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Part 1 of a two-part tale about unrequited love and longing.

Feb 16, 2024

Hellooo…hellooo…helloooo. Is anybody out thereeee…out thereee…out thereee….

Thanks so much to those of you who tune in here twice monthly to read my stories. Means a lot. Gives me a purpose and a joy that I’m really appreciating right now in the midst of my new 9-5 life. I’ll write more about the whole 9-5 thing soon. But for today: a piece I started almost five years ago, and have returned to over the years, and release to you now. Enjoy.

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I once had the good fortune to sit in a two-week silent meditation retreat at a Buddhist center in western Massachusetts. I had almost no experience with meditation. However, what I did have going for me was that I had fallen in love with a meditator. It wouldn’t hurt, I thought, to, you know, start “sitting,” as all the cool kids called it.

Do you sit?

Who, me? Of course I sit. Been sitting my whole life.

What’s your lineage?

Um, the ah, the Buddhist one.

Who’s your teacher?

Oh, you know, just life, man, the teacher of life, you know?

This was in my mid-twenties, during that terrible time when I couldn’t help but think Is it you? Is it you? whenever I saw a woman my age who was beautiful to me. Maybe it’s you! Please let it be you. My soulmate. There she was, perhaps, at that table across the room in Starbucks. On the plane, a few rows ahead of me. Emerging suddenly from the bathroom at a rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike. She was, potentially, anywhere, everywhere.

This time, I really did think it was her, though. And it seemed, for a good hot second there, that she was thinking the same thing. But alas, not long after meeting each other she decided it wasn’t going to work. She was just getting out of a relationship with some other guy, and she said she had to learn how to “love herself completely” before getting into another relationship.

Of course, this just made me want her more. So I hatched a plan to get her back. During that one week we had together in San Francisco, she had mentioned she wanted to do a vipassana meditation retreat someday. She spoke about it with a kind of hushed awe. I thought, at some half-baked, half-conscious level, that maybe if I did one of those retreats this awe might transfer onto me and she would then…what, love herself completely? Like I said, I was in my mid-twenties, single, and I just didn’t want to be alone anymore.

And sure, we’re never alone, right? There’s the bliss of nondual reality. There’s awareness aware of being aware (see, I’m in my mid-thirties now and I’ve picked up the lingo). And there’s the trees. The birds. God. Et cetera. But damn did I feel lonely after that week with her in San Francisco.

Aloneness hadn’t been a problem for me before. I’d loved my solitude. Relished it. Felt bad for the rest of you sorry suckers who didn’t know how to really be in your solitude, really go there, really do the work.

I had learned the ways, I thought. I had walked across America at 23 years old, alone. Then, I’d spent two more years on the road, solo, writing a book about it. No problem. I’d gone dark. Off the radar. Underwater. What ever happened to Andrew Forsthoefel? No one really knew, and I loved that, loved my aloneness.

But then I met this goddamn woman, and the well-contained river of my loneliness flooded the flimsy banks. It was a whitewater situation. Class 5. Class Fuuuuck. Class You’re-A-Grown-Ass-Man-Crying-In-Your-Mother’s-Kitchen-And-Mom’s-Looking-At-You-Like-Come-On-Kid-Do-You-Even-Actually-Know-This-Girl-It-Was-Just-A-Week-Wasn’t-It? My mom’s always been able to say a lot without saying a word. I remember she said without saying that perhaps my grief had to do with something more than just this unrequited love, something I’d been carrying without knowing it, something that was now flowing beyond my ability to control. I remember looking at her through my tears, embarrassed but unable to stop, and shrugging my shoulders, like, I can’t help it, this is just what’s happening.

Turned out I was not the expert I thought I was, the master and commander of my solitude. Either I hadn’t been lonely until that point, had only met the little lion cubs of loneliness and had assumed that’s as big as lions get and then suddenly the great-maned alpha male had me in his jaws. Or, I’d been in his jaws the whole time, I’d been lonely all along, and only now I was feeling it, the true cost of all those years on the road. She was gone. I was inconsolable.

I first laid eyes on her halfway through a poorly attended lecture at an urban ashram near Dolores Park. I’d been in San Francisco for about a month, writing. She was sitting straight-backed on a meditation cushion across the room, a curious presence: lithe and contained, sunburnable skin unsunned, nightblack hair neat to the nape of her neck. She seemed like a closed circuit of attention, no stray wires looking for ground. She gave me the impression of sovereignty: that she might want me someday, maybe, if I were lucky, but that she would never need me.

