For Love or a Manuscript

By: Nicole Lockhart

A self-love story about pursuing your bliss and taking the risk to choose your happiness at any price.

“Are you alright?” he asks me.

I smile. My lover always knows when I’m sick or in a fowl mood. He even gets crampy once a month. The truth is I was fine moments before I texted him that Toni Morisson, literary Nobel laureate, had died. In middle school, I was a terrible math student who would sneak out of class and down to the library to read. In the section marked M, I find Morrison. As I combed the thick language of The Bluest Eye or Beloved, between the pages and paragraphs, she gathered the pieces of little black me and gave them back to me in all the right order.

I came to Paris to finish my manuscript. It was time to put to rest the five year endeavor to write a memoir. The job I resigned from two months prior served as more of a hindrance than a mentorship. There proved too little time in the day and too little gas in the tank to write even a mile of my memoir. Quitting is my way of giving myself permission to possess the dream, for one cannot carry the weight of ambition with hands perpetually full.

But I can’t sleep that night; a combination of anticipation and anguish, the likes of which keeps many a sojourner staring at the ceilings. Tomorrow I would arrive in Seville, meet my lover in a storybook alley after a month a part. The unfinished novel presses against my backpack as our lips meet in a precious embrace at last. My foggyeyed journalist looks at me as if awaking from a sueño, capturing the reunion with the same skill as his lens in fieldwork.

“I’d almost forgotten how to kiss,” he says.

I, ever the writer, could never lose the sensation and found ways over the month-long holiday to remind him how to trigger those blessed “tacqui cardias.”

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception,” says Baldwin’s David in Giovanni’s musty room.

stench of my own self-deception. Baldwin was a tortured writer when he escaped New York and arrived to Paris with $40 in a romanticized exodus to write. I idolize it. I envy it. So much so that I too traveled to Paris with less than a thousand dollars to my name. My companion, mon amor, as penniless as I, can, as lovers do at times, make a castle of our love. During the month, we are aglow with nights of wine and tapas for meals. Yet when the bill comes, the terror begins to quake. I lazily reach for my credit card, the dread of not knowing its limit with so many days ahead. It is our second time out together, and it is my turn to pay for our meal and I add an extra $9 USD for the conversion. I sign our bill, we take the hand of each other, and walk to bed.

“But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.” (Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room)

The power went out the last night in Seville before our 7 hour road trip west to a music festival in Portugal. We finish a bottle of Manzanilla and each taking turns asking questions.

“What would you do if this was your last night on earth?” he asks, his hazel eyes ablaze in the dark of my own. The truth is I wouldn’t ask for more than this. Few times before have I been contented with every part of life. This month, I decided not to play it safe, and wouldn’t change it—pennies and all. So when we fill our Fiat somewhere on the expansive highway that next day; I will ask the teller if she has change for a 50E, and I will not break over the bank that’s crying broke. I will not be ashamed.

On a leisurely stop in a mountain town, I offer an older woman a smile. She does not know me, but rues my holding the hand of my white partner. Her spit falls behind us as we pass. I do not admit how much my feelings were hurt until I get back to the car. It pains me to have escaped shame so briefly, something I try to explain to him from the passenger seat. But we have a responsibility to our blessings, to protect them--and true love is a blessing.

We ascend the Douro Valley with brilliant sunsets and vines cascading the hillsides. I hate traveling the unpredictable mountain roads and though his hand rests on my knee, I’d prefer he use it to help steer our tiny car which could at any turn combust like Camus on a holiday in 1960. “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Camus had with him the manuscript of his last book.

“Basking in the Osun River”

Photo via Designer Eliana Murargy // SS 2020 Collection

company of only shooting stars to entertain us. I count seven and my lover only one. I wish for more money. I wish for nothing. I wish for freedom, hope in wartorn countries, a proposal one day, to own a farm like this one, and a job when I return to the city. Yet swimming, encased in shadow, I recall the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tender is the Night.

“Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.” (Fitzgerald)

And I am living as I wish to be. Spending my days spoiled for beauty, making friends in foreign places, cooking from the earth which fed us. This farm-life sensibility shared by my urbanite lover. In sum this vacation will have people thinking I “fell off the Christmas tree,” as Jacek, our host, makes light. But pursuing one’s own happiness does not make us a wonky ornament no longer befitting the yuletide gayity of others. Indeed, I know people like our trio my lover, Jacek, and I, are the celebratory ones.

New York is beginning to feel like another me, the risk averse and calculated me. Yet the gambler I am sometimes persists to hope; although I am feeding my pennies in a machine, pulling a lever and praying for a big win to make up for what I’ve lost. I am jealous of the holiday ease of Europeans. The job-given ability to take a week or two and truly not work, leave emails unread, and connect with your life again. Here, and across the continent, they shutter even the most profitable businesses regardless of the tourists who simultaneously flood their streets during these weeks of rest. It is as if to say, “Hey Americans! Stop your errands, look around. Have your drink and really drink it.”

Seaside in Porto, bathing our tongues in green wine, we taboo conversation.. The good thing about having a true lover is that honesty is never so brutal, and it is as welcome as the ocean breeze over our lunch table.

