love

Gone away: 23 May

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Today would have been my uncle’s birthday – my uncle who died last year in November. As with all losses and the mourning that follows, it has been rough, especially for my mom, his sister. I’ve written various bits about the loss and all the things you lose along with the person (the shared memory, or, as my mom put it the other day, “I was the person who had him in my life the longest of anyone alive” – in a sense this is true. As the older sister, she was there, 1.5 years old, when he came into the world, and with both of their parents gone, she is the only one who was there, and up close, for the rest of his life).

But in losing someone like him, we gain a deeper appreciation for who he was, and more than that, for what he taught without even trying. As I wrote at the time of his death: “the man collected everyone who came into his life, from “stray” people, to new friends, to ex-wives and ex-wives’ future families to new loves and their families and friends” – and this is always the thing about him that stuck with me during his life and now “post-life”. Perhaps because it is the thing I aspire to most. I find that somehow he was able to make it work, but I just encounter the most stubborn and traditional of barriers. I touched on the thought the other day: why are we so territorial and stingy with our love and acceptance?

Sure, I am a dyed-in-the-wool misanthrope, a come-to-life Oscar the Grouch (my hero, my idol), but it’s not actually who I am inside. Like my uncle, I am curious and my capacity for wanting to love people and show them compassion is boundless. When a former partner, who became a close friend, moved on and met the woman he has hitherto spent his life with, I was elated for him, but I lost the friendship because she was too jealous about its continuing to exist. When I got twisted into a mercifully brief emotional vise earlier this year, I swiftly got over the disappointment of it and thought we’d be friends – I tried to at least leave the door open to friendship on his terms but got burned by the partner/ex-partner/who knows now what she is/was because that became a question mark. Those details don’t really matter – I understand why these people got jealous, angry, irritated, upset. I just don’t think they had to – I have at least as much care and compassion for them as for the other party (the ones I actually knew directly). They have no way of knowing this and probably would not care because I guess there’s some intoxication or self-righteousness to be had in directing hatred or frustration toward perceived threats or annoyances. And all I can think is: I am sorry. I don’t think that holding onto hostility – or feeling hostile in any sustained way at all – is a way to live.

That is not to say I never get annoyed or hostile (often reactions to feeling hurt). But these things mend, and I look at situations and people (even virtual strangers) to see the good in all of them, to see what they must have gone through or experienced. If I could, I would be like my uncle and “collect” these people, too, into a distant but extended kind of network of people – like-minded or not, I am sure that if someone I cared about, even remotely or briefly, loved these people, they must be remarkable in some way. I’d venture to guess we all have a lot more in common than not.

Confronting mortality – both one’s own (and one’s own brushes with death) and others (so many losses, some obvious, some hidden) – it has always seemed ludicrous to be so insular and self-absorbed about love and particularly about welcoming and accepting people into your heart. My uncle, may he rest in cycling adventures and untold numbers of over-the-top characters and events on whatever plane he travels now – today, his birthday – and for all eternity, managed to live this challenge and invite others to live in this way too.

He taught by example, sure, but I really wish he were still here to ask him how he did it.

Photo (c) 2006 John/Johnny Grim used under Creative Commons license.

“You cannot live and keep free of briars”

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The Ivy Crown
-William Carlos Williams
The whole process is a lie,
        unless,
            crowned by excess,
It break forcefully,
        one way or another,
            from its confinement—
or find a deeper well.
        Antony and Cleopatra
            were right;
they have shown
        the way. I love you
            or I do not live
at all.

Daffodil time
         is past. This is
              summer, summer!
the heart says,
         and not even the full of it.
              No doubts
are permitted—
         though they will come
              and may
before our time
         overwhelm us.
              We are only mortal
but being mortal
         can defy our fate.
              We may
by an outside chance
         even win! We do not
              look to see
jonquils and violets
         come again
              but there are,
still,
         the roses!

Romance has no part in it.
         The business of love is
              cruelty which,
by our wills,
         we transform
              to live together.
It has its seasons,
         for and against,
              whatever the heart
fumbles in the dark
         to assert
              toward the end of May.
Just as the nature of briars
         is to tear flesh,
              I have proceeded
through them.
         Keep
              the briars out,
they say.
         You cannot live
              and keep free of
briars.

Children pick flowers.
         Let them.
              Though having them
in hand
         they have no further use for them
              but leave them crumpled
at the curb's edge.

At our age the imagination
         across the sorry facts
              lifts us
to make roses
         stand before thorns.
              Sure
love is cruel
         and selfish
              and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
         young love is.
              But we are older,
I to love
         and you to be loved,
              we have,
no matter how,
         by our wills survived
              to keep
the jeweled prize
         always
              at our finger tips.
We will it so
         and so it is
              past all accident.

blinking through middle age

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“Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.” -from Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

Erica Jong’s heroine asks in Fear of Flying: “Would most women get married if they knew what it meant?” She follows up by stating that perhaps in middle age, marriages would work better. It’s hard to say, of course, but seems reasonable enough to presume. But then maybe it’s more likely that a second or third marriage would work best, regardless of how old the participants are. The book’s protagonist is already stymied in her second marriage and seeking comfort elsewhere. Much ado has been made about “starter marriages” and the likelihood of future marriages working because you learn from the mistakes of the first. I don’t know what to make of this. It too seems plausible – but not applicable to me.

If this is true, what of middle-aged people who never married and got no “practice” other than in a collection of short or long-term, ultimately dead-end relationships? I cannot say because I am in this demographic: middle-aged and never married. I have had a couple of long relationships that never held any future promise and a lifetime, otherwise, of flings and experiments to which I would scarcely be able to apply a name or formal distinction. In between there have been shorter and longer periods of just being on my own, which have always been the happiest and most content times of all.

Confronting the ‘more’

While it’s true that being alone and – by extension – independent has given me a lot of joy, there are moments, often more frequent than in the past, that I imagine my calm life could be enhanced by the presence of someone else. I’ve already written before about not wanting to invite in ‘the wrong element’. After all, as Doris Lessing wrote in The Golden Notebook: “What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do”. It’s a delicate balance: you may finally confront the fact that you want and need to love and be loved, but to do so, is second-rate enough? Do you fool yourself into thinking that second-rate will do it for you? Can your view become so blurred that you think the ‘wrong element’ could be right? I’ve concluded that it’s most important to recognize the need for love – and go from there.

