A sea of strangers and random shirts and magic

I walked up to the nearest stranger I could find and asked in hurried poorly worded French for the nearest ticket counter. He smiled warmly and kindly offered up English, ushering me with sweetness from place to place across the busy Gare de lyon train station. We hurried as we talked but somewhere in the midst of the rushing there was just the faintest glimmer of a sparkle. I had all of ten minutes to print my ticket and get on the train leaving from Paris to Bern Switzerland. In typical French fashion, no one would help, but he did, and he was tender in silent ways for mere seconds of my life. I felt like fairy dust wabeing sprinkled on me thru the sunlight shining into this grand French train station. I suddenly noticed his hansomeness as not a mere coincidence, his beard and a scarf just the right thing to soften his smart conservative attire. Kindly allowing me to avoid the slow drudgery of my own French by letting me borrow his as he introduced me to the train attendant and showed him my ticket. I said goodbye as I jumped on the train just moments befor it departed. I wanted to hug him and say lets be friends or maybe even kiss him for sport but instead I just smiled and said thank you. I will never see him again. There were sparkles. I saw them in the sunlight.

We bump into strangers like this, share these moments and then let them go. It happens a million times over the course of a life. 

Weeks ago I shared two passionate nights with an inapropriatelty young frenchman on my island home. We had candelight dinner on the rice fields, we drank red wine on the patio of my villa as the warm tropical night filled with fireflies. We shared sheet wrapped moments of fingers and toes tangled together, of stroking hair and feeling skin. For those two nights I loved him as if he were mine to keep. On the second day, I felt him pulling away, slowly letting go. I dropped him off as he gave me one last twirl of my hair. I squeezed his hand and released him. I knew I would never see him again. My gut ached like fresh heartbreak, like it mattered, like it was real and not the lusty short lived game we were playing. I walked the slow long walk thru the rice fields towards my construction site saying "ouch" oultloud to no one in particular. Letting the sound come out of my mouth like releasing pressure from a baloon. Letting out the ache in slow small grunts. "Ouch, ouch ouch". 

Logic was clearly not at play here. We had little in common, our conversations would not even carry us to the third night that was available before his flight home but was being silently declined. His position as a regional manager of all Parisan outlets of a common American clothing brand gave us little common ground. But there was sparkle, we passed it back and forth between us. But It was not a sparkle I was meant to keep as eventually we would need real topics of conversation and less distance of age to hold us together. The pain in my gut would subside I assured myself. The grass blew in the wind as I walked. I will not see him again. Ever. Ouch.

As a married person with a child you are like a small celestial body. It matters not where in the world you are, they are always in your small orbit, your people. Now I am this solitary vessle with no anchor to steady me I am left to float about. I am becoming comfortable with this idea. This sense that I am carried by the wind bumping into people and exchanging small moments. I am starting to even understand this power. The gift of this. I am starting to see what is possible. 

I now begin to look for these moments. Seek them out like easter eggs in the grass. I sit on this train full of strangers wondering if one of them could light a small spark in me. 

Days ago I imagined the process of searching for people as no different than wading thru piles of used jeans. Trying them on over and over again looking for just the right fit. Like Digging in heaps of broken and ripped and out of fashion pairs at a third world market hoping that somewhere is a pair that hugs all my curves and has just the right pockets and I don't have to bargain too hard to call them mine. This image for too long has left me feeling broken and hopeless, like repunzel being asked to perform the impossible task of spinning straw into gold but lacking the magic to make this happen. This morning as I sat in a perfectly parisian coffee shop eating a chocolate croissant and sipping a cafe au lait I found a small secret that I had until that moment kept from myself. In an instant and for no reason, I let go of this image of used and broken jeans. Without warning a new image floated up and out of my coffee. The image of a grand easter egg hunt. The kind thrown for the royals before it became unfashionable to be ostentatious. A hunt with real rabbits, unimaginably large cakes and women toteing parasols. With each sip of coffee this image grew stronger in my mind and I realised that It is like searching the corners of the earth for just the right kind of magic, this sparkle that only exists between the right combination of people. Something that fills you up and makes you explode. If you know that it is there, if you believe that it is there maybe even a million times over, then it is just a matter of looking for it. It may be partly hidden, and surely unrecognisable if you don't look, but it is there. 

The train rumbles across the track and the green swiss fields roll by. The sun sparkles. I am on a hunt for magic. It can be found. Magic. 

50 dates

He was date number three, this is where I froze. This is where things got stuck for nearly a year. When I started dating for the first time after 17 years of monogomy I set myself the random numerical goal of 50 dates. Being a goal oriented person, this apealed to my sense of achievement. I also decided that this meant I was doing my part to be an active participant in the selection process of a long term mate. A process I had always chided my younger self for abandoning the academic rigor I would otherwise apply to other parts of my life. Much like standing at a shoe store and not trying anything on but complaining that you walked away with the first illfitting and unfashionable pair the clerk handed you, if I wasn't trying men on I had no bussiness complaining about the results.  And so it began. 

I remember my second date when my third suitor accidentally walked in on my dinner. I remember seeing him from a distance, lumbering with large unrooley hair and no attempt at fashion and thinking damn why did I agree to go out with him. I remember leaving my second date abruptly to stand out on the curb and take a phone call from my ex partner. I stood outside the restaurant on the phone reveling in the firmiliarity of his voice. The traffic hummed by and with quiet tears running down my cheeks I blandly admitted I was on a date with no one I cared to see again. I stood still, phone pressed to cheek longing to undo the damage that I had caused, but It was done. 

Despite dismissing date number three from a distance, I ultimately succomb to the unshakable effects of time and procimity and fell in love with him. This  lumbering stranger with big hair became mine for a all too brief a time. But afflicted with an unfortunate fleeing condition he was compelled to continously run off leaving me to my solitude. 

Now I am forced once again to pick up where I left off, the dating, the counting. I may have lost count. I must be nearly half way to my goal by now. 

Most recently there was the spaniard, who propositioned me for quick sex as we sat eating cheap indonesian food in the back of a dark warung. He oozed compliments like a tube of toothpaste with the cap left off. He could have been hansome and charming if clothing, education and context were different. But instead it appeared nothing more than an indecent proposal by a small, lost, unkempt and slightly dusty man. He subjected my last bites of fried rice to a series of rapid fire demands that I provide a valid reason for not letting him take me back to his cot on the floor and show me what a fine spanish lover he was. I had no response worth verbalising. 

Then there was the german, muscular and greying, he was hansome and well apointed. He lacked all experience with women and that combined with him being both german and working as a computer programer in a bank, meant that he gave the illusion that any future encounters would be conducted with the precision and sterility that germans are famous for. Fortunately his shy demeaner prevented any possibility of my needing to interface further with his german engineering. 

Then there was the bearded aussie from melbourne. We had quick banter together and his sweet warm accent was allready a part of something I wanted on account of my most recent love affair. But he was 27 and leaving the next morning. If he would have been braver I would have let him stay. Instead I sent him on his way. "You showed me all the houses but yours" he later texted me with a winking emoticon.

There was the portuguese skinned young canadian who wore his baseball cap backwards and talked of getting his certification in accounting over pizza.  His uncomfortably firmiliar accent only highlighted his inappropriate young age. His genuine sweetness showed in his followup text asking why I had left so quickly after dinner.

There was the 27 year old duchman who despite his guant and overly effeminate appearance seemed well versed in bedding women. He ran his fingers thru my hair as we walked. When I said I was heading home and would not be joining him for the night, his disapointment came to life. He suddenly transformed into a small child fully equipped with arm flaps. He whined of all that we were missing. "But we would have so much fun." He snorted. 

Of course there was the one I chose to bed after several well spaced disipointing dates in which I contemplated wheater a PHD could compensate for illconcieved tattoos. For reasons of lonliness and proximity I tried him on more thouroughly than the rest. The experience was disapointing and sad. I cried in his bed next to his slumbering flesh whose smell did not make me want to nibble it. I cried at all that he wasn't as he lay on his back, mouth open, snoring. 

