Traveling a path paved with romance and realness
I love watching her sleep, listening to her deep breaths like the purr of a cat. I love the moment when she wakes, slips closer to my chest. I’ve never fit with anyone the way I fit with her. Clicking together like snaps on a western shirt. We hold onto each other through the night. Desperate not to let go or lose sight of one another—even in our dreams.
The light is just rising as I thumb through the Moleskine pages of notebooks in the Faulkner Room, our William Faulkner-inspired office packed with books, desks, and four typewriters. The pages fall gently with the last soft flakes of snow blanketing Chattanooga sidewalks. It’s a week before Valentine’s Day and my partner, the love of my life, is asleep in the bedroom.
I have a ritual of waking her up by whispering birdsong in her ears: Sweet Virginia, Sweet Virginia I call in one. Pretty Bird, Pretty Bird I sing in the other. I’ve given her nicknames to match each layer to her quirky personality. Buttons, Roller Coaster, Hot Rod. But Sweet Virginia is my favorite for this delicately fierce little bird. She calls me Jackson, sometimes Charlie. I never understood where Charlie came from—it’s not a family name and there is no funny anecdote on how it came to be.
“Sometimes you get this sweet, youthful look. A Charlie look,” she tells me.
For the last week, I’ve come into the Faulkner room around 3 a.m. to try to get some sleep. Our tortoiseshell cat, Percy, has decided this is the time she must be fed and I am the one that must do it. She’ll hop into bed and sit an inch from my face, and stare. It’s a bit terrifying, especially when she hovers over my ear, breathing. From time to time she snorts, shaking drops of drool on my ear and cheek. While I love the cat, her affection can drive me out of bed.
My mind is made up that Percy and Sweet Virginia watch too many Lifetime movies and the cat has concocted some divide and conquer scheme. As soon as I go into the next room, the cat contents herself upon my pillow and falls asleep next to my wife. So I’ve been spending a lot of time surrounded by typewriters and old notebooks scribbled full of memories. Star-crossed love letters, really.
We are both writers and performers. In spite of the inherent moodiness of artists, being artists together is a romance in itself. That passion brought us together five years ago. She’d seen me play harmonica once at a literary festival in Baltimore. A mutual friend told her I was an author and had a book coming out. She wanted to interview me for a literary journal she edited and asked to meet for coffee. I’d never met her, but she won me over in her email: “I am from Kentucky, love bourbon, horses, and I am part Cherokee.”
I shared this introduction with a bandmate and she said, “Uh-oh.”
I remember the first time I saw Sweet Virginia. Of course, I could barely make eye contact with her over that cup of coffee. Her natural beauty intimidated me into a loss for words. But it was more than her appearance. Before we even shook hands I felt like I’d known this person my entire life. What was supposed to be a 45-minute conversation turned into three hours. I’m not sure we moved to get a refill on our coffee. And I’m not sure that we really talked about the book.
What proceeded was a flurry of writing songs, stories, and plays together. Falling in love together. Being in a position where we maybe shouldn’t have fallen in love. But we allowed, indulged in even, some kindred romance of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Sam Shepard and Patti Smith. Or was she my Jessica Lange? We drew all comparisons and all seemed to fit, like us.
But it’s not enough to fall in love—or for that matter BE in love—we have to be loving. We found ourselves in a wild world much like Romeo and Juliet. Some friends and some family did not back our whirlwind of emotions. We were cast out in the middle of America where the sky is so low it can almost reach down to touch the corn tassels. So we found logical jobs for unemployed writers: selling cookware at county fairs across the Midwest and South.
Banging pots and pans for audiences at live cooking demonstrations brought us to Chattanooga by roundabout way of Baltimore and Natchez, Mississippi. As it turns out, selling designer skillets next to hog-calling competitions is not lucrative. Times were hard, as they say. We’d argue on the road to the next Howard Johnson, but we both wanted the same thing—to be home in Chattanooga where the company, and fate, had originally placed us.
“Let’s turn this around” became our mantra to soften tempers. I remember the last road trip with a cargo of cookware when she beamed a smile wide enough to fill the Mid-Western landscape racing with the sun rising over the Mississippi River. We would take yet another leap of faith, quit our jobs, and try again. This time, rooted once and for all in Chattanooga. With a cat who isn’t going anywhere either.
We’re all looking for some secret to what keeps us in love, loving, once we’ve found it. I write to try to find answers for myself, but that too is a process. And maybe relationships are part process and part emotion.
She casts her spell. Reels me in. Comforts all these outlaw emotions pulsing through thin skin. This is what she fell for. She focuses the canvas of my breath. Shows me how to breathe through bluesy eyes that match hers. It’s clear, the story twisting in the burnt fleck resting inside her azure iris, the ever-curving movement of her powerful runner’s legs, longer than they are given credit for—a narration of unlicensed calculation of every inch of beauty and insecurity.
A light trot step, boot heel clap, click of sleek neck, tilt of a straw-thatched cowboy hat, peach braid above the brim for flare. Muscle memory. Everything learned from buried losses and reaped from what has grown. She knows that all of her innocence is delicately suspended by air and could crash to the earth at any moment. She owns every inch of her complicated skin. Let’s turn this around. Code for: This is our story. Others be damned.
Cherokee and Irish blood mixing and boiling. Scarred animals prone to bitter defenses, prowling and growling, probing to see which one might snap first and spit and run under the weight. In our own way. No, let’s turn this around. We fell in love head first with our heels kicking and laughing. That is what we fight for. Yes, let’s turn this around. This recognition hangs like a sweet C note your ears want to hold onto forever.
I wonder what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet had lived. They were married. Their parents weren’t fond of each other. Most likely, they would have been outcasts, scorned by friends. They’d have no financial resources. They may have been like us, banished from the fair city of Verona and selling pots and pans in Mantua.
Traveling through these love letters this is what I’ve discovered. The more you forget about yourself the more your partner will remember you. Often, arguments are two people saying the same thing and resolution is found in the respect of where the other person is standing. There are always going to be bad days. William Faulkner said, “You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.”
Know your motives and what your goals are. “The self drives motives, the partnership drives goals,” Sweet Virginia has told me. And be humble. Admitting you are wrong is great but conceding that you may be wrong even if you know you are right—you can turn everything around.
I’ll be blowing harmonica on Valentine’s Day this year. I play my heart out for this woman every day. Occasionally, I’ve been known to miss a beat. Sometimes I’ve hit the wrong note. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, tomorrow is another day to try to get it right. These are some words I wrote down in my journal just before the new year. And I hope I got them right:
Tip toes are thunder
Laughter is lightning
In our collision of constellations
Stars are bathed in the whisper of snow that blankets the path to be discovered.
— Love Charlie.
Every once and awhile Sweet Virginia says, “You talk too much.” Sometimes when you don’t have the words, I love you might be enough.