of lobsters

I arrived in berlin searching for a home but also for a person, for my lobster. a mate. 

I promptly scheduled a date with a german man, we had really good online chemistry. We flirted and I nearly let myself go for him with out even meeting him, but something stopped me. I was pretty convinced that we would click, but when I met him it was akward. He was tremendously tall and didn't laugh at my jokes. like a small prickly overly boisterous hedgehog trying to keep the company of a towering giraph,  I was left feeling out of place in his company. 

All my efforts at hair removal and nice underwear were in vain. I kissed his cheek and let him take the last bright yellow berlin subway car home, if its not a "hell yes" its a "no, right?

In the morning I panicked about my desicion to stay in Berlin. I had not fallen in love like I had hoped, there were no secret sparkles waiting for me upon arrival so I impulsively hopped a train and headed for prague, still searching for love. Alas I ended up wandering the streets packed with strangers with no love for people or place. I wandered disconected thru the city like I was a dim light left negletdly unpluggled. The feeling of both lonliness and homesickness sinking deep into my chest, aching like a hidden wound. But lonely for whom and homesick for where I did not know. I have no person nor place. I was adrift. A ship lost at sea without a captain, a compass or even a sail. shit, what had i done.

I sat at the train station with no planned destination. It was vintage 70's orange, and lacking any internet so I was stuck making decisions with only the most basic information to go on. Should I go to budapest and dive deeper into travel or should I go back to berlin and go on a date with a new german man who was messaging me and asking with a sense of genuine kindness I was drawn to to take me out for dinner. 

I had no idea what to do. I walked briskly and without direction and cried amongst drunk slovanians as I strugglied to find tickets or choices. In the end, for lack of enough information to make a properly informed decision, I boarded the first train that arrived at the platform. It ironically originated in Budapest but was bound for Berlin, giving me the unsettling feeling that somehow this empty old bruised train with stained orange curtains had gone to Budapest without me. My summer fate sealed by the convenience of proximate departure times. I ate goulash on the train while men yelled in hungarian after too many beers. I was achingly lonely amongst strangers. I spoke not a word to anyone. 

When I finally arrived in Berlin I decided to try and settle in to yellow subway cars, an endless supply of saurkraut and great vintage flea market finds. My date turned out to be a sweet german with a PhD in physics. I didn't have any feeling that I wanted romance from him but enjoyed his sweetness and our shared pain of divorce after exactly the same number of years of marriage, 17. After brunch and many words he asked if we should walk thru the park and he eventually led me to a grassy patch where we settled into talking. I am lonely I admitted. I am too he replied. Why not let me take away that ache you have, let me hold you and comfort you he suggested. But I couldn't. I saw before me a sweet man wearing an illfitting t-shirt and a small pageboy hat. The hat I liked but the tshirt was unflattering and I held this against him like a scar on his character. Sure he was rumpled and showed signs that he spent a disproportinate amount of time using his brain instead of his body, but he was also smart and incredibly sweet. He listened to me and consoled me, argued me into the logic of accepting comfort from even strangers in illfitting shirts. I started to weep as I struggled with this engulpging feeling of loneliness. I stared at this stranger who was offering to magically remove it all from me. Like a heart surgeon, he sat scalpal in hand ready to rid me of my pain. He leaned over across the grass to comfort my tears with his gentle arms and I  succomb to him with out real effort. This is where it started... Later, I got out of bed sweaty and satiated but vaguely nautious from what I had just done. I cried and felt repelled by his touch after leaving his bed, but I for reasons of loneliness and comfort agreed to see him again. Strangely, after a day a flip was magically switched inside me, and like a bullet train filmed in slow motion something quickly changed in me. The now familiar thick fog of lust induced brain chemicals overtook me and I started to crave his smell and need his company. Like a heroine addict who stops caring about the condition of the couches she sits on as long as they catch her in her drunken stupor, I let myself be overtaken, I let myself sink into the comfort of the worn and battered couch in the nearest abandoned building I could find. 