Mixed in there was the argentinian with long ratty braids who chose the intersection of two streets to start our date which culminated into nothing more than a walk around the block. 

There was a lonely dutchman who claimed online to be sailing around the world but in practice turned out had yet to find a boat. I abruptly and somewhat incoherently walked out on him without so much as finishing my coffee because the agony of his company was more uncomfortable than the solitude I would shortly return to. 

I think that makes eight plus three? Solitary, empty interactions with strangers who I won't see again. This is called dating. I will try and make it to fifty just for sport.  

Of course I am not counting the men in my life who ocassionally stop to ponder if our status as friends has any bussiness being upgraded. 

Sitting too close together on the blanket on this ones land while he surveyed trees and continously invoked with intention the term "we". 

Or the lone solitary dinner that one initiated before reuniting with his ex girlfriend but in practice occurred after the fact. A detail that left us to speculate without words over vietnamese spring rolls slowly dipped in two types of sauce the unknowable possibility of an alternate order of events. 

And of course there is the one who has taken me on as his unpaid personal asisstant as a hopless ploy to spend legal time with me while contemplating wheather my tits and the quality of our banter measure up to his girlfriends pedigree of sweetness.

 

I will count all these men as friends and none will go towards my 50 dates. 

Tonight like most nights I lay alone, i may message the stranger from chile who is leaving too soon to meet me or scold befor un matching the american who only would consider the hour drive to come see me if I could assure him in advance that I would sleep with him.

But in all of this I am alone, left to only count. What do you imagine will happen when I make it to 50? Will I still be alone. 

Feeling in writing

I feel like he may be returning. Some combination of womens intuition as faulty as it may be and subtle language on facebook. I am not sure how to properly resist him if I see him. Returning from motorcycling around vietnam and sleeping with random women. How to keep walls in place and not let him in while simultaniously enduring loneliness. It feels like a chinese juggler on a tightrope, dangerous and certain to end in broken plates. 

I need to remind myself how I felt when he left. How broken and damaged he made me feel. 

What I said to him befor he left was imbued with kindness and honesty. A delicate balance that was meant to speak the truth but not hold him responsible for his own actions. It followed a long night on my porch drinking wine and listening to the crickets in the long dark as a backdrop for hashing out why and how we had ended up where we were. Him sitting daily on my porch unable to touch me as he sought out sex from strangers. Him admitting that he was adicted to the high of aquiring new women and convincing them to sleep with him and that he didn't see giving that up. The next day I tried to recover my generosity and offered up this sentiment via messenger.

 "Sorry I reacted that way. I did appreciate your honesty. You have every right, you have been honest and transparent all along and deserve none of my contempt for trying to find the woman that does it for you in every-way. A women who instantly makes your cock hard and your knees go weak. A woman who wrestles you to the ground in witty intellectual duals and is only sweet to you after sarcastically putting you in your place. I want you to meet that woman and I want you to one day tell her you love her (even if you only keep her and that feeling for three to five years 😉 ) and I promise I want you to send me a message no matter where you are and tell me so I can be happy for you.  

But just so you understand what this feels like on the other-side, I am compelled to dump one of my patented PMS induced indulgently honest emotional Facebook messages on you. 

Part of the reason I have been considering dating women is that I have been sexually rejected by every man in my proximity for the last couple years and am starting to go all Ani Difranco (yes, I was once a 20 year old ani Difranco listening feminist) and really hate men for wanting some sexier version of female that I can't provide and they all only enjoy long enough to discard after a bit of use like cum soiled tissue. 

I am starting to realize that although I am trying not to let my psyche be impacted by this. It clearly is. 

I know you are a good guy (don't worry I won't put the bad guy stamp on you) i know that it is just unfortunate that we became as close as we did and somehow don't want a real relationship (which if it were left up to me and my lack of intellectual rigor we would have). 

I try daily to override my emotions when I am around you in the same way I might try to override car sickness by staring at the horizon ahead. But for me car sickness is automatic and no matter how much I stare at the horizon I can only at best keep myself from throwing up. 

My feelings may have both biological and cultural underpinnings that I in theory should be able to to use my well developed frontal lobe to override. I should be able to intellectualize my way out of all this, but the reality is feelings are mostly automatic and my efforts to override them are only successful in some sort of dull lifeless way that feels like fighting against what this short biologically fueled life is really for. You don't like the way my firefly blinks well, someone will. I don't think the female firefly sits there in the ricefields wishing that the male flying above would stop hanging around and pretending that her blinking light was good enough company but did little to make him want to copulate. She would just ignore him and find the next flashing male that liked her blink. 

I have over the course of a year (with a couple of interludes of incredibly satisfying love, sex, and friendship) chosen this pain, self inflicted this car sickness while staring at the horizon. I have chosen this myself over the loss off you, this person whose company I cherish, wit I enjoy, and intellect I want to dive into like a deep pool. I have chosen this pain over the loss of you and the ensuing loneliness in this stupid small town. In the end it is a sad, desperate trade off. 

What I have realized is that being around you all the time is a constant reminder that you would rather seek out strangers to fuck than me and this leaves me constantly feeling like a slightly sub par female. A female who is nothing more than just placid good company. This feeling is destructive to my mental health and slowly picks away at my sense that I am both sexy and desired. 

You are leaving on Wednesday, I will still enjoy your company as you offer it until then. This is not meant as an ultimatum as you will be gone anyway but I thought that you should know what it felt like to be me in this strange twisted version of us. I will still keep you as my friend no matter what, I just need somehow to find a way to stop torturing myself and needed to say this outloud to you, so thanks for induldging me in a bit of self reflective angst on the nature of the beast that is our relationship."

What I should have added is that I am responsible for puting myself in this position and allowing this from you, but you are responsible for your actions too. What you do matters. What you do does impact peoples feelings. It all matters. Don't do it again. Lord help me to keep steady in the face of you. I can say I am over you but the fact is I fell for you and though time may soften the daily thoughts you will never truely be wiped clean from my soul. 

Say fuck off more often

Helen miran was recently quoted as saying: 

"at 71 if I had one piece of advice for my younger self, it would be to tell people to fuck off more often" 

I concur, and will try to implement that advice swiftly and with a heavy hand. I will use it as a measuring stick for knowing what is right and what is plainly wrong. This is a reminder to myself, do not put up with the wrongs of human actions. Seek out only the good.  In an attempt to set the record straight I will conduct this retrospective analysis of wrongs. Let me say in the loudest of voices from the tops of mountains for all to hear, fuck off.  I deserve better. 

To you, the guy who I was merely trying on for size but who none the less stopped making out with me, stopped mid kiss to state the obvious that I was in fact less than nothing to him. His lips still nearly touching mine he reminded me that this was merely a "friends with benefits" scenario. As if romance was no longer a required pass for entry. Fuck off. 

To the same man later in the evening who felt that sexual liasons should be conducted with little or no concern for my enjoyment, resisting any attempts I made to rectify the situation by stating that infact that wasn't going to work for him. As if being a bistander of his pleasure was sufficient reward for my company. Fuck off! 

To further inspire injury over insult he chose to post photos soliciting the company of strangers naked in his pool instead of inviting my company only days later. Fuck off. No really, I am serious, fuck off. 

To the man who periodically tries to court me by suggesting tempting and exciting joint bussiness ventures, making plans, concocting ideas. He uses the term "we" in sentences about our future and engages my expertise in his projects, and invites me for breakfast and lunch. But ultimately in the end always chooses to run off with girls with short skirts, tan legs who smoke and drink heavily but offer sex on a platter, served and delivered. To you, fuck off. 