I believe she noticed me, too, and on my way out, after the dharma talk, we made eye contact for a second. There was an opening then, a bridge, but neither of us took the first step to cross it. I turned away, walked out the door, and promptly deceived myself into believing I wasn’t interested in her. I had grown accustomed to saying goodbye at that point, and to keeping my romantic desires private, locked away from even myself. Conceptual. Self-righteously celibate. Hubristically ascetic. It was: all you poor things having sex out there, you’re just avoiding yourselves, the real shit, the real work, of just being with your greatest fear, your greatest longing, yourself. At that point, after the dharma talk at that ashram, leaving her before I’d even risked saying hello was something I knew how to do. It kept me safe from the flood.

A few days later, I went to a late afternoon dance performance in the Mission. A friend, the director of the theater, had given me a ticket. Two dancers, women, moved in concert with a fluid light display on a big screen behind them which responded, real-time, to their movements. About halfway through the show, bathed in that swirling galactic churn of color, one of the women stood alone in the center of the stage, balancing on one leg, slowly lifting the other leg directly over her head, drawing herself like an archer draws a bow. The sum total of concentration in that room was directed onto the single point of that woman, and in that moment, I realized it was her.

After the show I found myself making a beeline for her, shouldering past the rest of the crowd to get to her first, my inhibitions overpowered by the sheer unlikeliness of this second encounter. I asked her like an idiot if she remembered me. She did. Where was she from? London. How long was she in town? One more week, like me. Would she like to get coffee? No, but how about an ecstatic dance the next morning instead? I didn’t know what an ecstatic dance was, but she could have invited me to a Donald Trump rally and I would have said yes without hesitation or shame.

We spent the next week together and I fell hard. Face plant. She seemed so at home in herself. So sure. And open. She was a seeker, like me. I’d never met one of my own kind, in the form of a gorgeous woman my age. And I had the distinct sense that she was ahead of me on the path, which I found both frightening and irresistible. She was in an open relationship—a spiritual partnership, she called it, which I hadn’t heard of before, and wanted for myself, instantly—with some guy back in England whose name I’ve forgotten, but even still, stirs that old unhappy giant of jealousy slumbering in the cave of these memories. The guy sounded like a dick. A spiritual dick. The worst kind. I was confident, in the way a migratory goose is confident, that the impact of her encounter with me would end things with him. I didn’t need to know him to know that he didn’t stand a chance, so sure of my splendor was I. It might take a few months, maybe even a year, but I would be patient, stalwart, like the goose on his long journey south. I wasn’t afraid of being alone. I could wait a little longer.

Saying goodbye was difficult, after that week in the Bay. I remember sitting together on the couch in my little Mission sublet, her legs swung over mine, drinking tea together. Our last night. I wanted, at one point, to lay my head in her lap. She gently stroked my hair as she had a few nights before, on a walk up to Twin Peaks, when we took a rest on a bench in the dark. So this is what I’d been searching for all these years, this perfect pillow of a lap. In the dim bath of a street lamp, she sang a song to me in French, which was very rare for her, she said, to sing out loud to another person, and as she sang to me on that bench, and stroked my hair, I felt my heart shudder physically, electrically, a weird somatic spasm that quite literally took my breath away. It didn’t happen again, on the couch, in the apartment, on our last night. I had been hoping it might.

She thought it best we didn’t sleep together that night, and so the time arrived for us to part. Watching her walk down the stairs, turning to look back at me once before rounding the corner onto the street, I felt my invisible hands reach out to grasp her, but she was the air and couldn’t be caught and was gone. The door closed, and my solitude, normally so familiar and collegial, was suddenly strange and hungry and maned and I just wanted to be in her lap, and wanted her to want that, too, and was genuinely baffled that she didn’t.

Can’t you feel this, what I’m feeling?

How could you walk away from this?

How could you walk away from me?

I got an email from her a few days later.

“I am really missing you,” she wrote. “It has hit me that I’m not going to see you for a very long time, if ever.” I was delighted to hear that she was missing me (“really” missing me!) but that last part didn’t make sense. I’m not going to see you for a very long time, if ever. Come again? On my end, I was preparing for the inconvenient but necessary move to London.

We emailed each other for a few weeks, even Skyped a couple times. It was looking good. Things with Anthony were indeed falling apart (ah, there’s the name!) and her dancing continued, and I kept working on my book, and these things seemed to be happening according to the plan of the artistic lives we were destined to live with each other, but then I got another email.

“I feel quite terrified of telling you this now but i know that i have to be absolutely straight. I think that the time has come for me to be alone. It’s been 7 years since i’ve been alone and i am really scared of it but i know that this is what needs to happen. Because basically, right now, I feel that I am incapable of truly giving myself to anybody, of total devotion and surrender to the other. And i don’t want to be in relationship any other way, it’s not enough anymore and i can’t hide from it. It’s time for me to deeply invest in loving myself in a way that i have NEVER done before and not look to men to validate my existence. I feel there is much pain to come but i have to face it now.”

