Young Love is Meant to Fail

“And my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun

or believes in anything, especially freedom.”

—Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums

I believe my life has been little blips of time, all scattered scraps and sewn unevenly together by universal, unseen hands. I am not terribly skeptical about many things; maybe the occasional Black Friday advertisement or paperback romance book. Maybe my own existence, illuminated by the gas station lamp on Highway 10. However, I am right to be weary sometimes— life is tough. And time keeps moving without you; it rushes out the backdoor without so much as a goodbye. Since Chuck died three years ago, I have understood what it means to lose. To forfeit regardless of whether the towel is thrown in. Chuck wasn't given a moment of meaning before he was taken by time and water currents. My mother was the first to hear.

Thanks for reading Grace’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I am reminded of him under the lamplight on Highway 10, and I am overwhelmed by a sea of regret. Loneliness is the road’s companion, I walk hand in hand. I store it like fat on my belly. Grief is no stranger, the front pew has held my knees. I will kneel again. I concede that some aren’t lapping at the heels of the gas station glow— grief has kept a kind distance. Emmylou was one of those spared. My mind drifts to thoughts of her—we are the story of two people who could not understand one another; time and sadness pulling apart the weaving at the loom.

Emmylou is my focus for this story, but you have to understand where I am coming from before I tell it. Chuck is the North Star. Every story begins with him.

I am retelling our separation and ending, not our beginning, as it was only a matter of time. No use in starting from the first moments as they have been gone for a while now. I wanted to be with her but couldn't, you see? A north star and a woman’s love haven’t mingled in the candlelight for many years . I am not sure they ever will.

I left Nebraska for Oregon, near Mt. Hood and below the hungry eyes of Washington State. Took a gap year, packed my Prius, and showed up at Merrill and Steven's doorstep contracted to do six months of work for them on their farm (à la Jack Kerouac— in '56, he hitchhiked to California and then booked it to Washington to be a fire lookout. Only $14.57 in his wallet, he knew how to live a life untethered and defiant). I admit, with miles keeping good distance, that the experience was the loneliest time of my life; biking forty miles into town, no women, and my family miles away. Sadness taunted me around every corner and under every turnip root. I would look out my persimmon curtains and glimpse the tippy top of Mt. Hood. I joked (to myself) that if I could climb and live on the snow-capped top, I would finally be happy; the absurdity of nothingness that seems to grip our society in its left fingers would be unable to touch me. I would make a home between the edges—it would be my version of believing in something.

I finally planted my last stalk of beans and pulled my final sweet onion. Started down the west coast, heading south. Like Kerouac!

I had a tailwind: the arms of a girl I had loved.

Texas! Texas! Texas!

Emmylou, sweet Emmylou was her name.

I stopped in Carson City, Nevada, on the way down to her. I had my eye set on Tompson's Tavern, on the corner of Littlefields Street and Gary Circle, and sauntered in. Asked the bartender with one eye for anIPA and sat in the corner booth to finish reading Shane by Jack Schaeffer. I wondered what Texas would stir in me, what seeing Lou again would feel like. She and I have this pattern of not figuring out how to make things work between us — I am too manic for her (she says). But she pulls me in; there is something about her that I will never be able to shake. We tried in school, tried in Texas, tried and failed over & over again. Tweezers try to pry apart my heart, her eyes dig for fake geodes. I am going to see her, even though I know how it ends.

The freedom of love, real love as I read about in the great American novels, or the love I saw between Mom and Chuck, is something she and I can’t find. Two beautiful keys unfit for one shitty lock. It's like I'm a prize to be won, and she is all out of cash. I know this sounds like a bad idea to go back down to see her, but I can’t help it. I love her, I do, in my own distorted way. And she, I. I miss her elbows and the lines of her forehead. And, selfishly, Texas is not for lovers but for writers instead. A playground of the mind. All the great authors —Vonnegut, Roth, McCarthy — dreamt of the vastness of Texas and the thrill of choosing your own destiny when dusting your boots in the sand. Maybe love a woman (or two). I was resolved, in Tompson's Tavern, to do just that.

I tipped one-eyed Moody (the nickname I gave him) a $5 and returned to my car. I pressed play on the stereo, and Jerry Jeff Walker sang me over state lines.

When I arrived, she greeted me in the driveway. She looked taller, her green eyes a little darker, but she had the same crooked smile with creases around her cheeks that I remembered well. "Hello, stranger," she crooned as I stepped out of the car to wrap her tightly into my burdened chest. I felt happy. She was home base, breathing room.

