love is sad, heartbreaking, but beautiful

Reflections on love and loss. 'Spring in Central Park', by William Zorach.

‘Spring in Central Park’, William Zorach 1914, The Met

There's a painting I love in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on the first floor, in a quiet hallway that leads to busier rooms of Picasso’s and Matisse's. It's a piece by William Zorach, titled Spring in Central Park. It's of a nude couple standing on a grassy hill, among yellow flowers and dark trees. The woman has her head bowed, her hands resting on her partner’s neckline, while the man holds his hands on her head delicately. It's one of those paintings that when you pass it quickly you think 'oh, that's nice', right before you keep walking. But when I looked at it closely for the first time, I was struck by how strange, and unsettling, the piece is.

Spring in Central Park has morphed into a kind of personal Rorschach test for me. On good and hopeful upswings, I only see happiness, joy. I see a couple peacefully in love, standing in a kind of bucolic Eden, the whole world transformed by their love. But in other visits all I can see is the tint of sadness and loss swirling throughout the painting. They're standing apart, their hands are limply on the other, both close and distant. It's like they're on the verge of some shift. Their closed eyes betray shades of sadness. The lovers aren't embracing, but holding one another back. Their hands aren't grabbing or holding, but almost limply pressed against each other, like they both have to pull away soon, but they want to cling to the moment they’re in.

On its page about the painting, the Met reaches for the low-hanging fruit, comparing the lovers to Adam and Eve and the scene to Eden pre-sin, Central Park in the spring as a "contemporary paradise." What I see most in the piece, though, is a yearning to hold on. If it's paradise, the painting seems to hint that paradise can slip so suddenly from our fingertips. I see a desire to lock the moment in time, to close one's eyes and hope that you can stay there in paradise forever. With their eyes closed, they can listen to the birds, and feel the way their bodies rise and fall with each breath, and believe it's only them in the world and that nothing else matters. That’s the dream, isn’t it?

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Really all I’ve had the energy to do recently is walk around the city and sit in parks. I walk, and sit, and then walk some more, and exhaust my feet so much that I collapse and can no longer think. I’ll bring a foldable table and my backpacking chair, and when I’m ready to rest I’ll set up camp at a different spot in the park. Sometimes I’ll read, write, sip my thermos of coffee, scroll, but mostly I’ll just lazily watch the ducks float across the water, or look out at the different people scattered across the lawn.

That was the plan again when I recently went to Central Park, before meeting up with a friend at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was beautifully sunny at first. A dozen or more dark-green paddle boats floated silently, the wooden oars churned through the water. The long mall was full of vendors hawking cheap prints and people resting on the benches. Couples in sundresses and chinos posed on the bridge, the Manhattan skyscrapers looming behind. In the water this time of year you can see miniscule ripples across the surface from turtles peeking out of the water. Their snouts glitter when the sun hits them just right. At one point I reached a spot on a pathway where I could see a boulder rising from the pond. A family of gooselings washed their feathers on the rock, their mother goose watching. It was all so serene, so relentlessly and frustratingly serene; the kind of moment that feels cliche and saccharine. It’s the kind of overwhelming bliss that makes you think ‘okay enough already, this is ridiculous’. It can be maddening to realize how easy it is to be happy, especially after so long veiled by the opposite.

When I was ready for a break, I unfolded my chair on the crest of a hill in a quiet stretch of the park. I took my shoes off, peeled the socks away, wiggled my toes in the grass. It’s truly wonderful, and ridiculous, how therapeutic it is to put one’s feet on the ground. I can see now why people tell others to ‘touch grass’, it’s the best.

I chose that spot in the park because I didn’t think I had been there before. So much of decision making lately has bent around the idea of ‘newness’, these kinds of minor and granular tweaks that supposedly keep life fresh and interesting. Different checkout lines at the grocery store. New walks around the neighborhood. Different flavors of the same processed cheese-chips I buy at 11:30pm from the neighborhood bodega. All of them are comfortable patterns that deviate in delicate and minor ways. The different slope in the park was a version of that, and while I didn’t know it then, I had already been to that part of the park after all.

The green hill sloped down to a looping pathway. A group of young women lounged on a picnic blanket, looking at their phones, while nearby a mother and son sat in the grass under an oak tree. From the pathway came an older man, maybe 65 or 70, holding hands with a toddler who was tightly gripping a toy truck. The boy had a black bowl cut, and a t-shirt with the Studio Ghibli character of Totoro on it. As he walked up the hill the toddler would point all around him, and squeak with his soft voice. ‘Iwa’, he said to a boulder, ‘risu’, he said when a brown squirrel ran up a wire fence. The boy waddled slowly, the man took each step gingerly, and whenever the kid got too close to a large rock or a divot the man would quickly grab his hand again and gently pull him back. The man would shake his head and deeply exhale before smiling from under his baseball hat.

