ON RESONANT LOVE

Deep within the fifth-floor galleries of MoMA, a modest-sized shadowbox frame contains the hypnotic canvas of limp pocket watches draped over figures objectifying time and life’s impermanence. The three prominent dreamlike figures appear fluid and denuded, are fixed in a surreal minimalist landscape stroked in soft hues of blue-grays and golds resemblant of dawn’s wakening glow. Equally as iconic as the flowing drapery in Ruben’s allegorical painting of the Three Fates (housed in the Louvre), are the melting clocks that captured Salvador Dali’s imagination in The Persistence of Memory (1931). The imagery blends politics, symbolism, and metaphor to confront notions of cosmic order, temporal guise, and destiny that embodies the melancholy caused by time and space.

A leafless tree limb supports a slackened timepiece, pointing toward the horizon beyond a sea flanked by a golden empty terrain of possibility. A soft pocket watch, visited by a fly, bends over the sharp edge of a wood mantle, facing upward to reflect the blue-gray firmament and the winged shadow of perseverance and transience in a new dawn. Cast in contrast, a locked timepiece is fixed beside the melting mantle clock, covered in ants imbibing on the decay of time. A pillowy-white figure with dark lashes, resembling a partial human profile, floats in the unconscious darkness— a clock blanketing the tenderness drapes over the softness as though saddling the cusp of becoming.

Dali’s clocks are blurred, near opaque. Light reflects on the face’s curvy metallic edges, like the burnished glint on tarnished spoons, the white-gold band I wore as a bride in my twenties, or the silver Mercy Band I’ve worn on my right wrist since entering Ground Zero on September 11^th, 2002. Anniversaries have rarely brought joy. The bend of time has sculpted a groove beneath the gold band.

The evening of July 25, 2001 was a balmy 95 degrees, like our wedding day fourteen years before. Enjoying our first meal at our new patio dining table on the deck completed two weeks prior, evoked an atmosphere of triumph and contentment. Aside from the milestone time stamp, a trip to Fehn’s Bakery (formerly Gersts, where our wedding cake came from) in Seaford, Long Island, and the diamond-flanked ruby necklace wrapped in gold foil, it was an ordinary Wednesday— Dave worked a full day, I wrote reports, the boys chased each other with water guns. It was too late and humid to consider hair and eye shadow, and in everyone else’s case, shirts. While David grilled the steak, I hurried to toss potato salad and squeeze a red #14 atop the ceremonious carrot cake, the edge marred from racing around a corner. The effect of squeezing a gelatinous ribbon of color from a plastic tube rendered an imprint that looked elementary— wavy bands with globby orbs— as though there would be more anniversaries to hone the lines. By the time the cake blessed the table, our 4-year-old had passed out, legs draped over the arm of a chair.

On the table was a whimsical card with a pink cartoonish rose on the cover. Inscribed inside— “Dew me,” Dear Still going after 14 years! With Love and Affection, your Husband. Though this instance of dew was a playful twist of glistening beads on morning petals and action, the tropes of love I’ve carried into courtrooms, memorials, and conference rooms have defined my life since the closing of that sappy sentimental fold.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word husband as first used in 13^th century Old English as a noun meaning master of a house, to dwell as in— remaining for a time, also akin to the Old Norse etymology meaning to inhabit as in— to be present in any manner of form.

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I’ve learned over the years that it is not presence alone that inspires connection, but something much more elusive, some kind of cosmic alignment between a personality and an imprint.

Recently, someone asked, How do you know?” Having been in a few long-term relationships they said, “I never had that level of connection.”

“The relationship is easy, I said— It just is.”

48 days after our 8-year-old lit our faces in the flash of a joyful moment, the image would remain on a negative ribbon rolled tight in a date-stamped cartridge until time developed and slipped it into the frame positioned behind a candle across from the chair where I ponder poetry.

Glowing in the eternal flame is a resonant love, an energy intensified by triumphs, failures, and adjustment, that expands beyond what is tangible.

