Love, remembered

Valentine’s Day is to an unattached person what flu season is to the unvaccinated. If you are asymptomatic, it feels unwise to tear off your mask to go dance among the infected. That’s why it was reckless last week for me to read a book titled “Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire” (by Bettany Hughes; paperback published by Basic Books, 2024).

With my love life on hiatus, I have no business contemplating desire. I have no inoculation against the red rush of memory such a book is bound to unleash. I had only myself to blame when a particularly virulent recollection returned to me in vivid detail:

It is the rainy season in Fairbanks, Alaska. Thin mist swirls knee-high from a dark spruce forest. I am sitting with a woman on the Pumphouse Restaurant’s sprawling wooden deck beside the tannin-tinted Chena River. This woman and I are each other’s first true loves. None have ever loved so deeply. We are sure of it.

We have just spent a week apart. I am finishing a summer job where we met three months ago guiding horse trail rides near Denali National Park. She has started fall semester at the university. I pick her up within minutes of her arrival in town, and soon we are parked in my little Ford Bronco off a forested backroad — windows slick with condensation. She laughs, swatting my arm, “I promised myself I’d never have sex in the backseat of a car. I blame you.”

At the restaurant, we touch each other’s fingers, our faces, our hair. A waitress drifts through our periphery as this beautiful woman pokes a french fry into my mouth.

“We are that couple, that couple who everyone hates,” she says.

I don’t care. I am newly created and she is the only other being in the world. Her brown eyes are ringed with black and golden flecks. Her smile can melt the permafrost. I don’t hear the river, or the restaurant, or the people. A hazy, woozy tunnel vision engulfs me. Stricken by this delirium called love, I see only her.

Truth? This memory caused a brief bout of nostalgia. That time along the Chena River preceded a quiet regret that has flowed darkly through my life ever since. But, even as the river runs eternal, time shifts the currents.

Today I am gratified by the new perspective offered in “Venus-Aphrodite’s” fascinating 150 pages. Think of it. For thousands of years, lovers, like any one of us hapless fools, have suffered from the earnest belief that our personal loves plunge deeper than all others. To be fair, we believe this because it is partly true. Isn’t every season’s first ripe strawberry the most perfectly flavored? Doesn’t the aroma of every flower’s first blossom drive bees into dizzying loops?

But the ancient love goddess wasn’t all candy hearts, chocolate highs and floors strewn with hastily shed handbags, dresses and heels. Long before the first Christians could gossip about Mary Magdalene and Jesus, humans had conjured this love deity who reigned over strife and fighting, as well as sex — or as one “Venus-Aphrodite” chapter puts it: She was a goddess of “fighting and fornicating.”

To the ancients, love and pain were packaged together. Happiness and despair competed for space. Romance gave way to disappointment, or maybe contentment. Only the goddess could know.

And that intoxicating bloom of our first true loves? Eventually every petal must fall.

I suspect the ancients would understand — maybe even appreciate — the helpless enthusiasm my first true love and I put into hurting each other, mere weeks after that evening on the deck. The reason for the break? Jealousy, fickleness, immaturity, emotional betrayal. We were young. And we were creative people; our words drew blood. None had ever hurt so deeply. We were sure of it.

Reflecting on my Valentine’s Day read about the Goddess of Love, I was struck that, years after Fairbanks, I had experienced the same delirious, trancelike sensation one other time:

It is fall in Boise. T-shirt weather. I am riding a bicycle to the grocery store. A reckless turn causes me to slam my front tire into the curb, whipping me over the handlebars, headfirst and unhelmeted, onto concrete. My head swims. I pull myself into a sitting position, back resting against a “No Bikes or Skateboards” signpost that I nearly hit. The irony doesn’t register.

I gape at my left pinky finger, which is bent sideways, floppy, at a right angle. Nothing hurts yet. I pull the finger straight, pop it into place. Maybe I imagine a juicy, smacking sound — like a small wet kiss.

A hazy, woozy tunnel forms as I stare at my injured finger. My vision narrows, slowly, with sparkles at the darkling edges, like fireflies or like the golden flecks in a lover’s eyes, and I fall, softly, into darkness.

Ferguson, a former Lewiston Tribune reporter, loves getting lost in a forest, or lost in a bookstore, or just lost in thought. He refuses to let his family put a tracking app on his iPhone.