A saxophonist played somewhere in the park. The music warbled through the air, some of the lower notes losing their shape. Behind me there was a man sitting on the edge of a tall boulder that jutted out from the hill. He was wearing a tan suit, picking through a packed lunch. He sat in a way so that his feet dangled off the edge. He swung his feet back and forth, tapping the edges of his dress shoes against the rock. He looked like a kid sitting in a chair that is slightly too tall for him. And he had that face too; a contented smile, eyes that slowly closed and then reopened as the sun was on him.

I find that, sometimes, the bliss of a sunny park day slips from me, like I can’t hold it. But then there are these moments where everything good and lovely gravitates towards you magnetically. It felt like that then. I looked up at the sky, where the sun was half clouded over. And then I felt the first plop against my hair. I looked down and saw that water had blotted the ink on the page in my lap. The skies turned into a flat, pale grey, and the occasional plops turned into a consistent drip. Some of the people on the lawn quickly shouldered their bags and hurried down the hill. But others stayed, including me. I moved my chair under the nearby pine tree. Behind me the man in the suit waited, the son and his mother looked up through the tree branches, and the toddler waddled and looked up. ‘Ame’ he said, pointing up at the sky. Rain.

I looked over everything, mentally preparing myself to hold firm and not let the day be ruined by a storm. But I started to crumple. I began packing my things, folding up the table, zipping my pencil case, until I saw a figure in a long white dress walking through the lawn. She crossed the pathway and laid down in the grass as a photographer followed. The photographer waved their hand, and the figure in white twisted in the grass, readjusting her legs, straightening out her veil. It was a woman in her wedding dress, posing alone in the grass as the rain began to pick up. It was strange, I thought, to have her pose here alone without her spouse. But then people started walking down the hill, and the bride veered off out of sight. First it was a pair of musicians, a violinist and guitarist, slowly carrying their cases, followed by a stream of figures in all black carrying bags and equipment. One of the workers carried a clear plastic bag full of flower petals. She shook the petals across the grass in a straight line. The man in the tan suit started walking down the hill towards the party. And then others followed; young couples in dresses and suits, a lone man who guided his leashed dog, children hanging close to their parents, people holding the elbows of the elderly who gingerly crossed onto the grass. The rain had stalled, but when it picked back up again people began to open their umbrellas; black umbrellas, translucent umbrellas, colorfully striped ones that stood out from the others. The musicians began with Hadyn, Bach, transitioning over to stringed renditions of Moon River and Elvis’ ‘Can’t help falling in love’. The people huddled closely. The wedding party itself began to walk up the trail of flowers; the bridesmaids, the groomsmen, linking their arms together two at a time.

And then everyone hushed and quieted, it was like the volume was turned down in the park. People teetered on the edges of their feet, peering around the umbrellas at the two people still standing at the edge of the grass. The dog jumped around onto people’s legs. A squirrel darted through the grass. A man on a citi-bike loudly rode down the hill right next to the wedding party. The music started, and the bride emerged at the pathway along the edge of the grass. On the pathway there were maybe a hundred strangers who had been walking. They all stopped and waited, leaving a large gap for the bride and her companion. Even though the rain was picking up, and the pathway wasn’t under tree-cover, the strangers still waited. Not a single person moved. Not even the little children who looked out from behind their parents’ legs.

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What I think I love most about the painting, Spring in Central Park, is the background. It’s not just the trees and the colors but the movement. The trees on either side of the couple bend with the curvature of their bodies. Flowers in the grass seem to reposition their blossoms towards the lovers. There's something about the scene that mirrors how love feels. When you're at the loudest and most intense stage of a relationship, it can feel like the whole world is contained within that love, as if the rest of everything exists only as the backdrop to the relationship. It’s like love changes not only the people in it, but the whole world. This can be a real change in some relationships, perhaps just a distortion in others. But if the world is changed by being in love, then what happens when the love ends or falls away? Does the world bounce back to the way it was before? Or is everything still permanently, hopelessly changed, curved and swirly but with a noticeable absence that can’t be retrieved?

I think in the geography of our lives there are these blank or foggy spaces, little absences left behind from the people that have moved in and out of our lives. I think of parks, and imprints left behind by people in grass; footprints, or the long flat indents left over by bodies when they’re sprawled out on the ground. When a person stands up from a lawn you can see their imprint briefly. It leaves an outline of flattened grass, lighter than the darker grass surrounding it. But then the blades slowly bend back upwards, straightening out until the grass looks the same as it did before the person sat down. Yet if something sits out on the grass for too long, it doesn’t just flatten the grass; it kills it. For days, weeks, months afterwards there will be a brown patch leftover in the shape of the form that made it. Eventually even the brownest patch of grass will grow back green and strong, if the conditions are right. But for a long time, all you can really see is the deadness, the absence. You can almost convince yourself that the grass will never grow back, there will be this person-shaped absence inside of you forever.