The ark of the ache of it

Many times I have cited Denise Levertov’s “Ache of Marriage” – and given a lot of thought to the ache one must feel within a marriage – but what about the ache you have without it? It’s something you feel without ever having had the missing part in the first place. It’s not constant but comes in waves. It can look so miserable when you look at it from the outside. Mundane, like a constant sacrifice of one’s own identity and preferences. What is it that softens us … age? The right element? The sunset? The need for warmth? Previous experience (which can also harden us)? The desire for daily soup? (Soup would really do it for me.)

Past sheds light…

Blink. Blink.

A recent experience, brief enough to be like the blink of an eye, has contributed one significant thing to my life. It opened a long-closed part of me and made me realize it made no sense to close it again. I had so many times before let previous experience influence me, to close me off, to shut emotional responses down. And now… maybe it was this recent experience, maybe my age, maybe all the previous “practice”, maybe the starker-than-ever realization that there are only so many sunrises and sunsets ahead, maybe a combination of everything that convinced me to stay calm, and stay open?

Cat bites: Desperate Characters

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“‘You know what you sound like? A person who has just gotten a divorce and is telling himself that his whole married life had been nothing but torment.’ Otto sighed. ‘I suppose so.’” – from Desperate Characters, Paula Fox

There are strange parallels in Desperate Characters and the life I have observed in other middle-aged (and older) people. The malaise of long relationships – the kind that have occupied and eaten up the entirety of one’s adult life. The kind that are easy to take for granted, despite everything you have been through. You go have affairs or behave badly in some other way or you clam up because communication becomes the most difficult thing you could do with this partner-cum-stranger. You imagine the other person is out to get you; you kind of sleepwalk, focus on your own things, take up residence in separate bedrooms but still go away together to the country home or on holiday. Every couple copes in its own way. Often the status quo is the easiest and most comforting choice.

Descriptions of Desperate Characters refer to the central relationship as “loveless”, but I felt like it was truer to say that the tale chronicles a mundane marriage. Two people who have lived together for so long that they are immune to each other, are no longer paying close attention to each other. Yet coexistence is still comforting, if grating, and this keeps them together. Even when one or the other does something to potentially rupture the whole relationship forever, it’s still easier to return to the marriage. It is easier to try to ease the slow, dull ache of it than to do something dramatic. In the opening pages of the book, the heroine, Sophie, feeds and is bitten by a stray cat. This injury, and its radiating pain, potential infection and other consequences, represents the uncertain way her marriage to Otto festers. That is, the marriage might be much worse under the surface, like the cat bite, than even she realizes. She might be going along trying to convince herself that the marriage, and the bite, will be fine. (It’s not entirely coincidental that my mom’s cat recently bit her, and it got slightly infected; somehow it too could be an edgy expression of her own marital unhappiness.)

I’m giving this a lot of thought because I don’t relate – I cannot understand any of this from experience. I have never really been the one in a long, disintegrating relationship – together but lonely and feeling emotionally abandoned. I could intellectually relate to some bits, and could relate to the idea that sometimes you stumble into an affair, but as the “other party” who walks into the situation, you don’t know what is on the other side. Like the protagonist/narrator, Isadora, of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying throwing caution to the wind, leaving her husband behind to go on the road with spontaneous, flamboyant Brit Adrian, her ultimate “zipless fuck”, who constantly chided and prodded her about not being free enough – only to discover that he had had all along a schedule and a plan to meet his wife and family on a certain date, at a certain time, which struck her as the most ridiculously hypocritical turn of events. Sophie in Desperate Characters  has an affair that seems to peter out as the guy starts to cancel plans, recede into mentioning his supposed ex-wife more and more. Suddenly in these acts, hostile or not, you don’t know if you were just a diversion from this whole other, full life. Just a little break in the monotony of their “real life”.

“Only a few weeks after their affair had begun, she suffered powerful interludes of scorn in which she saw herself to be a fool, the fool. Her shifting judgments on herself revealed to her how her involvement with Francis had shoved her back violently into herself. In allowing himself to be loved by her, he had shown her human loneliness.”

“That they should be sitting across from each other in the same way they had sat for so many years and that the habitual intimacy between them could have suffered so wrenching a violation without there being evidence of it, was harrowing to Sophie. If, all these months, she had so ardently lived a life apart from Otto without his sensing something, it meant that their marriage had run down long before she had met Francis; either that, or worse—once she had stepped outside rules, definitions, there were none. Constructions had no true life. Ticking away inside the carapace of ordinary life and its sketchy agreements was anarchy. She knew where she had been, she thought.” -from Desperate Characters

Worse yet, of course, even Sophie, who had only had the one affair and wondered whether she would have the strength to have left her husband for this man had the option been open (but that was the point – she had no choice, and the option was not open – which is something to which I do relate), snaps in harsh judgment of her eternally single friend who drifts from one affair to another, exploding with:

““Why don’t you make a retreat for six months!” Sophie interrupted, shouting. “Don’t you know how dumb you are? You think because somebody’s husband sticks it in you, that you’ve won! You poor dumb old collapsed bag! Who are you kidding!” God, had she killed her dead? There wasn’t a sound at the other end of the telephone, not a whisper of breath. Sophie was trembling, her hands wet. Then she heard a kind of hiss that became words, spilling liquidly, like broken teeth from a hurt mouth. “You…filthy…cunt!”” (And then silence.)

In any case, I don’t have the answers because I just don’t have the experience. But I don’t buy that the love is dead between these characters. It disappears at times, absent, but not dead. There was a fluid lack of connection between the two, but it struck me as disconnection in the normal way people grow apart and continue to do so if they don’t acknowledge and address it together. In this case, the woman has had an affair. But ultimately the two remain married.

Some analysis on the book posits that the two are trapped. But are they? Perhaps trapped by the ease of just carrying on in the same way? Trapped by the safety of it but also trapped by the time spent – would you have the courage to leave if other options had worked? You end up trapped by the possibilities (and your inability to seize them) as much as you are by the routine, trappings of the relationship that defines you and your daily life.

