The Miracle in July

The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.
[A Spy in the House of Love] by [Anaïs Nin]

Oh these three months
I've been inside the house
My pacing has worn
All of the carpet out

[November Was White, December Was Gray] by [Say Hi]

I had only meant to temporarily abandon the excavation of my digital love story. I had every intention of returning to Denmark – and to the shoebox hidden in the upstairs closet of my rented fortress there, shaded by twin trees stained with the shit of starlings – but instead I came home to Portland and slept for three months.

I had made what was supposed to be a brief trip home in good faith. I wanted to celebrate Christmas with my loved ones, to see my friend Jake marry his true love, and to make some needed appearances at the office. Laughing visitors loved to frequent the walk up the wide, concrete steps of my Old PDX-style home under the bridge to get their taste of my homemade scones served with fancy tea. I had been gone for months. I was missed. And I had work to do.

I took the echoing stairs up to my downtown office and embraced my work. I piled into a van with my staff to scout locations or attend off-site meetings for the movie The Miracle in July. Every day was [a good day]. But at every available moment I would find my head on my pillow and sleep in my bed with curtains drawn tight. I slept as though I were shaking an illness that had settled into my bones and which only rest could cure. And before long, one full month had gone by.

Film production began in earnest, and it ate up more hours. Birthday parties were planned for the future, and then suddenly it was time to unfurl the paper garland. Two months passed. Pay periods came and went, the cherry blossom and allergy season began, and now somehow month three has come and gone.

It was a recent a Sunday night, and I’m in the main hallway of the [Powell's Books] Blue Room. That’s where I happen upon a friend of mine, a Danish novelist who has at least one of his own published books on a shelf on one of the mammoth rows of this huge bookstore. I haven’t seen him for a long time, and he looks remarkably unchanged. He is wearing a long black wool coat, an orange sweater, and one of those white-fringed neck-scarves worn by many of the European-influenced. His blond hair could use a trim.

"Tell me how your career is," he says. I am reminded again how different his English accent differs from what I've heard from other Danes. It has a Portuguese tinge. He almost sounds Italian.

"Also, how are you?" he laughs, throwing his head back and arching his back to let his diaphragm expel a hearty "HA-HA!".

We chat superficially amongst the rows of books for a few minutes, then find ourselves at home at a small table in the bookstore’s coffee shop. I feel a compulsion to confess what I've been up to for the past few months, since my return from Copenhagen, and I tell him why I went there in the first place.

“I realized that this intensely emotional affair was becoming diluted under my own hand as I whored out dramatized versions of it over the years in different highly-fictionalized forms. So I decided to go to Copenhagen with a shoebox full of tangible artifacts from the relationship (hard naked truths which I hadn’t let myself look at for years), and even though Denmark was frigid, I called it my home. I submerged myself in my past so that I could see the past as it really was – for the first and last time.”

My writer friend considers this for a moment, then asks: “And have you finished it?”

I wince at his question. The truth is I still feel emotionally and spiritually exhausted by my recent trip to Denmark. Examining the digital and physical minutia in my old shoebox, the skin and dust of love's corpse, has left me with no interest in pulling the heavy ropes for my story’s final [curtain call]. I'd been through it once before, and was dreading the inevitable mourning that would come at the conclusion of a relationship which has been so central to my life.

When I tell my friend this, he responds with a thoughtful smile. "Do you remember the first time I critiqued your work?"

I do. I was already a couple of years into what was becoming a lucrative professional writing career, and I had just begun my first novel – the earliest highly-fictionalized version of The Miracle in July. I had emailed the first few chapters to this prolific Danish author, who was living and teaching in Portland, and after a week he emailed me back to arrange an in-person discussion. We met at a [sidewalk cafe] table on Belmont Street on a melting hot day.

"First of all," he started, "the writing is very, very good. But I am surprised. I thought it would be funny! You are so funny, but the story is so...heartbreaking."

I sat stoically across from the novelist, carefully avoiding any skin contact with the heated metal table and chair.

"And something’s missing,” he said, “As if you’re circling around some kind of raw truth, or decorating its surface from too safe a distance.”

“The next chapter is more intense. It’s erotic.” For some reason I felt the need to explain this upfront.

“Hm…” he said, thinking to himself as I gazed hotly from behind dark sunglasses. I was beginning to cry, but I didn’t change my blank expression. I imagined my tears instantly evaporating in the heat.

