Colpo

The arc that has been 2015 astonishes me with its significance. And one experience has saturated the entire year, has stayed with me through two hip replacements, a mother’s death, a 60th birthday, and the end of my 13-year Catholic odyssey.

I still haven’t made sense of the why or how of the experience. But I have come to know it intimately, almost like a physical object, and with a great deal of specificity.  Colpo di fulmine. Are you familiar with this expression? For some reason, I remembered it from one of the Godfather movies I saw over 40 years ago. Not the words themselves, but the expression’s substance.

J.M. Darhower describes it perfectly: “Colpo di fulmine. The thunderbolt, as Italians call it. When love strikes someone like lightning, so powerful and intense it can’t be denied. It’s beautiful and messy, cracking a chest open and spilling [out a soul] for the world to see. It turns a person inside out, and there’s no going back from it. Once the thunderbolt hits, your life is irrevocably changed.”

The only thing I would take issue with in his quote is his use of the word love. That’s not what it is. It’s a sense of inevitability that doesn’t have to be manifested to be real.

Colpo literally means a physical blow. That is precisely how it feels. Like you’ve been slugged in the solar plexus when you encounter the person for the first time. Fulmine is lightning, but it’s experienced more as sound than light. A thunder blow: a percussive effect like an increased atmospheric pressure, like the rumble that takes hold of your body when thunder happens directly overhead.  The English “love at first sight” doesn’t even remotely capture the experience. Colpo di fulmine is a deeply physical, particularized, even violent event.

What is strangest about the experience in my case: it can not be acknowledged. Indeed, at the moment it happened to me, I was invisible to him. It was a very specific moment. I remember the physical details with a weird lucidity.  And though there have been subsequent interactions, barring some synchronicity, there won’t be any more. For reasons I won’t go into here, there is an impossibility in the circumstance and context.  Even if it were acknowledged, it’s highly improbable that anything would come of it. Even were the colpo to be reciprocated. I use the subjunctive mood deliberately: a verb form employed to express uncertain possibility.

Another strangeness lies in the fact that, after all my adventures in the world among men for many many many years, this has never happened to me before.  I turned 60 last summer, for God’s sake. Of course I’ve been attracted to men. Lots of them. But this is different. I know because I’ve been around the block more than a few times. Nevertheless, it did happen. Darhower was right. It changed me forever.

The experience has somehow resolved in me the desperate search for other. Somehow the bar has been raised to an impossible height that no one else could engage. There’s nothing else to look for anymore. I found it, even if I cannot have it. Indeed, it doesn’t matter if I can have it or not. This only happens once in a lifetime. And I can no longer imagine an intimate interest in any one with whom it has not occurred.

It’s not as depressing as it sounds. Indeed, the experience brought me back to life in remarkable ways. It’s just a simple reality of my life now. I don’t talk about it much. It sounds nuts when I try to explain it to people. So I just let it live its quiet heart inside me. I seriously don’t think it will ever go away. Perhaps this is the way Dante felt about Beatrice? Or what troubadours wrote about?

I’m writing a villanelle about him. So maybe that’s exactly what it is.