Chapter 24

Chapter 24
Beaches, Adultery, and Complex Simplicity

I started going to the beach a lot, which was very healing for me. I loved the water, I loved the beach. I loved Florida.

A few months passed, and while things weren’t perfect, they were okay. There was a peace in the simplicity of my life. I had no friends, really, but I enjoyed the water and I had regular work and money.

My trips to the beach ceased for most of winter, but then I went back the next summer. There I met Danny. He was kind, friendly, and considerate. But he was also shy, quiet, and had a sort of sadness to him that I somehow just understood. We drifted together slowly, but eventually became dear friends. We eventually began to sort of date casually, until one day I admitted to him that I was falling for him. He came over to my apartment and we made love.

Then he told he was married. He explained the situation, and I listened. But I was heartbroken and I couldn’t continue as lovers. We stayed friends, but something precious had been lost. He was married to a woman from another country, and he said he wouldn’t ever leave her. I hadn’t asked him to. She wasn’t interested in him, but she stayed with him, and she needed his money to send back home. He felt obligated to her, and so he would stay.

I didn’t condemn him. I felt sorry for him, for his impossible situation. What he did was wrong. He admitted that he hadn’t treated me very well. But over-all, I felt more regret and sorrow over the whole thing that I did condemnation. I was angry, but I understood his hurt and his confusion and the fact that he’d made a grave mistake. Two of them, really. By marrying someone he didn’t want to marry, and then by cheating on her, too.

I felt like I should hate him, but I didn’t. In him I saw some of my own helplessness and regret. Don’t get me wrong, I repeat, I was angry, and he should have told me. But I didn’t have the strength left to work up righteous indignation. I cried when he left and cried that it was all over. That what could have been a long friendship was ended by something lies both old and new.

His society required him to marry her. His society required the marriage and then demanded the fidelity to someone who wouldn’t give him anything, not love, not human contact.

That wasn’t my only experience with adultery, but it was one of the rare cases in which I really found it hard to be angry about it.

And I don’t think that he used me, honestly. I think he was lonely and reached out in a way that, in the end, was inappropriate. We both wanted and needed human contact, and we let things go too far in our search for comfort and human kindness and connection.

I’ll ask it again, if it were so easy to find these things, why would you ever need to tell any lonely person the so obvious, “make a friend”?

The terrible insecurities that plague us cause us not to reach out, and cause us to lie to each other. Condemnation, judgment… they so often seem to result in despair, disunity, dissatisfaction, disharmony, and disappointment.

Metaphorically, this is the real fruit of which Eve ate. Judgment, condemnation. And she shared it with Adam. Judgment, condemnation, “good and evil” entered the world, and from this came murder and chaos and everything else. Pandora’s box was Judgment, from which all things painful and suffering flow.

From this encounter came the beginning of understanding that not everything is as it seems, and not everything is so clear as many would ask us to believe. Humans, the human heart… Life. They’re complex. Yet we all search for the same thing I’ve dreamed of all my life. We all want to love, and to be loved.

No, we’re not simple, and yet we are.