love isn't enough < all you need is love

Nola was different that all the other women. And that scared me a little bit.

I watched her get up this morning. She tried her darnedest not to wake me up. Tip-toeing from the bed to the bathroom. Not flushing the toilet after peeing. Even putting on her slippers after she left the room, despite us not being able to afford heat and the floor in our bedroom being made of concrete.

She was so beautiful. She smelled of watermelon and dogwood flowers all the time. I never quite could wrap my mind around how on earth that was possible. We could have made love for two hours, then fallen asleep sweating from the 92-degree inside heat in the middle of summer. But when we woke up the next morning, I’d reek like a sack of onions but Nola, she always tasted sweet. Her secret, I guess, and probably one I don’t want to figure out.

It’s why I kick myself for not falling in love with her. Or maybe the better answer is not allowing myself to fall in love with her. I love her, there’s no doubt about it, but I haven’t taken the leap into the unknown that Yyves Klein so beautifully explained.

“Come with me into the void!”

Maybe my problem is that damn poem. The unrealistic expectations of what love should be. And what it really is.

Instead, I should take the Johnny Thunders approach. Simple and direct. When you’re in love, god damn it, you’re love.

“Oh baby I love you. I really do. There’s no one like you. Baby, I love yooooooooooooouuuuu.”

Looking out the window, I see the Spanish moss hanging from the limbs of the dying tree in our front yard. I’ve been meaning to get that cut down for a year now, “take care of it” my father would have told me. He married my mom while he was still in college. They made it over 50 years before he finally succumb to the half a pint of vodka a day he’d been ingesting for decades. I stopped drinking six years ago. Kind of funny. I feel like a Robert Duvall character in my own life. Playing a bartender that doesn’t drink. A cop that doesn’t go in the streets. Me, I’m a lover who can’t love.

Of course, the Duvall character was always a drunk before an AA member. A gung-ho crime buster before being shot. Me? I used to not be afraid of love. I used to dive in like I was a 14 year old Arkansas farm boy who just discovered a new swimming hole. Now? I skitter on the edge, hoping love finds me instead of me finding it. Knowing full well that if you wait too long, it’ll pass you by. The effort has to be there, I guess.

It’s why the words “Love isn’t enough” echo through my brain way more often than they need to. The supposed love of my life said those words to me. She never told me why it wasn’t. Just that it wasn’t. Up until that day, my only belief was the same as John Lennon’s, that love is all you need, the rest will just sort of happen the right way.

Nola knows this about me. It’s why I’m surprised she sticks around. We used to have drunken barstool conversations that began at noon and ended at closing time. Never at one bar. We’d move around a lot. We both had that wanderlust, even when it came to martinis for her and bottled beers for me. It may have had to do with our constant need for new entertainment too.

I never had any problem talking with her. Always a good sign. I remember one night we were going to see Lucero play in my old college town. On the highway driving up, there was a wreck, unbeknownst to us. This tractor trailer almost drove off of a bridge. The road was closed for five hours before we even got near it. But there were no signs. So we sat on that highway for nearly four hours. Just talking. About nothing and everything. Well, everything except for us. She did offer me a blow job. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it really was a joke? Or could I have had a nice BJ while sitting in traffic. Never had one while still driving before. Heavy petting for sure. I should ask her about it. But then again, maybe not.