NOVEMBER 2023 SULLYGRAM  Pearls and snowflakes. They share indigent parents. A cast-off grain of sand or a mote of dust inseminates each. The pearl builds a womb layer by layer to contain an irritant that enters the shell of a clam, oyster or mollusk. And snowflakes begin with dust motes that gather water vapor into 6-armed sculptures as they fall to Earth, each artistically precise and unlike any other snowflake in the Universe. From cast-off beginnings to cherishable beauty, is that not a fable as inspiring as “The Ugly Duckling”?

Some human relationships develop that way – random encounters growing into something exquisite. Like snowflakes, they start in Heaven and float blissfully through a honeymoon phase, building starry lattices as they fall to Earth. But fall to Earth they must, and many crash land. Unlike pearls, the crashed ones fail to smooth over their irritations with layers of lasting love.

A look at divorce statistics makes you wonder just how many other marriages are barely surviving. Who but the principals know the separations sealed in silence, the rising walls, or the estrangements that go unrecorded? People no longer in love, people in love with someone else, people running out the clock, people living the wrong life, is the way I put it once. Add conflicted loyalties for those who have moved on emotionally but not physically with no prospects for healing. Our passions are as fragile as dissolving pearls and melting snowflakes.

In marriages that remain tight, couples share the same script, grow in tandem, or don’t grow at all. More power to them. They seize upon the vast array of prescribed possibilities in a world of social conjugations. Modern living has plenty of diversions to share, spoon-fed mostly through medias. Life can be very comfortable. Or sterile, for those who can’t sustain their pulse in that version of marriage. For the latter, disillusionment mounts. It’s those damn grains of sand and dust motes that inflated their expectations – the drive to re-discover the thrill of snowflakes and the glow of pearls!

Love that dies in a marriage rarely dies without spasms. Marriage may run on echoes and guilt-laden sympathy indefinitely. But if it’s scripted, there is no room to grow. One or both partners may feel trapped. It may be a tender trap and sustainable in any number of ways – couples coming together for sex and intimacy, for family occasions, for reassurance, for practical survival – but their lives flow increasingly toward separate interests and goals. Resentments build. Hostilities flare. The relationship cycles between renewal and alienation.

Is there a happy medium? Looks more and more to me that we’ve evolved into a society of serial relationships: a marriage for passion, a marriage to raise a family, a marriage for whatever comes after that. No one gets everything they want out of life. If they did, they would want more. But our degree of marital unhappiness signals a major disconnect and something deeply unfulfilling in intimate relationships. Undeniably, it’s a taproot of many social ills and personal struggles with depression, anxiety and addiction.

My solution? Wish I had one for this world where appearances count for so much. But sometimes you just have to live in your head for happiness. How much? Depends on how important snowflakes and pearls are to you. It may not be “happily ever after,” but the happiness that comes with a separate peace is an escape from limbo.

Or as I put it in another format, let your dreams be the crucible. Write them each day on a “tabula rasa” – blank slate – in your mind. You can express anything on a blank space (just ask Taylor Swift): the formula for romantic idealism, a Rx for libido, refillable script for hormones, an equation that balances. Your actual life may not follow that fantasy map, but your heart can still be a compass that points to true north. We all partition our lives in some ways. You may no longer live in all of your castle, but you can visit the rooms where all of you survives.

And for those who are still cycling through that alienation and renewal I mentioned above, let me adapt something I posted elsewhere. If you’ve never shared a secret sanctuary with the transcendent love of your life, it isn’t too late. Even if you’re both carrying supplemental oxygen to your Bingo nights, there’s a designated place and time for the two of you. Flying solo? There are triggers and proxies for whatever fate has stolen from you as well. Consider a magical fantasy. Diaphanous dreams and ephemeral perfections will do.

You remember how it goes, don’t you? The breathless silence that resonates all your senses together is exquisite. You suddenly recall how to come alive full senses five. Light explodes off every atom of autumn, heady aromas stir primal notes, you taste something cloying – tangerines or cinnamon – the wind whispers poetry while warm caresses awaken outposts you forgot you had. Is there anything that stuns you as totally as love’s most fundamental imperative? Sweet stings cadence a long and relentless arousal until at last the hurricane rush of a molten tsunami comes climbing, climbing, cresting for timeless seconds of paralyzing pleasure. Thence the thrilling deliverance as the wave shudders and plunges from infinite heights to spend itself smooth as glass over the warm sands of intimacy. Stress melts away, you exhale the tidal oxygen that was suffocating you and inhale an ether that fills every cell in your heart, mind and body with pure joy. Soul purged; circuits reconnected. Triumph shrinks the world. Peace.

Photos below of summer’s trees in their scarlet and gold lingerie before getting shamelessly ne-ked to go to bed for the winter.
 

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan