Chapter Twenty: The Women I Cannot Pay Back

Chapter Twenty: The Women I Cannot Pay Back

I owe debts that cannot be repaid in any currency that exists. I want to name them — not the women themselves, whose names I have protected, but the precise nature of what I took. From Layla, I took two years of first love and then removed them from a phone call, from four thousand kilometers away, because something had shifted in me in a marble courtyard and I had decided, without quite deciding, that my shift was more important than her continuity. I conducted the ending with the efficiency that I had developed as a defense mechanism and mistaken for a virtue. The efficiency was not a virtue. It was the specific cowardice of the person who makes clean what should be messy — who uses precision to avoid the full weight of what he is doing. From Sana, I took a crossing. She came across a line that her entire world had made into a wall. She crossed it with her eyes open, knowing the cost on her side, trusting that what was on the other side was worth the cost. I was on the other side. What I offered her was not worth the cost. I ended it in the flattened language of cowardice and received her grace without deserving it. From Nadia, I took the worst thing of all, which is the most intangible and therefore the most difficult to account for: I took the consistent half-presence. I was in the conversation without being in the commitment. I held the warmth without accepting the weight. I kept the connection as a possibility rather than a reality, which is a theft that leaves no evidence because the thing stolen never quite fully existed.

From Rida, I took the aftermath of a direct refusal given in response to an act of direct courage. She had the courage I lacked in every other situation in those years. I responded with evasion dressed as explanation and called it honesty. *** This chapter is not self-flagellation. I want to be precise about the distinction: selfflagellation is a performance of remorse for an audience, including the audience of one's own self-image. This is accounting. Accounting is not about how bad I feel. It is about what the numbers say, clearly and without the distortion of feeling. The numbers say: I moved through these relationships extracting warmth and offering freedom, which is another way of saying I offered the absence of obligation, which is the thing that sounds most like a gift and is very often the opposite of one. Freedom as a gift requires the recipient to want freedom. The women in these pages mostly wanted something else. What they wanted was not weakness. It was not a failure of their freedom. It was a different and equally valid expression of what humans want from each other, which is not the absence of chains but the presence of someone who chooses to stay. I was not that person. I am writing this book, in part, to understand why I was not that person, and whether I could become one, and what it would cost, and whether the cost is one I am capable of paying. I do not have the answers yet. I am working on the answers. The working is slow and the answers are not arriving in the order I would prefer.