Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

We were a long-distance couple. After meeting on an Amtrak train, we talked on the phone each night that first month. Then she invited me to New York for Thanksgiving at a girlfriend’s condo in Battery Park. It was to be an intimate dinner among friends; most of the group were expats from Spain — save for one, she said, who was an ex-boyfriend, yet “part of her inner circle.” Since I was trusting, pretty open, and confident in what we were building, I did not doubt her.

The first time I learned they kept up their casual friendship, we were a year into our relationship, heading to Cape Cod for the weekend. At a rest stop, a message appeared on her iPhone, charging in the center console: “Miss you already. Hurry back.” When she returned to the car, I told her to check her device; she was horrified and attempted an explanation but eventually confessed. I was no saint in previous relationships. Maybe even thought, this is what Karma looks like. I really wanted us to work. I didn’t want to give up. She was witty, sharp, and ambitious. I admired her success, drive, and movement in the world.

I looked beyond her transgression. The remainder of the drive along Route 6, we made promises to each other and kept our plans of lobster dinners and a whale tour. Then several months later, I came into town one evening to surprise her. I neared her Brooklyn brownstone and from a distance, saw them on her stoop sharing an ice cream cone. I hailed a taxi, returned to the airport, and flew back to Burlington.

The lessons of betrayal are plenty and I know them well; however, the reason why I stayed in a pattern of dishonesty was singular: I didn’t love myself as much as I loved this person. I was the one more invested in the relationship. Even worse, I thought the person would change. I rarely felt treasured and sublimated all my needs to keep this person in my sphere. Intuition told me to flee but I was stuck until released by the sight of infidelity.

Today’s poem dramatizes the important act of rediscovering and intimately coming to love who one is, in all our complexities. It’s a famous poem that teaches devotion of self before we make ourselves available to others.

Love after Love
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored 
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

“Love After Love” from SEA GRAPES by Derek Walcott, copyright © 1976 Derek Walcott. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.