Zero-sum game: Learning to give

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I read recently that there is a backlash to e-book sales in the UK. I love the immediacy and convenience of being able to get books on my Kindle device, especially because I live in the country, and even if bookstores were more accessible, I’d find precious little to suit my tastes. I could never feed the hunger for a book a day that is my current appetite, and if I could, I would not find quite the range of things I want. Thus, I appreciate e-books, but there are moments that I long for the real thing. (I suppose this is not unlike something like … if I may be so crass, sex toys/masturbation versus actual sex. Imitation does its job and in many cases may even be more effective, but it’s more clinical. Nothing is quite the same as the real thing. And guess what? It’s National Masturbation Month now! Take note!) In fact, imitation is one of the ways we can isolate ourselves, which is the point of this meandering ramble.)

We could praise this shift – moving to more compact and “less wasteful” modes of producing information, but we lose tradition and the ritual that comes with selecting a new books – the heft of it in your hands, the smell of the paper, the thickness and quality of the paper, the artwork/design, the way the book’s spine wears and pages grow tattered. We love them in a way we will never love an e-book. As cumbersome as it was to travel with books, for example, I enjoyed taking books on the road with me and then leaving them behind in airports, airplanes, hotel rooms, friends’ houses, cafes, wondering if their story would continue – would someone else take possession of the book and get something completely new? What would happen to a book I purchased in Iceland and left in Halifax, Montreal, Mexico City? Now, this will never happen again.

We have certainly lost something – not just in consuming and loving literature but in the way we live, the way we define ourselves, the way we consume, the way we relate to and love others and ourselves and, fundamentally, the way we are. Perhaps it does not matter because the universe as a whole is just a long series of losing things – or things imperceptibly changing. But observing the moment we live in, it feels hollow. No amount of flashing lights and distractions can distract from the emptiness the culture creates.

Dubravka Ugrešić writes in Karaoke Culture:

“The very foundation of karaoke culture lies in the parading of the anonymous ego with the help of simulation games. Today people are more interested in flight from themselves than discovering their authentic self. The self has become boring, and belongs to a different culture. The possibilities of transformation, teleportation, and metamorphosis hold far more promise than digging in the dirt of the self. The culture of narcissism has mutated into karaoke culture—or the latter is simply a consequence of the former.”

“We walk through the world with our memory sticks around our necks, each of us with our own homepage, each of us with an archive stored on the web. We, are everywhere . . . And the more voluminous the archive that trails us, the less of ourselves there seems to be . . . We don’t communicate with each other . . . Oh so modern, we put things on YouTube so anyone can gawk at them. We used to send out ghostly signals of our existence, and now we make fireworks out of our lives. We enjoy the orgy of being, twittering, buying new toys, iPhones and iPads, and all the while our hunger just grows and grows. We wear memory sticks around our necks, having of course first made copies. The memory stick is our celestial sarcophagus, our soul, our capsule, our soul in a capsule*.”

“In all its manifestations karaoke culture unites narcissism, exhibitionism, and the neurotic need for the individual to inscribe him or herself on the indifferent surface of the world, irrespective of whether the discontented individual uses the bark of a tree, his or her body, the Internet, photography, an act of vandalism, murder, or art. In the roots of this culture, however, lies a more serious motive: fear of death. From the surface of karaoke culture shimmers the mask of death.”

We are indeed more alienated and isolated – both from others and, even more alarmingly, from ourselves. But with gadgets, platforms and forms of high-tech mirrors, we fool ourselves into thinking we are self-aware because we are self-involved, self-obsessed even. But it’s the superficial self we plaster all over every new social media channel and into every app – crying out for attention – and connection – but moving further away from it all the time as we turn ourselves into caricatures, and eventually, commodities. And we start to see each other as commodities for exchange.

Treating each other as commodities, and treating ourselves as objects we must market and ‘improve’ so we can place the highest value possible on ourselves (but in a way that somehow empties us of self-esteem), started as a pet peeve for me but has grown into a full-blown worry as the trend has accelerated in the digital age and become its own form of epidemic. Dehumanized automatons cataloging themselves online for consumption in one form or another. I am no less guilty of committing this commoditization crime, subscribing to the “marketplace” idea of love or care. We convince ourselves there’s an endless supply of other, better, more interesting options, and so teach ourselves to dehumanize – that there is nothing to treasure, and nothing to trust in. It’s not a new idea, attempting to assign an ROI to people, to cut losses. It’s a game of emotional preservation, but it’s also a perversity. Eventually it does become about summing up balance sheets and ensuring you’re not playing a zero-sum game. And what in the hell does that have to do with care, love, compassion, feeling? It’s not just treating others this way – it’s an internal devaluation that leads us there in the first place.

Erich Fromm captures these very concerns in his The Art of Loving – and did so long before the advent of the internet:

“Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human relations are essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close to the herd, and not being different in thought, feeling or action. While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome. Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness.”

“At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one’s own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.”

It’s not just technology that has created this, as evidenced by Fromm’s observations from the 1950s. But technology sprays fuel on the fire and changes. Ugrešić highlights how technology radically changes the perception of everything. I relate, having succumbed to the same mindless tv addiction she describes and am now “clean”. I take it a step further to say it has changed our perception of who we are – how we are – what we are capable of (so much more in some ways, but so much less in others):

“It’s a notorious fact that technology radically changes one’s perception of everything, including time. Thirty years ago I could wile away the hours on the cinematic aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky and similar directors. Today I am ashamed to admit that my eyes have simply been weaned off them; the shots are too long, too slow, and the plot, if there is one, plodding and ambiguous. I used to love all that auteur stuff, but today I don’t have the patience. In the intervening time I’ve become hooked on cinematic “fast food.” Flowing in my veins, this fast food has changed the rhythm of my heart, my attention span, and the rhythms of my respiration. The truth is that I overdosed on television, and so I don’t watch it anymore. I’ve been clean for a while now, and I don’t miss it a bit. But I do watch lots of documentaries—it doesn’t matter what they’re about, the most important thing is that they’re “slow food,” that they offer me the illusion that what is happening on the screen really is happening. The way I read has changed too. At first I was surprised when friends told me that they were going to speed-reading courses. Now I’m thinking about enrolling in a course myself. My eyes are too slow, the computer screen just gets richer and faster, and my attention span is ever shorter. From the sheer quantity of information my memory is getting worse and worse. It’s not just that I have no idea what I consumed on the Internet yesterday, it’s that I don’t remember what I sucked up five minutes ago.”

