Losing is a genre of loving, with Michael Pedersen
In three fleeting months of this year, I’ve met every lover from this decade of my life. Not a tall order- there have only been three- but a licentious one; given that they each belong to different countries of the world, and more complexly, to different regimes of my heart. If love is political, hearts are ministries. To return to a former lover, then, is to temporarily down-tool from refurbishing chambers, and fumble through the flotsam. Old monikers, memories, and misdemeanors; all shore up, licking each individual grain of time-sand that lines your beached heart.
Suffice it to say, that it is a fecund, frolicky, feeling-fest; and not one for the faint of heart. I can’t quite explain how, but there I was, hands pleached with the past; in Delhi, in Edinburgh, and in London; in January, in February, and in March. Say what you will about the astro-girlies, but I partly attribute the pithy cores of Mercury and Venus, and their recondite retrogrades, for my display of rather bonkers bravura. It’s been a stentorian win for the anarchists, in the House of Hearts.
The final one of these encounters, left me quite dysregulated. We were seeing each other after two years; but this relationship had inhabited me long after it had ended. In the Richter scale for heartquakes, its end had scored a solid ten. And here we were now, greeting each other with such careful formality, as if we had not once made each other’s planets shudder.
Funny how we need to return to a place, in order to find a person. We chose to spend that one hour, in the park where we first met, March light ribboning through the willows, gently awakening them. He told me how grateful he was for the chance to apologize for his actions in person, and to see for himself how I was doing. That he’d feared he might never see me again. How he prayed he would. His contrition and gratitude glistened with sincerity, but I found them hard to absorb. I had decided to see him because I knew he wore guilt dangerously close to his skin, and it felt important to relieve him of it, once I was ready. And I was. But the playing back of what was once a great love story, as yet another tale of a man’s journey of growth and self-discovery, felt apocryphal, and frankly infuriating.
I was going through a really hard time, and I didn’t handle it well. I’m sorry, you deserved better from me. Thank you for everything you did for me, I am a much better man for having met you. Gratefully, a barn owl was screeching somewhere very close to us, so I wouldn’t have to.
Don’t get me wrong, I still cherished that evening. His eyes were still the colour of spring moss, and he still offered me his jacket, even though we both knew he was more sensitive to the cold than I was. When we embraced to say goodbye, his arms still built a home around me. How beautiful, that bodies speak in their own language when they meet former lovers and friends. How kind, that ours were still fluent in each other’s. Even if our hearts weren’t.
As we walked back to the train station, him gushing about rediscovering 80’s rock, I leapt towards a magnolia tree that lilted in our direction- these crunchy, cup-like flowers hadn’t yet come into bloom up north. He detected the distraction and smiled. Classic S. His easy recognition of me, felt utterly unbearable. Our worlds had collided so forcefully, instantaneously; it was a no-brainer that it was love. We were flattered to have piqued the universe’s cosmic interest, and clung hard from the second we came together. He likened us to magnets. Forceful and drawn to each other with inexorable intensity. But magnets can weaken; when heated, hammered, or flung from heights. It took all three, for us to grow apart.
I left that park feeling like I had bookended an important chapter of my life, but humbled by about how difficult it is to see someone outside the effulgence of the love you once beamed into them. Maybe it was because I found it impossible to recognize the version of me that once fit with him. I knew she had existed; she was very real, but the change was dizzying. It felt good to see him, the healthy flesh of him; but I couldn’t stand the ordinariness of our interaction.
The universe was still adamant; a murmuration of starlings pirouetted across the erubescent sky, and the softest zephyr, spring’s truest leitmotif, flirted against our forms. But outside the roseate hues of love, we were like two crepuscular animals, awkward and tentative about stepping out at last light. That steady stream of randy romance that once gushed between us, had gone gelid. Time had blunted our bond, and selfishly, I couldn’t bear to witness the unremarkable ebb of what was once an ululating love. I had forgiven the failed relationship, I was still mourning the ungentle end of our story.
