and even exchange words while ordering a drink. I smile, so does he. And then silence. Our drinks arrive, and we part as if we’d never shared the same square foot of space, seen the color of each others’ eyes, or smelled each others’ perfume.
My sensual awareness is finely tuned, but hardly abnormally so. Yet I ask myself: Am I crazy? In heat? Has my long absence crippled my ability to function in American society? How can something that feels so natural be so wrong?
I believe that America is ill. We’re disconnected. We’re afraid. Perhaps it is the result the feminist movement coupled with too many hormones in our meat and dairy that render men fearful and all of us docile and staring straight ahead like grazing cattle.
Whatever the disease, it needs a remedy. And while everyone else is concerned with the H1N1 Flu, I’m taking up the cause of America’s heart disease, and I’m starting with New York City.
The Project
At least once a week, I will do something utterly romantic and unexpected in an effort to break down the invisible walls between us. I will make eye contact. I will smile. I will leave a love note. I will be vulnerable and open to my truest instincts with no expectations.
I’m willing to sacrifice some of my dignity for the greater good. And as you follow along with my adventures, I hope that you will follow my lead. After all, what’s the worst thing that could happen?
You fall in love.