Should we be alarmed? It can be argued that laws, social mores, technology of earlier ages also came along and changed things. Airplanes, telephones, cars, inheritance laws, vaccines, and so on and on. Every generation predicts the end of civilization (or possibly something slightly less hyperbolic but nevertheless negative) because of change. But change is inevitable. Does it matter, for example, if young people’s brains end up being wired differently because of their affinity for devices? Does it contribute to this disconnection people my age and older are screaming about? Does it matter that taking notes in longhand will make the information stick if young people never really learn to write? Should these be the things we get upset about? Should we listen as Pope Francis chides the digital world for acting as a roadblock to “learning how to live wisely, think deeply, and to love generously”?

Is the loss of tradition, ritual, care going to objectify everything and everyone? Have we already crossed that line? We already “value” everything that is instant or fast. We cannot seem to handle things that are ambiguous or hard. Where do we find hope in this landscape?

Maybe it’s in all those people who take up knitting; all these “rebels” embracing old-fashioned books and letter writing; maybe it’s the neighbor planting a garden. And at the core, perhaps, it is also extending the sense of humanity and connection – building love, which is actually one of the most difficult things. No wonder we run in terror.

Fromm again:

“This attitude — that nothing is easier than to love — has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.”

Fromm poses a question, which he may actually, in some measure, have answered himself:

“Here, however, an important question arises. If our whole social and economic organization is based on each one seeking his own advantage, if it is governed by the principle of egotism tempered only by the ethical principle of fairness, how can one do business, how can one act within the framework of existing society and at the same time practice love?”

The answer, as I see it, apart from finding a way to love, is to cultivate true giving. The two go hand in hand.

“Nothing’s free unless it’s freely given” – Charlie Hilton, “Pony”

We can only love if we give freely, and we can really only give freely by loving. Actively. And through both, we can feel alive.

“Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a “standing in,” not a “falling for”. In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.

What is giving? Simple as the answers to the question seems to be, it is actually full of ambiguities and complexities. The most widespread misunderstanding is that which assumes that, giving is “giving up” something, being deprived of, sacrificing. The person whose character has not developed beyond the stage of the receptive, exploitative, or hoarding orientation, experiences the act of giving in this way. The marketing character is willing to give, but only in exchange for receiving; giving without receiving for him is being cheated. People whose main orientation is a non-productive one feel giving as an impoverishment. Most individuals of this type therefore refuse to give. Some make a virtue out of giving in the sense of a sacrifice. They feel that just because it is painful to give, one should give; the virtue of giving to them lies in the very act of acceptance of the sacrifice. For them, the norm that it is better to give than to receive means that it is better to suffer deprivation that to experience joy.

For the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning. Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.”

*See also Hal Hartley’s 1998 film The Book of Life.

The aged: A life of training

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“How the gravitational field behaves when it heats up is still an unsolved mystery.” – Seven Brief Lessons in Physics (Carlo Rovelli)

J said to me: “You seem to be someone who is blissfully, refreshingly, enviably free of… pressure.”

Perhaps this too is an unsolved mystery. It took time to be this calm. Or indifferent. (Picture John Hannah here, menacingly responding to an entreaty to calm down: “I’ve never been more calm.” I’d include the video but couldn’t find it.) Pressure isn’t building, even if heat bubbles up under the surface. That’s different: but how does the gravitational field behave when it heats up? We all want to know. But it’s probably not a pressure cooker.

Calm, one would think, comes with age. But not really. It’s an individual thing. Some continue to grow more uptight, rigid and agitated as time goes on and responsibilities, decisions and grievances accumulate. I, on the other hand, have moved slowly in the opposite direction. Is it some discipline that was once conscious that shifted imperceptibly into a natural, unconscious behavior? Some form of lifelong training?

FROM The Spirit of Place
-Adrienne Rich

Are we all in training for something we don’t name?
to exact reparation for things
done long ago to us and to those who did not

survive what was done to them    whom we ought to honor
with grief    with fury    with action
On a pure night    on a night when pollution

seems absurdity when the undamaged planet seems to turn
like a bowl of crystal in black ether
they are the piece of us that lies out there
knowing    knowing    knowing

But it does not matter. Not the why or how. Just that I am.

Many things that end up attributed to age, aging or being aged, may not in fact be related to age. Duh. Experience, and perhaps even more importantly, openness to experience, imbues one with a curiosity and, as Erich Fromm describes it, a concentration/sensitivity. It is learning to stand on your own two feet, to be freely alone, to embrace patience, to be sensitive not only to oneself but to others. I am not always good at these things, but it is a process:

“If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own feet, he or she may be a lifesaver, but the relationship is not one of love. Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the conditions for the ability to love. Anyone who tries to be alone with himself will discover how difficult it is.”

“To have an idea of what patience is one need only watch a child learning to walk. It falls, falls again, and falls again, and yet it goes on trying, improving, until one day it walks without falling. What could the grown-up person achieve if he had the child’s patience and its concentration in the pursuits which are important to him!”

Mature sex: Stay calm, but hot

Embracing age, being alone and even the fundamentals of unconditional love (as a concept), we are still left with our bodies and the demands they make. And then what is most telling is how one thinks about the sexuality of the aged/aging. I’m calm, facing the realities of wild and dramatic corporeal metamorphosis (when is the body not changing, either from uncontrollable forces or our own manipulations?) and half a lifetime of experience and observation. I know the story isn’t finished. We are not a very mature society, at least from an anglo-world perspective, imagining sexuality to be the domain of the young, nubile, and virile, turning away from and denying that it may very well drive us at all ages, continuing to add fuel to the fire of our lives, until the end.

In a somewhat related sphere, I have come to evaluate the people I meet based on how they react to a specific film: Cloud 9/Wolke 9 (a German film – not the Disney film). I wrote about it before. Basically it’s a story of average, normal senior citizens and their love and sex lives. It acknowledges how the body, how the perspectives, how the perceptions, how the wants and desires change. Do you stop wanting sex – or, more importantly, the intimacy of being with someone with whom you can talk and laugh and be understood through it all just because you’re old? No. I keep coming back to and referring to this film. Not that it was a masterpiece, but I have rarely seen these issues that we will all face depicted in a real, honest and stark way. Somehow “old people sex” as a topic is the butt of sitcom jokes and lines the pockets of big pharma.

I tell everyone I meet about Cloud 9 and gauge their reaction. I don’t love or rely on knee-jerk reactions and wholesale judgments based on something like this, but their immediate reaction gives me a glimpse of how the person works – and ultimately about their respect and compassion for the aged, for others, for themselves – and the aged people we will all become. A reaction of disgust or laughter causes me to pull back mentally. And frankly this is the reaction I usually get. Except from senior citizens, generally, although even they often tell me, “I would not want to see that.” Then I actually brought it up with someone recently, who said, “I saw that film at a festival. I found it very moving.”