Contrary to unrequited love, where love returned hardly ever resembles love given, resonant love is a synchronous relational vibration. Some people describe it as soulmate love. Like violins made by the Italian master Stradivari, the vibrations possess a quality of resonance that later violinmakers can never precisely duplicate.

When I stepped out onto the front porch of our Long Island home— waiting for my 4-year-old’s school bus— after witnessing the sudden death of my husband, my world shifted. Everything familiar of my physical surroundings was unfamiliar. It was as though I had died and re-awakened into a distorted universe with my senses misaligned, the world muted— the sky had no color, words lacked meaning, and air scorched my skin. I stumbled against the force of gravity.

The moment David left the World, the shadow of time halted then cleaved into simultaneous instruments of time— a durante vida and a post mortem— the shrinking span of existence and the expanding arc of surrealism, reflecting a collapse of a perceived fixed cosmic order. Like Dali’s melting timepieces, the rigid clock that holds hands over to-do lists, Day-Timers, and wealth plans softens to a fluidity of time that bends and warps certainty, memory, and the subconscious. A state of confusion bending reality.

In a chaotic world fraught by continuous discontinuity, the evolution of relationship sundered by the black flower of death, unfurls into the chrysanthemum of continuity. The resonant love becomes vibrational echoes, a slow incantation that shapes the landscape of what endures. An ache to reach toward what is known, a homeland grounding in the surreal and familiar.

Poet David Whyte writes about unrequited love in Consolations (Many Rivers Pres, 2016); “… a love returned rarely ever resembles a love given, but unrequited love is the form that love mostly takes. Requited love may happen but is a beautiful temporary… an aligning of stars coming only once every long cycle. The great discipline, he writes, seems to be in giving up control in how we are requited.” I don’t know which specific elements of our relationship depart from this wisdom. Dating game aside, there were no severe elements of unmatched wanting, need, or control in our marriage. Movement mirrored need.

Perhaps it was the unique bond formed as a response to his blindness, a practical need and trust described by Andrew Leland in Country of the Blind, as though we were “a single human blanket organism.” David and I checked in with each other several times on workdays, planned individual activities together, and shared clearly defined roles in childcare and life management. Our schedules were intricately synched— boys in tow, we navigated the hardware store, car tune-ups, and eye appointments. The four of us moved through life with the “full intimacy and unmeditated experience” of being like a single organism with four voices and eight legs.

Maybe, our love was predestined in the alignment of the cosmos, an energy which bumped us together on a campus sidewalk and thrust us apart in a twenty-year span framed by a single calendar page— September 11^th. Is it possible that we embody a meta-human quality of affection that is un-measurable and transcendent— a resonant love, a radiant ethereal energy inhabiting the afterlight?

Perhaps it is pretentious for me to assert that Whyte’s meditation on love contradicts our own truth. Throughout the twenty years of our relationship, David and I had become best friends, each other’s cheerleader, confidante, shoulder. Meeting at 17 and 20, we sculpted adulthood together, four hands on a lump of spinning clay, pushing towards a center, shaping something functional. I was the fire on the stove, the eyes on the road, the hand in the dark. He was the bread on the plate, the point of interest on the map, the embrace in the night. He needed my sight, I needed his vision.

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Since David’s departure I have worn and tossed another’s ring, moved the deck chairs to another home, and perfected the lines and edges of hundreds of celebratory cakes. At this thirty-eight-year mark of our marriage, we have been physically apart more years than together. Throughout the twenty-four years of his absence, I have raised our sons, championed for justice, and rooted in the world the legacy he never got to carry forward. What I have learned in the shifting landscape of intimate remembering is that love is the throughline upon which transformation occurs. Evolution bends the lines forward. Continuity holds its shape. No measure of time diminishes the persistent resonance of memory.

This July 25^th, I honor our anniversary with reverence to the requited love we share. Seated alone at the table, I fork a single slice of carrot cake in a take-out box, raise a martini glass to the cosmos, and toast—

“Dear, with love and affection, your wife X/O!”