memory

I hold no truck with your burning my goat

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Friday, I do believe, may have been a/the sobriety anniversary for someone I know/knew. At least that’s what my memory started telling me on Thursday – or actually Wednesday – while walking in central Oslo passing some of the things I had seen with him the last time I wandered through the city center. All those hi-fi stores – I will never understand how they all stay in business. And there was even a semi-sung rendition of “Just Like Christmas” by Low. Strange how far away all of that, and even winter itself, feels. Things that happen in the permanently dusky, fictive period that is December/holidays/early new year are like that: they happened but take on an almost invented quality later when looking back.

Yes, these spring days in cold but sunny Oslo: This time it was a work dinner (at a restaurant that seemed to serve little, other than ceviche). I winced my way through the whole day, hobbling through a good 28 waking hours by the end of it, despite feeling a kind of searing pain surging wildly in much of my body. I, however, was more annoyed at the complaints I voiced and the visible indications of pain I showed than with the pain itself. (Back pain, which has been on and off for weeks, had abated but came roaring onto the scene again after an ill-advised long drive coupled with other stuff.)

This drummed up different thoughts, none of which were linked.

For example, I wondered how one comes to realize s/he is an alcoholic in a country and culture that is technically full of them? Where is the line?

As David Sedaris writes: “Turn down a drink in the United States, and people get the message without your having to explain. ‘Oh,’ they say, ashamed of themselves for presuming otherwise. ‘Right. I should probably… quit too.’ In Europe, though, you’re not an alcoholic unless you’re living half-naked on the street, drinking antifreeze from a cast-off shoe. Anything shy of this is just ‘fun-loving’ or ‘rascally’. Cover your glass in France or Germany — even worse, in England — and in the voice of someone who has been personally affronted, your host will ask why you’re not drinking.” (from When You Are Engulfed in Flames)

I thought of a colleague who kept using the word “pivot” but pronounced it “PIE-vot”. The kind of guy who suffers from a kind of Napoleon complex, driven by a must-boast, one-up, must-be-right, I-was-there(-first) syndrome – but luckily only at first (he has to mark his territory when you meet him) because eventually this gives way to a smart, sarcastic personality that is also warm, competent and insightful. I recalled one of his humbler moments, “I fucked up. And from the fuck-ups of our lives, we learn a lot. Immense amounts.” Or another colleague (although that implies there is something collegial or cooperative about our working together) who said, “Let’s not rewrite the wheel.” What?

I remembered also all those times people said things to me that smacked of other motives than what they thought they were transparently offering, betraying true intentions that lurked just beneath the surface. Much like a child who draws attention to his transgression before there is ever any suspicion aroused. The, “Oh, I might have this Mexican woman move in as my new roommate. But she’s not my type or anything; I am not attracted to her.” Hmm. Did anyone say you were? But you just showed your hand, friend. Or, “Nothing happened. I just got her phone number because she has the right look for my photography.” Um, okay. All the things that illuminate without lights.

But then, just as quickly, the mind shifts to asking what the difference is between ceviche and poke. Or to figuring out if I can finish reading all 13 books I have going right now before the end of April. Or to how expressions get muddled – the aforementioned “rewrite the wheel” or, my favorite flubs from Mr Firewall (of which there are many), who at least can laugh at himself first and longest, saying “burns my goat” instead of “gets my goat” and “tans my hide”.

Many thoughts but nothing too coherent – that’s how it goes in the delirium of too little sleep. Often it comes back to Pessoa:

“All that was lost, all that should have been sought, all that was obtained and fulfilled by mistake, all that we loved and lost and then, after losing it and loving it for having lost it, realized we never loved; all that we believed we were thinking when we were feeling; all the memories we took for emotions” –Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Photo by Medena Rosa

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.

Reflective deceit – interchangeably on repeat

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“We are who we’re not, and life is quick and sad.” – Fernando Pessoa, The Age of Disquiet

I had given a lot of thought to mirrors – both literal and figurative – in the days leading up to his sharing a random thought about mirrors and their uses. I twirled that around in my mind – how is it that each thought he expresses is like a mirror of my own thoughts? Not just general “thinking similarly” but near-verbatim captures, as though he were me and shared my consciousness, overlapping in time and meaning. I would think something, be overcome by something, silently, and he would voice the next logical thought or feeling for me. It should have been frightening to realize this interchangeability, but instead it was comforting to feel that a shared mind could express what I could not, or could extend my expressions, without my exerting any effort at all. An intellectual and mental mirror image.

My considerations, informed by a complete overload of reading, centered on how mirrors and reflections (both the visual and the intellectual varieties) intertwine effortlessly with memory, desire, identity and our whole concept of time, i.e. what the past and future mean to us as we creep through the minutes and hours of the present.

We know there is no objective truth when it comes to human reflection, but does that make it all reflective deceit? Our reflections have value, but at what cost?