After wading through so much nonsense, and living a life of experience and training “for something we don’t name”, that is exactly what I wanted to hear.

Photo (c) 2013 pelican used under Creative Commons license.

Identical twin

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How I ended up with a broken – or at least bruised – heart isn’t terribly important. I lost my heart, temporarily, briefly, to someone who was ridiculously cute, with tastes ridiculously astute, and I struggled with it for a while. I had been swept up in something I could not control. It became clear that while I had really loved, for whatever misguided reasons, I had loved someone who did not really exist as he had temporarily existed for the brief moment we had. Maybe I did not really exist in that way either except for that moment in time. Who knows? It’s irrelevant now. It took some fumbling in the dark to realize that that’s really okay – it does not, as he had once said, take away anything from that moment. He was right. I was never in the game of pointing fingers and laying blame about anything – it was never like that. It’s easy to get lost in the maze of feelings, twisted up inside by injudicious expectations… until you map your way out.

Always life’s impossible balance between expectation and hope. Probably in my life I had expected that certain events would play out as though they were predestined – like when I was a child I imagined that it would be perfectly reasonable that I might be married and even have a child by the age of 25. I suppose I thought and even expected this because it was the reality modeled for me. My parents had me when they were 24, and they had been married just over a year. Their marriage to each other was already a second marriage for both of them. I didn’t consider that perhaps my life would take a different path, that I would spend so much time undertaking formal education, that I would want to uproot myself from where I came from to explore the world, that I would come to think of being 24 or 25 as being almost a baby still, that nothing I did would lend itself to ‘family life’. I didn’t like ‘family life’ as a kid or growing up, so as time went on, I realized that having some other form of family life – one I built myself – was not a priority. The expectation slowly went away, deferred for an undetermined hope of “someday, maybe”.

This hope was dashed early on for various other reasons, but I was still very young, so I had time to get used to the new paradigm, to build different expectations and hopes while convincing myself most convincingly (!) that I didn’t need or want this ‘family life’ or anything like it – ever.

Did hope die then? I don’t think so. It’s just that when you are in your 20s, you don’t feel like it matters. Expectation, though, was dead and buried. Year by year, one by one, all the friends become ‘family people’ (pod people?!). I live on my own island, making the best of, the most of, it. It’s fulfilling enough, but is it enough? Is there still, against all hope or reason, some hope remaining for something that is the unlikeliest of unlikelies? It’s hard to say for sure – there are glimmers. I have made my peace with it.

Still, the body gives and takes away. Strapping young armcandy-like men swoop in and buoy me up but also remind me that I am not 30 like they are. (Who imagined that one day I’d be old enough to refer to someone in his early 30s as ‘shockingly young’?) These virile ‘youngsters’ who casually exclaim, “Marry me!” because we both watch the same tv shows cannot understand how this (in)delicate balance becomes unbalanced – when expectation shifts to outside hope before toppling over completely. Nor can they understand the set of deeply conflicted, jarring feelings that accompanies this whole thing. The older, the wiser, the better.

He: Actually, I think about this a lot. At 6 AM, most 45-year-old men are probably shaving, putting on a tie and getting ready to have a family breakfast before the morning commute.
She: How do you feel about not being one of them?
He: Sad. Elated. Lucky. Hard done by. Jealous. Smug…
She: Heavens. That sounds exactly like me.

How doleful, but unexpectedly joyous, to consider this shared fate, this shared set of discordant, inconsistent feelings and to know, at least in some way, this part of making our way through the maze is not something we have to do completely alone.

Photo (c) 2013 Julie Pimentel used under Creative Commons license.

Kill switch / Hold on hope

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“Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” -Anne Lamott

Feb 2017; Same old lessons, different day:

  • Be the adult: Don’t sit around and wait just to see what happens. Be the adult; be responsible and just hit the kill switch immediately. Do not give someone else the chance to jerk you around with their indecision and inability to find or voice their feelings. This is difficult if you have fallen in love or have more feelings than the other person. Someone jerks you around, runs hot and cold, shuts you out but gives you mixed signals and words, and behaves in an unhinged way; if they hem and haw, make premature declarations and backtrack or ‘aren’t sure’, you have your answer. Instinct and experience have handed you the hard-won answers: use them, heed them.
  • Acknowledge your own real feelings:  Just walk the fuck away when you know logically and through evidence exactly where you stand and where this goes. Be connected enough with your own feelings to know when you’re trying to convince yourself of what does not exist and are faking it to justify satisfying morbid curiosity.
  • Scrap the three Cs & adopt three other Cs: Don’t stick around out of curiosity, courtesy or compassion… or some rancid mix of all three. Look at context and content to see if someone is being a cunt (or whether you need to be one) and go from there. (And ‘cunt’ here is the strictly English way of using it…)
  • Turn around and run from flashing lights and sirens: You see flashing lights and red flags ahead and choose to ignore. In fact, you run right into the fire. DON’T! You hear the alarms and sirens going off and think maybe it’s just your fear. No: don’t wait; don’t give the benefit of the doubt; don’t make excuses on anyone else’s behalf; don’t ‘be noble’. Just run – fast – in the other direction.
  • Turn off the projector: When you have a whole shitload in common with someone, don’t overlook all the things that don’t connect. Don’t project attributes or feelings you possess (and imagine you share) or wish the other person has onto him/her, hoping s/he will embody them just because everything else is shared in common. It doesn’t matter that you were led to believe these things were shared at some point: don’t assume that it is real or will stay that way.
  • Tune the fuck in: “Goddamn, girl, you don’t gotta be psychic to know the truth. That boy don’t love you. At all.”
  • Remember that silence speaks volumes: Silence might not be permanent; it might not signal that someone is pseudo-“ghosting”; however, someone who cares is going to talk to you – whatever is going on – even if s/he is not sure quite what is going on or how s/he feels.
  • Kill the curiosity before it kills you: It’s very tempting to watch the whole movie even when you know it’s not gonna be a happy ending. It’s an extension of acknowledging your own true feelings – sticking around because you’re curious is a waste of time. It’s not good enough – that is, you are not being good to yourself – to tell yourself you weren’t doing anything anyway, so it won’t hurt just to watch all of this unfold. It will hurt. And if you’re not careful it could lead to something worse – ending up in a situation you really don’t want. (You know what I’m talking about here: you cannot even figure out why you want to be wrong because if you were to get what you tried to convince yourself you wanted, you would be miserable.)
  • Keep your eyes (and ears) open: It IS clear what is happening – on every level. But you want to believe it is going to turn out differently no matter what harbingers of doom lurk around every corner. It’s clear. Embrace the truth your eyes show you and ears tell you, not the misleading song of the heart. But don’t be so open that you become a sponge absorbing all the misery and anxiety of someone else while getting/feeling/experiencing nothing in return.
  • Refer back: When in doubt, when bending to someone else’s will or charm or even carelessly letting them dictate all the terms and conditions, the way you relate to each other: refer back to this list. In fact, print it out. Laminate it. Carry it around with you everywhere.
  • Identify triggers and patterns: It’s not anyone’s fault: period. But it is also not anyone else’s fault. You have triggers and patterns. Certain kinds of people appeal to you; learn to recognize the ‘signs’ that you have met one of those types. Recognize and put a halt to your own ‘enabling’ and ‘deflecting’ behaviors (similar to ‘absorbing all the misery and anxiety and getting nothing in return’ listed above). You have to be open to taking it to receive it – all this kind of shit takes two to do.
  • Hold on hope: Okay, so you don’t hold onto hope about a hopeless situation. Face reality and embrace it for the often hopeless dead-end it is. Nothing is ever surprising in that way. But it doesn’t mean you should declare hope dead. There are fragments of it floating around everywhere.

