The Perfect Trap

Is There Really Just One Perfect Person for You?

I went to see a voodoo priestess once in New Orleans.

It was my friend’s idea. She wanted to get a reading done, and we were together, so I went too. I had just broken up with someone, someone who had meant a lot to me, and who I was hoping to someday reconcile with.

Priestess Miriam (yes, that was her name) told me I would be married within the year (she was right). I asked if it would be to somebody I already knew. She said no.

She was right about that too.

But the way she answered was interesting. It’s one of the few things I remember from the reading. When she told me I wouldn’t marry somebody I knew, she sort of paused. She cocked her head, like what she was seeing wasn’t quite straightforward, and then said, “No, you are going to have to come full circle.”

And then she went back to the reading.

So, I wondered what she meant by “full circle.” But when I met somebody and got pregnant (yes, we were trying; no we weren’t married) less than a year later and then calculated back from the due date to the date when the baby would have been conceived, I realized it was a year to the day from when me and the “somebody I already knew” broke up and figured that was my full circle. That I had come full circle from the breakup and was starting a new life.

It seemed kind of kismet-y.

But things have a way of not being exactly what you think they’re going to be. Even though I was happy to be moving forward with my (yes, we did get married; yes, it was within a year of the reading) new husband and first then second then third then fourth child, I found that I never quite moved on from the “somebody I already knew.”

At least not in my heart.

On February 24, 2002, a little more than two months after the “somebody I already knew” and I had broken up, a review of Robert Altman’s Gosford Park appeared in the Sunday New York Times.

Altman’s movie ends like the long sigh of an old man who seems to know that contrary to everything we are taught to believe, we cannot always cheer up, move on, seek revenge, find replacements. Life goes on, but so does grief. And who is to say, after all, that an open wound is more painful than a scar?

— Kristen Hohenadel, The New York Times

I cut that review out and kept it in a box for twenty-one years. At some point, I misplaced the box (I’ve since found it) and contacted the New York Times to see if they could possibly send me a new copy (they obliged).

I was kind of nutty about that review.

I spent twenty-one years trying to disprove it. To disprove something I knew two months in. I spent twenty-one years waiting for a scar to become less painful (if I’m really honest, I spent twenty-one years waiting for an open wound to even become a scar). I spent twenty-one years trying to get over someone I knew right from the start I would never get over.

But kept trying to.

The “trying to” was what turned out to be my life.

I told my therapist today that I seem to have reached a sort of level ground, a firm and consistent terra upon which to stand. This is very different from the perpetually shifting sands I’m used to beneath my feet.

Part of this leveling is accepting that I’m not going to get over the “somebody I already knew.”

Nor am I going to be with him.

Somebody I know referred to this as a living grief. And I guess that’s what it is. But a consistent living grief, I think, is preferable to an inconsistent one, one where I go to bed every night hoping to find the grief diminished by morning only to wake up every morning to find that it hasn’t.

Part of this grief becoming consistent, ironically, has been accepting that my feelings are consistent too. That this love is love and that it’s not, thirty years in, going to fade into something less.

And so, I have come full circle. Full circle back to February 24, 2002 when I knew both that I was in love and that I was always going to be in love.

The difference is that then I thought maybe the “somebody I already knew” would be in love someday too.

And now I know he won’t.

A person can’t be perfect if they don’t want to be with you. No matter how much you want to be with them. And even if they do, however inexplicably, turn out to be the only one, it isn’t meant to be if you’re not the only one for them.

Which, as it turns out —

I’m not.