Shampoo Water

A Valentine's Day Tribute to a Certain Polish Gypsy

The second most terrifying thing in the universe is to love a human being. The first, of course, is to be loved by one but we’ll get to that part toward the end. I did my best to put off both of these for as long as possible. Love is difficult, burdensome, and perplexing. From day to day, love feels like being dropped into the middle of an unfamiliar maze and being asked to navigate your way out only to be rewarded with another maze. There is nothing so mysterious as another person, especially after you’ve known them for years.

Contrast this to being just sort of mildly liked at the periphery of someone’s attention, or the entropically perfect state of being “okay” with another person. Not enough has been written about the comforts of the half-smile, the half-wave, the nod of acknowledgement, or the thumbs-up given across a parking lot. There is nothing more restful than being a background character in someone else’s movie that doesn’t have to do anything in particular and will never be challenged to show depth, sincerity, or commitment to the relationship. Think of all the time it gives you to read! To be alone with your thoughts! To develop strange theories for your own private enjoyment! Nothing could be finer than being okay with another person!

This knowledge is why I used to greet the fluttering of butterflies in my stomach or the palpitations of my heart with an ugh. Though the occasions have been few, it became my habit when entering a room to immediately exit if I even suspected such a thing might occur. Think of how absurd and inappropriate it is that just because some stranger happens to randomly possess a facial symmetry or hormone profile that bypasses your well-placed psychological defenses that you are then powerless to prevent her from burrowing herself into the most foundational roots of your soul. Were it not natural it would be universally understood as a rudeness. There is nothing quite so unprofessional as developing a deeply rooted psychological need for another person. An ounce of it inspires the mind to unproductive rebellion.

“What did we install these rules to protect?”

“Truth in pursuit of what, exactly?”

“I wonder what she’s doing right now.”

I made up the first woman I ever loved. I figured that was the safest way to deal with my baser urges and the minimum required level of mooning insanity to go about my otherwise serious business. I kept her locked up in my own imagination, safe from the world and from flaw. She could have a life up there with grand adventures as well as small joys and simple pleasures. I would be faithful to her, always. I would think of her often. When loneliness threatened to push me to rash action, like talking to someone or seeking company outside of a book, I made sure to push all those urges toward her. Perfect as she was, she held all of those feelings without fail.

I wrote pages and pages of Fantasy novels, all so that she could have a world to inhabit. Languages and history. It was not enough for her to be perfect but the world had to be set to order around her. It was the only place to go for a giant, wildly eccentric —but also leaning too much into his eccentricity— kid growing up in a logging town. A private space in a world in which I had no assumption of privacy. It was a much more appropriate world than the one in which I found myself. Sometimes, it seemed like I lived most of my life in that place up inside of my head. Real life, the real world, so often paled in comparison. I planned to simply stay up there until I died.

This was also, in its way, something I thought of as a kindness. I could not ask or expect an actual woman to love me without engaging in some kind of deceit. Not after what I had survived. Not when I knew what strange angles those horrors had put in my personality. What possible excuse could I give to a woman as to why I was so resistant to the idea that she should ever meet my family? I had surveyed the damage done to my psyche by my upbringing and acted as humanity’s quality assurance representative to remove myself from the production line. I congratulated myself often for this enormous sacrifice, but whenever I indulged in self-pity this was usually the reason.

Was I not doing something good for hacking my own emotions this way? That’s what I told myself, anyway. I never “made eyes” at anyone. I refused to be silly or immature. I could be cool and polite. Friendly and uncomplicated! Once, I heard a fifteen year old boy at a video rental store tell his pregnant fourteen year old girlfriend, “I f—king love you and shit” when he let her choose the second movie of their rent one get one free deal. I vowed that I would never do something so tasteless.

Just after high school, a good friend of mine remarked that we were all alone in her apartment and stepped close. I felt an immediate uncomfortable heat and became over-aware of both my body and hers. I swallowed, looked over her shoulder, remarked that her bannister was broken, then rushed out to my truck to get some tools and promptly fixed it. I left after the repair was completed without delay, feeling I had avoided a terrible sin by the skin of my teeth. I had been saved from ruin by the deepest veins of pure autism in the bedrock of my soul.

Except, of course, I am, with deepest apologies and regrets… a person.

Which is silly to say except that the above paragraphs still come all too easily to my fingers. I obviously thought I should have been something else, but I can’t say I ever knew exactly what. A knight of unattainable honor? A wizard with too much knowledge to be moved by human impulse? We shall elide over my lapses in virtue to save myself the much deserved embarrassment. I only ever really tried to have a proper relationship once, and it was an utter disaster. That was all I thought I could stand.

Then a young woman four years my junior needed help with her astronomy homework. She remembered from high school that I was good at science. She sent me a message on Facebook and asked if I could help her with an assignment, for which she would be glad to pay me.