“Every street is dark
And folding out mysteriously
Where lies the chance we take to be
Always working
Reaching out for a hand that we
can’t see
Everybody’s got a hold on hope
It’s the last thing that’s holding me
Invitation to the last dance
Then it’s time to leave
But that’s the price we pay
when we deceive
One another/animal mother
She opens up for free
Everybody’s got a hold on hope
It’s the last thing that’s
holding me
Look at the talkbox in mute
frustration
At the station
There hides the cowboy
His campfire flickering
on the landscape
That nothing grows on
But time still goes on
And through each life of misery
Everybody’s got a hold on hope
It’s the last thing that’s holding me”

-Guided by Voices, “Hold On Hope”

Signals

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“A signal is what you use in your car, dude. Not a way of communicating with someone who clearly needs direct answers.”

I only get through things and process them by writing and thinking. It does not work to talk about things, not only because I don’t know how to say or explain things without introspection and processing first but also because I am so bloody concerned about how things will affect other people. Like… if I say things that are not fully formed, I’m putting burdens onto someone else – and of course, in a two-way exchange, you can intuit and know when that the other person can’t handle or deal with whatever you might say, or will take it all on board and cloud things up for them, or make them feel worse or guilty. And why do that when you could suffer with the uncertainty or hurt on your own without making two (or more) people feel bad? It sounds like I am being some kind of martyr (I’m not), but I just can’t do it. It is not my nature to expose a larger group of people to harm or damage if I can take the hit myself (even when that means internalizing something). I have to work on this. Anyone who knows me knows this.

By the time anyone gets the full lowdown on something I experienced or felt, it’s because it is in the past – over, done, processed and packaged neatly into a box and tied with a bow. Then after the fact and all the acts, curtain closed, I can reveal all the feelings I went through – but it is like I have to finish going through it before I can show it… which is not the healthiest way to go about it. I write, think, feel my way through things, and then revise, think and finally come to a peace with even the most painful of things. Then perhaps I put the ‘incident report’ in some form or another into blog posts, but by the time I do this, the deep-seated and immediate emotion is long gone. There was a time when I would not even have made this much public, so I like to think I am making the most imperceptible steps forward. Sometimes the disconnect between the brain and the fingers is enough to make these moves for you. For example, deleting something that you wanted to save, hitting send before you were ready. Are these really mistakes or is the immediacy of the fingers taking action where our brain fears to go?

This is perhaps also where my own blind spots/insensitivities are. I process and publish, and because it’s all over for me, and I am just ‘clearing out cobwebs’ and more or less just telling a story after the fact, I don’t think about how the retelling and my own rendering (which is a compendium of my feelings and interpretations throughout my processing – not an objective recollection of fact) of ‘how things went’ might be hurtful to anyone else. Another thing to work on.

But at least all of these ‘operations’ provide an indication of where close partnerships, friendships, relationships and the like are actually impossible. Where you find you really censor yourself, close up and hold back – not because you can’t share but because you don’t want to unduly influence or trouble the other person – where’s the parity – or clarity – there?

It’s a little bit fucked up – when you’re adults, intelligent and seemingly capable of communication – and even talk ad nauseam about the importance of communication (thus ending up being all form and no content, which is a good way to fool yourselves into thinking you are actually communicating…) – you should be able to say what is on your mind. But it becomes one of the hardest things to do. You then detach to get to solid ground again, and that journey takes you through the full range of feeling – or elements*, as DH Lawrence would have it. But you eventually make it back to the start, to rediscover the things that made your mind race with joy and thought.

It’s a shame, too, as you end up at such a distance from, in a protracted silence with, someone who is without doubt beautiful, amazing, hilarious, messy, quirky, witty, and smart – exactly as you always believed, someone you genuinely care about and truly miss. But having communicated – or not – in staccato fits and starts, never quite saying what was going on, never quite being truly open – you may never get back to a place where you see anything but yellow caution lights in a sea of faceless stop-and-go traffic.

Most importantly, and this is my signal: I am still, and always, here, and I still love. Unconditionally. If I didn’t, it would not have been such a trial in the first place. Of course.

Elemental*
-D.H. Lawrence
Why don’t people leave off being lovable
Or thinking they are lovable, or wanting to be lovable,
And be a bit elemental instead?

Since man is made up of the elements
Fire, and rain, and air, and live loam
And none of these is lovable
But elemental,
Man is lop-sided on the side of the angels.

I wish men would get back their balance among the elements
And be a bit more fiery, as incapable of telling lies
As fire is.
I wish they’d be true to their own variation, as water is,
Which goes through all the stages of steam and stream and ice
Without losing its head.

I am sick of lovable people,
Somehow they are a lie.

Photo (c) 2006 Rachel Knickmeyer used under Creative Commons license without modification.

