The Transformation Of Amy Lunaro: Chapter Two. {fiction}
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It had been in the middle of things, about two years in, when Amy and James had started to fall apart.
It was after the glory glow of their new love had begun to fade, when their swept off their feet love story was no longer enough to sustain them.
Then the body of their love begun to decay. And the house their love built began to feel fragile and hollow and haunted, like it could blow away with the wrong gust of wind. She began to overprotect it, didn’t let it breathe, and the love itself stopped living.
And a pallor of doom set upon them, a death-like wind always at their backs, one they could only pretend not to feel for so long.
When the shiny surfaces of their individual images were worn down and seen through by time, they were faced with each other’s internal dark seas, and they were in over their heads. It wasn’t that she ever stopped loving him, she loved him so much, sometimes he said too much.
He was often asking for breath under the heavy blanket of her love. She focused everything on him, abandoned herself, and then, well, then her resentment seeped in and it poisoned their well, she grew needy and starved for attention.
Only in hindsight had she started to realize that love was like a living thing itself, that maybe it needed to be watered and fed and given space and room to grow. That love itself needed love.
She had always thought it was curious the way the words live and love were separated by just one letter, and she was beginning to think there was no life without love, that nothing could live without love, that everything died without love.
Right after her parents divorced, her mother, alone with a broken heart, was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had stayed in bed after the heartbreak, and then came the cancer, and so Amy had associated heartbreak with death. In her mind, her mother had died without love.
They had found the cancer in her lungs, that place in the body that stores the stories of grief; the death of our dreams, the agony of things unsaid and love un-lived, the people we can no longer touch. Amy was so obsessed with the idea that she would die without James, she didn’t realize she already had.
Once on their apartment’s balcony overlooking 2nd Avenue, on a beautiful summer night, with the yellow taxis streaming below, a flesh-tickling breeze on their skin and cool drinks in their hands, but death in her belly and throat, he had asked her, “Where is the girl I fell in love with?” And right then he vocalized every fear she had had, that she had lost herself, and in turn lost him, and she had crumbled and said, “I don’t know,” and then hot tears, like lava, burned down her face, and she had ruined another night.
She had really really wanted to find her, to retrieve herself, she really wanted to get to the bottom of herself, before she ruined everything for good, but she just couldn’t break her own muddled surface. She didn’t have the tools to find herself.
She didn’t have the scythe to hack away at her own darkness. She was completely disempowered and repressed, and everything she did made it worse. It felt like being in the quicksand like in Princess Bride, but as if Prince Wesley had abandoned her in the Fire Swamp’s mud to save himself.
And she didn’t know you aren’t supposed to thrash around in quicksand. You’re actually supposed to breathe and stay calm, and lay back like you’re floating. Some would call it surrendering to the chaos.
But instead, when she was stuck and sinking in her own quicksand, Amy thrashed around like a drowning woman, which is exactly what she was.
James had also hoped one day she would just wake up fixed, just find herself, and start writing again, and finally finish the book and turn her own light back on, instead of being a ravenous moth to his flame.
Having a depressed wife, as a touring rock star, was a major drag, a super buzz kill. Every time she called or texted from the road, she acted out for attention until one day he finally likened her to a rescue dog he should never have adopted, a mistake he wanted to send back to the pound.
She remembered that conversation viscerally; she was on the vintage green couch in their apartment, in between glass two and three, and he was on the bus, in between St. Paul and Minneapolis, and the guys were roughhousing in the background of their conversation. The music was blasting, and the beers were cracking open; it was the soundtrack of that never-ending party at which she wished she could always be.
“So I’m the dog?” she had asked.
“Well, you know,” he had said, and she could feel his shrug, his apathy, like he was there, but not. She often had asked him, “Where are you?” when he was lying right there. And he would say, “Here,” like she was crazy, but with that far-off look in his eyes, making her only feel lonelier, because his body was there but his soul was somewhere else. It was as if she could touch him, but not touch him, and she had no idea how to express that to him. And the more she pulled at him, the more he pulled away. “I had the best intentions,” he said. “You were lost and adorable and I wanted to take care of you. But I’m just not up for the job. It’s too much.”
She couldn’t remember a time she felt less sexy or less empowered than her husband likening her to a rescue dog.
Every time he went on tour, her doctor was always upping her Klonopin dosage, which made her feel even more like a rescue with abandonment issues who needed to be treated for separation anxiety.
And because when he left the house for tour, she stopped leaving it too, she was even more like a dog who was too fearful to leave its crate. So yes, as usual his metaphor landed, but this one hurt like a bitch.
She had tried to suppress the truth of their doom, but it kept rising in her like the sun, that nagging way truth has of always refusing to be suppressed. Of eating you alive from the inside, like a wolf in a cage until you let it out. He finally ended it, like a mercy kill, when you kill something that is suffering and has no chances of survival. She would never forget that call from the road. “I’m not coming home and I never loved you.“
Amy brought the Wrangler to a four-cornered stop sign and looked around. The island was more beautiful than she remembered, with winding sand roads and green ragged cliffs that fell into the blue sea like the topography of Scotland or Ireland. It was… magical.