“I wouldn’t’ve come on this trip if I couldn’t afford it.” he says. “The same is true of kids. I would want to get out of debt and make sure I could financially take care of us before that.”

There is at once a kick in my gut. Choosing one’s own happiness flavors of shame. I kiss my gorgeous man and swallow a sardine. We already agreed that children for us would wait for better financial situations. I admit two things for the first time. The first is that I had come on this trip in a financial pinch. The second was that early on in our dating I had worried about a pregnancy. But was I so opposed to life interruptions that I stiffen to the beauty of the unexpected? Some things are not so bad. I was not pregnant then--but if I was--would it be so bad? I may not find a job when I get back to the city, end up in a place-holder role once again, but maybe it

wouldn’t be life ending. No, I could not wait another day in the dead-end job while my aspirations stall like boats in the nearby harbor. We agree that it would be okay if we turn our pockets inside out and pool together to survive this month long holiday. It is my turn to cover the bill again, but this time I feel the truth has paid the price.

We drive into Montejaque behind a parade, a comical return to Andalucia’s providential region after the misfortunes of Portugal. I see why Hemingway and Welles favored these little hamlet towns tucked into the mountains. Following a night of partying with locals in the square, I finished my book. I sit numb and close the laptop, sans wifi, and recline. It is finished. A mountain makes a manuscript feel insignificant, makes a man know that all that he is, is but a mustard seed. Man can build his Alhambra, his palace grandioso, but he cannot build a mountain. In some ways it is a writer’s job to build both the mountain and the castle. At times I’ve made in to mountains of the wrong things (money, my career, people, etc). And yet I am beginning to realize that the view from the top is not better than the climb.

On our first day in Tangier we explain to our Moroccan friend that he only needs seven friends to be truly happy in life. Love, if done to the best of its power, is perhaps the only thing that is beautiful on both the journey and the mountain top. When I and my lover meet eyes, or palms, or lips, I know that we are both journeymen traversing together. And yet I still wonder if he will ask me to marry him, and even in my frequent fantasies I hold back the answer.

We contemplate renting an apartment here. Well, my lover isn’t so much for the idea, but I am told by a widow named Trudy that an apartment in Tangier would cost a mere $750 a month. Nevermind I haven’t a job to keep me here or that my French is less with each passing year. On our hotel roof we also made friends with two girls who confess to quitting their jobs in pursuit of artistic careers. And even though it was my third attempt to find myself in the same sea of doubts, I shine a light for them (as I wish someone had for me) and illuminate a path towards the answers we were all sailing for.

“Who am I,” I ask them. “If I am not who someone pays me to be?” Fear creeps in all of our eyes, and I look to the lost one who is considering her answer for the first time. I point to the nearby veranda. “That’s where I sat three years ago when I reclaimed my life from my job and my heartbreak.” I promise them, as any lighthouse does to those lost at sea, that a new shore is coming. I promise that it is worth it to choose themselves, to take hold of their lives like our rolled cigarettes and inhale-- deeply. Maybe today we cannot afford an apartment in Tangier. Maybe tomorrow, our debt collectors will call back and we will not let it go to voicemail. We will tell them that I spent all my money on my happiness. We will ask if they accept a check. We have recently come into a new kind of wealth from which we can never overdraft.

Photo via Designer Eliana Murargy // SS 2020 Collection

With more than a week left to the trip, a large sum of money had at last been deposited in my account. I mourn the relief, much like a struggling actor does with sudden fame who must leave the restaurant camaraderie for the silver screen. Even with the recent deposit I find myself longing for home and the familiar waves of the city rhythm. I miss the paycheck which greets me bi-weekly and no worries as to who will care for my dog. It becomes impossible to rest, the Airbnbs so hot that it stirs both my companion and I with dreams of returning to working days. It will be easy enough for him to return, but I who have neither job nor interview, am still in danger of drowning in uncharted waters.

“Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.” says Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

I treat him to coffee and a cigarette at Cafe Baba, in chairs sat in by our idols: Bourdain, Bowles, The Beatles... I know. Even with more money, I’ll never be able to recover from this sickness. That like old fishermen I will never lose hope for my next great catch. I could never be a high-earning doctor. I’ll always be an artist, unable to stop chasing phantoms of what I might create. And he will never stop worrying about if he will provide for me, and for us, or a family. I want to hold him until he knows, to bruise it into his bones that there will never be enough work. That he’ll never have enough money, and we’ll never be too broke or too in debt to choose a life with each other. For better or worse I tell him about the ring I bought for him two months prior, that I would honor a career as his wife. But this man’s heart is cursed, not by self-love as my own, but self-respect. To seek his own worthiness and build his legacy through his work. Or perhaps these are just our southern traditionalist values slowly surfacing for us to take a hard look at long-held limiting beliefs.

Somewhere in our discourse is the truth, straddling both the forthcoming and the not yet. What is true is that I am a writer and that he loves me. Tomorrow may not bring literary fame or a wedding ring, but there is contentment in knowing one’s self and being loved for that same self. It is in love that I have been liberated from the tightness of shame or fear. And like a ripe tomato I see summer – its bounty and blemish. From this day forward on the banks of Triana, our Sevillian home, I will not worry of what I may become. For “If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.” (Morisson)