The first few mornings were a dream: waking beside her subtle snores, fluttery, tired eyes, and tousled curly hair. She would roll over and look at me with stealth of someone who couldn't believe their luck, coupled with the tinge of uncertainty hidden behind her pupils of how long it would last. Always on edge, never truly comfortable.

Mornings had their routine: I would get up, make our coffees from the espresso machine in the kitchen, and she would put on a record (the last day of pretending was Gin Blossoms). Three mornings in a row, as the mean old sun peeked out from the spiraling cloud patterns, she would follow me to the porch, placing her head on my shoulder while we finished the New York Times crossword. The pen scraped the paper. We would have been perfect for each other.

Four days in. As I said, we had this pattern —we were both naive or in love enough to think each time would be different or that we could try again with a different outcome. I think we were both. I wanted Texas to be a fresh start for us, which is true, but committing to her and to Texas felt like a shrunk shirt, collar buttoned tight, and I needed to tear it open with scissors to take a deep breath. I was downing; she pleaded with inquiries. Gentle caresses. Simple understanding. It was too late, there was no air left for me.

I felt pushed into a corner. I began to think: did she know me outside of morning lukewarm coffee?

We went to meet some of her friends at a natural wine bar across town. As we opened the glass door of the entrance, the opaque city lights of East Street flickering in the tinted glass, Lou introduced me as her partner to the sullen faces looking back at me. I was playing pretend with her friends, all around the age of twenty-seven, trying to nod and seem interested as they conversed about competitive salaries, their unstable jobs, and what they would make for dinner. They drank wine that commodified the organicness of life and called it "funky"; they muddied themselves, like sediment in their glasses, until there was no personality left. No spark of intellect in their words; when they spoke, they were more interested in what I did than who I was. Was this the Western dream I was in search of? I felt crushed in this sprawling city with its search for a different American Dream: one where you sit at a wine bar with your friends and complain about the state of it all. It was foreign to me. In turn, she began to feel like a stranger. They all had molded into a mirage of dark eternal torment.I suppose Lou was not particularly like these people, and there was grace to be given to her, but I was already backing away. Love melted into the florescent skyline, and dissolved.

I told Emmylou I needed to leave on Friday at dawn. That I would leave the morning after and wouldn't be back. I tried to make her understand, I really did, that cities make me go insane, I was unfocused, and that I simply could not go on living as a partner to her regardless of my desire for her; one who would cook her dinner, delight in grocery shopping, and ask about her day each time she came through the door. I watched as she furrowed her brow, her forehead creasing as she took in what I was saying. Gears turned as she tried to understand me; I knew she never would; sadness, loss, and loneliness made me distant from her. Chuck pulled me away.

I did not have answers for her. Our time together, this time, beautiful and strange as it was, was just a blip. I will always love her, I suppose, and I think I will always love Texas. But love changes, shape shifts. Love is not always infinite, though it lasts forever. Sometimes love requires distance.

I held her in my arms that evening, then woke up early and drove away for good. I rummaged through her wooden cabinet drawers and found a slip of paper and a dull pencil. Before I left, I wrote her a note. She wrote me many things over the years we have known each other—four years. My olive branch was to return the favor:

"Though it's strange, and the next chapter of our relationship may take place years and states away, I believe I am better for knowing you. I know, on some level, cosmically or spiritually, our spark will survive. The world, and time, is a very strange thing."

And so I left. Back to my north star. I was Kerouac again, high on the uncertainty of the next thing, riding the spirits of a young age. He is right, you know, about our karma in this life sequestering us to America. Where freedom is made with money, and time is something to be bought. Where did the exhilaration of the American Dream, as spoken about by the poets, hide itself? Maybe I will never know. For now, I will keep on driving and every now and then, I will fondly think of Emmylou and her delicate shoulders.

I am heading home to Omaha, and perhaps the Dream will be waiting on the porch with a beer. Maybe it is humming a tune that is so soft that only I can hear it.

Or it won't be.

I cross the state line as the radio hymns:

You and I, we might be strangers

However close we get sometimes

It's like we never met.

Me and you, what can we do

When the words we use sometimes

Are misconstrued

Oh, I don't wanna know

Oh, I don't need to know

Everything about you

And you, don't need to know

That much about me.

I see Chuck in my rearview mirror. I am back on Highway 10.