"You have an unresolved relationship, yes?" he asked.

"Well," I quipped with a smile, "I'd say it's pretty well resolved, in that it's over."

"Many people have these kinds of relationships. I have had one as well. We authors often write about them. Sometimes great things come out of such writing – publishing success, even fame. But if you want any kind of substantial personal resolution, you have to really dig for it. For the rawest most naked truths.”

Now, years later, my Danish friend again sits across from me at a cafe table, and again I find myself considering what it is I need to do. But I realize that I don’t have to be in Denmark to do it. My work is here in Portland, along with the people I love.

I look steadily across the table at the novelist. “Yes. I’ll have the shoebox shipped back here from Denmark. It’s time to finish what I started.”

It was Lily, kids in tow, who picked me up from [SEATAC] after my first fateful trip to Denmark. The flight from Denmark had been agonizing – I could feel every microscopic tear in the space which was increasing between myself and Daniel.

"I saw Daniel last night...on the web cam. He was drunk," she said. "I've never seen him so sad."

I commandeered the steering wheel, and as I raced us all south from Seattle to Portland I couldn’t wait to get home, where I could finally log into the instant messenger, talk to Daniel, and quiet the fear and confusion which had surged up during our final moments together.

How similar this seemed to my trip to Hug Point with Becca only a few weeks earlier. That had been the first temporary severing of digital communication between myself and Daniel – lasting for three days – right after Daniel had first said, “I’m in love with you.” But that had been early, seemingly very early, in our relationship, and either of us could have taken advantage of the space and begged off altogether, to be [free] from the hurt of being apart.

But this time the separation felt different. I was unsettled by Daniel's good bye, the fact that he’d chosen to wait until I was alone on a charter bus bound for the Billund airport before saying those three words – not with tender lips brushing my ear – but via text message. And I had realized by now that our grandiose lover's language and our unconditional promises on-line had fueled unfettered assumptions that had ultimately crashed and burned once I’d taken my place, in person, in Daniel’s Danish life.

How different people could be offline versus online! And though I’d wholeheartedly fallen in love with the man online, it wasn’t until I’d held Daniel in my arms – felt his sleeping breaths against my breast and his beard tickling my inner thighs – that my love for him became a far more saturating, precarious, and unbearably bittersweet love.

A rude shift of reality reared into these thoughts as Lily, in the passenger seat beside me, began to confess to me that Rod, the man who'd been living in my spare bedroom (in return for cleaning, cooking, and keeping an eye on Ryan) had been running the household into the ground in my absence. Lily described the bonfire which Rod had recently built in my backyard – under a large [Box Elder maple tree] very close to my wooden deck – in order to entertain four children under the age of 13 who were in his care, one of whom was my son. He had burned not only paper, magazines, and the dog’s flammable chew toys, but also the edge of Ryan’s sweater, and Lily’s son’s lower lip.

"I didn't want to worry you! I had everything under control," Lily said, "up until the end."

I was mad, but I tried to understand Lily's position. Still, I had to insist that she find someplace else for the nomadic Rod, starting that night. I gave her no choice in the matter beyond how she would go about asking him to leave.

We reached my house just before 9pm. I checked in with Ryan, who seemed displeased in general and pissed off at Rod in particular. I told him, quietly, that Rod was leaving the house tonight. Then I returned to the living room, where Lily was explaining to Rod that she needed him to baby-sit her kids that night at her place, and that he should bring whatever he needed for a couple of days. Rod looked bewildered, but he started to gather up some of his things.

I turned on my laptop and logged into the instant messenger. And there was Daniel, logging on at exactly the same moment in Denmark. It was 6am there, still dark, and he was getting ready to catch the hour-long bus ride to the school where he taught.

Daniel: I miss you, honey.
So much. I have your rock in my pocket but it's not the same.
Me: Oh, sweetheart.
I miss you too!
Daniel: My flat is empty without you.
Thank you for the nightie you left behind for me.
I noticed it as soon as I got home from meeting with Søren.
Me: You should try it on. I bet you'd look lovely!
Daniel: It smells like you.
And I want it to stay that way!
I got your epic email. Beautiful words, baby. I'll return the favor soon.

