Love Love Love

The weekend after Thanksgiving, when I was officially about ten weeks pregnant, I went on a bike ride in the rain with the boy whose genetic material was taking hold in my uterus. We rode together over the Golden Gate Bridge, and it started to rain. When I got tired part of the way up the Marin Headlands, he rode up behind me and started pushing me up the hill. He was so strong, and it was raining so hard, I felt like I was back in Oregon, where we’d met, and I thought about how nice it would be if I could just be in love with him. About what an athletic baby the little group of cells in my body would turn into. About how if I loved him, he would love me, and this little alien creature could turn into a human that absolved us both of the treacherous things we’d done to each other and to the people we loved. My legs were covered in mud, and my bike gloves felt like wet diapers, and I could imagine a little baby being born and everyone loving it and everyone knowing that I had slept with this guy and the story we told everyone would be about our complicated beginning, but the baby would make it okay. My dad as a grandpa. My brother, an uncle. My mom, the perfect grandma.

We turned downhill and the rain didn’t let up, and when we went through the tunnel, I let him get ahead of me. I thought about the things I did really like about him: He is cute. He rides a bike. He agrees with me on everything except for the one time I was for Hilary and he was for Barack. He once said he thought I was intimidatingly smart. He’s fun to have sex with. But those are just things really, and a person is more than muscles and politics and sex and compliments. A dad is, anyway.

When we rode back over the bridge, it was getting dark, and I didn’t have any lights. I said, “This is getting dangerous,” and he looked at me seriously, dramatically, and said, “You have no idea.”

Then I realized that the problem wasn’t his girlfriend or our history. The problem wasn’t that he was unavailable to me. The problem was that I didn’t think that what we were doing was dangerous. Not emotionally, not physically, not to my existence. Even pregnant with his hypothetical child, I was completely removed from him. He was putting what felt like his whole life on the line for one bike ride, a few hours of time with me, and I had never risked anything for him. Not once. He looked so serious, skidding on the bridge, through the dark pounding rain, and for a second, I knew he really would do it, throw everything away with that other girl and his plans for law school and the respect of his family and his friends, if I had ever said, “I love you. Be with me.”

The rain dripped down my face, and below us the San Francisco Bay boiled, and I remembered being in love. I remembered screaming, crying, when the person I loved was leaving me. “You are killing me from your life by leaving!” I yelled. “Why are you killing me? Why do you hate me so much to kill me from your life?”

When you love someone and they leave you, you scream. You barricade the door. You cut off your hair and stop eating. You smoke all the cigarettes. The boy on the Golden Gate Bridge had left me various times. Always, I was just sort of relieved.

by Lizzy Acker, The Rumpus |  Read more:

Image: Lara Odell