Strange Embrace
Oh, Man: Excerpts (Part 1)
Oh, Man is a book I’ve been working on for the past four years, a memoir of stories and reflections on masculinity. I’m sharing excerpts here as a way of opening up my creative process. Thanks for reading.
(Paid subscribers can scroll to the end to listen to my reading of this piece).
After a gut-wrenching breakup around my 30th birthday, I flew to London to convalesce with my brother, Luke, who was studying abroad there. Luke is ten years younger than I, but around that time of the breakup he began to feel like an older brother to me. The kid knows how to listen. Every summer we spend a week hiking together on the Appalachian Trail in New England. He’s a quiet one, a still waters run deep kind of guy, so it can take some time on the Trail before he shows himself to me, and it’s always a surprise when he does, like a big, beautiful buck suddenly emerging from the treeline at dusk, illuminated by the light of our campfire. He really is a glorious young man, a man whose diapers I used to change, the only man I trust with every atom of my being, and if it came down to it I would die for him without hesitation, as I know he would for me. It’s like that, a medieval, martial love.
That summer on the Trail, just a week before my breakup, Luke listened ruthlessly, giving me no quarter, while I stumbled my way word by word into the realization that my girlfriend-at-the-time was not the love of my life after all. Bringing this into consciousness was like passing some kind of spiritual kidney stone. The realization cascaded into more realizations: Our garden would have to be turned under. Our home, divided packed up. Our dreams, euthanized like the sick puppy from Kentucky who started dying just a few months after we adopted her.
Our first day on the Trail that summer, I couldn’t look Luke directly in the eyes, such was my fear of the truth. But truth is the language we speak to each other, so eventually it started coming out of me, helplessly, unstoppably, emerging from the trees one night fireside. Luke just listened, the way mountains listen. He really is a mountain, to me.
After our hike, Luke flew off to London to begin his semester, and I began the breakup. The breakup took about two months. The day after I finally moved out, I wasted no time in flying to London to be with my mountain. We were both lonely in our own ways. Luke had never been alone so far from home. My man was struggling. Didn’t say so, but I could tell by his tone, hear it in the space between his words. His solitude was working on him. Aloneness wasn’t a stranger to me. I myself had spent lots of time alone in my twenties, but now, post-breakup, my aloneness had a dark quality to it. Our solitudes needed each other.
We decided to take a long weekend trip out to the west coast of Ireland, because Ireland was the land of our ancestors, and maybe I’d fall in love with the place, or even better, with an Irishwoman, and maybe I wouldn’t have to go back to America to deal with the rest of whatever it was I might have to feel back there. I could just begin again in Ireland, pick up the story where my forebears had left it, where I would’ve belonged if they’d stayed. I didn’t know their stories. Maybe they left because they, too, didn’t want to feel something all the way through, figured it’d be easier to just leave it all behind.
The roads from Dublin slowly narrowed as we approached County Clare in our rental car, to the point that I was genuinely surprised every time we passed another vehicle without shearing off a mirror. Wending through hedges and hillsides, we watched ancient stonewalls march their unmoving marathons across treeless fields, built by ancient hands and ancient backs and ancient legs all long since surrendered to the ancient soil, to become living grass, to become living sheep, to become the flesh and blood and bones of those descended from the ancients. Us. Or if we didn’t try the lamb stew, then maybe we’d buy wool sweaters. Or just post a few selfies on Instagram with our ancestors-become-soil-become-grass-become-sheep in the background. This was our home, or something like it. We’d never been before.
The west coast of Ireland happens quite suddenly in County Clare at the Cliffs of Moher. The land just stops, ends, drops almost a thousand feet straight down to the sea. It was near sunset when we arrived. The old gods were out, the sky banshees screaming and the sea titans heaving, the wind a howling fury so powerful we had to get down on our hands and knees to approach the precipice. There was no fence there at the end, the beginning, the vertiginous threshold of life and death. I could feel myself almost lifted up, almost wanted to be, imagined myself scooped by the great invisible hand of the wind and tossed out into the raging airstream shooting up the face of the cliffs. I would be carried skyward, like the seafroth and the seagulls, higher and higher, far away from this terrestrial mess called loneliness, called bewilderment, called what am I doing with my life and why am I alone again and how am I going to go on. What would it be like, to just drop? What an extraordinary way to go that would be.
“I don’t want to live an average life,” I said to Luke once, when I was about as old as he was now and when he was still a boy. “I just don’t want to be average. I want to be extraordinary.”
“Andrew,” he said, “average is good.” Maybe he was always my big brother.
We locked eyes in the tempest on the cliffs and roared. The wind was so loud we could hardly hear each other.