To the man who I fell in love with and who dumped me seven times to run off with other women engaging instead in the seemingly innocuous game of just friends. A scenario that is akin to having a platonic boyfriend who withholds sex from me, and tortures me with his slightly out of reach loveliness, making me feel like his unattractive little sister who he is gerously letting tag along. Well, let me say loud and clear with anyone willing to bear witness. Fuck off!

To the man who ages ago ended my marriage by taunting me with all that was him and teasing me with cake, grandiose bussiness plans and unhavable romance but who ultimately left me for a russian model when I needed him most. Fuck off.

I say this mantra because I deserve someone who wants me and loves me and cares for me. I deserve someone who sees me and knows what he has found when he has found it. He knows that i am the perfect ven diagram of beauty, brains and heart. Someone who doesn't need to think twice about this equation. To the rest who want to play with my emotions and leave me to dine alone, fuck off. Really, fuck off!

Its going, flowing, moving

Nyala. My mind seems oddly stuck on this word. Like a strangers voice repeating in my head over and over again. Nyala. It is the word in Indonesian that people use to describe when the water starts running thru the hose after being blocked, or the motor starts to turn over after being stuck on idle. Nyala, Nyala, nyala.

My life is flowing, like a river, flowing. 

I think I may have finally let him go. Let him drop like a rock. My obsessive daily thoughts are starting to slowly fade like the sun setting over the horizon, dusk is gradually enveloping me. Yesturday I floated thru my day surrounded by firmiliar faces. Nyala, nyala. Its unstuck, its moving, its going. Nyala, nyala. I felt singular but surrounded. Wrapped up. Men were suddenly everywhere, coming out of the woodwork. Like men in camoflage stepping out from behind trees. Texting me, inviting me out, hugging me and showing up at my house. Nyala, nyala. 

Something has shifted, like the wind. Nyala, nyala, nyala. 

Reframing my inner slut and other psychological transformations

I did it. I had random sex and feel nothing about it. I will not marry this man, nor will I at any point consider him my boyfriend. I simply fulfilled a basic human need for comfort, and gratification. I did it.

I can do this. I can be a proper slut. Its a lofty goal I know. But I think it is achievable. I am going to abandon urges to attatch to one person like a sea urchin clinging to a rock. I will open myself up to all people and all things and at least ponder them for a moment. I will float like a leaf, landing on a man's lap just long enough and then float away again. I will let them in. I will seperate and devide emotion and physical pleasure. Creating lines and spaces and boundaries so all of these things can exist seperately. I will reframe my sluttiness as that of a cat in heat. No more. Seeking out satisfaction. I will emulate the fierce nancy, the drug lord of weeds fame who stares down strangers in elevators grabbing hands and legs and stealing quick bits of pleasure and then letting the doors close. Drinking men up like milkshakes and leaving the glass dirty for someone else to wash. 

"Don't call it sluttiness" my friend pleaded over dinner as if I were saying a bad word. "call it open to new things" 

"Thats why you left your marriage" chimed in her boyfriend. No in fact this is not accurate, I left my marriage so that I could take the friendships I had and make them more intimate. The irony is thick as mud that infact I still can't do this, I thought as I looked across the table at my friend who I would happily borrow just to exchange a bit of our souls for a small moment. But I can't do this with any of the many men in my life, so i will have to settle for strangers.

I will reframe it from my giving away of something valuable to consider it the taking of something free. I will have it. I will take it and I will walk away without care. 

I will do this because it is the only antidote to longing, heartache and crushing lonliness. It is the cure for my disease. It will imunise me, inoculate my brain from over active oxytocin receptors being fludded by the interaction of one person. I need many. I need many people I need to keep moving on to the next. I need to keep sorting not sticking to just one. 

Everything can change in a day

It just takes one day to change your life I read yesturday on someones random facebook meme. Yes, this is possibly true. Just possibly. 

But alas today was not the day my life changed, or yesturday. 

 Last night I was ditched at the last minute yet again by the random platonic friend who keeps trying me on for size. He slips me on like that shirt you have in your dresser that you feel like you should like in theory but in practice everytime you put it on it somehow doesn't make you want to wear it so you take it off and toss it back in the pile of undesirable cloths. This trying on and discarding somehow always leaves eating alone with only my extra side of brocoli for company. I decided to take a random tinder date to fill the time between meeing up with actual friends. The man who greated me was wearing a calllared expedia shirt and drinking a beer at a restaurant that was clearly chosen by someone who finds charm in all things generic. He upon basic inquiry turned out to in fact work for expedia and apparently felt the need to provide free advertising for them even while on vacation. Was there anythng else I needed to know about this man? I didn't think so. I abandoned him after only minutes of conversation by concocting a nearly incomprehensable excuse as to why I had to exit even befor I had achance at ordering a drink. 

Today I met a female friend for lunch who is in a new and seemingly happy relationship. I managed to say out loud as I briefly lost my breath that I think of that man with the curly hair every day and that the hardest part is realising that most people you meet you feel nothing for. That most people you can't even manage to get thru coffee. That the thing that he ran from every month for nearly a year was rare like Australian beef cooked on low heat. It can't be found everytime you bump into someone new.

Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about was and start to focus as if your life depended on it on what could be. 

Focus on the one who is walking around right now who you will meet. He will suddenly just walk up to you on a street and say something smart and funny and you will want him and he you. He will have been an academic or a journalist or an author but now he is independent and entrepreneurial and free from the constraints of money and comitment. He likes to get muddy and sweaty in the jungle while on long hikes. He may have his financial house in order but he will care little of material posessions and prefer good healthy food and time and freedom over fancy cars and things like couches. 

He will like to tickle your intelect with deep thoughts and can be silly and witty and make you laugh hard every morning and every night. He likes music and delivers new offerings to your ears as he finds them. He has an older child or he doesn't but loves the possibility of having one. 

He sometimes grabs you and kisses you on the back of the neck for no reason. If he danced he knows how to lead and if he doesn't well, he still knows how. 

He gently arm wrestles your wisdom and takes in your messy world without judgement. He laughs when you loose your keys or your way or forget to buy shampoo. When he meets you you both say wow, I know you. There is something there.

He is surely walking around, he is real he exists at any moment you may pass him on the street. Focus on this. Everything can change in a day. 

On solitude

I sat around a dinner table with 4 girls, it was our weekly ladies night in which we talked mostly about our love life and held each others emotional hands over red wine and chocolate cake. 

Three of them took turns talking about thier collective luck in each finding new love in some form or another. They swooned and aplauded each other. I chimed in to congratulate them but tried hard to keep my own grief and solitude out of the conversation until a new girl who didn't know the tragic details of my love life...asked. It then came flooding out like a sad muddy river. My river was more tragic than the ganges river in India, with more dead bodies floating in it then should be allowed for bathing and washing of white saris. 

This girl listened and then said along with the rest nearly in unison, "it is good for you to learn to be alone. It will make you strong. Being alone is good. You don't need someone." In that moment I wanted to hurl my cake across the table at her until it soiled her pretty white cardigan with chocolate splatters. She was not alone and based on her horrid choices in past boyfriends nor would she choose to be. So why was she dolling out this horrid advice like the chalky pastel mints next to the cash register at all American diners. They are not good, nor should they be taken even if they are free. None of these girls keeping me momentary company were alone, all of them would leave our dinner and crawl into bed with someone who would hold them close. All off them would disapear silently off into the night and keep someone company untill another week went by for us to meet again. So then, why were they all extolly the virtues of aloneness?

The death rate for lonely people is statistically higher. Lonliness is a silent killer which goes untalked about. A secret kept hiding under the stairs with dust mites and sad lonely spiders. People who are alone are more likely to die of cancer and heart disease and more likely to suffer from depression. 

Solitary confinement is a punishment in prison and during war because it is physically painful. More painful than a knife to the skin. Taking humans away from each other actually hurts, physically hurts. Yet, we live in a society that rewards solitude. 

