Becoming a Couplet
written by: Catherine Arra
My second ten-year marriage was finally dead after an additional ten years of on-again-off. I had just dumped a wannabe rockstar who hadn’t performed for decades but fashioned himself into a Facebook Bon Jovi, and then a beer-guzzling Trump supporter. My body didn’t measure up to a porn star’s, and he was going to “straighten out” my liberal ideas. So when I received an email from Alex:
April 14, 2023
“Hello Catherine,
Thoroughly enjoyed your poems on Verse-Virtual.
‘Prefer to live with ghosts …’ is a great line from a moving poem.
Also loved the poem in Rye Whiskey Review. It read like a noir western.
Look forward to reading more.
Thanks
Alex Stolis”
I was wary, but intrigued. I wrote back:
“Thank you, Alex.
Um, who are you?
Cathy”
So began a correspondence between poets, Alex in Minnesota and me in upstate New York. This was not unusual. Writers and poets often reach out to each other in this way to offer encouragement and to lessen the loneliness and solitude characteristic of writing. I didn’t Google him. If I had, I would have found that he’d been writing and publishing for 20-plus years in addition to his work as a Treatment Director and Counselor for Alcoholics and Addicts. Instead, we unfolded in email letters, poems, personal stories, and histories.
For a year, we composed a book-length volume of discovering relationship regardless of distance, a cancer diagnosis for Alex, and his transition out of a deteriorating twenty-year marriage. We had in common a mutual willingness to be vulnerable, to risk security, stability—everything at 62 for Alex and 67 for me.
I liked him right away for the honesty in his written voice. I had worked as an English and writing teacher for 34 years and knew something about integrity rather than pretense in voice. Plus, after fending off a myriad of Covid predators online, I appreciated Alex’s no bullshit, no sleezy come-on effort to simply communicate. I liked his poetry and his overall sensibilities about life. Poetry talk evolved into personal questions about work, background, relationships; the usual stepping stones to friendship.
Alex said he had conjured me in all his years of writing. I knew that fantasy and romantic projection are often the self-made traps of yearning and desire that lead to disappointing heartbreak. I was careful and circumspect with him. I worked at keeping our communication reality-based. We broke off a few times, the first in early July. I wrote:
“I am your secret, Alex. How would your wife feel if she came upon all of the correspondence between us? I know how I would feel. I always think about that.”
He responded:
“Yes, I have thought about what my wife would feel and know how I would feel if situations were reversed. This will be the last correspondence from me. I know you understand …”
I did understand. That severance lasted about two weeks. We began writing again with an agreement to accept our situations and to respect boundaries, only we grew closer and had fallen in love. This arrangement went on until Labor Day weekend, when Alex informed me with two sentences sandwiched into a lengthy newsy email that he and his wife were going on vacation for a week in September. I blew and ended it for good, so I thought. In lamenting what felt like betrayal to my best friend, she promptly said, “Oh, so you are upset because he’s going on vacation with his wife?” I slammed my fist on her kitchen table and shouted, “Yes, damn it.” But I knew she was right and accepted the reality slap, though it stung.
Both of my closest female friends had been opposed to Alex and advised me to let it go. “Just no!” said one. “For crying out loud, the man lives in Minnesota,” said the other. So I did. His friends had warned the same. That breakup lasted 50 days through which we were both bereft. My spine collapsed, literally, after a weight-lifting mishap exacerbated by the emotional avalanche.
In mid-September, Alex received a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer, which threw his life and psyche into desperate self-inventory and chaos. He wrote a poem, “Listening to John Coltrane’s ‘Love Supreme’ while getting an MRI for cancer screening.” He managed to get it published in an online journal that we both subscribe to, and of course, I saw it. I knew this was intentional; the only way he could communicate with me, and I responded to the poem and to him.
We reunited quietly and shyly, knowing we would not let this happen again.
