Our Styles Just Didn't Coalesce

I will forever remember that cold morning.

I’d just returned from a month-long road trip cross-country in a beat-up Chevy, chasing something like spiritual renewal.

She stood by the picture window, in a kind of blah, looking typically unavailable, watching the leaves change in the front yard.

“How were those long, lost hours in the Hollywood Hills?” she said.

“Like soldiers searching for truth in a field of lies,” I said.

“That’s deep.”

And just like that, we slipped into some sort of shared psychosis.

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” I said.

“Did it hurt?”

“You were right. I’ve given up on life. I need something to bring me back to care about something again. Where I really am, or ever have been, remains anyone’s guess.”

She shrugged.

“That’s the price you pay for living the life of the oblique mystic minstrel. Tomorrow morning, you’ll wake up, tell me how bored you are, and ask me how to resuscitate whatever parts of you still drive your creative spirit.”

“My myth-telling surrealist poet days are over.”

She laughed.

“I’ve always found your tangled, impenetrable writing charming. In a self-aggrandizing, self-pitying sort of way.”

I let that pass.

“I wanna come back,” I said.

She shook her head.

“I love you.”

“There’s only one man in my life right now: Jesus. He’s the only man I can submit to, the only one who can teach me anything.”

“I taught you how to make a whistle out of bamboo.”

“But you don’t know how to teach me to be a better me. You can’t teach me how to live in Christ and be built up in Him.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you don’t even like people. How do you expect to teach me how to live in Christ when you’re such a misanthrope?”

“I’m not a misanthrope. I’ve got some trust issues. You want me to teach you to be a better you? I’ll teach you how to be better than that. In Northern California, I went to this seminar we had to firewalk. Hot stones. Test of faith. You wanna be taught? You’d learn fast. Those stones had something in them. I swear I transcended.”

“Interesting how there’s no mention of firewalking in the Bible.”

“It could’ve been edited out. You don’t know. There’ve been more revisions to the Bible than an Arnold Schwarzenegger script. All the translations, the interpretations you can’t even get a roomful of scholars to agree. And you’re gonna trust King James?”

“Yes. You know all the angles and you choose to stay on the outside. You choose.”

“I stay on the outside because people like you keep pushing me there. All you people who want to convert me.”

“You push yourself. And I have never tried to convert you.”

“It’s the language. The nuances. That holier-than-thou tone. That personal relationship you have with Jesus how you’re going to heaven because of it, and I’m not, because I’m a Jew and I don’t live in Christ.”

“You’re crazy.”

“And you’re a bigot.”

I don’t remember what came next.

Just the sound my hand against her face.

Her eyes filling. The break in her breath. The way the room collapsed into those broken sobs.

I remember driving home with no heat. A few drops of rain at first, then snow, then sleet tapping against the windshield.

The phone rang at noon the next day.

“I forgive you for calling me a bigot,” the voice said.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too.”