In bali, where I call home no one would ever consider solitude a goal worth striving for. The balinese do nearly everything in groups. I once walked into a room to discover all four of my staff cleaning one window. This is not because this window demanded this kind of effort but because they wanted to be together. Close together, right next to each other in fact. I frequently find them all curled up on my porch sleeping happily together under one blanket. For them, togetherness is easy. The western world fights it and keeps it at bay, believing that solitariness is the kind of noble pursuit of the likes of Hemingway, lost at sea writing great works. I reject all of this, I believe we should have people. But which people I wonder as I sit alone at home with my phone and my computer. Which people? 

Not good enough

"That is a very sexy dress" he once told me before taking it off. It was a blue dress with a white stripe. It was the dress that embodied sex appeal. My presence in it was merely circumstantial to him. This was the pinacle, the peak of his complements. The point at which I should linger endlessly imagining that more might come around the corner. That any minute if I waited he would decide to want me, to pull me in, to grab me hard. More didn't come. For a whole year I was left wanting and waiting.

"Why would you want that?" Someone who left you wanting, someone who would rather seek out sex with strangers than dare admit that they may actually want you. Why would I? Why would I not seek out the version of love that even strangers on tinder will show up to give me. Complimenting my yet unknown beauty with flower emoticons. Want me hard, love me big. Tell me all about it. This is how I want to be loved. 

This year was a year of pain and wanting, only neatly punctuated with moments of sheer bliss. Just enough to keep me hooked on the drug, waiting lonely and in pain for the next fix. Willing to rob banks for the oxcytocin he sold me in small dribbles, I hung around like a junkie on the street corner. Like sucking water drips from a broken faucet on a hot day I waited around for him to doll out small droplets of love. This pain was something I inflicted upon myself. I stood there and took it like a limp punching bag. Proof of purchase of my intelectual dominion over my reptilion brain. If I could just sit on my porch and serve him tea while he gave his body to others, I had won. I had won against biology. But I was really just treading water, bearing the pain with the hope that I could have the next fix, like a washed up crack whore. 

This is now a new chapter. A new book. A book bound in leather with gold embosed lettering. This next book of life will turn the corner on this waiting and wanting. I will offer up the world to myself. 

This book will have stories of love, of  wealth, abandon and abundance. Stories of rain showers and sunny meadows. 

All things yummy and good. Money and love will flow out of my pockets and spill onto the floor. I will only seek out and let in the best of what is good. This will be a salad year, a year of cheese and chocololate and wine. A year of dancing and friends. A year of beauty and play and creation. This is a new book.

Its all the same

Angry young girl music is what I listened to at 20. I listened to it because at 20 it is all about relationships and I was in the midst of feeling that even at 20 the game was not worth playing. I let Ani defranco croon "fuck you, and your untouchable face" loud in my ear as I drove thru the desert night in my tiny beat up 84 honda civic. The warm desert wind wipping my hair around like a blow dryer. It was then that I gave up, it was then that I picked a random guy out at a party and said "he'll do". It was then that I gave up weeding thru lonlines and strangers like sad lost gardener with no seeds or tools. It was then that I gave up.

I picked this random man with intention. I picked him because he seemed good enough. He was a bit fat and seemed way too enthusiastic about his lack of a job, but with a likable dry wit and an obvious humble sweetness. We stood in front of a world map smoking a joint for the duration of the party discussing all the adventures the world had to offer.  I decided that he wouldn't hurt me. I decided he was a safe bet whose self esteem was just low enough that I seemed like a phenomenal catch. A big Alaskan salmon in a small muddy pond. I could safely ensure that he would worship without wandering eyes at the alter of me from then on.

After the first night with him I met my girlfriend for coffee and proclaimed that I didn't really like him at all. His penis was small and it was all akward. But he listended to me endlessly while I talked  so we persisted based on this small egotistical boost and his many thoughtful gestures. 

At six months into our relationship the burly bearded pastry chef who ran the oven at the bakery where I worked began to take an interest in me. Woo me with instructions on how make a proper chocolate ganache. Somehow without real effort he managed to get me to indulge in a teenage makeout session in the parking lot against the faded grey paint of my civic. I didn't really like him beyond our obvious chemistry but decided to sneak off for a weekend in a nearby mining town and stay the night in a place that called itself the copper queen. Contemplating if I could have my cake and eat it too, It was at this point that I should have realized my relationship was over. I should have jumped ship and run for the hills. Continued to bravely sort thru humans like piles of second hand denim looking for the right match of pocket style, color and size. Instead I ended up half naked and in tears leaving my date sexually unfullfilled and perplexed.  

I felt deep pain, I knew I needed to leave this man who had in six months become my boyfriend, and I had failed at my one feeble attempt, running away with the baker. 

I knew that this fat, spineless man was not Indiana jones and that stoned in front of a map was the closest he would ever get to travel unless dragged unwittingly by someone like me. I knew that I didn't want him, I knew that he would never grow into anything more than what stood before me. But the pain, how to explain the pain. The thought of loosing him after six months hurt so bad that I could no longer bear it. I needed it to stop and my lack of experience in such matters compelled me to mistake this feeling of ache for the type of love that should be stuck around for. 

To opese this pain like a slave to its master, I ran home and replaced one sin with another. I told him of my trip, safely omitting the details which even 17 years later would be stoked like a fire when tempers flared. I then told him a lie that I could never take back and only time would grow it into a version of the truth with a bit of care and watering. I lied and said I thought we should be together. I knew it was a lie and over the years would wisper the truth to those who would listen, like a hostage trying to solicit help escaping from her captor. I would say in quiet rooms "he is not the one I should have ended up with". My poor naive 20 year old self ended up making a life with someone as a trade for the gut achinging pain of loss. This is not a worthy trade. But a life I made. This man for 17 years was sweet to me. He brought me chocolate without asking at the right time of the month, he held my hair back and comforted me when I was sick, he organised all the details of our life that I would sooner let slip thru the cracks. He would not chastise me for only noticing I needed milk or shampoo when the containerd were empty, and instead quietly slip full containers into place. He was many things that I now know many men are not. The error I made was in not spending those years appreciating these things but instead lamenting my youthful choice of weakness. 

When I finally decided to walk away, I did so imagining that I could rectify this mistake. That I could forgive my 20 year old self for her lack of courage. This time the older and wiser me would make the right decision. But what did I do? I immediately fell in love with the first person I slept with. If he hadn't walked away I never would have. I would have tolerated his drunkenness and his most certain later scoldings for empty toothpaste toobs. 

I now take a moment to forgive my 20 year old self for her weakness, because even at 39 I know I lack the strength to resist the power of a proper human bond. I forgive you. I forgive you, but now do it right don't let pain guide you. Let hope and beauty and all things good be your guide. Let yourself stand alone and proud and strong so that you may not just survive but be happy beyond measure. 

Let it all out

My body is preparing for its monthly blead and I am crying, weeping for all that is lost. It has been some time since I have wept like this. 

After my divorce when this part of the monthly rollercoaster ride struck the emotion would come flowing out of me like a river after a heavy rain. I would be pulled to my knees on the path in the middle of a bright sunny day. Brought down hard. 

Then I wept for having given away the only thing I had, for rejecting the only thing honest and true, having thrown it out like it was yesturdays trash. 

Now as I weep, I weep for you and what we can't have. I weep because I am meant to give my body away to some stranger and try not to let that person in deep enough that they can hurt me as you have. I weep because somehow physical affection is off limits for us because its power is beyond our control and yet this power should be free to strangers? Why? Why do they deserve this. What is so wrong with me that you have to reject me over and over again. Why is the love that I can give you something to be safeguarded against. I am left only to make you tea and fix you eggs and keep my hands from touching you so that your heart can stay safely hidden beneath your skin. 