I first experienced the magic of Michael Pedersen, when he came to launch his new poetry collection- ‘The Cat Prince,’ in a local bookshop, on a mid-September evening last year. I remember being instantly ensorcelled. His tall, seated frame, spilling over the minute metal chair; a full head of curls, the perfect topping (nod to the bookshop) to his bobbing, beaming, body. He spoke so beguilingly- about his feline childhood, architectural angst against the demolition of his Portobello high school, lamentations for the lack of a physical vocabulary of love between men, and a coltish curiosity about all textures of intimacy- it disarmed everyone and made the whole room liquid. I cherished that autumnal hour of him reading poetry, because it marked the beginning of my very slow return to the world, after a summer that had tormented my heart and properly put it asunder.
A hurting heart is first and foremost, an overexposed one. Peeled out of my own skin, I felt entirely permeable, and unable to discern and enact the edges of my body. Wobbly with worry, weary of world. I was operating on such skyscrapic anxiety about my bones turning to dust at the slightest contact; a gentle shove in a coffee shop, a kind nod from a stranger, the sunlight falling at an unexpected angle; that even the throbbing thought of an intimate audience- composed limbs and intentional gazes- terrified me. I had no business being at a public event, feeling this coarse and cautious. I went anyway, because I hadn’t read any poetry for two months, and that was the achiest ache of all.
That night, while inaugurating his book of poems, Michael gestured also, towards his recently released novel- Boy Friends. What had started as a clamorous recapitulation of his favorite moments with a close friend, after his untimely death; had ended up becoming a palimpsest and paean to all friendships which had; even through their loss, taught him how to love. Michael admitted that he had always loved in excess, and it had still never been enough. He wished that if a day of reckoning ever came, he would like to be judged by how much love he had desposited in his relationships. I have never been sold on a person, or a premise faster.
He shared a story (beautifully told in the book) about how his dear friend, collaborator and well-known musician, Scott Hutchison, had been pronouced dead, by the time the bill for their final extravagant meal, had cleared from his bank. They had shared a seafood platter in Mallarn, two days before his body washed ashore near Queensferry. This fiscal receipt of human fragility- “£149.50 (plus £20 cash tip)” laced with coastal craving, filled flesh into my frangible form. Listening to him outline his stricken heart; how it was simultaneously ravenous for, and offended by the slightest suggestion of intimacy, felt like a flint of arterial solidarity, which lit up my whole heart.
I went in search of poetry, and left yenning for prose. Two weeks later, P, who has gained such proficiency in the languages of my heart that he often identifies its needs more clearly than me, got me a signed copy of Boy Friends, for my birthday. You brought up a poem on our walk after so long, it was a sign. My heart was not yet ready to step out of its sad-girl-summer era. But signs can be patient. And so can friends. For six months since, my copies of Michael’s poetry and prose have stuck close together on the bookshelf, overseeing my slow return to the world; the subtle shapeshifting of loneliness to solitude, the gradual return of mirth and warmth, of friendship and food; patiently awaiting their turn. After the final, London-leg of my ghosts of past lovers’ tour, and after depositing my initial reviews with P, these books have accompanied me like lustful, loyal groupies.
In the muted afterglow of my excursions, I have been thinking about how relational loss accumulates like nothing else. I’m curious of how we imagine loss; the shape and texture of it. Is it a person-shaped hole in a heart-wall, a loosened anchor which threatens to cast us adrift, or a ghost that cannot be glassed, but must be endured? In Boy Friends, Michael writes, that living through the peculiar helplessness caused by loss, “is its own act of endurance,” one where there is “no shame in having to try so hard to stay afloat,” because “to keep going is a gift.” He recounts how, in periods of utter heartbreak, he often left evenings of good company, thinking, “Got away with that. Got away with what, Michael? Being human?” How he felt both grateful for and guilty about the friendships which centered him, and ensured his survival.
The acme of my heartbreak last year, was the moment when I realized that I couldn’t traverse my emotional extremities, or keep them from spilling into those around me. When the kernels of hurt conjured up such a stinging salmagundi of suffering, that it became impossible to tell them apart. Grief is many things; it is also like being forced to sit at a table when you simply cannot eat. But there can be; and often is, nourishment in the company. Deep in my despair, my ignominy was caressed by the wonderful people in my life, who arranged themselves thickly around me, allowing me to lick my wounds. I was tired of being heartbroken, yes. But more importantly, I was tired of narrating it. Fearful of the ways narrative stabilize, and become life-arcs. What is it like to walk in the world, not with a wound, but as one? Mottled and mawkish, threatening to ooze at the slightest graze.
