Grand Canyon Blues
By Remé Grefalda

Finally one day, we faced the great divide: Two women pacing the rim of opposite cliffs. I leaned over the chasm. I must have thought I could fly.

"How could it happen?"

Even I was incredulous—and the incredulity seemed to ignite a bonfire, like grease drops on grey-fuzzed smoldering coals.

Hey, what does it matter.. It's over!

She broke it off. But we resumed—which was predictable. Then I broke it off. And again, we resumed. Finally one day, we faced the great divide: Two women pacing the rim of opposite cliffs. I leaned over the chasm. I must have thought I could fly.

* * *

I was a puny human being before the Grand Canyon 's craggy and battered face. And I stared at the panorama in total devastation. It was the peak of desert summer and my fingers felt like icicles. I couldn't breathe for the suffocating ache in my chest. Dying must be like this—gut-wrenching pain . . . nausea
. . . and all in the midst of breathtaking and sweeping beauty: God's own face before one's eyes. And one absorbs simultaneously . . . shuddering fear . . . a slippage underfoot that made your knees buckle . . . an expanding pain and an unmistakable reeling ecstasy.

The sun was setting. A carpet of orange, red, mauve and pink spread serenely over the rocks. My sight surrendered to wobbling panes of tears. It was apropos to die right there and then. My insides were in splinters. My head was pounding.

Her words, like a broken record with the phonograph needle stuck, kept a snare-drum pace, "I'm not rejecting you. This is not a rejection."

Later, much later on, she said I let go without even protesting, and it left her confused and aching. What she didn't understand was that I let go without a protest because she cried out the anguish she was carrying for so long and it unmasked itself in her voice. If all she needed in order to end her racking ache was for me to let go—I... let...go.

* * *

It wasn't what she said specifically which finally ended what we had resumed. It was more her phrase, her words—needles which lodged in my mind, like splinters imbedded, beeping a sonar pain.

It wasn't what she said. It was how she said it. To have to listen to the trite and righteous sense of regret in her tone. As if she was preyed upon. So soon. How could she forget? Or perhaps she needed desperately to forget.

We fell in love. Simple as that.

I can say in hindsight that I wasn't looking for it to happen. But I was primed. I was primed for the world to finally get off its axis and come tumbling down into my lap. And the wonder of it all is that it was precisely how it seemed to happen.

Even back then, she was defensive when I casually observed that I was picking up a sense of vacuum which exuded from her, like the faint scent of perfume when her nearness brushed me. Actually, I didn't know her well enough to just blurt out, "How come you're so depressed?"

In a word, she wasn't looking to fall in love either. She was too busy being depressed.

It wasn't a matter of sharing the music we were hearing. It was the compelling need to be in unison within the music that was carrying us away...

Who can contradict a force in the universe when it slaps a badge of undiluted magnet on your chest? And Heaven help those who carry loose change and paper clips for they might as well stop digging in their heels to brace themselves against the centrifugal force pulling them smack into your sphere.

There I was—a magnet of fullness, for her emptiness.

* * *

I take back "We fell in love. Simple as that." We were sucked into a classic, worn-out, complicated, tangled sweet mess of a love affair. To say that we were incompatible is to fire off an understatement. I was definitely not free. I was chained and dragging along my baggage of recent pain and rejection.

And neither was she. Not free—she was married.

Is there a right time or a wrong time for things to happen, things like "falling in love"? In this day and age, one will probably say, who cares? Ah, but there is a definite "wrongness" when those who become involved are barely equipped to see the matter through to some completion.

I for one was ill-equipped. But not ill-equipped enough to woo and be wooed. "Ill-equipped" as I was, I exuded charm, wit and a sense of energy that made me lovable.

She was out of the running. She was keeper of the other half of a pledge and had no business being hospitable to my intrusions. Jokingly, I warned her that people would talk. Cavalierly, she said, "Give the masses a thrill!"

I think we were overconfident about being in control. And this bravado, this overconfidence underscored the writing on the wall, so to speak: A graffiti of unleashed longings—hers and mine—inviting the scrutiny of the world.

She couldn't and didn't want to understand the attraction that seemed to overwhelm her. And she saw me as "harmless". So harmless that she initiated every meeting between us until no morning could begin unless we talked. And her work day couldn't end until we talked. Silly, trivial, harmless talk. But underneath the harmlessness of it all, our feelings kept getting in the way, searching for some definition. As if once defined, the turbulence would subside and the fluttering sweetness of connecting would resume a desired casualness. All that choked-up frenzy would have gone away. I was sure of it. Well, at least eventually, it would. Who knows, maybe burn itself out.

But a love affair doesn't just happen, until it actually begins. And at what point would you consider a beginning? I'd say, when one is asked to dance. Literally, when the extended "invite" meets the outstretched "accept". (Much later on, we pin the labels of "prey" and "predator" because we hurry to regain some sense of lost innocence.)

When one is asked to dance. . . . It wasn't a matter of sharing the music we were hearing. It was the compelling need to be in unison within the music that was carrying us away. . . .

But it ended—the music, the dance. . . .

She needed to feel whole. I needed to heal.

We entered a new terrain, becoming the missing jigsaw piece for each other, even in our estrangement.

In the face of her ambiguity, I continued to love her. In her attempts to have some future with me while excluding me from her daily life, she kept me fixed in her horizon. We would never again speak of the longing. But the loving continued in some unspoken plane.

Sometimes, in a burst of spontaneous laughter, her eyes betrayed our life. Sometimes, in a fit of neediness, I resurrected our past. But we outlived our separateness. We outdistanced the awkward years.

Today, we enjoy an easy camaraderie. Two women joshing over spilt beer mixed in a bowl of wonton soup. The transformation from lovers to friends arrived at a snail's pace. But to those who want and who wait, it is given them. She wanted it desperately. I longed for it. The miracle is that I am healed. I look back and saw how I was learning to love myself as I experienced that self loving her.

And today, she is whole—no longer divided by me.

© Remé Grefalda

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