I weep because this torture is never ending. Because the only escape means loosing you forever. Replacing you with someone else. I weep because I am totally alone. How am I meant to pretend that this is all ok. How. I am left with no other choice than to let the monthy flow of hormones envelope me and weep. Big warm crocodile tears that turn my cheecks into a wet mess. I weep. I let it flow and let it out because not loving you is all I am allowed to do. I weep. 

Choices

"Mankind faces a crossroads, one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

-Woody Allen.

Sometimes what we choose is nearly a matter of what is available. If I lived in rural kentucky my choices to date would fall nicely between a guy who chewed tabacco and a guy who drove a pick up. 

A man who has yet to try to sleep with me seems to want to see me every day and text me non stop. This is platonic dating at its finest. Breakfast and lunch, breakfast and lunch. He is cute and we have a long list of things in common. He wants to buy the same landcruiser that has always been my car of choice. He likes travel and building things. He is financially secure and the kind of gentleman who flags the waiter down for you. But somehow what is missing just keeps bringing me back to the man I can't have. He doesn't make me laugh or indulge me in intelectual play. I want to talk about evolution and laugh about it. Damn you for giving me that but not the rest. Damn you for tickling my brain and my humor. This is all I want from someone really. To make me laugh out loud. To fight me boldly in a debate.  Damn you. Damn you for not wanting me. 

What if

I just heard the news third hand that the crush of my youth just divorced. Split, separated, no longer a them, just a he. This man who was for a decade of my life and our friendship, unhavable. Because we were both permenantly partnered we were backed hopelessly into the awkward corner of just friends. But he was like no other friend, he was the kind of friend who made me swoon and obsess about the possibilities of "if". This is what life is made up of. The not having, the wanting, the "if" of life.

He was finishing his PHD in Anthropology at the time, the hipster of all hipsters, he indulged me in jarring up pickles from cucumbers we had grown or helped to assemble brigades of friends to glean and process olives from the university campus because he knew these were my interests. He wore vintage collared shirts with the shiny shell buttons. The kind of shirt that can only be worn if nicely pared with whatever irony he had left in his pocket and a pair of expensive designer  sun glasses. The glasses were there to remind you that the shirt was intentionally culled and had nothing to do with poverty forcing him to shop in thrift stores. 

He called me sunshine and hugged me big when he saw me. At parties he played the guitar and sang me funky melodic alternative toons. This music on account of him is still deeply apart of what makes my heart flutter. A small fact that even my latest boyfriend managed to unintentionally exploit. 

He introduced me to fancy anthropology mind leaps like liminal space as we foraged for wild edible mushrooms. He once invited me to the yucatan in mexico for an Anthropology conference ignoring our collective spouses. I spent a decade wishing I had enough money and confidence to buy that ticket, as I somehow knew that was the moment where my life would have turned left instead of holding a steady constant of straight. I ignored the temptation to be frivilous and prolonged the eventual heart break for life. 

When my belly was swollen and pregnant with my first and only child I joined him and others out one night for our regular friday happy hour. Me sipping a virgin bloody mary with extra green olives and wearing a clingy choclate brown dress that was my staple of pregnancy. I proudly showed off all that was my bulging tight belly and felt naively and egotistically that I was somehow redefining motherhood and sexy at the sametime.The desert summer night was dry and hot and he walked me away from the bar and across the street to the bookstore. He grabbed me by the arm to save me from the traffic as we crossed. "I sometimes wish that was my baby inside you" he wispered so quietly I almost didn't hear it. I pretended he didn't say it and we walked into the bookstore in silence knowing that there was no way to fix this problem of want.

It took me years to get over this man whose wife I eventually befriended to apease my guilt for wanting him. I was who he called the morning his daughter was born to come help them learn to swaddle an infant and change a diaper. I drove to california instead, running from the sting of this new permenant part of his life that was not mine. 

Now as I see his photos on instagram I see only a stranger, the want is long gone. The want is only a line on my forhead, a remnant of my imagination.

This story is one that makes me me, unrequited lust and shared friendship. I am nothing now but a thousand stories like this, stories of love and want and life that are even now unfolding. As I walked the streets of singapore yesturday I pondered all the faces in front of me. Thier lines, thier wrinkles, thier eyes. What wants and needs and regrets did these people carry with them in thier laps as they rode the subway? 

This is life, the having is only half of it, the rest is all want. Gritty, and messy and beautiful. Want. 

You

I have no idea if I will feel this way a thousand times over. I hope not. The pain stings like something too sharp. You sat across from me nights ago displaying all your worst traits. Drunk, angry for silly reasons, short on good logic, long on cutting words. But this didn't stop me, didn't keep me from wanting you. I wanted to crawl into your lap and run my fingers thru your beard and nuzle my nose in your curly hair. I wanted it so bad that it took all the strength in the world to hang on to my chair. I hugged you tight and breathed in your smell but let you walk away. Strength, courage, pain. Breath it out.  I want you because you make me laugh, I want you because you roll around in intelectual topics with the same fervent need for academic logic. I want you because you can talk about all of it with clear bold honesty, wading thru it all with boots on ready for the emotional muck.  You admit to your flaws and mine with compassion that feels like creamy soup, smooth and warm. We have some sort of genuineness that is not easily packaged. I keep spending time with other men wondering if thier smell could ever intoxicate me as yours does. Looking for someone whose smell I want for breakfast, whose conversation I want for lunch and whose skin I want for dinner. I keep waiting for some sign that another is possible. But I can't seem to find it. Help me lord if you are the only one that I can't unstick from. Help me lord if you are the only drug that gets me high. 

Catch me

Today is one of those days. Nerves fried to fierce ends. Hanging on to the edge of a cliff as I alone battle to finish the project of my life. Fighting mafia and battling against time I swim upstream alone. I am single handedly holding up the universe on one finger. I am strong and fierce and more capable than most, but I want nothing more than to collapse in safe arms. Arms that will have me, and hold me, and brush away the worries of the day. I don't have this, I am left to hold up the world and trust that I am enough alone. I am strong enough and I can manage this, but what I would do for a soft lap, a sweet hand in my hair and someone to accept my worries without judgement. Having him across town but unhavable only concentrates this feeling like a bullion cube yearning for hot water.

Why does he not share this feeling of need for soft comfort? Is there really someone else that is better? 

There must be. Let my faith survive the hard edges of day and live to see the comfort and acceptance of another. 

Step back, wait for him

Tonight in salsa class as we were practicing the cuban rueda, I was reminded of the power of waiting. "Ladies" the bubly gay balinese dance instructer chiped. "Please remember to let the man come to you. Keep doing your normal step. Step back and he will be there to spin you to the next step."

As someone who prides myself in making things happen in mylife I was happy to be reminded that relationships are really more of a dance. Less about making somthing happen and more about holding space for something to happen. He will come to me if he likes me enough. If I step back and he likes me he will step forward to meet me.

If a man is not stepping forward, swiftly grabbing my waist and spinning me toward him, I do not want him.  Grab my waist and spin me round. Do it, I dare you. 

Butterflies and the like

I spent part of a day with a boy who makes my stomache flutter. I am totally unclear why. Do butterflies mean something or are they just nature telling me to sample his sperm for genetic suitability and have no bearing on cultural compatability? I think I allready know what is wrong with him. He is another one who can't attatch. Unfixable. Also, his sense of order would ensure he hated me and my disorder once the oxcytocin wore off. But there were butterflies. Isn't that worth something? Or should it be discarded. 

Friends who I know who are dating plainly shouldn't be. The girl coos and looks on with awe at all that is hansome about the man. But the man looks to me like he is missing butterflies. Like there is a hole in his stomach and they all flew the coop in search of someone else. He is a sweet man who likes the company enough and doesn't want to hurt her that he may just decide to stick it out. 

I know what a real relationship feels like, one that drudges thru paying bills and dirty diapers and still enjoys the sweet comfort of a conversation after a long dirty day. But I also know what 17 years feel like when there were no butterflies to start. I think maybe you need the butterflies. I think they maybe should not just be cocooned worms upon first meeting but allready have shead thier crystalis and be swarming about madly. 