I was an old man in my own eyes. God, I was almost thirty! And I was well-established in what I figured would be my new life. I was a loser. I had a part-time gig as a weirdo. I would be a loser and a weirdo until they put me in the ground.

We worked on her homework together and I refused to take her money. She insisted this wasn’t fair since she would need my help again. Had I known how cheap she was, I would have known to think more about this. I still refused her money, but promised to help her if she needed it again. I’d done some physics tutoring a few years before and it helped to kill the time and keep my memory sharp.

There was no single moment when I realized this was the woman I was going to marry, but it was good not to be so lonely. We are not very much alike at all, and I thought so at the time. While I can write openly and honestly about my feelings, somehow I am generally not aware of them until they’ve had a chance to move through my fingertips. I am content with not speaking for several hours at a time. My wife, on the other hand, was born with the lungs of a duck. It’s as if the air is constantly circulating into and out of her mouth without interruption. We’ve gone hiking on steep inclines, where we are both panting hard for each breath, but where she hasn’t let a single second pass without the music of her voice. She can comment on anything and everything without ever failing to find something new to say. As the years have worn on, her pop quizzes about what she just said have kept me grounded.

It was difficult for me to learn to love another person who lives in the real world and not in my imagination. Who is capable of doing things that irritate me to no end, like taking way too many napkins at Chipotle, or really pushing the bounds of generosity for how many sauce packets it’s fair to take at a fast food restaurant. Or being really astoundingly, bewilderingly cheap in general. And yet if she wasn’t in my life, I think I would hardly be alive at all. It’s as if part of myself lives outside my body, willfully defying expectation and demanding constant attention.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have a career before she showed up at my house for the summer, so we could try each other out. It was that I didn’t even want to have a career. I had no material ambition of any kind. And yet whenever I saw her looking at something I couldn’t afford, I suddenly found my own modest desires intolerable. Why shouldn’t she have a dishwasher that worked or a really warm blanket? Or a new bed? Or enough money in the bank to not have to worry? Or to turn the heat up way too high? How was I to content myself with a library card in my small house when she had things she wanted but couldn’t have? My anxiety around interviewing suddenly seemed like such a poor excuse. I had to go out and do something for her. And so, I did.

Love is a game of mazes and surprises. The person you care about is there in the center of the mystery, waiting for you to find them every day and to love them is take joy in navigating the maze. If you dig too deep into philosophy you hear this idea about “solipsism” which means something to the effect that only existence of the self can be proven. I think therefore I am, is the only atomic knowledge in that philosophy. This strikes me as wrong. Properly defined, there is also “WTF?!? Therefore you exist.” I don’t know what part of my wife’s spirit delights in capturing mice when she finds them in our house, or naming them, but I know it’s not something that originates from me. Once you allow yourself to see, there are others that you know to be distinct from yourself. It’s the people you love, who you know, with whom you share history, and yet who constantly surprise you in ways you didn’t fully predict. It’s that moment of surprise that tells you that you’re not alone.

I think I am probably an average husband, although I wish I was better. Knowing in how many ways I must disappoint her is why it’s so terrifying to accept the love of another person. I’m still too up in my head even though I’m much better than when I was younger. She still has to carry me along with her like a balloon. When I’m thinking too much about the ultimate fate of the universe and what it all means, she’s hyper-focused for days on exactly what kind of mats she should get for our new minivan. All the smallest details about our family and children are important to her in a way that I cannot seem to make them important to me. When I’m bleeding from my shin when I come in from the garden, having already forgotten how I managed to cut myself or even that I’m bleeding, she’s there to feel the pain for me and grab a bandaid. So what if I make sure there’s money in the checking account? You wouldn’t say someone was an amazing car owner for filling up the gas tank.

Love is difficult, burdensome, and perplexing. It is also worthy, valuable, and riveting. It is perhaps the only indispensable thing in the universe, for try as you might you can’t do without it. I don’t think even the strangest sort of life you can imagine can really, truly do without love. I would have such a small life without love. I would be such a small person. My irritatingly cheap, napkin-hoarding, Polish gypsy wife is infinitely more valuable than a flawless imaginary woman who doesn’t exist.

My wife tolerates me and my quirks and opens up my entire universe in return. In big ways, like our children, and in all kinds of small ways my life is better for having her in it. We go to the store and get all the good things to eat that I would never have bought without her insistence. We eat Trader Joe’s or we buy something organic no matter that I can’t tell the difference. It’s so terrifying that she loves me because that means I have to try to be worthy of it every single day and I know I must fail at that in so many ways. We buy kombucha which I had never heard of before we got together and she laughs when I call it shampoo water, because I think that’s what it tastes like. Although I’ve learned to still enjoy it somehow. She laughs when I say things like shampoo water, or whenever I say something strange that surprises her, and I hope I’m at least doing some small part for her of what she does for me.