1.
There is a space in what is not yet a relationship when you are as yet unsure whom she is (let's say it is a she), the one who walks beside you, just as she does not know who you are (think of Donnie and Gretchen in Donnie Darko). In the same space, there is a kind of security - something, each thinks, is at work between them, but what?
It doesn't matter. Trust that 'something'; trust the to and fro of an exchange that has, as its basis, something like luck. Luck that you two were brought together here; luck that there is an attraction at work between you and that it is reciprocated; luck that there is time for conversation itself as conversation spreads out into the night (think of Jeffrey and Sandy's first walk in Blue Velvet).
Yes, there is trust and this is beautiful. Who does not remember such a conversation with such and such a person on such and such a night? It is a memory of youth - or rather, the youth of memory, that freshness that returns when you are brought into a space of possibility, in which words speak that search ahead in the night (let's say it is a night).
Searching words - but what are they looking for? For that moment when silence wells in from that space space in which speaking occurs. For that enveloping moment when you face her and she faces you. Yes, when you are face to face, and it is time to stop talking, when it is as though all the night had gathered itself to the threshold where you stand.
2.
But what if that threshold goes uncrossed? What if the course of the night was as though interrupted? Then you and she have unfinished business; you await another night, and another time with her and you live now in the open hand of that waiting. But what if that theshold will forever go uncrossed; what if you and she will never bring to an end what seem to begin, then, long ago?
Then that uncertainty - the first - is redoubled; if you see her again, uncertainty remains. First it will be experienced as benediction - there is something shared, you speak in a shared space and are intimate no matter who else is around you. But then, gradually, it becomes the obstacle to your relationships with others; it is an unpleasant constriction, the obsession of an event that withdrew almost as soon as it happened. What happened? Luck? But is it luck any longer? Finally it will become what you must now address rather than talk around. You must speak of luck. But how is this possible?
3.
It is true that new lovers speak of their love, of the fact of their loving. What effect will this have, you say to your lover, on X. and Y.? What will Z. think? Lovers have love to talk about: the surprise of their affair for others, but first of all for themselves. They experience love as benediction; it arrives as a gift. The lovers become tiresome for others when they assume that they have found the path to happiness - 'if only you had what we have': this is the smugness that has made good on luck.
But in interrupted love, what is spoken of is without benediction. What speaks? If I say the outside it is to refer to what is lived by smug lovers as their privilege, their special benediction and by those whom love has interrupted as enigma. For the latter, luck is not privilege or good fortune, and you would not wish it upon anyone else. For those who must speak of it, it is the fate of a relationship that cannot come to term. A luck no longer shared as between two terms (Lover and Beloved) and which does not allow you to play the game of lovers.
Both know they will have to have done with what binds them without binding them; that it has become intolerable. Do they flee one another or come closer to try at last to drive out what inhabits them, to have done with luck once and for all? How to speak? How to address what retreats from you both, what gave itself once without giving you a future? How to be released back into an ordinary life and to the hope for a relationship that will be mercifully ordinary?
4.
No doubt a great deal is announced in interrupted love. Failure punctures a hole in the lie that smug lovers tell themselves: that the luck that turned each towards the other was theirs, and in their possession. That they were not possessed by love as by an outside they do not control. And that those first moments of infatuation were destined to lead them to the comfort of romance. Exposed is the lie that love is personal and lets its course be steered - and the lie of that smugness that would make good on luck.
Divorce, break-up, leaves each without trust and without luck (think of the quarelling couple in Mirror). It is as though a joint was bent without cartilage - bone grinds on bone. The pain is raw and direct. That is when you know what love was and that you can never lean on love.
And for those who could never lean on it? Those whose relationship was already an experience of the impossibility of loving which was never just love's absence? They too know what love is not, but they know also of the enigma of luck which ran them together, the ones who are joined in their relationship to the other as to the outside.
5.
What has the impossibility-of-loving taught you? What have you become, you for whom that impossibility is fate? You are the one who loved what he could never enclose and who loved another to whom he was joined by luck. Consolation: for all your absence of love, you will have known luck better than anyone else. But is that a consolation?