Love Dog notebook, 7/15/2014: finding out what the wait was about
In the December 31, 2011 entry in Love Dog, Masha Tupitsyn writes,
A couple of weeks ago I kissed a man at the OWS Verso Books party, a week before Christmas. He was a good kisser. Yet afterwards, as I looked at him while he talked to me on the subway, I knew he didn’t have the kind of face I really wanted or needed to look at. His face just wasn’t for me.
But somehow faces are the first thing I forget once a person is gone. They become a blur—foggy—because they have to. Because it’s too painful and burdensome to carry a face (a life) you knew so well—a face that was for you—around once it’s gone. A face you took that seriously. It can drive you crazy. I’ve been driven crazy by things like this. Love and faces, and responsibility. To the other. In this way, writing is not only a substitute for love, it’s a substitute for the face (life) you’ve lost.
I’m ambivalent about faces. Because of my history with my own face, I feel that faces have as much capacity to obscure the truth as to reveal it. I’ve worried that my own face has made it harder for me to connect with others than it should be. But your face always seemed so open to me, so revealing. I think that it is possible, even likely, for someone to look at my face and not be able to really look at me, but I always felt that to look at your face was to look at you in a very real way. Yours is a face I could both lose myself in and find myself in. In the one and only photo I have of us together, taken on the day we first met, I don’t mind my own face. It’s as if, in the context of your face, my own face seemed more honest to me.
Your face, your life, were never for me, in the way that I wanted them to be. I know that now. I’ve known it for a long time. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t look at you the last time I saw you. It was too painful to look at you, to really see you, while I was that close to and that far away from you.
When I told friends about this, one of them said, “You need a rebound.” I said, “I don’t think you can call it a rebound if I was never with the person in the first place. And anyway, I’m not interested in a rebound. I’m interested in something real.”
“Oh,” my other friend said. “A realbound.”
Being around you that last time I saw you did what being around you always does. It made me feel like my walls were collapsing, like I couldn’t hide the truth of what I was feeling from myself or you or anyone. And I couldn’t help but hang on your every word, delighting in what they revealed about you and aching that those revelations revealed more about a life that I can’t share in, not the way that I wanted to. Like the song “In Limbo” by Radiohead once worked for Masha, you thaw me out. Like Muriel to Macon in The Accidental Tourist, without even meaning to, without even trying, you take an axe to the frozen lake inside me. Maybe it’s not good for me, but even though it hurts now, sometimes I think that I want to be around you, just to feel my walls collapse again, my heart open up, just to be reminded of the depths of my own feeling, even if right now that feeling is just a profound yearning for connection with someone who makes me feel some of what you do, someone who brings my walls tumbling down. I don’t want to be with somebody who doesn’t do that. I’ll wait for somebody who does.








from Beginners
But what is the wait about? What’s it for, really? Will I look back someday and understand why I had to go through all this, why I had to spend so much time waiting?
Lately, I’ve been really concerned with waiting. When Masha was writing the entries I’ve been reading in Love Dog lately, she was really concerned with waiting, and with time-jumps, in movies and in life. On January 5, 2012, she wrote:
I don’t want to wait, but I have to. And after all of my resistance, indecision, and frustration, I’m somehow riding the wave of time now, letting it sink in. I am living in the time-jump. The time-jump, which I knew was coming for months, but dreaded. The time-jump is the time inbetween the wrong time and the right time. The time between me and you (X.). Now and then. Present and future. In the movies, two characters meet at the wrong time and time needs to pass, to—jump—in order for them to be able to meet again. Sometimes time has to jump over and over for this to happen. To pass and pass. Sometimes it takes one time-jump. Sometimes it takes many. Sometimes six months pass, sometimes ten years. The point is that while we, the viewers, are aware of the time—the time that’s passing between two people—the characters onscreen are not. Not knowing what they know or must know. They (the unsynchronized lovers) are in the back of each other’s minds, and the forefront of ours, but they are not aware of the time that’s passing. That’s passed. They are living their lives, often with other people. Major things happen in between. Things that might be extremely difficult, but not impossible to undo. They don’t know what’s coming. You have to be almost unconscious, or at least only semi-conscious, of time when you are in the time-jump. It’s on our minds (the viewers), not theirs. So if I am self-conscious about the time-jump I’m in, is it really even a time-jump? In fact, time is not jumping at all for me. I am literally watching the clock. Waiting for the kettle to boil.
If. When. How many times.
And later in the same entry, when writing about how bell hooks, in All About Love, talks about Jacob’s encounter with the angel (something I wrote about in my own way recently, not knowing that Masha had written about it in hers), Masha writes:
I have been Jacob. I have had to be Jacob. I have been him willingly and against my will. I have made wrong choices and difficult decisions. Wandered alone. Failed and labored and waited. Tried again. Been in the dark. Had faith. Time, years and years, have passed. And now I am at once tougher and softer than I have ever been. I am and/both.
Is that what the wait is about? Getting tougher and softer? On January 16, 2012, writing about the Pretenders song “Tattooed Love Boys,” Masha wrote:
The lyric, “I, I, I, I found out what the wait was about” conjures a time-jump. So what is this wait? This wait, still. This wait, again. How do we know when we’re waiting and not simply living our lives? That we’re doing something extra, in addition to living. That there’s an added element involved. The element of something future coming. Something not-yet.
I’m waiting to find that out, but to do that I have to wait some more.
I feel like I’m waiting there too. From Love Dog:

