Carey, Bertina (Part Two)

No matter what one says about a failed relationship, it comes out as "savaging" the other person. And that is never what one means to say; but just saying the truth, as objectively and coherently as one can -- belies the truth. Perhaps that is true on the positive side as well.

Way back when, in the distant reaches of time, Bertina and I wrote letters to each other. It was after she had graduated from Interlochen, and before she came to visit me at school. She wrote well -- honestly and completely about her life in college -- though she never wrote the whole and complete story; she probably didn't want to scare me away from her. There were many results of her childhood trauma -- alcohol chief among them.  There were boyfriends, and crushes, and relationships that ended horrifically -- all of them I wouldn't know about until later. And we wrote more, even after our "almost affair" in and around Grunow theatre. 

Did Bertina have a crush on me then? Did I on her? Yes, I think so -- in both directions. As I got to know her much later (after 2007 -- 30 years later) I found out details -- men who tried to control her, men whom she loved but were not quite right for her or didn't want to marry her; some good situations, some bad. All of them told to me with both the good sides and the bad, though with emphasis on the bad. All this led to the possibility of an "us"-- could we really learn to be with each other -- for the first time, for real, in a "love kind of thing."

God I hoped so at the time. Even though I thought at times our experiences had led us in such different directions, and we didn't listen to each other closely enough. 

We competed to be lovers and both of us lost a little bit in the process. I never thought of myself as a very good lover, but I was always about "the other person." In many ways Bertina thought she was a good lover -- and she was all about the other person too as a way of fulfilling her own desires. It should happen naturally (I think) in her eyes. I'm not sure it ever did. It had been a long time since I had really worked with the physical side of love. And Bertina was seemingly much more experienced than I was.
I was not jealous of that, only worried that I could never keep up, or catch up, to where she wanted to go. That brought out observations, recriminations, and judgments that neither of us were experienced enough with the other to be able to make. And that was our big mistake -- presuming what the other person was doing, and then attacking them for it. Wrong words, too harshly said, too completely closed!