五大 – Zen boredom

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“Everything feels remote and random from afar.”
“Yeah, I have also had my a-ha moment: This is fucking boring.”

Dear “Hideo”,

My friend Emi and I once gave her abusive boyfriend Ed the nickname “Yuki” (after the yuki daruma, or snowman. Why? Because in tough situations, he melted and/or ran away. Same difference, right?). I will call you “Hideo”; first because bestowing fictional names is hard. Second because there is something about the hesitant nature of your cowardice, how your self-esteem and your desires bounce wildly, up and down, like a rubber ball uncontrollably hitting the walls in an empty room, that reminds me of an actual Hideo I once knew. He was easily scared, a bundle of nerves but driven by supposed feelings and strong urges that he regretted almost as soon as he admitted or gave in to them. I recall how, as the hours ticked on, spending non-stop, sleepless days and nights wandering through Tokyo with him, we got into minor disasters that led onward to other seemingly endless obligations. He, distracted while driving his Mazda Miata in bumper-to-bumper city traffic (the standard for Tokyo), rear ended another car, setting into motion days of events related to this minor fender-bender. He was high-strung, hung up on the rightness, procedure, protocol, etiquette of how to handle every post-collision step.

My tiredness and jet lag during those interminable days made me grow calmer and more docile than normal – I may as well have been catatonic. On balance I became increasingly bored until I was more interested in how air conditioning blowing full-blast in a hotel room could not remove the stifling humidity of the clinging, wet September air; it merely made us shiver in sticky frigidity as we awkwardly attempted to have sex, which made him into a fumbling, nervous wreck, both before and after. I became even more tuned-out and bored, but felt a tingling of interest about the background story as to how Sanrio characters ended up being used on the packaging of condoms, like those he’d found at the local 7-11. Badtz Maru the penguin is Japanese sexy time for me forever after.

It is this same kind of disengaged, but intellectual and detail-oriented “let’s see how this turns out” interest that remains when I think of you. It is with dwindling, and possibly non-existent, interest that I write, isolated from whatever excitement or warmth I had once perceived or felt. The feeling, as I have tried to say a million times before – but have stopped myself for one reason or another – departed a long time ago. Today, interaction (if it could be called that) is rote, checking in because checking in is what you do at some point – expected, de rigueur. It’s passionless and entirely devoid of heartfelt curiosity and certainly of urgency or magic, maybe even devoid of real concern. It’s exactly the daily life I never wanted, going through the motions, saying hello during brief windows of available time, running through the dull (and duller) lists of daily activities and a gloss-over mood check. A few platitudes, meant to be reassuring. Each interval feels compartmentalized, and in no compartment is there any fever, flurry, fury or impulse to do, to act, to entwine, to overlap, simply to be together. The lack (of all these things) should not feel personal but does. And probably is. I kept making an effort but was the only one wandering in that compartment, either because I really was the only one who was genuinely interested or because you really are that self-involved, selfish, blind and thoughtless, or as your ex-wife had hissed repeatedly: “unfeeling”. I am a small part of a nebulous problem, one fine, almost invisible, strand in the tangled web of which I occasionally get a glimpse, but into which I am not interwoven.

I knew I would be stepping into an unpredictable tempest of an entanglement – received fair and early warning. Not quite the all-caps screaming, lights flashing warning, which, upon reflection, might have been more appropriate: UNKNOWN TERRITORY. I did not know that that “unknown territory” would be so boring, and that the ‘agony’ of it would be so humdrum. Wishing for small signs, never seeing any because signs don’t exist in uncharted territory, but interpreting the smallest things as much bigger than they are because they are the only perceptible signs of any kind. Every ‘sign’ is either my imagination and/or something that keeps me on the hook (probably not done maliciously or consciously but done nevertheless). Realizing that the two of us are, actually, ridiculously self-centered, both cut from cloth but in completely different patterns, we aren’t going to be sewn together. I already know I will never be – and never was going to be – one of those women who, godforbid, marries a Boeing machinist named Rick, Scott or Bill who drives a fully loaded Ford F350 Power Stroke Diesel, and who spends the rest of her life doing laundry, trying to match up stray socks while lamenting this stupid, stupid mistake of a life, so it is not as though I have been waiting around for some standard, prescriptive finality or entrapment.

Yet, I have been trapped by my own feelings, the certainty and level of them unprecedented for me – but also unreciprocated in their depth and truth. It was an illusion for you, a stepping stone out of an unhappy situation and the mania that followed. I don’t see why it makes sense to stand still to discover that no, after so much time, I really was just a well-equipped harbor in which a damaged ship could complete repairs, but not at all someone with whom a person could see him or herself ‘setting sail’, so to speak. I keep ending up in this situation – thinking that in the absence of something else (i.e., I would not be otherwise occupied with emotional entanglements and similar horse shit, so sitting on the periphery, waiting for the madness to abate or for the feelings to become clear, doesn’t hurt). Yet, even if it does not usually hurt (but sometimes does – I grew in very short order to feel shut out and isolated), and does not stand in the way of anything else I would not be pursuing anyway, I’m selfish with my time, and it’s being squandered – right now. Particularly because once again I’ve put myself in a situation where the terms are all dictated by someone else and their needs, their life’s circumstances. I am not sure it can easily – or ever – be otherwise because everyone else’s lives are so dramatic – or, better said, everyone else is so filled with anxiety, nerves, troubles to the point that they elevate everything into an all-caps BIG DEAL. And almost nothing is a big deal to me. I go with the flow, and you’re easily pulled into the undertow.

Another part of all this is the undercurrent of feeling foolish and suspicious – there are hidden things, activities, falsehoods and booby traps, all silently taking place in the background, behind all the doors and compartments (for whatever reason – to keep all options open, to not hurt anyone’s feelings, to avoid a ‘serious’ or uncomfortable discussion or make any choices). I was just left to wait, wonder, wait, wonder, wait, watching the clock, feeling the days creep by, knowing this was nowhere I wanted to be today, next Halloween or anytime in the foreseeable future. In the beginning, once beyond the skepticism, most barriers down, I am all or nothing – ready – open – ripe – for complete upheaval and transformation (even if it is fraught with uncertainty and uncomfortable change). But when that willingness is met with doubt, a lukewarm response, mania, avoidance, long periods of silence, masks … anything but what I would need to drop anchor, so to speak, all moves swiftly toward nothing.