She had been on so many tours with the band, but they had never really left the hotel rooms or backstage areas. And now she wondered, had she been to Scotland? Maybe, but she had been that sleepy fuzzy pill drunk, her preferred lens on life, so tours were also a blur.
If you were clear and clean, you see your self and your life clear and clean, and that was the last thing she could handle, so she stayed sedated.
The bus would let the band out into the backdoor of venues, and the tour manager would lead them like moles down dark tunnels to where the booze sat ready for them on catered tables. Their life had been so very, very dark, but Amy romanticized it as glamorous.
But still, once, their hope had been so very, very bright.
James had written many songs about the loss of her light. Songs about her never coming true. They had hurt so stabbingly bad that she couldn’t help wondering if they were the truth. That she had not only failed him, she had failed in life. She wished she could just trade this one in for a new one.
She had ruined this one past the point of repair. And she would feel the pain of that for a second, but then she would swallow a pill and open the second bottle of wine and think, the next day, tomorrow, she would reclaim her light. That she would start writing again. That she would get off the medicine that was killing her and she would finish something.
But that someday just kept slinking away. She felt there was something quite cruel about an artist who told his adoring public about his feelings before telling the actual person whom he had those feelings about.
She didn’t know much about intimacy, but she thought it had something to do with telling the person you loved the truth, despite the consequences. Somehow though, she understood why he did it, why he could tell a sea of strangers who lapped us his every word like gold, because that was safe. And telling her, that was dangerous. There would be consequences. She could relate though, because it was the coward’s way out, and she herself had become a coward.
She hadn’t always been so tiny. She had been pregnant with potential, bursting with promise. But all that pressure on her potential broke her into pieces. Which is how she never ended up writing that book.
There had been so much blinding promise about the book deal, that it landed her an agent and a publicist. She was, according to Variety, going to be the Voice of a Generation.
She would write her story, from an intern at Rolling Stone fresh out of her small southern high school to working her way up the New York magazine circuit, to the Kings of Leon hotel parties and car service on Bon Jovi’s lap to marrying a rock star, and retiring at 26 to play housewife.
She used to live like she was always writing some story for the public, not actually living it for herself. She felt she owed that, as well, to her mother’s death, because that was the day she put that glass between herself and her life, and disengaged from it, didn’t actually live it.
She had thought living it was far too dangerous and painful, but now she realized it was the other way around. Not living your life is what will kill you.
On paper her life had been so cool. Great cocktail conversation, great fodder — once again, a great story. But as for a real life, for a real life it was a real fucking mess, so messy she lost herself in its fog.
Her agent had been kind about it for a while. “I get it,” she had said. “There’s too much smoke on the battlefield of your life. You need to wait until it clears to see.” Except that the smoke never did clear. And she never did write that book. And all that promise, well, all that promise disappeared in the smoke.
She had once felt brighter than the sun that shone onto her phone as she tried to read the directions to her house in the woods, by the ocean, away from the gogogo distraction of the city into the peaceful solitude of nature, where her therapist had begged her to rest until she felt better, and to avoid the tabloid glare.
Specifically her therapist had said, speaking from her chair with Amy sprawled out across from her on the beige leather couch, “The public just loves a downfall, and they’ll gobble you up, looking like…,” and then she snaked a finger through the air around Amy’s sweat-panted and dirty t-shirt clad form in pity, “… this.”
When her mother had died in their small southern town, for weeks people brought by big deep glass dishes of frozen casseroles. Big deep creamy cheese and noodle dishes that bubbled in the stove and made the house smell like a real home and comforted her so deep Amy soon walked around with a whole extra down layer on.
It was like in Lars and the Real Girl, when Lars is allowing his imaginary girlfriend to die so he might have a real relationship, and the women from the town come over with casseroles, and they say to him, “We came over to sit. That’s what people do when tragedy strikes, they come over to sit.“
Amy had never received so much attention as when her mother died. And she knew there was more than a little something to that.
All that presence around her finally, after a childhood of sitting alone, now there were people sitting with her and feeding her those warm gooey casseroles that momentarily filled the hole in her soul.
She had all those feelings to eat, and the more she ate, the more she felt a layer of protection between herself and the new terrifying reality. But then her mother’s sister, in town for the memorial, had pulled her aside into the dim hallway off the kitchen.
“I have a feeling that life has chosen to put a spotlight on you,” she’d said. “Your mother had the same thing. So you need to learn now that people are always going to talk about you. And it’s best to not give them anything…,” her eyes flickered up and down Amy’s body, “extra… to talk about.”
And that was sort of what her therapist was saying, now, that people were already talking, don’t give them all the gory details of the downfall. Fall apart in private. Go into hiding. Like a big fat depressed bear for winter. See who she was in the spring.
This is an ongoing series from a forthcoming fiction novel by Sarah Durham Wilson of DOITGIRL.
Tune in weekly for the next chapter in ‘The Transformation of Amy Lunaro’.
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