omelets. She wanted them to sit on her bed in the afternoon watching movies and eating pizza with mushrooms and caramelized onions or reading aloud to each other. Psyche wanted to do Cupid’s laundry with him. She wanted them to go to the farmers’ market together and buy baskets of strawberries. She wanted to give Cupid natural supplements for depression and fatigue. Someday she wanted to have a child with him, a baby girl named Joy. (Cupid had once wondered aloud to her, “If you know right away when you meet someone that you want a baby with them, is that because you are supposed to have babies with them or is it just hormones and projection?” She had been afraid to answer so she had shrugged in the dark and kissed him again.) Besides wanting to have his baby, Psyche wanted to buy Cupid shirts the color of his eyes, or at least the color she imagined his eyes were, because she could not see them — he always came in the dark, made love to her, and left before it was light.
In fact, she did buy him a shirt at a thrift store, a size large cream-colored French cotton shirt covered with blue irises (she hadn’t been shopping for him; she’d been trying to find a vintage dress with roses on it but the shirt had caught her eye), but she knew she could not give it to him yet because it would scare him away even more (although less than the knowledge that she had already picked out the name of their unborn daughter), and so she put it in the back of her closet to save it for the day when he was no longer afraid. She imagined giving it to him then with a casual smile: “Oh, yeah, I just found this today. Hopefully it fits.” (It would in fact fit; she had measured the breadth of his shoulders with her hands while they were making love).
Psyche was right; Cupid would not want the shirt even though it did in fact match his eyes and fit his shoulders. The shirt would have felt like a symbol of some kind of commitment and he was afraid of commitment; he knew he even had trouble committing to himself. His day job was draining him. Cupid was a gifted actor — he had been in a theater group in college and had gotten the attention of a number of agents — but he was afraid that if he fully devoted himself to his art he might fail. He had gone out for auditions after he graduated but he hadn’t had any luck. He began to drink more heavily. Finally his agent fired him. Now he was sober but he didn’t even do theater anymore; he told people he didn’t have time for it, he was too drained from his job. He was fond of Psyche and loved being with her but she scared him a little. She sent him such passionate poems by her favorite poets like Pablo Neruda and Sappho, and she didn’t even know him yet! It seemed as if she wanted to drag him into the daylight, dress him up like a doll and take him out with her to show him off to the world. He came to her in the dark for a reason. The reason was not, as she suspected, that he was ashamed of being seen with her in the world (after all the bad relationships Psyche was feeling a little insecure about her appearance) or that he didn’t want to look at her in the sunlight or that he didn’t care about her as a person, but only as someone to fuck. No, he knew that in the dark he could hold onto himself. Cupid did not want to lose himself in anyone. He knew what it was like to go on a date with someone, then see her the next night and the next. By the fourth or fifth time he knew what it was like to feel as if he were completely invisible. That was why he came to Psyche only at night. He would not get lost in her. He was already invisible in the darkness so he could not disappear. For this reason he insisted that Psyche never see him in the light.
Psyche was in therapy and knew that she was projecting a lot onto Cupid. The fact that he came to her only at night allowed her to project onto him even more. She felt blind with Cupid and panicky, the way she had felt when she was a child playing hide-and-seek and she was the blindfolded one. “It.”
One night Cupid fell asleep after they had made love. Psyche was hoping that he would sleep through until morning so that she could see his face in the light and they could go out to breakfast. She lay awake for a long time watching the clock and waiting for the sun to rise. The room felt hot and stuffy. Finally Psyche could not wait anymore. She got up, lit a candle, and watched Cupid as he lay sleeping beside her. She saw that he was not a beast as she had sometimes suspected when she felt the fur on his chest and the prick of his horn (not that she would have cared if he were a beast; she would still have wanted to buy him groceries and supplements — maybe even more supplements! — and go out to breakfast with him) but a tall beautiful man with eyes like blue irises, as she had also suspected. He did look exactly like his online pictures. He took her breath away and tears came to her eyes suddenly like a pang in your chest. But then some candle wax fell on Cupid’s chest, above his heart. He woke and saw Psyche watching him. There was so much love and need in her eyes and it scared him. He wanted to run away.
