How to Tame Your Self

You’ll meet on match.com. For your first date, he'll suggest making you his famous lasagna from scratch at his place, to lure you in before you're ready. You will be alert and almost never meet him at all until he also suggests a restaurant. You'll arrive exactly at 8:00 p.m. and wait outside for him. You'll be on the lookout for someone almost six feet tall, bald, with light brown eyes. You've been on dates like these before, and you know that the person isn't always as advertised.

His profile picture could be in a beefcake magazine: him in his unbuttoned fire fighter coat, no shirt, the come-here eyes. And Thank God, you'll think when he appears: he looks just like his pictures. He'll approach, kiss you on the cheek, tell you that his tardiness is because he's a New Yorker, that he's accustomed to eating late. This is the second sign you will willfully ignore.

You will sit beneath the metal pendant which lights your table for two like an interrogation spotlight, and he'll up-turn his forearm so you'll see the tattoo. It's an ugly black hole from elbow to wrist with illegible writing. It reminds you of Voldemort's dark mark.

"What's that for?" You'll ask.
"It's a memorial of sorts."
"For?"
"I was in 9-11," he'll say, and you won't correct him though you'll think, at.
You'll remind yourself that you want to have babies with someone before you're forty, that you regularly spend money on massages just to be touched, that after ten years with someone whose back was broken and repaired twice, you literally want to be thrown around. You are horny, after all, and if nothing else, you simply want some cock. You are finally beginning to feel attractive again, almost free of the story in your head resulting from your ex not wanting to fuck you for years.

The New Yorker, you remind yourself, is not your ex. This is real, live, man meat. You'll forgive him his clunky accent. You find him sexy. He is muscly and he isn't wearing cargo shorts: your ex's uniform. In fact, the absence of this particular article of clothing will turn you on more than you thought possible. He also has a perky, round ass, which you'll appreciate when he excuses himself to the men's room. He is triangular with broad shoulders the shortest side of an Isosceles. You can tell his chest isn't hairy because the forearm hair was blonde and fine. He looks like Pit Bull on steroids, and he's hapa, like you: half Swedish, half Puerto Rican, which was part of your list.

He will look you in the eyes, like a promise.

"I only date one person at a time," he'll say, his perfect teeth glinting, his small eyes disappearing as they shut. "I believe in monogamy. And besides, I'm going off match tomorrow."

"Interesting," you'll say, impressed. "So tell me more about the memorial on your arm."

"I was there," he'll say. "It was my first day on the job."

"So you're a hero," you'll say.

"No," he'll say, "but I worked with hero's."

"Just like Dick Winter, just like Band of Brothers."

He will stare at you, dumb and expressionless.

"You know, Dick Winters? Who had out-takes at the end of some episodes, and talked about how only the men who died were the hero's, even though he got them through the rough stuff, even though he saved so many and was so brave."

"Yeah," he'll say, reluctant, "I've seen it."

"I think he died this year. Or last," you'll say, forgetting for a moment that you're there with him and not talking to yourself. "I've watched that series so many times . . ." You won't mention the part about how your ex insisted the first time, after your father's death. It was the

first time you tried on immersing yourself in someone else's story to dull your own. Because without your dad living, breathing, being, you had to find another North. You were compass-less, which is why your mom was so happy you'd had your ex.

"He's the tether to you. He's the steady thing."

"I guess," you'd said, realizing what she thinks of you, glimpsing how she's afraid for you for the first time.

"I'm jealous. I wish I had someone like that, who accepted me like he does you."

You'll think of your dad, how he was an anvil and not a tether, how he was a mallet, always trying to tenderize everyone. Then you'll think of your ex, and that day when you fought. You'd just planted a kalo plant outside your bedroom, realizing that nothing would ever grow there unless it was accustomed to always being swamped.

"You're just like your father," your ex had said. It had felt like a falling from the jungle gym straight on your back when you were a kid, the air sucked from your lungs.

"Lionel." he'd said, distain sopping from his tone.
"You're the one who encouraged me to talk to him."
"Yes," he'd said, searing his eyes into yours. "And I will regret that for ever."
After your dad was gone, you couldn't get out of bed except for work. You'd come home

and weep, wake up and weep. Your tears were private, your mourning was personal. Except that he saw you. Your ex would let you be, would not pep-talk you from your despair, your heave-crying, your utter emptiness. His father had passed, too, the year before you'd married, and he knew something about loss you were just learning.

