Deserving
Henry Miller didn’t deserve Anaïs Nin.
Diego Rivera certainly did not deserve Frida Kahlo.
Henry did a nice job of professing adoration (mostly sexual) to Anaïs, but, as a writer, he was a paper plate. Anaïs is the deepest, clearest ocean, where you see and feel infinity, fall in love with it in awe and without fear. No wonder he was obsessed. He lived in a persistent state of vasovagal reaction.
Diego’s art was prolific in concept, scale, and ego, but he didn’t deserve a romance with Frida’s genius and vibrancy. He eventually consumed her entirely—apt because of his girth. What a fool. As if he could trap her in his enormous body and infuse himself with a modicum of her brilliance. It lived outside of her physical being. Ugh, dear Frida; he truly didn’t deserve you.
If I had been friends with these unmatchable women, titanic women, enrapturing women, I would have always wanted to save them from their hunger and theft of their inadequate partners. I would have loved them but languished and mourned every time they emerged attached to their succubus.
Recently, I spent time with two of my dearest, closest friends with whom I have likely traveled many lives.
For one, I feel like we’re going through an ebb period in our friendship. She’s pulled away from me and settled into a different group of humans for love, friendship, and support. I don’t take it personally—although that’s my initial response. I really want to take it personally. I want it to be about me because I am hurt by finding myself outside the scope of “important people” in her life.
But it’s not about me. I know she isn’t personally and specifically casting me away or aside. I know her life is hardening in ways that are overwhelming and scary, and I know that sometimes my love isn’t a soft place to land so much as it is a granite castle wall. My instinct is to protect people from what’s hurting them, but what gives me the right to dictate when someone needs protection? Sometimes people need acceptance and an open heart, not rejection and a raised bridge. Not that I was rejecting her. More so, rejecting the needs fulfillment, the empathy she cedes to the people that are hurting her.
I asked aloud, “Why?” It really wasn’t a a fair or friendly question; it made her defensive. Why shouldn’t it? To be asked why can sometimes feel like someone isn’t asking why you’re choosing to do what you’re doing but instead why you’re so dumb for choosing to do what you’re doing. Of course, in this friendship of a thousand lives, I am never implying her stupidity. But I am implying something. Typically, I’m implying that others are not worthy of her; they are undeserving of her. They have never and could never earn the right to hurt her or disenchant her or anything negative her because they couldn’t hope to reflect even 1% of her spectacular being. The fact she’s allowed them as much time and space in her life is something of which they should be in deference—and yet.
Our astute observer, Anaïs famously wrote, “You cannot save people. You can only love them.” I’d awkwardly amend, “You can only love them in the ways they need and want to be loved. And love is not always protection.”
The last brings me to my second sister/friend/time-traveler. In our friendship, I’m consistently surprised by the depth and breadth of her being. Outwardly, she sometimes deploys a naive or overly compliant persona, bordering on the submissive, but she is far more observant, calculating, independent, and resilient than the woman men have fawned over since she was still too young to be called a woman.
Empty men with shallow, dark hearts will lose themselves in her dazzling smile, find comfort in the warmth of her wholesome charm, finally relax in the effortless fun she offers with open hands to all in her orbit. Empty, broken men seek her out as if she were the last beam of lighthouse light breaking through black, storm-pregnant clouds of their weak minds.
Her mind is not weak. And she is not their beacon of salvation. When they find this out they get so angry. This woman was supposed to fix everything they couldn’t fix within themselves, just by virtue of them having so great a “thing”—her. But my friend has never let herself be anyone’s trophy.
//…unfinished thoughts, but more to come.//