Like I said, I just wanted her more after this. But it was done. She had made the cut, ruthless and loving and clean and true.

In the weeks that followed, desperate, I made two significant decisions. The first was to settle down (because maybe I had to be more settled before the gods would let us get back together again, and plus, the flood of my loneliness was full-blown now and the solo road-dogging just wasn’t working anymore for my mental health). So I moved to western Mass, which seemed as good a place as any to put down roots for a while. I found an apartment above a fish market in downtown Northampton, next to a Chinese restaurant, and set about the task of making friends. Soon, I heard about a nearby Buddhist center that did silent meditation retreats like the ones she had told me about. Vipassana.

My second decision made itself: I was going to sit.

On the grounds of this particular Buddhist center, when a retreat is in session, the front lawn is full of people walking in slow-motion, back and forth along their respective ten-foot meditation paths, none of them making eye contact with anyone else, none of them talking, heads down, literally treading lines into the grass. Think 1950s psychiatric hospital meets school for the deaf and mute, with vague overtones of a probably benign (but you never do know) cult. When I became, at least temporarily, one of those weirdos treading his own paths into the grass (yogis, they called us, or yoginis), I couldn’t help but wonder what the people in the passing cars were thinking of me. There was a lot of that, a lot of thinking about me, Me, ME, there in the mind-magnifying field of that silence.

I arrived at the center never having sat for more than forty-five minutes at a time, and maybe just a few dozen times in my life, total. We were supposed to wake up around five in the morning and meditate till nine at night. We did get to eat breakfast and lunch (no dinner, if you were hardcore, which of course I was, or wanted to be), and we got to listen to a dharma talk at night, but every other moment was dedicated to meditation: sitting meditation sessions, walking meditation sessions, and the meditation you were supposed to do in between sessions. In-betweening, one teacher called it. So really, there was no end to it. Even during the meals we were supposed to be paying attention to our breath, watching the mind. Practicing.

Meditation, as far as I understood, had to do with something called enlightenment. What enlightenment was, I didn’t know, but I did know, somehow, or believed, that I didn’t have it, and that I should want it, and also that I had to work hard for it, fight for it if need be. Anthony was hot on the path to enlightenment, and I would be goddamned if he was going to get there first. So, I would do what I had to do. I would sit in the retreat, and the universe would somehow alert her to this news, and she would reach out to me. It had to be her now, to reach out. It couldn’t be me. I wanted to respect her decision, and also give self-respect the old college try.

Meditating was difficult. We were supposed to just follow our breath, keep our attention focused on the air flowing in and out of our nostrils. I was quite embarrassed, even a little horrified, to discover that I couldn’t sustain my attention for more than a few seconds. Maybe half a minute, max, if I was honest. I couldn’t stop the mind from plunging headlong down endlessly branching rabbit holes of thought, into the intricate stories made up of those thoughts, entire worlds, especially the world in which she and I ended up moving into a little cottage on the English coast in a town with an unpronounceable name like Ilfracombe or Aberystwhyth and we’d watch the sunset over the ocean like we did at the end of that hike up Twin Peaks where I held her back against my chest and…Ahh! Back to the breath, Jesus Christ. Let it go, man, just let it go. But I couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t just be here now like Ram Dass told me to do in the book she told me to read.

So this was what they meant by “suffering.” This struggle against reality. This resistance to what was, what is, what’s actually happening. What was actually happening? I was sitting in a meditation hall. That’s all that was happening. The rest was made up.

At one point, the guy behind me in the meditation hall started talking out loud, cursing. “You son of a bitch,” he muttered. “You fucking son of a bitch.” The hall was utterly silent except for his fervent whisperings. I simultaneously felt compassion for the man and better than him. Poor guy, I thought, he must be new to this, must be from New York or something, must be going through a divorce, maybe his buddy slept with his wife, must be hard, gosh, I’m glad I’m not him, amazing how some people just aren’t cut out for this…Jesus! Back to the breath, man. Just follow your breath. I mean, what the hell is wrong with you? You can’t even track your breath for ten seconds. You’re never going to be able to…Okay, really, though…Just back to the breath.

It was just like she said: “I feel there is much pain to come but i have to face it now.”

When I first read those words in her email, a certain smugness hid my fear of losing her and the anger that I could do nothing about it. Oh, sweetheart, I know what that’s like, to realize you have pain in there and that you have to face it. I remember that. Yeah, that was hard. But you know what, I survived it, and so will you. You’ll learn to love yourself, and I’ll be here waiting, and when you catch up we’ll get this show back on the road, m’kay? What I hadn’t counted on was that I had only just begun to work on myself. That there was more, much more, to face.

The Little Courtyard

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