Together, you visited Normandy with it's impossibly long beaches, Bastogne with its biting cold. You both attended the 60th anniversary of D-Day and watched the paratroopers drop from the same silk chutes, like dandelion feathers. You visualized the landing boats on Omaha Beach and the men falling like mown grass. Outside Bastogne, you saw the great, old trees that

lined the Battle of the Bulge, imagining them exploding like matchsticks, dirt raining from the sky, gunpowder like fire works, shrapnel and smoke. Your loss was not that bad.

You'll wait to fuck the New Yorker. Dating him, you'll reason, is a lesson in patience, a way to incinerate your utter lack of that trait. His bedroom will have one window with a black pillowcase hanging from some safety pins, and there will be mirrors on the closet doors so you can watch him fucking you. He can watch, too. There will never be moonlight. You'll wait for his lasagna, which isn't as good as the one at Buena Sera in Kailua, which isn't better than the veggie kind you buy frozen. You'll wait for him to tell you that he loves you because that is what you're accustomed to. You'll wait too long for this, give him too many chances because you feel like you deserve him wanting you.

He'll call to fuck, which happens only once a week, which isn't enough, and afterward, he'll hold you, stroking your arm or leg or hip gently, like calming a tiger. He will talk for hours about what he's lost. He'll tell you about Afghanistan and trying out for the Navy seals, which was his dream. He'd sprained his ankle and that derailed his chances. He'll tell you about moving to Hawaii with the Marine Corps, about racing the wrong way on the freeway in his teens and being molested by his babysitter when he was nine, about watching his father snort cocaine and watching his best friend die after a stabbing in Tijuana.

He will tell you about walking into a bar in his fire fighter uniform after 9-11 and picking willing, strange women to fuck in the bathroom, about partying and drinking and trying to forget the reason getting pussy was so easy. He'll tell you more, but you'll be fluttering in and out of sleep, wanting to remember, but too tired to write it down. He won't sleep at all.

Mornings you'll wake tired. You'll find him playing Halo, play-murdering people on the screen. You'll watch, imagining the casual way he went to work that 9-11 morning and the people he saw, talked to, touched, and laughed with, and how it felt to watch them die. He'll describe the sound a body makes when it hits the pavement, "like a balloon popping." He'll

recount bits of fire truck flying through the air, like broken toys, and rain made of paper and copier trays and telephone receivers. You will see the world blanketed in gray dust.

When he asks you to write his story, you'll agree even though your girlfriend says, "that's a lot of work," and "are you sure you're ready for this?" But you believe that writing his story will help him heal, and you want to forget about how your ex-husband is still living in your house even though you've told him he should go back to Belgium, back to people who love him, that you do not any longer.

You will watch old episodes of Rescue Me with Denis Leary so much, you'll sometimes forget. You'll see the widow fucking her husband's best friend while her husband's ghost watches as you fall to sleep. You will dream of that scene and not holding hands with your ex under the small lights of Saint Mere Eglaise. You won't dream of the inn at the end of the driveway lined with rose bushes or the long windows overlooking the gardens or the wood floors or how he loved you or the baritone of his loving or who will love you now you've stopped loving him.

You will write four chapters. Each page will feel like you are cutting yourself. You will be fascinated and distracted. Your ex's cheeks just after he'd shaved won't occur to you, the soft way he'd search from your milky forearm to find your hand won't come to mind, nor the way you fell asleep each night with his palm on your hip. You won't think of the dimples in his cheeks or the light greenish eyes with yellow flecks like a cat's.

When you go out, the New Yorker will take you to the movies, but you'll never get to pick. He will buy your popcorn and mochi crunch. You will watch movies about the world ending and being taken over by aliens, about soldiers and super heros. Outside the movie theater, just before the last movie you see together, he will ask you to sit for a minute in the car because he's got something to tell you. Then he will say his secret. He has an eighteen year-old daughter in New York who has a brain tumor. She is going to die soon. She won't talk to him. She hates

him. He'll say he was married once, too. You will pretend not to be shocked, pretend not to see the whole of him, not to pity him.

"I'm so sorry," you'll say, wondering why he is telling you this, wondering if it's because you're writing his story. But this is tragedy compounded. It's unreal, as if he's a dumping ground for shitty stuff to happen. It's too much for one person to bear, you'll think. And you'll advise him to go see her before it's too late, to ask if he can help.