To privilege one kind of love over others, is yet another way in which we make ourselves lonely. To narrate losing without the loving that punctuates and often palpitates (behind) it, is an added screed of violence we layer upon what’s already hurting. In narrating loss of monumental loves, through death, distance and decree, Michael insists on iterating the good fortune of having “always found friends who wanted to love too much, who collided rather than met.”
After a July of non-stop rain, August was flirting with light. Walking next to R, along the beach, I was worried about her bare, translucent feet in the sand, exposed to the moon jelly embossed in the seabed. She was skillfully skipping around them, and I didn’t want to curtail her careful choreography. I didn’t feel light, but wanted to be as close it as possible. She sensed my caution and touched it. Not every bruise is fatal, darling. We can trust our bodies to tell the difference. We kept walking, until the sand melted into the sea. Insight without incision. Friendship more luminous than jellyfish.
Loss gathers over time and place, and love does too. Bodies can tell the difference.
My intention of revisiting the past, is often to soften; the harder footprints that departures inflict. Michael writes about the inevitability of relational loss and the particular violence of ungentle endings- “there’s no escaping that one day we’ll be without them. They may go kindly with expected effervescence, or…ungentle and sudden.” It is something I struggle with- the glacial declines of what were once scorching stories. While I’ve loved and lost enough times to recognize how one is a genre for another, I still root hard for benefic endings, soft landings.
It is a terrorizing expectation; learning to become a stranger to someone you knew you so well, and I hate that we’re getting so good at meeting it. How we repeatedly render the palmary, prosaic; the momentous, momentary; the romantic, redundant. For Michael, grieving is the continuation of the love that was promised, but remained unfulfilled. My struggle with sharp endings, is the truncation of the conversations which were tabled for later, trips which were yet to leave the tabs of screens, and meals which were yet to consumed.
If we are to hold unfinished stories of everyone we once lost, we must become better storytellers of love. If losing is a genre for loving, then we need to find softer ways to write about heartbreak. Words which gesture towards past violence, without seeking to unleash further destruction. The poet Megan Fernandes writes- “I’m telling you a hard thing, but not to hurt you, just to let you know that sometimes things are hard.” In his poem, Meditations in an Emergency, Cameron Awkward-Rich talks about how sometimes, just being alive in the world, is enough to break open a heart-
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds &
the thrill of rain breaks my heart.
Broken by the world, he still dreams about loving it, with a hand on his heart; a hand on his “stupid heart.”
In several poems from The Cat Prince, Michael Pedersen also calls his heart by soft names- “my old loaf of a heart,” “our little thatched heart,” “my spangled heart,” “my little hummingbird heart.” What’s in a name? Apparently, the fate of our hearts. If, as Michael says, “grief will come for the heart exposed, like hungry seabirds for a carcass washed ashore,” why are we trying so hard to hide its softness from the world? Why only in their breaking, can we recognise the activism, that hearts enact daily? Instead of asking more of already hurting hearts, what if we celebrated them for doing their utter fucking best?
Relational hierarchies enact bureacratic control over registeries of loves and losses. It is as exhausting to apply for approval, as it is to crusade against them. Which losses are permissible for whom? What love is worthy of grief? In his crusade against such ordering, Michael rages against the lack of a contract for relationships forged outside of marriage and employment- “no wonder we’re left so discombobulated when things go awry.” Through his writing, he seeks to acknowledge all the loving we do in this world, despite knowing the limits of its recognition.
If there was ever a contract drawn up for lovers and friends, (and I think Scotland should take the lead on this) my one non-negotiable clause would be, to separate in ways that honors the texture and temperature of our entanglement with each other. In the long-division of loss, there will always be a carry-over. An unfactored excess. Could we please, make it of love?
