residual nitrogen time

Thirteen years ago this week I was in the Cayman Islands. There I spent one idyllic week, seven supersaturated glorious days with C, the man whom I once considered the love of my life. These were seven perfect days, eight perfect nights, that C and I shared in an expensive low-rent dive motel. We were in love, more profoundly, passionately and giddily in love than I’ve ever been, before or since. I would gladly relive that week over and over again for eternity, or until such time as those days grew thin and weak with experience. I would put my money on eternity happening first.

That week, each morning after breakfast we went out in the boat to some underwater destination. We would sit side by side on the boat, our dive gear in discreet puddles at our feet, surrounded by other people and their dive gear. Diving is the sport of geeks. There was this husband and wife who matched their neoprene skins to each other’s and their dive tanks to themselves. Each dive they would unroll this party-colored lycra condom over each of their tanks, like they were giant dicks and they were at an orgy lit with black lights. Underwater, she would squeeze off rounds of Cheez-Whiz while her husband took picture after picture of her feeding the fishes. There were other people on the boat too, but I only had eyes for C, except when extraordinary behavior like this couple’s pirated my attention.

We dove wrecks and walls and reefs. We saw tarpon hanging silently and shiny as bumpers of ’57 Chevys. We swum quietly under the infinite lazy circles of hammerheads. At night, we snuck up on octopi and during the day, barracuda. We saw crazy Dr. Seussian critters: a paisley flounder, Yugo-sized barrel sponges, and parrot fish nestled snug as toddlers in great mucous bubbles. When you dive what you hear is your own breath, and we got drunk on nitrogen underwater, and when we surfaced, we got drunk on Red Stripes. We were always drunk on love.

When we rode back in the boat, C would sing “My Girl” softly to me. I would smile and notice how the black hairs on his earlobes were being bleached by the sun. We would do careful, hasty math and note our residual nitrogen time in our dive books, careful not to let nitrogen build in our blood.

In the afternoons, after lunch, we’d take our jeep and search out some secluded beach, and we’d lie there, side by side, and talk. We’d go home to the motel room, dank as a raised ranch rec-room, and we’d shower and fuck. Sometimes we didn’t make it out of the bathroom, and C would lean me over the sink and fuck me as we gazed into each other’s eyes in the mirror. We were constantly looking in one another’s eyes; we got stuck there.

We would wake from our post-coital nap in time to sit at the motel’s outdoor bar and watch the sun set. When it did, all of us, locals and tourists, clapped. It was uniformly spectacular and we uniformly showed our appreciation. At night we had dinner, each evening a different restaurant. Each night lovely and sensual, full with the sound of waves and the taste of good food, each night more black, more velvety and more incomprehensively beautiful than the last.

The night meant more fucking, and if I didn’t come in the afternoon, I would at night, clinging to C’s slender body, biting his cruel scimitar lips and his sharp chin, our bodies so ridiculously complementing—his darkness to my light, his whippiness to my effulgent curves, his straight black shoulder hair to my ass-length wheat and honey hair, his cock to my pussy—we were written by a romance novelist.

It was one perfect week. One flawless, gorgeous span of time, so perfect that it was colored with just enough discord to make it interesting, just the slightest soupcon of frisson, just the tiniest friction, to make us know that it was real and not a living waking dream.

When we returned at the end of the week, our flight had a stopover in Miami. There we saw magazine cover after magazine cover with the same image. Kurt Cobain was dead. He had put a shotgun to his mouth and blown off his sweet, scruffy face in the empty echo of his garage. I read the story and imagined the concrete floor turning a shiny shellacked red with his spilling blood. The story seemed unreal, the idea that someone had killed himself when we had just spent this apotheosis of a week felt inconceivable.

C looked at the magazine cover. “Oh well,” he said, “whatever, nevermind.” And then we went outside into the wet Miami night to smoke a cigarette.

I still see C periodically, the last time about a year ago. He has a wife and some children. He has grown grey, his hair is short these days, and he is clean shaven. His scimitar lips are still red-rosy. His nose is still cruel and beautiful, his eyes still black as licorice. His fingers are not so fine anymore, and his body has padded out, filled, grown a belly. He is not the man I knew, not the man I was in love with, not the man I spent that week with fourteen years ago. Nor am I that woman who fell in love, the woman he loved.

