Taking the fork in the road

The journey to a decision.

“If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi Berra

My grandfather quoted this Yogi Berra line almost daily.

My grandfather died a month ago.

I have been standing, frozen, at a fork in the road ever since.

Readers, there’s something I haven’t told you: I’ve been seeing someone, someone I met in the real world (so, I can now report: The Great Offline Dating Experiment works!). But things have felt off for a while. The process of grieving my grandfather probably didn’t help things, but I believe whatever that may have accelerated would have come to pass, eventually.

For weeks, I sat at the trailhead of two diverging paths ahead of me: one where I stay with a really good guy, but I don’t feel seen, and I don’t feel treasured. Or one where I break up with a really good guy and summon whatever blind faith I possess to believe that I can find what I had with him again. My head swung from left to right, every day, multiple times per day, trying to peer a little further down each road in the hopes that I might spot a signpost with clear instructions. Even a dash of paint against a tree trunk would have been a welcome reassurance that I hadn’t taken a wrong turn.

On Monday, I finally took the fork. I asked him to meet me in Regent’s Park and I decided to walk there, which took me two hours. Walking is my meditation, and I needed to quiet my mind and my body, which had been at war over this conundrum. Even that morning, I was still so unsure about what I wanted to do that the only way to get myself out the door was to tell myself this was a discussion, not a decision.

I didn’t plot a route on Google Maps, I figured I’d let my feet take me. A few blocks from my flat, I reached another fork in the road, only this time it was literal. If I chose the street on the right, I could recreate a walk we’d once taken with his dog in search of late-night ice cream.

If I chose the garden path on the left, I would walk into the park with the bench by the duck pond that I’d visited the last few weeks to journal or cry or just try to untangle my thoughts and feelings about him like necklaces at the bottom of a jewelry box; picking up a thin gold chain between my fingernails and trying to figure out where one ends and the next begins. Are they even separate thoughts? Is it all one necklace? Should I just give up?

The two faces of our relationship converged at this point. There was the togetherness on the right: holding one another, dancing in the kitchen, sharing secrets in the dark. And then there was the solitude on the left: the increasing timestamps between our texts, the days that went by without seeing each other, things left unsaid. If this might be the last time I would see this person, which path did I want to re-travel to get there?

I turned right and walked down the street toward the ice cream shop.

We had walked this way only three weeks before, on the first warm spring night when the wisteria was winding its way around every front door. He let his dog off the lead in the quiet neighborhood and we pointed to the houses we would want to live in. We looked into windows as the sun went down and the lights came on. I wanted to be in one of those houses with him, twenty years in the future, watching a young couple out for an evening stroll. Knowing when we see them point at our window that they’re wishing they had our life.

photo by me

Our relationship began when the first crocus torpedoed up from the ground and the daffodils trumpeted Spring’s approach. It blossomed in tandem with the cherry trees, but it faded before the last of the fallen pink petals were swept into the gutter.

Now, the spring flowers that I’d looked at with the twinkle of first love in my eyes mocked me with their redolence. They burst forth from every vine and tree. They were obscene. Even the browning petals that carpeted the street chastised me like a memento mori. All things end, they whispered when the wind stirred them.

The lilac bush from which I’d stolen a purple cone to tuck behind my ear the last time I visited him waved its fingers facetiously at me. A tiny, pink rhododendron in someone’s front walk was a pathetic stand-in for the two-story-tall, blood-red rhododendrons we’d gotten lost amongst in Richmond Park. I told him the story of Rebecca while we tried to find our way out of their shadows. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley…I said ominously to him. My grandfather loved to quote that line, too. It’s funny, the things that stick.

The path I took brought me to the spot where we’d had our first kiss. Our second date was on a frigid winter night; we both shivered when we left the restaurant. I put my hand in his to warm up. We crossed a busy road and for the first time since I moved to London, I didn’t look both ways. I’m not trusting of men – a learned trait – but I felt safe with this person I’d met forty-eight hours ago. He pulled me into his coat in a quiet square and kissed me. Then he opened his car door for me and reached over to turn my seat warmers on. I felt like a little girl.

I walked over the same flagstones now, the branches of the chestnut tree in the square had been bare when we’d huddled there in the cold, but now they were heavy with flowering chandeliers. He brought me to Windsor at Easter, and we strolled down The Long Walk beneath a blooming allée of 300-year-old chestnut trees. He said the flowers looked like mini Christmas trees. The blossoms floated on the breeze like snow. I wasn’t sure we’d make it to winter. I kicked a chestnut down the street.

photo by me

I took the stairs down to the canal path. I listened to Haim’s Something to Tell You to drown out the imaginary conversations I’d been having with him in my head for weeks. I prayed for a miracle: that by the time I was finished with this conversation, Haim would announce they were dropping their new album ahead of schedule — today! Then I got greedy and prayed for another: that it didn’t have to end today, that he would finally fight for me.

I thought I’d found a rock; it had felt solid and weighty in my palm. Real. Joni Mitchell broke up with Graham Nash in a telegram that read, “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers.” Was it a rock I had been holding, after all?

I followed a teenage couple. They held hands for a minute and then got embarrassed. They raced each other up a hill. I wondered: if I’d had a teenage love would I be “better” at relationships?

The wind blew from every direction, making fun of me for wanting to look good for this. It pushed hair into my mouth, tied the ends in knots and blew an unflattering cowlick into my bangs. It started to rain, and I tied my sweater around my head. I felt ridiculous.

The canal wound through Camden, and I remembered visiting the neighborhood for the first time ten years ago and feeling edgy. Now it was overrun with tourists eating perplexingly complex “street food”: French tacos and Yorkshire burritos. I entered Regent’s Park from the canal, like I’d done with my sister four years ago when she first moved to London. Then I took the Broad Walk, the main artery of the park, which I’d first walked down six years ago with my friend from college. As we walked, she told me that she’d met the man she was going to marry; they’d been dating for three months. Now they have a house and a dog and a baby. How can you tell how far you’ve come when you’re walking the same roads?

I wore my grandmother’s bracelet like an amulet. My heart climbed up my throat with every step that took me closer to the spot he’d pinned on the map. Part of me wished I’d taken an edible. But a bigger part of me wanted to feel the hurt. That had been the point all along: to reveal those tender nerve endings to him, raw and smarting, and see what he’d do. If you ignore the human instinct for self-preservation, is that bravery? Or stupidity?

I saw his dog first. And then, there he was, walking toward me through the fields of Queen Anne’s lace.

I couldn’t tell you what was said. It’s muffled in my memory like we were under water. All I know is that I walked back up the path alone, and when I pulled my sweater tighter around my neck to shield myself from the wind, it smelled like him.

I wore the sweater all day and by the time the sun went down I couldn’t smell him anymore. I took it off, balled it up, and pressed it to my face frantically like an alcoholic shaking the dregs from the bottle, but there was nothing left. It’s funny, the things that don’t stick.

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Maybe you’re not ready either