The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Coffee And Chocolate

"Coffee and Chocolate" 

When it got to be difficult between us, when he knew I was on one of my ‘tangents’, he would often stop me by saying these words: Do you want to go have a coffee and talk about it?

It wasn’t a genuine offer, you see. It was offered in a mocking tone, one which was meant to belittle me and everyone who enjoyed conversation over lattes or cappuccinos. He did not respect me, I thought, or understand that there were things I enjoyed which might have been worthy of my passion. Oh, I think he loved me, but our differences made it hard to like one another after a while. It wasn’t simply an issue of gender, as it is in a lot of relationships. I knew going in that he might enjoy fishing and car races while I might never understand the reason behind either one (driving in circles and hooking a defenceless animal for sport? What was that about?). I knew that he favoured red meat that bled on mismatched plates and sex for dessert, and I tried to work around both of these things, preferring chicken and chocolate in tiny portions.

I was a fan of spices: the curries, the cumin, the kidney beans and the lentils, and he could stomach none of it, pulling his face, scraping his plate. I loved rainy days with woeful winds because it meant I had an excuse to cuddle up with a book, and he‘d rage at the sky outside the window, wanting to play in the dirt. I wore black, and smelled like patchouli, and he wore blue jeans and baseball caps. He outgrew hair metal, and I outgrew alternative rock and Goth, and we both found our fit in grunge, cultivating a rhythm together that we’d been awkwardly trying to perfect for years, slowly morphing into a whiskey-voiced entity in Doc Martens.. Then, Cobain killed himself and it all came undone. I went back to the pretty things, and he shaved his head, but we still wore our Docs and occasionally rocked each other.

Somehow, after many, many years, hairstyles, fashion flips and pounds of flesh, we began to see one another as we were. There was love, sure, and it was real, rooted in youth and naïveté (which is the best time of life, really) but somehow it began to sink under the weight of our differing values and ideas. We began to blame one another for everything in our lives which we felt we were missing. He blamed me for his not being able to work abroad, for his not joining the army (this made me laugh, he hated authority in any form), for our not having children. He blamed me for wanting to keep my name, which he said, was the reason he hadn’t asked me to marry him. He could not marry a woman who did not respect him enough to take his name, and so, unless I gave in to this, he would not ask.

I blamed him for holding me back from school, for my not finishing my BA and for keeping me tethered to my family after convincing me that buying a home with my parents was a good idea. I blamed him for my job, which he encouraged me to take, and for the subsequent panic disorder that came out on a hot, summer afternoon and hasn’t left me since. I blamed him for my childlessness, because I didn’t want to be mother until after I was a wife, and I blamed him for not proposing because he didn’t respect me enough to let me keep my name. I didn’t know how to be anyone else and had no intention of changing.

We’d fight, and there would be yelling, and broken things, and days and days of silence afterward (my doing). I knew he loved me, I felt it, but I could not break him. He had as much pride as I did, and though we seemed to want to be together, we would not give in to one another. It was a time of frustrating, albeit beautiful, insanity.

When the weather would pass, he brought me chocolate, knowing it had a way of easing me back into a gentler version of myself. As the years went on, the chocolate became waxy, the sweetness tasting artificial and syrupy. I would quietly munch on it, not giving much thought to what I was taking in to my body. I was robotic, catatonic, and thickening around the middle. Coffee began to make me sick, with sudden bursts of fight or flight impulses ripping through my bloodstream, and I stopped drinking it. I gave up chocolate, too. There was nothing good left in them, anymore.

Then, as if on queue, someone else entered the picture, and my spirit soared and left the planet. I had found a man who wrote me poetry, who believed in possibilities, who thought a woman should keep her name. He said the words I never knew I wanted to hear, and I was instantly part of him, as he was to me. I did not feel shame in any of it, I think I might have even thought my boyfriend deserved it, and with small, deliberate steps, I began to emerge from the low-level life I had once thought I wanted.

As you might imagine, my sudden rebirth drew the suspicion of the one who I had loved for thirteen years. He knew he hadn’t been the one to bring about the revelations, and so he dug deep and found what he had feared the most. That was a dark period for me, not just for him, and I spent months trying to figure out how to steal the passion and the hope and the contentment from the new association and bring it back into the old one, like a transplant of sorts. It seemed like forever until I discerned that this was not to be. You cannot bring the dead back to life, no matter how much of your own blood you put into it.

It’s been five years, somehow, since the end came and went. I still remember the way he smelled, the texture of the skin on his hands, the way he laughed. I still feel like I’m bound to him in a way, like the delicate beginning of our love is fully intact and breathing somewhere deep, and I am actually pleased to feel it. This means it meant something, that it wasn’t all for nothing, and that perhaps, despite the harder moments with their deceit and their anger, he will always feel tied to me too. It did happen, and it meant something, even if we’re still working out what.

Today, I have a different life, a new version of myself to work with. There are certainly elements of the old me, some good and a lot of bad, and I know that love cannot fix all the wounds in this body. I am wonderfully flawed, and I am hideously imperfect, and I grapple with this most of my waking moments (I’m a Virgo, it’s what we do). I ruminate about the former love (known to most in this journal as R.), and how I treated him unfairly and unjustly, rarely thinking about the moments in which me made me cry, because I’m a classic case who has the tendency to find my own faults in things after I let the justifications slide. I am now a mother, my favourite role to date, and I have a man in my life who seems to find value in me, even when I don’t. He has a way of quietly letting me see where I need to improve myself, without criticizing me or condemning me for it. It unfolds, neatly and quietly, and I stand back and smile. He brings me chocolate too, but not just after an argument or a difficult moment. He brings it because he knows I like it, and he always brings the good stuff.

French chocolate, Belgian chocolate, Swiss chocolate, homemade truffles, drinking chocolate, brownies from scratch…I let it all roll on my tongue and I savour every kiss.

Today, we’re going for coffee, and we’ll talk about things, and I’ll feel loved and warm as we watch our little one massacre a date square or an oatmeal cookie. I drink decaf now, I’ve learned that much, and I always get the Caramel Macchiato, because it’s the one that tastes the sweetest without needing anything extra. It’s okay that my old love doesn’t drink coffee or the good chocolate to be happy. His simplicity was one of his best traits, and I’ll always love him for it. What I had trouble with back then, was acknowledging that I was a little more high maintenance, and that my constant attempts to be more like him was killing me a little every day. The sacrifices I made, no matter how small or great, were only noticed by me, and I grew to resent it because no matter how much you try to change, who you are is part of the stuff that keeps you breathing.

As I sit there today, with the warm cup between my clasped hands, listening to him talk about his planes, his art, his ideas, his needs, I will be hit with a slap of rightness, and it will not sting.