Elmossy

(This post was pretty much all written before our breakup.)

Elmossy was the name Liza and I gave to our relationship. We gave it a name because a relationship is its own cybernetic organism with its own behaviors, feedback loops, internal stores of goodwill and patience, and homeostasis that is separate from either of its members. Seen in this light, disagreements are not a matter of who’s right or wrong, but are instead a matter of organism health. Perceptions are not reality, but phantom pain is still pain; if you perceive there to be a problem, then there is a problem, but that doesn’t imply anything about who, if anyone, or what, if anything, needs to change. Matters of system integrity aren’t about assigning blame, but about how the challenges posed by legitimate individual needs could be surmounted by you as a team, by the relationship itself as a living and breathing organism.

We named Elmossy because as humans, giving a name to things helps reify them. You can have the same two people, but introduced together under a different context, with their interactions developed inside a different environment, and they’ll have a different dynamic, a different relationship between themselves, like identical twins reared apart that are uncannily similar in ways but ultimately still their own distinct individuals. Liza and I are grateful for this current dynamic that exists between us, that has grown and adapted over the years even as we ourselves have grown and adapted as individuals.

A momentary gust of freezing air swoops down. The flames of Elmossy flicker and sputter about, as if unsure on whether or how to recover, before perking back up to a lively dancing blaze. How long will this lovely sight last for? No matter; we take good care of Elmossy today, and it in turn takes good care of us. And if one day Elmossy should end up dying a natural death before either of us do, I trust we’ll be adult enough to scatter its ashes in a proper burial, to honor all that it’s meant to us in this phase of our lives when it is clearly the right thing to be a part of, to honor all it’s done for our personal growth to the point where it’s time for both of us to move on. Was the fall of Rome an unmitigated disaster, or mere change and continuity? Perhaps both narratives can be picked out from the historical data like different frequencies picked out from a Fourier transform; perhaps our personal historiographies can also encompass more than one valid perspective, to be interpreted and re-interpreted according to our growing understanding of ourselves.