I know mama said you can’t hurry love, but sometimes I think this is getting a little ridiculous:
How many heartaches must I stand
Before I find the love to let me live again
How long must I wait
How much more must I take
Before loneliness
Will cause my heart, heart to break?
Sometimes I just want to fast-forward to the end of this time-jump, to the time when someone else comes along who makes sense to me the way you seemed to.
When I think of time-jumps, I think of Broadcast News, and when I think of Broadcast News, sometimes I think about how I feel about you. In her entry from January 11, 2012 called Mourning After (one of my favorites, one I’ve read and responded to before), Masha writes:
When it comes to love, we circulate either a repressive and reactionary set of values and narratives, or disposable platitudes. Sometimes we give up too soon and sometimes we don’t try at all. We miss the opportunity to try. We don’t say enough, when we should say everything.
Perhaps I say too much, with you. Like Aaron in Broadcast News, I say a great deal, then I say that I’m going to stop, and then I say more.
















But of course, he does say more. He fights for her.


Well, maybe they do, but it doesn’t matter how hard Aaron fights here. Her love is not for him and never would be. He never had a chance with her, or, you could say, she was never a chance for him.
In that same entry, Masha writes,
I treat the whole idea and task of “moving on” with suspicion and rigor, and always have. Mourning is often synonymous with forgetting and denial. So I think I will always prefer (trust) people who mourn—even people who can’t “get over” someone or something; who take too long—to people who don’t mourn or take any time at all. Or, who promiscuously and indiscriminately claim to do everything in the name of love; who call everyone a lover.
I want to hold on and I like others who do the same. Character is formed there and devotion is made possible. I’ve always been bad at the exchange part, partly because I never wanted or set out to exchange or be exchanged in the first place. The whole process terrifies me. I’ve been called an obsessive and a die-hard romantic because of it. And it’s true, I am one. I want to wrestle, grapple, stay, linger, hold on, remember, recall, retrace, ruminate, honor, know, understand—hold on.
I share some of that, but I’m not holding on because I’m still fighting for you. I know that I was never a chance for you. I’m holding on because for now I don’t know how not to. But things change.

the Broadcast News time-jump
I said to you once, when I knew that you weren’t a chance, that it’s hard when two people love each other and neither can give the other what they want or need. A lot can happen in seven years. Not much has really happened in my personal life in the last seven years, but more has happened in the past one year than in the previous six, and I expect that the next seven will be somewhat more eventful. Seven years later, Aaron’s got a love of his own and can just give Jane his friendship, which, as I said to you once, when I still thought of you as a chance, is a different kind of love but no less real than romantic love.
It’s the big time-jump of their lives:

and they seem to have found out what the wait was about. Jane especially.



Let us all be so lucky.
Notes
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mashatupitsyn said: God, I love this. And all the overlap i our writing/feeling. We even take the same screen shots. I have that “7 years later” screenshot for a photography exhibit project I’m doing on time-jumps in movies. You’ll like it. Also love that “Lion” line.
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