There were a few rifts along the way, but Alex left his marriage in March. I had refused to ever meet him or even talk with him on the phone while he was in the marriage and marital home. This was as much for self-protection as it was out of respect for his wife and for marriage itself. It was a hellish time for all of us. He had and did love his wife and still cared deeply for her. He dreaded knowing he would hurt her. I understood fully. I had been through the same grief and hoped that he and she would be able to navigate the storm and find friendship in the aftermath much the way my ex and I had. Ironically, both marriages began in the same year and both reached an expiration date about the same time. Both marriages had offered gifts and growth. The hardest thing was knowing when and how to move forward under different circumstances.
On April 4, 2024, nearly a year after our first email exchange, we met in person for a long weekend. More than storybook or fairy tale, it was real-time romance with the usual anticipation, trepidation, and a whopping dose of sexual tension. I was so nervous that I hired a driver to take me to the airport to fetch him. I was sure I’d have an accident otherwise. I had paid the driver for a return trip as well and told him that if things didn’t work out, he’d be driving Alex back alone. And there in the hum of traffic and horn blasts was Alex, waiting on the curb—a tall, lanky, well-built man with a smile smeared across his face. He jumped into the back seat, encircled me in his arms, and I felt us melt into each other in touch, smell, breaths, and sighs. The next two days were a magical, sensual deepening from the inside out.
Then came the rigors of hormone therapy and radiation treatments for prostate cancer from April to June, along with an outpouring of poetry from each of us. I wrote and published individual poems about our journey. Alex began a collection of poems entitled ‘Atomic City’ about his and our cancer journey. We continued our email and handwritten letters, daily texts, and long phone conversations at night; our daily anchors. There were no FaceTime or video chats, no sexting or erotic video clips. We sent the occasional selfie to throw a kiss, wave hi, or to capture and share a landscape or special moment.
We continued to write poetry separately and together, we critiqued each other’s work. We collaborated, paring some of Alex’s photography with my poems in ekphrastic poetry. We spent a week together in June, after the radiation blasts had taken a toll on Alex. We were tender with each other. He needed to sleep, to exhale, and be grateful. I wanted to embrace him in softness that would be healing. I, too, was grateful.
On August 14, 2024, after a tense morning of waiting, his first post-treatment scan came back “cancer-free.” He traveled east again in late August through early September. To date, we had spent less than 30 days together, but knew we would make it the rest of our lives.
Through the next distance, we kept writing letters, sending cards, poetry, and we began solving the NYTimes Spelling Bee together, and always made Genius level. We anguished through the election, spent a week together in January prior to the inauguration, and now try to remain balanced through the present political turmoil and national upheaval.
My best friend said, “You two have a real old-fashioned relationship.” We do. We protect and nurture it from desensitizing technology. We work at staying fully conscious of our motives and desires. We communicate openly. We argue and disagree but always stay in the ring together to resolution. We are honest. Our relationship has deepened in the distance. And now, in May 2025, we are merging our lives together in New York and hope to become a couple of old Q-tip heads driving too slowly in traffic, hobbling down a grocery aisle, letting soft-serve ice cream dribble down our chins.
In the January 2025 issue of Verse-Virtual, our collaborative poem “Tonight Time Falls Back” was published. We had arrived full circle to begin again.
TONIGHT TIME FALLS BACK
co-written by Alex Stolis & Catherine Arra
Our lapsed years layered in dormancy
will loosen, free hands to unravel
each linen strip soaked in cedar resin,
sculpted to our embrace.
We will be tender in our disrobing,
disarming, quiet in our sleepy waking.
We will live inside infinity, tumble
through a cancer diagnosis, untether
threads of triangulated radiation, create
a world we design, our names
on the lips of wind, rain; our story
written in the rustle of deer at wood’s edge.
Hollowed of mortality and sin,
we will drift forward in a wake of natron
and sawdust, grateful for amulets, afterlife,
for love after love.
We will exhale, close eyes. Our life the razor
tip of an arrowhead.
- Becoming a Couplet - August 1, 2025
- You Can’t Get There From Here - July 22, 2023
- The Velocity of Shattering - August 18, 2021