That evening in September, I learnt several things about Michael. One, he had an insatiable hunger for learning new words. “When you are speaking from the margins, language is something that needs to be fought for; it is never bestowed.” Two, writing, for him, was a way of giving exactitude to the clumsiness and failures of intimate encounters. Language enabled him to re-narrate and make elegant, the losses that come from loving in unmeasured ways. “I write in apology to lovers; this is what I would have said, if I wasn’t so shaken by heartbreak.” Finally, he insisted on writing about loss in the midst of love, because that is how we experience it. His narrations of relational failures are laced with anecdotes of intimate flourishing. Moments he had inhabited with lovers, friends, and audiences, where they had given each other the emotional passport to be as messy and excessive with their feelings, as they needed to be. “Why be pious to grief, but not love?”
This month, I have learnt a lot from just being in Michael’s company. I met over sixty-five new words and befriended at least twenty of them in this essay. Through inelegant interactions with ex-lovers, I permitted myself, to be more curious, than critical about the changing hues of our hearts. To face a loss and write of it with love. I have found that it is impossibly hard, to condemn someone for trying to love you. Love is often trying, and it is also in the trying. And when the trying fails, there can still be love in the leaving. We needn’t rush. Ultimately, I’m most grateful for the lovers who didn’t leave a second sooner than they needed to. And the friends who readied their new memory-foam mattress for me to dissolve in, after they did.
I’m still learning how to mourn lost loves without aching for their return. What would loss feel like, without the punishing that follows? How could we wear it, take it to the beach, honor it, without becoming it? For Michael, memories are the “distance travelled in bodies.” When we travel long distances, can we learn to pack lightly; and set the weight down, if it feels like too much? Can we come to adore the distance between bodies, as well as we cherish the lack of it? Can a magnolia in London be the shared unit for measuring love and loss? Would we tend to hearts a little better, if we called them flowers?
At another book launch, this time in Portobello, Michael confessed trying to smuggle poems into his novel. He thanked his editor, for gently weeding them out, so that the prose could breathe. I loved, however, the good weeds which remained in the book, and rooted it. Here is one of my favorites-
Ten fond falls (to bring a little balance):
the way apples fall from trees;
the way conkers fall from trees;
the way pinecones fall from trees;
the way apples fall from trees (that don’t collide with
heads). I would like to list lemons, figs, pomegranates
and peaches, but will stop here in terms of fruits, nuts and
seeds falling from trees.
the way rain falls differently on every village, city, town
and hat;
the way lunar light falls like milk over the moon’s
rimmed saucer, disrupting even the deepest of dark;
the ways hair falls by bungee jump, out from a bun or top
knot, renewing the face, revisiting a mask;
the way mouths fall open when unexpected good news
breaks free (especially in hospitals);
the way weight falls off when healthy and active- slower
and more seasoned than the weight loss of worry;
the way eyes fall shut after sunup and sundown safaris,
glowing sui generis from supreme glimpses into the
animal kingdom.
I’m no poet, but I cherish how they plant windows for light to tumble in and surprise us with what it clarifies. I especially adore list-poems, for how they render the elusive, enumerable. I cannae write a poem, but I can open a window. And I can certainly; make a list.
Ten fond losses (to bring a little balance):
the final exhale of an indoor sunflower, that did
her bloody best, and tipped
her hat to Scottish summer;
the last leaf off the linden
hibernation is a heuristic for
a greener good;
the dirty dishes drowning in soapy sink sea
because the dinner was gushing too much glitter
to bother with cleaning up
(and because your mother is sound asleep four thousand miles away)
the train that forgot to stop at Waverly
so you could linger longer in
Edinburgh’s effulgent embrace;
the recipes your grandmother couldn’t write down
she spelled more with a ladle than most
do with a pen,
and it gives her a reason to stick around;
the clouds which swallowed the
sun whole
even before its naissance
but spit out a kenspeckle spectacle of
golden light at gloaming hour;
the inevitable break-up of all
boy-bands, how easily we got over them
(all except Rascal Flatts);
the maroon dress your sister stole,
the pretty one won
but your cerulean chiffon
spilled a splendid shade of softness;
the rejection letter that didn’t beat around
Fife would have to be Florence for now;
the lover who named you
wildflower
even when you
never saw the same
flower, nor the same
wild.