Searching for Each Other in a Sea of Words
Ninety-two. That’s how many emails we sent to each other over the course of our eight-month relationship, all with links to articles we found interesting and wanted to share, hoping one of us would find something new to dissect into dust. Nathan and I connected through words; logic, for now, was where he lived. We met through a mutual friend—they were studying together in Jerusalem at a postgraduate Jewish philosophy program designed for people who didn’t grow up in an Orthodox environment. Our first date was an entire night of squeezing each other dry as we talked about the pros and cons of living an ultra–Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, our favorite diners at home in New Jersey, the tractates of the Talmud he had studied that week, until our voices went hoarse. Through email, though, we never got tired. All we needed was the comfort of a third party’s voice—essays on love, movie reviews, articles criticizing societal norms—and we grew closer to one another: Dissection, we discovered, was our thing. We inched forward, analyzing ad nauseam, simultaneously tracing the curves of each other’s hearts.
Three months in, I emailed Nathan a New York Times story about the prevalence of “awkward sex” in popular TV series; I wanted him to tell me what he thought. He wrote back: “I want to keep doing this and never stop.” It made my stomach flip with joy—but the feeling was quickly overtaken by the fear that this epistolary intellectual connection, this mutual mental masturbation, would be the deepest point we’d be able to reach. There was always something in between us, something propping us up, something to connect over. I wanted to connect with him without an article, an essay, or a movie. I wanted to x out the tabs of buffers I had saved on my laptop and let Nathan have me without a hyperlink attached. We used our love of language, of logic, as a crutch for connection. We desperately needed that third cold metal limb, those training wheels to remain with us, to steady us, to keep us from falling into a place where logic didn’t rule.
On our first date, we had sat on my couch drinking a cherry liqueur from Tekoa out of plastic cups, as two became three and three became almost four in the morning. The liqueur was sweet and thick like jam, our kisses slow and careful, as we made sure no burgundy escaped from between our lips. Earlier that night, at a hip-hop nightclub in Tel Aviv called Kuli Alma (Aramaic for “the whole world”), we had sat on a concrete ledge next to a wall mural of Napoleon Dynamite, our knees just barely touching. As Dr. Dre warned anyone who would listen about the perils of love, You never knew she could be earnin’ her man, and learnin’ her man, and at the same time burnin’ her man, Nathan and I had entered into an entirely private and wholly new world of our own.
That night I told him that I believe eating non-kosher meat poisons a Jewish soul. His eyes glimmered. It felt like he was envious—that I was confident enough to articulate an extreme viewpoint on a first date, and that I was able to easily cling to the doctrines of a faith he was just beginning to explore. I felt safe, and strong, and comfortable, like he could be someone I could share everything with. A few months later, I told him I loved him for the first time over the phone; it didn’t take long for me to give up on hearing it back. I made myself believe that I didn’t need to hear the words; all I wanted was for him to make me feel it.
As we kept seeing each other, I began to feel like we’d stalled out: I wanted our connection to surpass language and go beyond our witty emails, to enter into a realm where we didn’t need words anymore. But it didn’t. The closest we got was one night when Nathan blurted out that he could see “the long-term potential of our relationship.” I started to sweat and untangled from his embrace to stick my head in the freezer. I lay my cheek against a bag of frozen spinach. I couldn’t process his gesturing toward some vague idea of a future together when he didn’t make me feel loved, not really.
I had that same speechless, sweaty reaction (minus the freezer part) two months later while visiting New York, when Nathan’s best friend asked me with a coy smile about how my love life was going. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t feel like I had a love life. I wanted to tell him that hearing the words “long-term potential” made me feel like an appliance at Home Depot, promising possible buyers longevity in blending, mixing, or pureeing. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to cry at a vegan restaurant in Williamsburg seated across from a handsome stranger whose allegiances weren’t to me.
Nathan and I were never the topic. We never spoke about each other. And so, I indulged him in his addiction to musings until I became one.
On February 3, while Nathan took a bus from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to break up with me, I was looking for crackers called Crunch, a flavorless bagel chip knockoff to which he claimed a surprising addiction. I cooked salmon that night. When Nathan said he “couldn’t do this anymore,” I didn’t respond. I continued to chew as the hot fish singed the inside of my mouth and made my tongue feel swollen. Nathan refilled his glass of white wine and looked at me with an infuriatingly controlled gaze. I pressed my tongue hard against the roof of my mouth until my cheeks were wet with tears.
We took turns crying, which then turned into sad kissing and an insistence on making each other “feel good.” As usual, he wore my gray Fire Island sweatshirt to bed. The next morning, he kept telling me how strong I was. I hated him for being right. He said he hoped his smell wouldn’t linger too long in the fabric of the sweatshirt. I wanted to tell him that he couldn’t dictate how long his smell would linger for and for how many nights I could come home and breathe in the scent of his skin with loose gray arms swung around my neck. But I didn’t. I had the sweatshirt professionally laundered the following week so it smelled of a flower that doesn’t exist.
The weekend we broke up, La La Land opened in theaters in Tel Aviv. Sitting next to my couple friends, I choked on my tears in the theater, watching how easily the potential for a life with a certain person flares, catches fire, and then sputters into darkness.
Nathan called me that night and told me it had scared him when I told him I loved him, because he didn’t feel like he loved himself. That’s when our “long-term potential” really came into focus: children with my green eyes and his dark hair, our hands intertwined on flights to Florida to visit his parents, driving through suburban New Jersey from his childhood home, parking a few houses down the road from my house so we could kiss in the car. Shabbat afternoons spent on a couch in some part of the world, drifting into sleep against the steady rhythm of his heartbeat while he read The Economist. And then the line went dead, and I took my hot cell phone from my cheek, and I was alone.
Four months after Nathan pressed me up against my kitchen cabinets and kissed me for the last time, I asked someone out for the very first time. His name was Yam (which means “Sea” in Hebrew), he was Israeli, spoke minimal English, had a nipple ring that he thought was too childish to still be wearing, and he drove a motorcycle. The language barrier meant that we both had to work very hard to articulate exactly how we felt, what we needed, and what we were able to give. We didn’t have the luxury of literary crutches. We couldn’t dance around each other with words, because we were listening to different songs.
Time went by, and I found that I was able to do it again. In between deep breaths on a secondhand couch speckled with dog hair, I told Yam that I loved him. Too scared to look up, I kept my gaze on his mouth and watched as his lips curved up into a smile. I squeezed the back of his neck, pressed my mouth against his, and winced as our teeth collided. I wondered if he understood what I said or if I should repeat myself, if “I love you” was universal or if I should say it in Hebrew. And then it turned out, I didn’t have to.
Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day for the first two weeks of February, until Valentine’s Day.