The man who just broke up with me did so I believe because no butterflies were present. He feared our friendship would not carry us without them. I forgive you sweet friend and wish a bit with pain in my heart that I could have delivered you soft swooping wings painted in many colors filling your belly and tickling your heart. I lacked that power. 

I have no idea how I am meant to sort thru a pile of humans for butterflies and a good resume but I am starting to think that maybe it is the butterflies and not the resume that really count. 

There is a man who I have gone out with a few times and somehow I imagine I should like based on his resume. Despite searching at each coffee date under rocks and behind trees I find not even one odd winged creature. 

Firelies in the wild mate by flashing. The female stays on the ground and flashes a patern and the male flies around looking at the flashes and flashing his own pattern. If they like each others flashes they mate. 

I am currently wandering around searching in the dark for the right flashing that sends wings a loft inside me. May we both feel this together may we also have something worth talking about once the winged creatures are sleeping. 

You are just some guy I used to know

"You'll tell them that it didn't work out because it didn't. You'll tell them that the next thing will be better because it always is. I've started over a lot, this is the hardest part." - Don Draper

I went to the American embassy yesturday as a family. For the first time in a year we three sat in the same car and ate at the same table. Infact, it has been almost nine months since I saw any more than just a glimps of his alcohol bloated face peaking out of his helmet as he picked up our child on the motorbike. It was strange and surreal and yet also firmiliar. 

At first I felt a sense of validation. He looked terrible and not like someone I would even want to spend time with, muchless date. But the firmiliarity of his presence and the sense of shared love for our child made me walk away with an ache that felt only like sore muscles days after a long run and not the stabbing pain of a fresh wound. 

Getting over things, getting over people. Moving on. Picking yourself back up. This is the work of life. I realised as I sat there in the car how far I have come. A year ago was when we floated down that tragic river of finality in borneo with new knowledge in our aching stomache. Carrying the sad news that infact this was it. The end, no putting things back. I still remember that hotel room we shared, with stained wallpaper, rough outdoor carpeting and two single beds. I banged my head repeatedly against that bleak beige wallpaper urging the pain to stop. I cried and pleaded with him asking through grunts and tears if he was in love. He was, he just didn't know it yet. Me, I was just starting the horrible grieving, the crying daily, the not eating. The ball on the floor of tears beyond reason. My mom inviting me out to lunch, a gentle offering to my lonley stomache which I picked over as I stared with a blank expression, unable to hold a conversation.

 

In that year so much has changed, that was then. I am over it all or at least mostly, I got over my infatuation with the russian who planted the unrecovrrable seed of divorce that lead to that fateful river trip. I let him go completely in my mind. Vanquished him like a bad spellI. I even finally let go of my partner of so many years. I now accept and even find moments of gratitute that he is no longer mine. I see him as an odd firmiliar stranger, someone I once knew who is only recognisable by his contours.

I now have a new letting go. Something I need to allow to drop like a heavy stone from my hand. Letting go of my best friend and lover of the last nine months. The man who scooped me up out of a pecha kucha line as I looked dazed and confused, still a walking open wound. Keeping me company, making me laugh and caring about my day. 

It was strange comfort to sit across from a man who was mine for 17 years and feel only mild nostalgia for what was, little pain. We sat there in this Indonesian mcdonalds eating cheese burgers and french fries and discussing the duty at hand of renewing our sons passport. It felt like an old shirt that still fits but you no longer want to wear.

I am strangely happy in my life now, I now only ocassionally battle a dull ache. Each day I discover new ways to vanquish lonliness. Now if I can just let go of this last one. I must find a way to let him go. Last night over dinner an aquantance argued my theory that he was quick to find someone to sleep with by telling me the story of how he got down to his underwear with a girl he had gotten drunk, who then left. This story helped, it hurt like a knife being sunk into my belly but I knew more or less the time he was referring to and thought deep about the technicality of our status as friends at that point in our on again off again relationship. It filled me with aching hate for this game I let him introduce me to and play with me, the game of just friends. I hated him in that moment. Hated him for not wanting me. Hated him for getting drunk and naked with strange women. I hated him for all of it. A little hate is required for letting go. Thank you for that image friend, so I can hold onto it firmly in my mind like clutching onto the last branch on the edge of a cliff. Look at it, see it. Naked, drunk in blue and white striped underwear, trying to seduce a drunk woman after only days earlier spending long sweet hours together. I will keep it as proof that this man is no good. An instagram in my mind. A souviner of the pain. 

If I can let go of 17 years, I can let go of this. 

It didn't work out, the next thing will be better, I have allready made it thru the hardest part. 

Do you want to fuck?

Active 25 hours ago his facebook says. Another 14 hours tonight of missing digital engagement. Once before bed and once when I wake up, I look. Yes I look. Yes, I know what that says about me. This digital engagement or lack there of tells a story. It says girl hanging on against her will to what isn't there. I know what this digital void says about him too. It says so enraptured with someone's company that facebook does not demand checking. It says his phone is lost to the depths of his pocket while he drinks in this new person like cool water on a hot day. It might even say that she spends the night and he lets her borrow his toothbrush, hopefully having traded his bali version for a new model to match his new life so she doesn't have to unwittingly share my own personal strain of streptococcus mucus. 

Ok, so now I am stretching my phychic abilities to thier limit. But, I know this facebook time check works. At least for Correlation being as good as it is worth.  That and the unresponsive void left after my last message. Multiple times I fact checked this against our best days so I know that this data holds weight. P values could be examined. Statisticall viability could be discussed if applied across populations. He has been taken offline for so long that he is no longer plugged in to anyone but her. My imagined generic woman that he has chosen. He has plugged her in to him by searching out just the right songs to play in bed and tickle her female brain enough to make her wet while she waits for him to make the next move. 

This is where my tears finally come like summer rains, fast and hard but over befor morning coffee. Goodbye sweet man, enjoy her. You will spit her back out anyway at somepoint and break her heart like the rest. You are broken and not capable of real love. I feel warm pitty for you in this. Like figgy pudding on christmas day, tasteless but required eating if brittish.

Like some alarmingly large percentage of the population you cannot feel. Like a baby mouse who was not licked enough by his mother. It is a new modern affliction run rampant, adult detatchment disorder. It is epidemic. What happened to all these poor people that can't love. Were all these children ignored in favor of corporate worlds, tv dinners and other sad tales of busy modern life? 

My hansome charming friend platonically courts love while seducing randoms on tinder on weeklong getaways where sex and travel are nicely merged. He seeks out long legs and short skirts and easy access and then tosses them aside like the peels of a ripen and well enjoyed banana. On the ground. He then returns to long platonic hours and days pretending that the blond on the back of his motorbike is not his girlfriend. Because he is not sharing his bed or his skin with her he can let her long hair flow behind her as they ride thru the night. Him letting her hold tightly to the clarity that her hands around his waste are all she can have. He is too broken to share a bed with anyone whose company he enjoys.

Do you want to fuck? The message blinked onto my phone. His dating profile photos were quirky and hansome in all the right ways. He was even french. His image portrayed himself as much more evolved and witty than one who would ask such a question. Black and white with angles and shadows that intentionally pointed out asthetic inclination. Yet, with this one simple line he became not an artistic frenchman but just another human confusing his dick for his heart and wondering why he was unclear about the meaning of life.

Do I want to fuck? No! Do I want to be kept at arm distance from your heart? Do I want to be tested for holes as you saunter in and around me but never thru me. No! I want you to meet me and say I have no idea for how long but I want you fully now. I want you completely. I want you, all of you. The whole apple pie. Sex yes, but your soul and your brain and your heart too. Is this too much to ask? Do I want to fuck? No, I want you to reach in fully and grab my heart tenderly in your hand and turn its contours around in your fingers untill you know it as your own and understand its reasons. Red and fleshy and rawly beating. Hold it gently with the knowledge that it is breakable if dropped quickly. If you need to let it go because you and I don't match up like even rows of corn or the last 15 minutes of some b grade romance, then set it down gently and I will blow you a kiss as I walk away. But do I want to fuck? No.

