Prologue to my memoir:

This is a revised prologue to a memoir that I am currently rewriting/editing.  Enjoy!

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Prologue:  And then there was light

I knew it would take years before I could engage the subject of Isabel.  I did not, do not want, to demonize her.  I loved her, even as it ended.  Even as we sobbed into the phone on our last day as a couple, I loved her.

Was it dysfunctional?  Yes, but dysfunction fails to distinguish it from others.  Was it abnormal?  Probably, but only in its intensity, which flowed up into unsurpassed moments of elation, and down, into a universe of self-abuse to which I had never before, and would never again, subject myself.

*

We walked into the terminal, necks craned up, looking for international departures, then, having located those signs, looking for the Lufthansa queue.  It was mid-October of 2004, the last day that her 3 month visitor status was valid.   One more day, and she would be illegal.  I had driven back to Connecticut two days prior, nursing a cold.

She had already complete packing, and as we were about to leave to drive her to the airport, she decided to check her e-mail.  There was a message.  It was from ESPN.  She had not gotten the job, despite the strength of her interviews.  A question of paperwork, of work status, it being October.  She began crying, right there.  I said something about other opportunities.  She said I was nuts, that this was her only hope.  It was borderline true – getting a job at ESPN was where she had focused nearly all of her job search efforts.  And close she came, but bureaucracy had the final say, and there we were, staring at the message, that they were sorry not to be able to move forward with her application.

“I’m never coming back,” she said.  I tried to console her, but I wasn’t even sure I believed myself.  She’d have better luck finding work in Europe.  She had family there, she had friends there.  Here, she was living with my parents.  She felt isolated.  She hadn’t found work.

So, this is really it, I thought.  She wouldn’t be coming back.

We punctuated the two hour car ride to the airport with a back and forth as to how we’d make it work.  When we’d see each other, how often, saving money, and me assuring her not to give up hope, that there would be other chances at finding a job here in the US.  Her scorning my pointless optimism, and me falling silent when she asked where were there jobs for her and how was she supposed to get them and what was I doing to help?

I watched her in line, back and forth with the Lufthansa agent.  She got her ticket and walked towards me.  Just over a year ago, I had met her.  She was the same, petite, black haired and olive skinned woman here in the airport as she was at Les Halles in Central Paris.  Same deep set eyes, same small hands, same attributes that drew me to her on a night when the museums were open late.  She looked a little more tired.  She looked at me.  She put her arms around me.  We were standing on top of a map of the world.  We were crying.

“No me dejes,” she implored.

“No te voy a dejar,” I said.

“Prométeme.”

“Te prometo, te juro.”

She said good-bye one last time.  We kissed, we kissed again, she turned around, and she was gone.

I would never see her again.

In December of that year, a month after I, in the form of a transatlantic phone call, terminated our relationship, I received two letters from her in close succession.  The first noted how in the weeks since the breakup, she had come to the epiphany that it was all her fault, and that she wanted me to know she had realized it only now.  The second wished me a Happy Birthday.  I held on to both, at least through graduation from Middlebury in May.

Her older brother sent me a message in the spring of 2005, the semester of my graduation, informing me that it wasn’t right of me to have left Isabel and only to cut myself off from her so completely, from blocking her on MSN Messenger, to not replying to her letters.  I should be a bigger man, and face it down.  This was the singular communication that I would have with him.  I unblocked Isabel from MSN Messenger, informed her by way of an e-mail that her brother had contacted me, and within the week, she wanted to talk about things.  We did so online.

She dove right into it:  was I with someone else?

I asked her why she would think that.  She had heard from sources she refused to divulge.  I told her that I was, that I had been for some time.  That yes, I was in love.  How could I, so soon after the breakup, she wanted to know.

So I told her:  “I just wanted to be happy.”

We were together eleven months.  I avoided thinking of her for years; I distilled my bitterness, fell in love again, and got a job.  But she remained in my brain, a whisper and then a scream, the possessor of my year in Paris – mostly lost but not forgotten.