I had started writing the “epic email” well before leaving Daniel’s flat in Århus, but by the time I sent it (from the Copenhagen airport, while waiting for my home-bound plane to arrive), many of its tones and colors had changed. When I read it now, I’m almost asphyxiated by the flowery nomenclature so typical of our love letters. But this slice of communication reveals things I had forgotten about my trip to Denmark – like the way Daniel shivered the first time we made love – and I’m still surprised by my bold choice of words.

SUBJECT: Epic Email

My darling,

Can I just state the obvious first and get it over with? Now that I've held you, touched you, tasted you, felt your breath on my skin, enjoyed your climax inside me, I am even more sure that you are the love of my life. Being with you these two short weeks has been one of the best things I've ever experienced. All of it was just as it should have been, even things that might have derailed a couple not as secure in love as we are – how I got upset at dinner, the text message that made you so angry, the many times I boinked you on the head with the [umbrella] and stepped on your pretty Italian shoes, or when I got moody or you got blunt...it was all just as I wanted it. I wouldn't change a thing. It's not that I learned more about you (although I did), but I am so pleased by the ease of just being us, together, and how well that translated from us, apart.

I have so many memories of the trip, and here are some favorites: meeting your cherubs and your parents, how handsome you are – and how unaffected you seem by it, our picnic and walk on the trails, your strength holding me as we walked the cobblestone roads in the rain in Copenhagen, the way you shivered after we first made love, how nice it was to be in the same room with you while doing our own thing, you quietly challenging my beliefs about unluckiness (how I have wanted a partner to encourage me to see things differently and then allow me the chance to work things out on my own), snuggling on the sofa watching movies and eating junk, and of course the incredible connection we have during sex. How beautiful you make me feel as I’m giving myself to you.  [Read the rest of the email...]

On the morning after my first full day back in Portland, I awoke around 11am and found Daniel logged into the chat messenger, waiting for me to log on as well. He wanted to use the web cam. I was sleep-tousled but desperate to see him animated in the little chat video window. When I saw him I cried a little. He was drinking Jack on the rocks. It was nighttime in Denmark, and the hygge glow filled the living room – without me. Behind Daniel's head I could see the couch where we last made love. I knew Daniel couldn't see the tears brought on by [the sight of love] and I didn't call attention to them by wiping them away.

"[Godmorgen]. You look beautiful, Shelley," he said. His eyes were dark as he traced the shape of my face in the video window.

"Good morning to you! Shall I take off my tank top?" I asked coyly, letting my long dark hair fall over one eye.

Daniel smiled broadly, a sunshine face, but the smile vanished with the sound of his cell phone ringing. It was Søren, Daniel's filmmaking partner.

"....hold on, Shelley – will tell you all about it – have to hear this."

Daniel, expressionless, rocked in his chair – the chair where he’d held me for one last time before my departure – as he listened to Søren's voice.

"I hear a lot of 'uh-huh'," I said. "And now 'yeah yeah, yeah'."

Daniel pressed his long index finger against his lips. I stared at his mouth, wanting to be his finger.

Finally Daniel put down his cell phone.

"After we parted at the bus I had to meet with Søren. I complained about you leaving and he suggested we come up with an idea to secure funding to shoot a film in Oregon. We'd take advantage of the scenery and the filmmaking bonuses your state offers." I had pitched Oregon as a good place to film while having drinks with Søren and Daniel at [The Hollywood Cafe] in Århus, where I had spent most of my two weeks. Oregon has the a lush woods, hot desert, ocean coastline, and volcanic mountains – as well as a generous tax incentive.

Søren had called Daniel with an idea on how to make that happen. He'd dreamt up a horror story involving the mysterious deaths of elderly people at a convalescent facility located deep in the green, dark Pacific Northwest forest. He described the facility – it was eerily similar to the facility in the dream I had had while still living with Daniel. It was, as he described it to me that day, exactly like the place in the dream in which a laughing, tap-dancing Daniel gets himself carried off by the police.

Daniel asked me if I would help them with the project by doing research for the script and finding local filmmaking talent. There were other things required on the [Danish Arts Agency] application, things that I could help with. Things that only I could help with.

"I've gotta go," Daniel said. "I'm shooting a scene in a student film and then I'm off to my parents for dinner."

I smiled stupidly, brilliantly.

Daniel's dark eyes emitted a flash of light. "Goodnight," he said, and severed the connection.