Wrinkles and such

I am complicated and pithy and real. I am a woman not a girl. I bear stretch marks on my left breast from the time I swelled up to become a cozy home for another human. I have wrinkles between my eyebrows because I frequently squint at people who I percieve as daft or dull. I have any number of grey hairs that each represent worry and heart ache that I have earned with time and sweat and tears. I have skin that was inflicted for too many years by the sun's rays. I am not always charming and sometimes have nothing at all witty to say.

Do you really want that 25 year old just because you can? 

If you don't like me because I make you laugh, make you feel cared for, or will even sort out your troubles in a big pile on the floor on any given rainy day, well then I can't help you my friend.

If this means I have only friends and not lovers than let this be so. If all men want are youth and valid curves than I am not suited to them or them to me. 

If what we had is not good enough for you then I can not save you from your lonely existance. If you don't realise that my flesh and my soul are connected and that later you can feel both if only you will give up plyable constructed notions of age and beauty and substance in exchange for what is real and good and true. I am a thousand things. I am 39 years of life. I am messy and late and disorganised. I am imperfect in every moment. This I know. This I love. This I have made peace with. 

Leave me like table scraps and maybe someone hungry enough will find me. Let my sweetness find a home in the lap of another because my life and my soul is so tangled that it is no longer recognisable to you as beauty. Let me make peace with the fact that I don't measure up to childhood fairytales of lost glass slippers.

Don't worry. There are 6 billion people in this world. There will be someone who will scoop me up. Love my wrinkles, my well used breasts and my messy life. Someone who will see the well wrapped gift that I will share if they let me. Its ok if this is not what you want. I can not help you want me. But I know the hidden treasures burried in wrinkles, you are the one missing out. 

Letting go of the law

I snuck thru customs. I did. It was scary and hopelessly reckless. A carefully orchestrated scheme to get out of this crazy backwater wild west like country without incident. I became a counting sheep jumping out of turn and wandering off into the night. After a solid year of illigal stamps and a new administration trying hard to eradicate corruption of the democratic variety, my only course was a delicate exit in plain site. Orchestrated like a broadway play, I was texted instructions late at night while I lay awake regretting my laziness in buying stamps instead of jumping on a plane. 

The instructions were precise, approach gate number twelve at 4:00am sharp, give Mr. Oka your passport with 400,000rp neatly tucked in the back like grandma's christmas card minus the note. 

Despite my reluctance I had no choice but to follow orders. So I intended to, but we were late, stuck in line too long. You should have printed out boarding passes like dad always does my son scolded. It was 4:12am. Everything was wrong. We were late and all the custom agents had jackets to protect against the unreasonablly conditioned air which inadvertaintly concealed thier identity. Mr. Oka became unrecognizable in the tidy line of uniformly jacketed men. I couldn't turn back. I had no choice but to walk forward. I was up next. I walked solemnly and blindly toward booth number twelve searching desperately for a sign that I was expected or recognised. There was none. I gave the man my passport first then slipped the bright red bills into the back of my sons passport. The anonymous brown man behind the counter didn't remove the bills. He looked at me and glanced at my many Indonesian stamps and chuckled as if he knew my secret but wasn't playing along. Stamp, stamp and we were thru. Easy as baked beans.

I wanted to cry or run or maybe just hide in the ladies room. But instead I sprinted past gucci bags and duty free Chanel no. 5 until I was safe deep within the magazine racks and trashy airport novels. My son happy to peruse books till we departed. 

I wanted to tell someone of my relief and spill my pent up worry quietly into someone's ear. Like drops of hot wax from a candle, slow and deliberate. I opened Facebook messenger and glanced at his image at the top of my list. His overly exaggerated digitized afro filling up the circle all in black. Active 7 hours ago it said, giving me more information than I wanted to know. I started to type. Then I stopped and closed it. Resist. Resist. Like cigarettes and mento candies, something you enjoy beyond reason but must resist for the good of your health. 

Stop, dwell for a moment on all that is bad. Don't think about the long intellectually indulgent chats over coffee, or the muddy jungle adventures, how his hand feels neatly tucked in yours, or how his music manages to strum all your nostalgic strings at once like we have some strange shared past that happened simultaneously on separate continents.  Don't think of this. You can't have him, you shouldn't want him even if you could. Remember what is true and unfixable.  He is only good half of the time. Half of the time he will loose his temper and scold you like a child for your humble failings, poking you with sharp unrelenting words. Half of the time he will not take charge long enough to sort out anything that is meant to be shared. He will leave hotel bookings and dinner in your care but will respond only with vague displeasure if not anger at your disappointing choices. "It was not what I expected" he complained regarding my impulsive and inadequately planned and executed travel agent services. He only gives you half of the affection you need, leaving you naked and wanting under the sheets and desperate to be kissed even once tenderly for no reason without expectation of orgasm. He will leave you over and over again, running off to scenic locations to share beds with other women, or simply sit in the dining room alone leaving you to ponder his absence in your shared hotel room on the beach. Remember this. He is only half good. There is someone better than fifty percent. Find 80%, search him out. Wade bravely thru the loneliness. Like the thick swamps of solitude you will eventually pass thru this. Remember that even if your white horse sinks lost in the mud you will get him back after the nothing is defeated. All is good in the end and if it is not good then it it is not yet the end. 

Don't give into urges that feed a want for something that eventually will only break you. Find a new habit. Take up knitting, start jarring peppers in oil or dancing salsa. Dance, dance every day. Dance till all urges vanish like morning mist. Garden even, plant things and water them daily. Squeese your son when you need squeezing. Squeeze oranges, and drink the juice.  Seek out some poor friend to inflict your thoughts on, spill them all over their open palms, like my sons cup of noodles in my lap on the plane, wet and messy.  Or write, write it all out. Get it all down in black and white type. Treat it like good journalism, fact checked for accuracy and edited for clarity. Read it again and again then ask if that is in fact exactly how you feel about this situation? Confirm that it is and then release it to the world. 

So what you snuck across international borders like a deviant spy in your red scarf. So what if it was dumb and stupid if full of bold triumph. So what if you made it to singapore with your shiny new immigration stamp ready to spend the day eating Swedish meatballs and shopping at ikea for items rare in Indonesia, like stainless steal pots and colored sheets. He doesn't need to know these trivial details of your life. Don't text him. Resist. Give up the nicotine. Don't take a hit and inhale deep. Quit that habit. Find a beter one. Eat salads, dance and find cherished friends to lean on. Ones that will not leave you or at least invite you with them and help you sort out a plan when they go. Quit the habit, give up getting high on his pheromones. Forget burrowing your face in his beard. Don't text him, he doesn't need to know, you don't need to tell him. You can live without that future, you have yourself, bold and fierce and hopeful.  Its ok to admit you love him. But let go. Let go my dear. 

Winter is here

The winds have changed. Suddenly overnight winter has arrived. The strange tropical version of winter that only those lost too long on islands can imagine is a real proper shift in seasons. Only real Island dwellers can sense the now cooler windy mornings. The crisper clear nights. This subtle change that hints at the fact that we share the seasons and the hemisphere with Australia. Seasons shift, marking time. Time for jeans and extra blankets. Seasons change. Everything does. 

Just days ago I kissed you and said goodbye. You kissing me hard and hugging me bigger than you ever have. Lifting my feet off the ground as the driver patiently waited while precariously parked on the sharp part in the road. Just last week you had asked me how I felt about you leaving and never coming back. But then today you carefully spilled out honestly tender words that resembled uncooked meat, raw and difficult to handle. As we held eachother under the shadow of your mosquito net, you said I had come to be important to you too, as you to me. Sweet words of goodbye. Not coming back, going to vietnam instead. This was all code. Code for away, gone, departed, us no longer.

