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When she was nineteen, halfway through her sophomore year at Berkeley, CJ read that sonnet by Neruda and knew that it described how she would experience love. “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved/secretly, between the shadow and the soul.” At the time, there was a boy whose tangle of dark hair and wounded eyes made it almost compulsory to believe in love as a knife-edged knot of complexities. Love that didn’t hurt couldn’t be love. Christ, she thought, tracing the years back; that was decades ago. Decades. But in point of fact, the Neruda sonnet hadn’t just resonated in the substance of a relationship long since melted away. That sonnet had stuck with her as the kind of poem in which she found an echo of herself. She did love, always had loved, in just that way – deeply but privately, almost silently. And it just so happened that some loves were more amenable to that than others; that each one in a series of dark, stifled relationships had felt truer and more natural than the next; and that the one exception had felt so incongruous with the way she loved that she’d convinced herself, time and time again, that she could not have it.
Because Danny didn’t love like Neruda. Danny loved brightly, in a way that poems struggled to capture. There was that one – the choosing oranges one - that was almost right: “This is how I will choose/you: by feeling you/smelling you, by slipping you/ into my coat./ Maybe then I’ll climb/ the hill, look down/on the town we live in/with sunlight on my face”. Those stanzas fit, but the poem kept going, and she didn’t like the ending. Really, Danny loved like Whitman – joyful without being foolish, self-aware but not self-focused – with one notable exception: Whitman loved everyone and everything that way, whereas Danny, as far as anyone could tell (and God help her, she’d asked around), just loved CJ. CJ and journalism, maybe, which was why on their date, nearly two years ago already, when Danny had said he was about ready to quit being a reporter, fear had hit her even more forcefully than hope. She’d never known that Danny could give up, never imagined that there would be a straw that could break his back, especially a straw as stupid as Doug Westin. She could understand breaking in the face of some of the things he’d seen – but Doug Westin? She’d had to fight back incredulous panic because even then, before she’d known that she would leave the White House, CJ had realized that the conflict of interest wasn’t as much of an obstacle as it had been. Him giving up his career didn’t remove something that was keeping them apart – it was just Danny quitting on something he loved. And if something as insignificant as Doug Westin could be the thing that ended Danny’s love affair with reporting, which thoughtless mistake of hers could kill whatever had kept him stuck on her for so long?
There had been a sickening moment where she thought she’d had her answer – when she’d somehow found herself saying nothing when he suggested that she didn’t see him in her future at all. But he hadn’t quit. Somehow, thank God, he hadn’t quit, and he loved her. Just as importantly, he understood the way she loved. And maybe he did love like Neruda, even if a love like Danny’s had never met a shadow it couldn’t embrace into lightness; the last few stanzas of the sonnet fit perfectly with him in a way they never had with anyone else. “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where./I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;/so I love you because I know no other way/than this: where I does not exist, nor you,/so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,/so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”