“At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Los espejos son gratis pero qué caro mirarse de verdad…” – Julio Cortázar, “Inflación qué mentira” (Mirrors are free but how dear to really see yourself”)

Particularly given how memory is tricky, slippery and totally enmeshed in personal consciousness.

“La memoria es un espejo que miente escandalosamente.” -Cortázar (Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies)

The fallibility and subjectivity of memory means it cannot be trusted.

“Stuck On Repeat” – Little Boots – because repeating shit is what I do: “Every time I try to break free/then something comes along to intervene”

But we’re alive,
full of memory and thought,
love, sometimes regret,
and at moments we take a special pride
because the future cries in us
and its tumult makes us human.

from “Describing Paintings,” Eternal Enemies – Adam Zagajewski

Photo (c) 2013 Dermot McElduff used under Creative Commons license.

Bigmouth, whip in hand

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All at once the winds of the past start whipping, frothing up a deposit of the beautiful debris of yesteryear. It’s blowing without warning, independent of forecast.

The man, steady, with whip in hand and discussions of ethics on the lips; the memory of yet another Creeley poem (which I had forgotten entirely in my Creeley hysteria a few weeks ago, despite “The Whip” long being a favorite), The Ukrainians and the frenzied sound of their Ukrainian-language Smiths’ covers.

I spent a night turning in bed,
my love was a feather, a flat
sleeping thing. She was
very white
and quiet, and above us on
the roof, there was another woman I
also loved, had
addressed myself to in
a fit she
returned. That
encompasses it. But now I was
lonely, I yelled,
but what is that? Ugh,
she said, beside me, she put
her hand on
my back, for which act
I think to say this
wrongly.
And on the horizon, the PoPos – not slang for the police, but the “Po” countries: Poland and Portugal. And the UK, which I prefer to just call (Y)U(C)K.
Photo (c) 2008 nerissa’s ring used under Creative Commons license. And no, not that kind of whip.

Eight weeks

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How different eight little weeks, and the speed with which they pass, can feel depending on the place you find yourself in life.

For a man struggling every day, every minute, with sobriety, eight weeks is an eternity – but almost an unbelievable one (to the degree that he has been fearful to even count or keep track consciously). And each little milestone (being able to claim two months!) feels like a major triumph, but also comes with a possible downside. Like all lifelong ‘afflictions’, it’s forever. It’s something he lives with that must be maintained and nurtured with great care and consideration. He may be sober but never free of the label, the disease, the temptation.

Eight weeks feels like a very long time: each of the days passing not hour by hour but minute by minute. Each day packed with AA meetings, work and gym-going (or whatever fills those minutes) and the slowing evening more difficult, staring at the clock while the minutes pass until the stores that sell alcohol finally close. (All these themes appear at length in David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest, which I’ve been slogging my way through for days; the addiction parts are by far the most interesting.) It’s a safety net, knowing he can’t get anything if he suddenly fell into despair. Eight weeks, eight days, eight hours, eight minutes. Everything broken down to the smallest parts, anything to make the time go faster.

Meanwhile, for a newly pregnant woman, if she is even 100% sure she is pregnant at eight weeks, time is almost accelerated. At eight weeks, she has barely accepted the reality but is in a race with time if she, for example, intends to terminate the pregnancy. Many places have a 12-week cutoff point (at which point she could still terminate but needs special permission from her doctor or a panel of doctors), and while one would imagine that the four weeks in between eight and twelve weeks is a whole month, it’s never quite that simple.

She has a massive, life-changing decision to make. She may be in denial. She may even attempt to schedule an appointment to terminate, but even that can take time. Again it depends on where in the world she is. (It could be that depending on the stage of the pregnancy, the abortion will cost more; in the US many states don’t have abortion facilities at all, making the whole ordeal that much more challenging.) Eight weeks into a pregnancy, it’s already so well underway – like two months have already slipped away sneakily, almost without her conscious knowledge. And she wishes for anything that could make the time go slower.

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

Flakes like feathers

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How is it that I have never written about Prague before? Actually, this is not totally true. It got a brief mention in a recent post on 1999. Prague has not been a huge part of my life, but at the same time it has always been on the periphery. My Russian, eastern and central European studies years – all the literature, history and folk music. My brother and his friend making fun of my folk music purchases. The dear friends with Czech roots. Friendships and strange connections to this place. The memory of traveling to Prague for work in a change-infused period soon after I had left Iceland for Norway. The trip with colleagues to Prague for a photo shoot (and ending up, haphazardly, at a random restaurant we still refer to as “the old place” because we went in there first, left, wandered around aimlessly looking for somewhere else to eat, but ended up back in “the old place” – which was technically the first place. It was called U vejvodů, which I remember because I am that kind of person – the one who remembers the name of every place and street, even years later). The constant travel back to the Iceland for which I felt desperately homesick. The even more constant pull of Paris affairs. It’s no wonder that in those first dark months, Oslo felt more like hell than home. I was never even there.

How could all of that have been nine years ago already? How is it that it has taken nine years to find my way back to the old place?

