A Winter of Despair in the Shadow of Rainier

Reflections on love gone cold

To meet a really cool girl in a really cool way; and then to like her more and more, every single day.

A house Once a home Now abandoned to the elements Now rescued, only to fall again into limbo. A home? A broken dream?

They say that half of all marriages fail. They also say marriage is the leading cause of divorce. It turns out both are true.

I guess it’s comforting in a way, knowing you’re no different than all the rest. But at the same time, it makes you feel like a goddamned statistic; a walking cliché.

It’s sad not to know a girl’s soul. What drove her to this state? But it’s equally sad to know it — its dreams and desperation. And to then feel responsible for it, as though to know it is to have adopted it. And then to realize it’s neither your place nor within your wheelhouse to fix.

It’s like she’s seeking a flaw to pounce on. Now I feel like being the caricature she’s drawn me as.

I can be a shoulder to cry on but will not be an eternal punching bag.

Every time she gets pissed off at me, I fall ever-so-slightly more out of love.

You know that feeling when you’re sitting there, and you’re talking to a girl, and you’re feeling warm and fuzzy and good, feeling a definite chemistry, a connection. And then there’s a brief, fleeting, magical moment when your eyes lock, and your lips pucker, and a kiss is mutually imminent, inevitable, like an outside force has possessed you both, like all will be right with the universe if this simple yet loaded act is consummated.

Yet it’s not inevitable; it can still be aborted, can still go sideways and be nothing more than a fleeting fancy, a delusion, a one-sided momentary mistaken longing.

And sometimes you even sense all of the above for a mere instant in the eyes of one for whom it’s hopelessly inappropriate and doomed to be unrequited, and there’s a confusion and questioning sadness; and then it passes and it’s as if it never was.

And that’s the aching beauty and frustration and madness of it. And that’s what makes human interaction so wonderful. Everything that’s absent from imposed or undesired solitude.

Values and visions change, or change in importance, and people then drift apart, or clash and cause irreparable damage. Familiarity becomes the death of passion.

But ever onward. Nihilism, hedonism, rinse and repeat.

Colby Hess is a freelance writer and photographer from Seattle, and author of the freethinker children’s book The Stranger of Wigglesworth.

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