Our season finished. The hot season is over and now we are ushering in the cold season. 

The cold season is allready here and you are now allready gone but I have yet to find a way to wash you from me. Wash you off my skin and out of my mouth. I need hot water to pour over me till my heart no longer sheepishly leaks out a thick feeling of want. I need to stand in the rain and let it wash your smell out of my hair. I need to let ocean waves crash over me till I no longer hear your voice or imagine your brown eyes and curly hair and smell your sweet skin.

Wash it off of me damn it. Its cold and you are gone, but I am left behind with not enough sweatshirts and a feeling of want.

I know that your love can not ever be enough to subside my ache. I know this. I know that you will never do the things that make me feel cared for enough. Not enought to want my eggs to drop willingly, like ripe fruit falling and then planting your seeds by burying themselves down deep in my womb. I know that I will never feel you search out and grab that spot hidden inside my chest that contains all of the love that I hold. I know that you will never take a deep warm breath and sqeeze it tight. I know that you will never come so far into me that for moments I loose where you end and I begin. I know you won't do these things. I know instead that you will always only maintain a slight distance that allows for a safe passage. I know these things. I know that trying to make you increase your emotional proximity as you deny me will only give this ache inside my chest permission to knaw away at my soft snuggly edges, till what is left begins to question its worth. I know this like I know the contour of my hand, the shape of a circle or the sound of rain. I know this for sure, but I still can't wash you off of me. I also have now seen your dark side, irrational and scolding even with the dropback of clear tropical waters this angry man startled me. This is surely not someone I should forever attatch myself to. My brain knows this but my heart constantly betrays me with blind willingness. I can't wash you from me. 

At the moment all I can hope or imagine to be true is that some yet unknown human has the magical power to take you off my skin. May this person waste no time in bursting forth from hidden trap doors standing tall and strong and smother me with so many kisses that your spell is vanquished. May it be so. 

I am lucky beyond words

Normally happiness doesn't make me write. Wallowing in sarrow and bitterness brings me to the pen. But recently My life feels like its been transforming, slowly shifting. I am an observer watching from above as I become something new, like a moth slowly unfolding her wet wings after releasing herself with effort from the confines of the chrysalis. Slow, deliberate change with a growing realization that flight is now possible when it once wasn't. 

A month ago I had a fleeting moment of gratitude. I was sitting on my upstairs porch, the sun setting, the rice fields flowing green until they vanished into the sea. My sweet son reading to his hearts content next to me. Me sitting there holding a decent glass of red wine in a land deplete of such novolties. An organic salad was being made and hand delivered to me. The smell of purple sweet potato french fries in homemade coconut oil were drifting up from the kitchen where a young man who works for me was preparing them for my guests. I had just finished a long but fruitful day of presenting a months work of research to my funders. The results of a compolation of interesting days and nights interviewing HIV positive balinese transvestites and transexuals about condom usage. I mean really, who gets to do that? I spent the second half of the day managing the design and construction of a house that I alone have had the pleasure of designing. Every inch of which is full of hand carved bits and daily induced laughs and fun as I enjoy all of the people who work so hard to make it happen, all while practicing my indonesian. I am lucky beyond words.

Unfortunately this beautiful feeling of fullness in my belly was fleeting. It was way too easily over taken by the grief of loosing someone. I spent days on the beach, a perfect farewell to a sweet man who had kept the lonliness at bay. I spent the many weeks after his departure battling off this feeling. This pang of lonliness of unwantedness, rejection and loss. The emotional stew that was too large and heavy to not overtake the feeling of gratitute for all that is my very full and rich life. I was overwelmed by the feeling that my life was doomed to be perfect but unshared and that there was only a sea of strangers in front of me that I had to endlessly sort thru for real genuine human connection. The kind that makes you feel like your whole being is understood and wrapped up. But now I feel even this part of my life shifting. Lifting up like a hazy fog as the sun pokes thru.

A few days ago I went to a party. The kind of party where you have to compete with loud background noise for the attention of strangers. Normally I would leave feeling miserable at how foriegn this space is to me, but at this party people noticed me and talked to me. Suddenly even the handsome latino salsa dancer who ignored me in class walked across the room to remove me from my conversation and pull me over to one corner to privately charm me. 

The british boy who usually swivels like a chair between enticing me into trips and bussiness plans and turning his back on me for others, spent real moments wrapping me up with his attention. On the way out even an American I had fancied ages ago asked me if he could lift me off the ground, he spun me around in a circle and told me we should spend time together before letting me go.

What was lovely as I left alone to ride my motorbike home was that suddenly I realised I would have none of them and I was ok, not alone. They were just the few random grains of sand in front of me yet I was standing on a beach. On our way to 7 billion people the world is overflowing and the "N" as they say in statistics is large beyond measure. I don't need to share my bed with them, share my pillow and my kisses and my skin. I can simply talk to them and hug them and travel with them. I felt so fine in that moment and greatful for my phenomenal life that I lacked nothing. I felt surrounded by possibilities as I suddenly realised that I infact had the perfect life that everyone should want, that I in fact held all the cards. Like a gambler who has allready won and knows it.

My life is full and amazing. I need nothing. 

Dropping, catching, falling

We walked thru the jungle in the rain, the night was just about to slip its vail over our vision and the trail had vanished amongst the ferns and choclate trees heavy with bright orange rotting pods. In front of us, was a raging river, newly briming and thickly churning from a heavy afternoon downpour. This was the direction we imagined was forward, whatever that nebulous concept meant in this context. 

In an atempt to beat nightfall we had to cross this beast. We had no real choice. We examined large rocks and currents and then you plunged ahead with the help of a bamboo pole. I however, became imobilised in the middle of the rushing water, afraid to take even one step in contradiction of the strong current for fear I would be swept off my feet, the muddy river pushing hard against my legs. Me ludricusly wearing jeans that were now wet up to my waist. The rain continued down in a steady sprinkle that somehow implyed that wetter was even possible in this context. I stood there for far too long trying to will myself forward. Then, just as I lifted my foot and the water gave its strongest push, you came back for me and stretched out your arm, offering your steady hand as solice from the forces of nature. With one quick grasp we were both across and once again standing on thick firm jungly land. 

You normally are more of a egalitarian than a shivilrist. More likely to want evenly devided pie and checks than cavalerly throwing down your coat in a puddle for me to fooloshly walk over. But in that moment, in that context, you reaching out to me was worth a thousand withheld sweet kisses on the back of my neck. Your strong hand in the midst of my fear was the same as a thousand doors opened in front of me, a thousand dinners ordered with me in mind. You made me feel cared for and safe. In that moment I loved you hard and strong like the mossy rocks that held back the rivers force without even budging. 

Once safely on the otherside of the river the trail magically appeared again. One step at a time we made it home, faith that the path existed and could be found was all we needed. That and the willingness to move forward with knowledge that being swept away is not the only answer. We made it home, the last bit on a motorbike, me stealing your heat on the back as we sailed thru the balinese night talking and laughing away the raindrops. I wanted to go home with you and steal more of your sweetness against your will as you slept. But I had another man waiting for me at home, a steady and humble eleven year old who needed my company more. I said goodbye without even a kiss. 

This is what will happen again soon, saying goodbye. Will this time be for good? I don't know. Do you? At the moment I can't see beyond next week. Our future is muddy and blocked by long forced time apart across vast oceans. Our connection to one another not being swept away by the black abyiss of the unknown is all but impossible. I will take a moment, a deep lingering pause, to have faith that a path exists. Hidden only by jungly vines that only need to be pushed away. I will find faith that no matter our distance we can be there to take each others hand when raging rivers require it even as we have found different paths to forge in life and in love. I love you like a rock, steady and strong, take my hand if you ever need it.