At first there was sadness and pain (it comes with realizing that someone with whom you have haplessly fallen in love is not who you thought they were – and they don’t feel the way they proclaimed in some misguided, too-early frenzy), then there was uncertainty and resignation (this is the internal argument – you already know your feelings are all but dead, but you’re wondering if you should make a last-ditch attempt at CPR), then came the release of clarity with unfeeling and indifference (accepting that the feelings are gone – those feelings, anyway) peppered by a dash of the compassion I’d extend to anyone swept up in the whirlwind of personal crisis – not my personal crisis, even if I were a piece of the puzzle. And then, somewhat surprisingly, one nondescript day, came boredom. Deceit, dodging, shame, self-preservation, boredom, lack of feeling or whatever is actually going on behind the scenes might matter to me if I weren’t first annoyed-bored out of my mind, followed by the serenity of zen boredom, just like that September day in an icy-humid Tokyo hotel room. Zen boredom, by which I am overcome and to which I have completely succumbed.

In some, but not all, ways, this experience mirrored an entanglement from many, many years earlier (so long ago that it was another century). I met a smart, funny, seemingly stable guy, R, who had shown what seemed to be deep and genuine interest in me. Early on, in the interest of transparency and openness, not wanting to scare me away sometime in the future, he talked about the period in his life to which he referred as “The Dark Years”. It had been the late 1980s, early 1990s, when aimlessness, music and heroin flowed freely – but still well before the spotlight was shone on this ‘gritty underworld’ of Seattle, which eventually exploded into broader public consciousness. There were a number of local, high-profile overdose deaths at the time, and this R character had apparently been a part of this scene, had been friends with these departed people. This history that he dug up and shared felt totally incongruous to the life he projected by the late 1990s – professional, conscientious, tremendous follow-through, baseball enthusiast and whatever-other-stuff mainstream-seeming American dudes did then. Totally out of step with this personality, the goals, the drive I had seen. I could not reconcile the two. (I later learned, and still need to remember, that the ‘demon’ of the dark years – for everyone who experiences such things – is never really dead. It is always there to seize onto a thread of vulnerability and unravel everything, eventually weaving its way back into a position of influence, the loudest voice in the person’s head. The surface is, after all, just the surface.)

Briefly, I had had considerable joy with him. We could put ourselves into garlic comas at the local Mediterranean joint; we could geek out over baseball players, strategy, terminology and stats; I could mesmerize him with my eyes, until he said stupid things like, “You are so beautiful” over cliche flickers of candlelight. We could end up bruised and carpet-burned on every surface of our bodies, pierced by punishing, raw physicality. None of it really mattered, which was the point. Because life was not at all the same then as it is now. I am much older, less patient with nonsense (even if a whole lot more compassionate). At the time of the Dark Years R affair, I actually lived with my boyfriend – a boyfriend who was not R. R was someone on the side, about whom my boyfriend knew. It had been his idea to ‘structure’ the relationship this way. Open. Mostly for his benefit, even if he did not benefit from it very often. I was young and figured I should take advantage. The danger, of course, is that you can get swept up in the intensity of the non-official, non-sanctioned affair. Because the affair has no stakes, you can actually lose yourself in it much more easily.

In fact, I look back and think that, unlike in more traditional situations, where one person meets and likes and is shy/nervous/in the throes of a crush on another person, the fact that I was already spoken for, in some way, was like a safety net. It erased all the inhibitions and hang-ups that come with fumbling-meeting-dating idiocy generally. I was free to be exactly who I was without any kind of self-doubt because I didn’t care what any person I subsequently met thought or felt. In meeting R, in greeting his wide-eyed amazement at the balance between my love for baseball and my intellect, my academic interests and out-of-control sexual appetites (or whatever – these are things he said, true or not) and everything else (possibly even the fact that I was not available), I could just enjoy the situation and then walk away.

But because it was so easy, and I felt no attachment, it morphed into, as I wrote, “getting swept up in the intensity”, which emerged without even realizing it. A strange attachment did start to form, during which he declared a whole lot of feelings, started making plans about the future, asked me to consider leaving the boyfriend, moving to a new city, and for a split second it almost sounded reasonable. You see, danger.

Before I ever had to decide anything, or even give it any real thought, though, he started to withdraw. I can never really know what precipitated it, despite what he said, the little seeds he planted – his excuses. The last time I saw him was intense and physical – but also totally disconnected. I felt nothing but the inevitable ending, and I knew it would be the last time I would see or talk to him. In bed in semi-darkness, not saying a word, his face betrayed regret, written thinly over a deeper layer of detachment – both emotional and chemically induced distance.

“I think the Dark Years are returning,” he announced, as he turned over and away from me. I knew what this meant – regardless of whether the actual darkness and its accompanying past activities and addictions had really returned or not, this was his escape route. I understood that there was a huge part of his life that I did not and could not understand. Only problem was that he did not need to make flimsy or unnecessary excuses – he could have walked away without a word any time – he had always been the one to insist that there was a ‘future’ to be had together, but that idea mostly left me silent – and bored. Despite the intensity, I had never asked for or wanted that. I did not want anything, and if I had, it would not have been that.

That last time was an early morning in late winter, maybe early spring, grey as all Seattle mornings are in my memory, and R crawled out of bed, and started dressing to go to work. I did not bother to get dressed. I was anxious just to be rid of him, pressing him toward the door, feeling a sense of relief that this was just a few minutes and a few meters away from being a part of the past.

“It’s been fun,” I said in a flat tone, standing in the doorway, watching as he walked out onto the landing. He kept looking back at me as he walked away, repeating, falsely reassuring, “Don’t worry — I’ll call.” With sardonic smile, I said, “Okay.” I shut the door knowing I would never see or hear from that guy again. (No suspense: I never did.) I turned on the tv to see another relic of “the dark years” (otherwise known as the 1980s), the film White Nights, with its dismal Lionel Richie theme. Another smirk. I made coffee, and chalked this whole thing up to experience – the experimental years I would later refer to, as now, as my own dark years.

And yet this experience has not saved me from letting the same kind of misguided forces pull me toward and through unwarranted intensity and misplaced feeling. Or imagining there is a future when there isn’t. Or finally reaching that place where I know what’s coming – no matter the reasons and their antecedents – and I just smirk, perfectly zen, and say, “Okay, I was bored anyway.”

Bored, but sincere.

Photo (c) 2011 Antony Mayfield