Alli Alone
April 29th, 2005 by Adam
The scars on her wrist remind me of painted lines across canvas—perfectly linear and passionate: bold, deliberate cuts that release fine droplets of blood and the long weeks worth of stress, insomnia, feelings of inferiority, and fear.
Alli is curled up on the couch, head in my lap, as I run my fingers through her hair; trace the curve of her jaw with one finger. She looks like hell—exhausted and miserable; pants hanging far lower than they did ten pounds ago; eyes puffy from intermittent tears; hair pulled back tightly. I stare at her downcast eyes and well manicured hands, feel her ragged breathing as she grabs my hand between hers.
She’s beautiful.
I wish I could erase the pain so evident behind her eyes. But even more I wish that this was six months in the future, or a year, or two years—a different place and set of circumstances when the dry resolve and unrelenting pain of today is a fading memory, eroded by the adjudicating hands of time and perspective—a time when all this leaden sorrow might be behind her and she wouldn’t be afraid to look at me with unveiled desire, or love. Yet, for all this wanting, I expect little– all the time feeling the futility of knowing that she’ll more than likely go back to Him, continue hanging on because the devil you know is always better than the angel you don’t.
She showed me her arm and I was horrified, stomach turning at the sight, not from a weak constitution, but because someone I cared for was in pain. I suppose it’s not an uncommon reaction– similar to my need for piercings, or alcohol, or my transitory bouts of starvation. We each choose our own poison. We are, one and all, constantly in the process of inventing or perfecting new ways to abuse ourselves. For my father it was drugs. For my brother it was silence. The sight of that arm struck me intensely because suddenly her internal trauma had an urgently physical corollary and I could see it, complete with several neat stitches from an emergency room doctor.
Her therapist says she needs love and support—two things she seriously lacks. I sit here quietly, begging her to notice the obvious fallacy of what she is saying—that she only lacks support because she denies herself the luxury, because she pushes away those who might be able provide that love. It’s dismayingly obvious as, in that moment, I resign myself to the inevitability of failure.
ain’t she cute?
So I find myself here on a Wednesday night with graduation and the uncertainty of the future looming, sitting on a couch, cradling the slight frame of a fellow human being as she cries—a beautiful and brilliant young woman with whom I have absolutely no chance in the world, with whom I will never know the joys of intimacy– of falling asleep and waking up next to; of making love to for the first or hundredth time. In that moment I accept this as truth– accept defeat– yet my feet don’t budge. My mind makes no effort to convince me to leave and it dawns on me that, despite everything, there is still nowhere else in the world that I would rather be. I’m happy to be here for her, happy to be making the slightest difference in her life in the best way I know how.
And this is what we do: we sacrifice for those we care about. We stay up late nights and drive long distances in the hopes that Alli will never have to feel alone. We beat our heads against walls looking for the perfect solution to an unsolvable problem. We try and fail. We try again and fail better. We love, and we are loved.
Call me an optimist, but I have to believe that’s enough.
Adam