He will do neither.

It is then that the questions you had since the beginning will flash like emergency lights. You'll wonder about why he lives in a building that requires escorted entry and exit, not just the front door, but the elevator, too; why he has two parking spaces and only one car; why you only see him on Saturdays.

After four or six months of seeing him, it will be the anniversary of 9-11 and he will disappear for days. "It never gets easier," he'll explain. Later, he'll tell you he's been asked to receive an award at a ceremony at Pearl Harbor. He'll show you the article in the paper, then say he does not want you to attend. That day during the ceremony, you'll watch the sunlight soften and lose its heat through the louvered glass windows. You will weep convulsive, all- encompassing sobs into your pillow because you are now living in your mother's house, waiting for your ex to leave, waiting for him to let you go. This is worse than losing your father, you'll think, worse than any pain you've ever felt. You'll feel like you are being ripped from the inside with a back hoe.

Days later you'll find coconut conditioner in his bathroom, even though he is balding and shaves his head. He'll say it's because he likes the smell, but he won't explain why the shampoo he claimed to have bought for you didn't do the same. Weeks later you'll find translucent cloth bags of necklaces lying on the kitchen counter with this scribbled list:

mom

christina
diana
jodee
"Who's Diana?" you'll ask, consciously trying to control your voice, noticing there is a

shrill upturn on the "iana" part. "Ooh, watch out," he'll say.

"Who is it?" you'll repeat, forcing a laugh.

"Listen to that tone. Strident," he'll say, which is a word you've defined for him a couple of days ago.

"What?"
"Who's Diana?" he'll mimic.
You'll talk on the phone a week or two later. The cell phone heated up making the side of

your head sweat. The display read "47:05" when you hung up and noticed the hot tears coming down and pooling in your left ear canal.

He will tell you the reason he didn't want to make out with you the last time was because he wasn't feeling it. By "it," he means you.

"I didn't think you'd react this way," he'd said just before hanging up.
"Neither did I."
He won't have admitted he has cheated on you, not ever.
A few weeks later, you'll meet him at the Japanese Garden at UH Manoa, behind

Kennedy Theater, and the bamboo will shade you. There are lava rocks and large stones, but he has chosen the grass, so you sit with him there cross-legged, facing him. He is wearing a green t-shirt and cargo shorts.

"I wanted to get out of your way so Mister Right can come along."

You will smile instead of arguing with him, instead of telling him you know what's best for you and not him.

He will give you a check for writing his story and thank you for your work. You have asked him for this payment because processing his story has meant daily visits to Bikram Yoga on 12th Avenue, which was expensive. That's where you wrung your limbs and internal organs. That's where you stared at yourself in the mirror and recognized yourself as god and creator, where you understood that this now was all your choice, that you can't blame anyone for what you needed to do. And each time you emerged sweating as if getting out of a pool, you'd known that your lessons in patience have taught you compassion, have helped you remember that no matter what, there are things inside you to love.

You will smile, pretend you didn't heave-sob on the phone previously, that you have some pride left, that you didn't conflate your divorce with him breaking up with you. And you will hug goodbye, his broad chest muscles pressing into your breasts. You'll wish you'd paid more attention the last time you fucked.

Months later, you'll see him at Lanikai Juice, where you happen to be meeting your girlfriend. Seeing him will feel like you've been ambushed, will make you flush red in the face, suddenly hot.

In that cool, air conditioned store sitting there with your acai bowl, he will interrupt your conversation with your girlfriend to say 'hello.' The urge to sprint will be strong.

"Hey," you'll say, breathing out with intention, willing your heart to slow. You've practiced appearing at ease your whole life, so you'll sit back, rest your arms on the back of your chair, open your chest, and straighten up despite the urge to slouch, despite wanting to protect your heart.

"What are you doing on this side of the island?"

"This is my island." You stare at him, unblinking. "I belong here. You should go back to yours." You will say it smiling, humphing, and he will smile, too. But it won't be a joke. You will see the recognition of this in his eyes.

After he leaves with his kale and green apple smoothie, with his oat cake and sweaty t- shirt and his stubbled, unshaven head, your girlfriend will say,

"Look at yourself. You won."
And even you will know this without her saying it, "Really? You think so?" you'll ask. You'll know something else, too: you escaped.