I am not the kind who stays friends with my Xs. I suppose if I had joint ventures—children or businesses—with an X I would find a way to make peaceful friends. It makes me sad, sometimes, to think about these people I’ve loved, loved intensely and loved well, and how we are now just strangers with deeply intimate memories. Other times I think it’s fine that we can’t all get along. We had our moment, our dance in that tropical dark that is love, and now it’s over and it’s fine.

When C and I see each other, I feel like I’m looking at an anatomy textbook. There is us as we are now, creased and crumpled, worn around some edges and softened in others. There is the flawed beauty we have become, but at the same time there remains those we were, that person those years ago, and one image overlays the others. One is the skin and one the arteries. I’m not sure which is which, for I see these two parts together, inseparable, ever overlapping, even if—or perhaps because—C and I  are now and always will be apart.

Comments

[Metron]

::sigh::

now I'm depressed and meloncholy.

thanks ALOT. :p

[The Provocateur]

...hauntingly beautiful entry. coincidentally i read it while listening to "this morning blue" by joe purdy (www.joepurdy.com - you can listen there); album, "stompin grounds". everything fit so snugly: your words and the music and the moment i found it - your vacation islands and the millions of desolate acres of sea. live and love and lust is incredibly, hearthbreakingly delicate and, alas, fleeting. and you drew me back into that again - on a gray day where i needed exact that. wonderfully executed.

[Prince of Darfur]

Nice!

[Karl Elvis]

I've been trying to comment on this since the early hours of this morning, when I read it with foggy eyes over a cup of steaming coffee.

My head has cleared over the day but my ability to say what I want to has not come forth with wakeful consciousness.

You describe scenes that could come out of my fiction or fantasy; my love of scuba, my memories of blissful, sun-soaked days, in and out of tropical water. The smell of neoprene and salt and sweat.

I've done days beyond count in this scene, in oceans from the south atlantic to the north pacific, the Caribbean to the south pacific.

Yet I've never had this moment to share with a loved one. The tropical fantasy of love and sex and sun and salt water remains something in my imagination, not my experience.

On the other hand, the phrase '...strangers with deeply intimate memories... resonates all too well and deeply.

I do not understand how you can segue from the idyllic fantasy to the sense of dull, aching loss, your narrative hinged on the suicide of a pop-star, and make it work. The above piece of writing should be askew and confusing. Yet it is not, and for the life of me I can't say why.

What I can say is this - my god you're good, and come to a tropical island with me, promptly.

[saratoga]

CG-

I appreciate this post. Believe it or not, in some odd way, I think this has happened to me on an emotional plane, with my ex-Mistress.

We are still friends, and occasionally meet and talk, such as when she gave me a ride from the airport recently, when I returned from a funereal trip.

I had some of the same feelings you have had. I 'see' the things we've done together, now distant memories. Emotionally unattainable anymore. Seeing with my mind's eye her tall, black shining boots beside my hips as she thrust into me with her strapon.

It's like that was in another universe now.

So near, yet so far......

Thanks again.

-saratoga

[dirty filthy princess]

I agree with commenter 2. a "hauntingly beautiful entry"

[~Angel~]

My God ... why do I have tears?

~Angel~

[Preheated]

The anatomy textbook simile captures the sentiment exactly: though once our flesh was all flame and passion, it dissolved into facts. I can't/don't remain friends with my ex's either. Once you've seen each others guts on the floor, it's hard to smile sweetly.

[Lucy Felthouse]

This post is wonderfully sexy, but also very sad at the same time and has me thinking about similar things in my past... how you can see an ex and wonder how things went from how you were, to being almost strangers as you pass in the street.

[Curvaceous Dee]

Beautiful writing of beautiful memories.

xx Dee

[Sarengetty]

Just so very lovely.

[e]

holy. I stumbled onto this post from god I can't even remember - that's how it affected me. Truth that resonates within us all. profound.