carousel of guilt

Years ago, we assembled for a dinner draped in the finery of celebration, a tableau of faces and lives arrayed for the occasion. Even then, amid the swirl of conversation and clinking glasses, there was the flicker of something in me, a quiet, insistent pulse. A crush, if one must name it so crudely. I told a friend, in the casual way one might let slip a secret, of my growing attraction to S. She, delighted with the role of conspirator, promised to watch him, to see what I could not. But S. did not come. How could he, his body fevered and quarantined, prisoner to the invisible invader of the times? The evening passed, leaving him a specter, absent but profoundly felt.

The years that followed moved not in leaps but in slow, measured steps. Yet between S. and me, the air thickened, a quiet current pulling us ever closer, though we spoke nothing of it until we did. We acknowledged it at last, but not as lovers might, with reckless abandon or fervent declarations. No, we dissected it, laid it on the operating table like some exotic specimen. Transference, we called it, reducing our tangled emotions to the sterile vocabulary of the profession. Chemicals, hormones, neurons firing in the brain, each interaction between us no more than a physiological equation. How clever we were, how safe we felt behind the clinical terms we had so neatly assembled, as if that could protect us from the thing itself.

But there comes a point when logic frays, when even the most carefully constructed walls begin to crack. The tension between us, once manageable, began to swell, grew ravenous. Every meeting became fraught, a test, as if we were both the subjects of some cruel, cosmic experiment. I began to wonder: Was Satan himself at work here, using one of us to lure the other away from God? Had we become pawns in some darker game, neither of us willing to admit how far we had strayed from the light?

And so, after one particularly unbearable encounter, we met outside, beyond the familiar confines. We cataloged the reasons why this, why we, could not happen. We laid out our defenses with the precision of architects, discussing the strategies we would employ to avoid the inevitable collapse. The conversation was long, exhaustive, and useless. When the alarm chimed on the phone, signaling the end of our allotted time, a wave of panic washed over us both. In that frenzied moment, without a word, we undid every measure we had sworn to uphold. The dam broke, our defenses crumbled into dust.

Since then, our encounters have become a sort of exquisite torment, a delicate balance of proximity and restraint. We circle one another, never quite touching the fire, but feeling its warmth, knowing we could, if we chose, plunge into its consuming flame. This dance of ours, this game of denial and indulgence, has become its own form of punishment. A penance for the sins we haven’t committed, but might, at any moment. Every other day, I resolve to end it, to sever the thread that binds us. But then, ah, then, he pulls me back, with some gesture or turn of phrase, and I almost, almost, believe in love.

I think of the words I offered when we parted with our foreign exchange student, sending him back into the world with a motherly aphorism, worn smooth by years of use: “Always do the right thing, whether you want to or not. Your conscience will grow silent if you ignore it.” How often that same advice echoes in my mind now, each time the phone buzzes with a message, each time I am drawn to S. when there is no reason, no justification beyond my own desire. I hear the whisper of hypocrisy in my own thoughts, and yet, still, I am pulled toward him. Still, I cannot stop.