The first time I looked at Spring in Central Park I could very clearly see both lovers. They were individual people, but fused together still, transformed by their love. But when I went back to the painting about a year ago, I could only see one of them at a time. There’s a woman mourning, and a man preemptively grieving. They’re touching, but not together. They’re completely alone and inside of themselves. Every visit since then has been shaped by this, and I no longer see what’s actually on the canvas, but what isn’t; the absences, the missing spots. I only picture what happens after Zorach’s scene. Maybe the woman stands there alone, her eyes closed and head still bent in the way that he left her. Or maybe she leaves first. The man then would probably stand there for a little too long, naked and broken. Even after people told him to move on. He would turn around, eventually, and sit on the hill and look out over the familiar park and wonder. Just wonder.

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The wedding party was far enough away that their words didn’t reach my spot. All I could hear were the choppy laughs, the murmuring when something profound was probably said. The bride and groom were hidden by the trees, so all that was visible were the guests facing the altar. People on the lawn nearby were watching as well. Sparrows hopped through the grass, picking at the soil. The photographer slid through the crowd. Some guests looked at the lens, smiling, while others kept their eyes on the ceremony. The oooohs and aaaaahs increased, grew louder, until everyone in the crowd started cheering and clapping, even the strangers still watching from the pathway. The bride and groom walked down the aisle, and then the others followed, one by one, until there was only a crowd of attendees hovering in a circle. People huddled underneath their umbrellas and gathered their things. A young couple nearby walked down the hill and looked at the crowd. The mother and son stood up from their spot under the tree and walked away too. The son looked at what was left of the wedding, but his mother didn’t. She put her hands around his shoulders and squeezed.

What’s the approach to dealing with those voids? Do we turn away from them entirely? Do we fill our lives with new things and experiences to fill the empty space? Or do we keep turning back to the voids, trying to hold the emptiness in some way, trying to reconcile it?

This is where remembering can feel like more of a burden than a blessing. I keep returning to the modern idea; maybe it’s better to just forget, to not dwell on the past and absences. But that’s never worked for me. All my attempts at this have only made the absence more apparent and all-consuming. So I keep remembering, even when I don’t want to. The memories strike me at strange moments, unexpectedly. I can be living so deeply and immensely in the present but then flung backwards months and years in a millisecond. Suddenly I’m in the middle of old conversations, tired fights, familiar dead-ends, all these different moments where the connective thread between me and this person I loved was either frayed or cut. All these moments are in some way pivot points, where pathways and potential futures diverted and died off, and for a brief moment I think ‘oh, this might have made it better’. But of course it’s too late.

I put remembering and forgetting as an active, conscious decision, but that isn’t perfectly accurate. I already am forgetting, unwillingly. The sharp edges of the past are being dulled. The details are blurring. I can’t remember the specific words in the long and heavy conversations, not even many of the wonderful ones. All that’s clearly left is a vague feeling, a general tone. But then there are moments where the sharpness briefly returns, like a dagger. It comes in an overheard conversation among strangers, from hints of the same words or tones. Or from a random place that I once shared with the person I had loved. Oh, look, the corner store where you bought them aloe cream. The sidewalk under the bridge where you both cried out of exasperation. The tuft of grass on the lawn where you stared up at the clouds and thought for the first time, in silent unison, that it might not work out after all.

It is not just my memory that I mourn. It’s the loss of the whole global, collective memory of a love like this. In most relationships, it’s hoped or expected that the memory of the relationship won’t only belong to you. It’s supposed to pass along a cascading tier of others; friends, family, future-children, future-grandchildren, all the future-those who might discover old love letters in the attic or ask over the dining table ‘so, how did you two actually meet?’ But when a relationship crosses a certain point and ends, the promise of the memories begins to fade. The double-dates end. The future house with the attic is never bought. The children and the grandchildren are never born. Society at large moves away from the ‘failed’ relationship, the exes become a hushed name in the household. The only people that can keep the memory alive are the lovers, and even they might not want to hold onto the memories. But for some reason I do. Because I have felt how wonderfully transformative love is. How it still moves me and shapes me. I am not just heartbroken over a lost relationship or the end of a chapter; I’m heartbroken over the knowledge that I’ll never be able to precisely say how much it matters, and why it should to everyone else.

When the wedding was over and long gone, I walked over to where it had been. There was still a trail of magnolia petals on the ground. I picked a few, pressed a couple for myself, passed one over to my friend when I later reached the Met. Near the end of our visit, while the museum was closing down, I speed-walked us through the first floor into the gallery where Spring in Central Park was. The staff had closed off the hallway behind a rope. Cosmic justice, I thought, for being too late to a realization! But I guess the joke was on me. After all that, the painting wasn’t even on display.