“You don’t love me as much as I love you,” Psyche cried when she saw the fear lit in his eyes. “I’ve been in relationships like this before. I can’t do this again.”
This made Cupid more afraid and he said, “I don’t know how I feel about you. I am fond of you and I love being with you but that’s all I know. I haven’t seen anyone else.”
“You’ve been seeing someone else?” Psyche shouted, all her senses distorted now with fear.
This made Cupid angry. He spoke slowly. “No. Psyche. I haven’t seen anyone else.” Then he added, coolly, “But I might have tea with somebody if it came up.”
“Tea?” Psyche shouted. “What does tea with somebody mean? Is tea a euphemism for fucking? I can’t do this.” Psyche said I can’t do this too often. She said it whenever she got scared in a relationship and then she regretted it because the man she said it to heard her and decided, in that moment, he couldn’t do “this,” either.
“I can’t talk anymore,” Cupid said.
“Wait,” said Psyche, softening as the adrenaline drained from her body, as she realized how far she had gone, like the other times with the other men, and that it was probably too late. “I just want to tell you that I think you are wonderful and I don’t want us to hurt each other anymore. No one is right or wrong. We just want different things.”
Cupid, also softening with resignation and with compassion for Psyche, replied, “You are beautiful and wonderful and I don’t want this to get fucked up. It’s no one’s fault. We just want different things.”
Then he blew out the candle, went out the back door, and left her shaking with regret in the darkness.
The darkness was not safety for Psyche. If she disappeared in it she felt she might never return.
But there were so many tasks to do there. It was where she had to be.
Psyche worked hard in the figurative darkness. She taught her kindergartners, marketed, did the laundry, cleaned her apartment, did yoga until she was soaked through with sweat, meditated in her fairy garden, ran on the beach, worked out with weights, paid all the bills. She also tried to keep up her appearance. She got haircuts, facials, manicures, pedicures, and went shopping for cheap cute clothes at thrift stores (she scrupulously avoided the men’s section) so that she would not feel as if she had completely vanished into the dark. Even though her life looked light and bright and happy, and she was happy with her children at school and by herself in her sunny little apartment on weekends — the walls covered with the construction paper, tissue, crayon, and glitter art the kids had made for her — she felt so dark and empty when the sun went down, as if someone had stolen her organs and run off with them and she was left hollow as a scooped-out gourd, rotting in the night. She felt like an old pumpkin that you could smash with your fist, that would crumple in on itself if you even touched it. After Psyche got in bed and read a few chapters of a novel, she cried herself to sleep in the dark. She was always surprised, in the morning, when she was still there.
On Monday afternoons, Psyche saw her therapist Sophia. Luckily, Psyche had a really great therapist who kept the rates low so Psyche could see her every week. (If your name is Psyche you really better have a fucking great therapist like this one.) Sophia had been away for a month in Italy when Psyche confronted Cupid. If her therapist had not been away, Psyche would probably not have lit the candle at all. She would not have attacked Cupid and they would still be making love in the dark. Psyche had a history of breaking up with men while her therapists were away. None of the other therapists had been as good, though. One of them had been an actual psycho and called Psyche a bitch when she told the therapist things weren’t working out and that she wanted to move on. One of them got a rare disease and died soon after the vacation during which Psyche had broken up with her boyfriend at the time. Psyche did not have a good pattern around therapists on vacation and boyfriends. But Sophia, she was very wise. When she got back from her vacation in Italy, Sophia told Psyche a few very important things:
1. Love is pain. You cannot avoid pain. It is part of love. (Psyche hated this one.)
2. The pain can feel like it will kill you but it won’t. (This one was better.)
3. When a baby and a mother are relating to each other, there are more incidents of misattunement, when they don’t understand each other or connect, than attunement.
4. The key to a successful relationship is not how many times you have misattunement, which is inevitable, but how many times you are able to heal those breaks with kind communication.