Photo Ryan Lum

aged

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The beauty of being older is that you may experience pain but you know it’s only temporary. You will float right out of it eventually. You have all the evidence in memory and sometimes even in writing that all the things that so wounded and destroyed you when you were younger, and continued to do so over and over, will keep happening, and you will get over all of it. You will come right out the other side of the pain and feel almost as good as new.

Reading notes I’d jotted down from 1996, 2001, 2011, and various other points throughout, I see my pain splattered all over the pages, remembering exactly what I was doing, where I was sitting, even how I was breathing or crying or wringing my hands or writhing in physical pain, when all these catastrophes occurred – real catastrophes and crises or just those minor dust-ups that inveigle the heart – and I can even smile at this repeated pouring out of the fucked-up muck of life. All that agony, frustration, keeping up appearances, feeling used, tremendous loss, self-torture, deconstructing so many illusions, treading water, fecklessness, justifications: all of it felt like something once but eventually becomes something you don’t consciously remember.

Photo (c) Paul Costanich.

1999

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A trove of notes from the summer of 1999 – the past, while so well-illuminated feels like a part of a long and long ago night.

Summer begins, and I’m traveling around in Hawaii (Maui) and then all over Europe, accompanied by what appears to have been everything Nadine Gordimer had published at that time. The sounds of the Red Hot Chili Peppers followed/haunted me everywhere in the world I went. A Spanish guy who spoke no English tried to seduce me in Prague; an Australian tour guide named ‘Mat’ kept referring to every few-hours-stop in one city (without an overnight stay) as a “city lick”, which struck me as obscene; Budapest was enveloped in a massive thunder and lightning storm; Munich was unimpressive; I remember very little of Vienna other than the oppressive heat and a seemingly bipolar Australian girl; my hatred for Italy was born, as I lost my wallet and subsisted on the bits of various currency I had on hand for the various destinations (pre-euro days) I hit after Italy, although my time in Rome was made softer by meeting an American airline crew stuck there overnight; Luzern, my only stop in Switzerland, was civilized and orderly, as you would expect; I told a man in Nice that he had a piece of paper stuck in his hair; on a sweltering Friday night in Barcelona, John F Kennedy Jr’s private plane went missing; hellish times with hellish people in Madrid; a man came up to me in Tours and started saying something, which startled me, which caused him to ask if I understood French, to which I replied “un peu” – in English, he continued, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” I said, “Thank you.” He replied, “No, thank you” as he placed his hand to heart dramatically and kept walking. Hahahaha. So French of him.

There are other bits that I noted nothing about, which I found less than impressive – London, Amsterdam, Monaco. But I fell in love with Berlin then but still have nothing to say about it.

After all of this I ended in Iceland, where I spent several weeks and knew I wanted to stay there. At the time, I thought forever. But it only ended up being about 8-9 years. Only. En route to and from Reykjavik I had to stop at Oslo Gardermoen, which was then new, and seemed so strange. Now it’s my “airport of choice”, like it or not, but back then I could never have imagined. By the time I got to Iceland, I had exhausted my Gordimer supply and bought new books (my new credit card had been sent to my friend’s house, so I once again had money) – Jose Saramago, Bohumil Hrabal, Haruki Murakami.

I never wanted to leave. Unfortunately, I did not listen to my instinct and did leave, and found that leaving had been a huge mistake. I should have stayed. At least I returned as soon as I could.

Photo (c) Paul Costanich.

Observations

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Is there anything more dismal than frequent emails from frequent flyer clubs where you will never have any kind of status?

Probably.

Hardened
…Like letting memory wander aimlessly back to revive details such as the wiry, coarse, invisible hair that thickly covered K’s sinewy, hard arms, attached to an explosive, compact, bony, muscular body. Somehow this improbable package provided unfathomable pleasure when hidden away in a dark room somewhere, even if K’s hip bones protruded to penetrate almost painfully deep into the soft flesh of the thick, pillow-like thighs of the other, which made her resolve never to become hard like this herself.

Retail therapy
…Like reflecting on the fact that the most successful department store, at least in the Seattle area, has boomed using boozed-up retail – killing it by bolstering your consumer confidence with some bubbly while brainwashing you to buy more Burberry. (Apparently there is a bar in the Burberry section.)

Reading aloud
…Like spending untold hours reading books I’d never read myself but following through because I promised I would, even if the promise is almost a decade old.

It’s been one of the things I sometimes do – reading books aloud and recording them (these days making MP3 files) – for a big part of my life. Either for my grandmother, who lost her sight late in life and therefore also lost her life’s greatest passion, reading, or for dyslexic friends, who could understand their reading better by hearing it. It’s time consuming, sure, a labor of great love actually, but also a labor of learning for me.

Today I told someone I was reading what amounts to an (amateur!) audiobook, and he exclaimed, “It’s a job! Like a real job. But one that Jeremy Irons does!”

Photo (c) 2013 Vassilis.