Looking

How do you react when it looks like a man you knew for years--a man who, for all you knew, was a dutiful husband--turns out to have been a horn dog all along?

Back up. He's a medical student, and she had leukemia for several years. So happy together. She died only a few months ago. Three months. I don't know how you can say that's too soon, but maybe it is... Three months seems alright (but maybe pushing it? I'm really ambivalent here). You have to deal with the death, don't you? The whole "mourning process."

Or maybe it's a bit of jealousy on my part, because he's so easy and accomplished at certain things that I will never be skilled at. Like picking up women, for instance. Okay, so now I have to look inward. Perhaps I have projected onto this guy my own fantasies... I don't think that's entirely accurate. It is not surprising to find some element of the psychological. However many women I meet, and however many more I would like to meet--actually not so many--, there is no satisfaction.

I reject the idea that I am jealous, having looked inward, for the pain he suffered (not to mention hers!) is too great to compensate for a few years of happiness: To have loved and lost... yes, but I've already done that. More like astonished. That is the awesome--I mean, in the oldest sense of the word--part of it all. The contingency of their committment, the lightness of it, the strength, like a bird's bone; hollow yet full of power. And in the end that void must be impossible to fill and yet easier than breathing to set aside, to replace with a new void-in-the-making, and new attraction and a new love.

That isn't part of the healing process--if there is one. That is what we do; we move one and let the healing take its own time. A failure to mourn is a failure to move on, and the psychic stitches we use to hold our broken hearts together cannot replace the mechanisms our minds intrinsically contain to unconsciously fill the gaps. (Though sometimes these last fail.) Our imperative is love... or something that replaces it. Of course the eye returns: to dampen the pain, yes, but also to send it into the past.