Was it possible that I had judged too soon, that I had simply not looked inside the cover of this non discript book, not discovered its hidden knowledge. We were strangely similiar in so many ways. we both yearned for logic and science, we both needed our brains let free to wander about. 

We stopped eating and sleeping and for days we drank in only each other. I tried desperately to run away from this new addiction but after 4 days I succombed and did what any sensible person would do in this situation. I moved in. 

You're not my lobster I appologized repeatedly even as I lay naked and wrapped in his arms, having just let my lusty screams out the window to gently float into his neighbors kitchen uninvited. lobsters mate for life so they must somehow find this one lobster that suits them so well they have no choice but to choose them as thier sole companion for a lifetime of strolling the bottom of the sea. Or so i mistakenly thought at the time due to a poorly researched episode of friends which had somehow inadvertently infiltrated my psyche with unscientific but romantic imagery of the sex life of this delicious crustacean. 

Your not my lobster was our mantra. But I got the feeling he imagined I was his. We passed our days wandering from a small Italian coffee shop to its matching small Italian lunch cafe. In the evenings he brought me to candlelit berlin bars adorned with velvet couches and low tables, giving you the feeling you had wandered into a hipsters living room just after the power went out. We made out on the couches like we were teenagers with no where to go but our parents house. if only he were my lobster. But his flaws were adorned across his arm like large badly drawn tattoos, they were too hard not to notice. He was only a slightly upgraded version of the man I spent 17 years with. He lacked the quantity of testosterone that allowed him to do for me deeds of cake ordering without asking. His sweetness was not balanced with enough power, he did not embody the sexy appeal of the lion stalking his prey on the Savannah, mane blowing in the night wind. This was not good enough somehow, not good enough to pay the bill in full for the mighty sacrifice of my family. I had unwittingly thrown my family into cauldron of the fiery volcano, like the sacrificial cow of balinese custom. I better get something good in return. But still somehow, how sad that this man was so sweet and wanted to hold me and kiss me for hours but still lacked some essential missing detail, like buttons all missing on a shirt making it impossible to wear. 

so I did what you do when you are trying hard not to fall in love, I left for rome, declaring that if I had to pick one city to live in and one person to be with he was not it. But do I have to pick just one? I began talking again to the adulterous kiwi without fear of heartache. I also began arranging dates like I was picking cherries off a tree. Is it possible to juggle people and places like a chinese plate spinning circus act. Could I do this? An Italian man bought me a cappucino. He was handsome and wore a proper collared shirt and a nice watch. He had been married and when I asked if he wanted to frivolously date or was he looking for his lobster, he declared with typical Italian flair. "But of course, a man needs a woman!" a lobster needs a lobster, but which one and for how long?

He walked me to my bus stop after only a brief conversation. He then without warning and a simple cappucino as his only payment for my lust, began to kiss me. He was handsome and I liked his nicely groomed beard and his clean smell, so I kissed him back. This went on for what felt like three long leasurely minutes under a large shady tree on a bustling street corner in the heart of Rome. Eventually, I pulled my lips off his and thanked him, I told him it was nice meeting me and I turned and walked away without looking back. I may not call rome home but I can visit, and I can kiss an Italian after a mere cappucino. Maybe in fact, I am not a lobster afterall. maybe I don't need to find a home. maybe I can merely find enough kisses and cappuccinos to keep me going. 

It turns out that in fact the true story of lobsters is much sluttier than the metaphor erroneously stolen for this 90's sitcom.  The female lobster only finds a male to mate with when she sheds her shell and needs protection for her soft tender skinned body hiding beneath her hard now discarded exterior. she stays with her selected mate until she hardens up ready again to face the world and off she goes, another female waiting in the empty doorway for her hasty departure, the tough sexy lobster male happy to accommodate them all. Am i a lobster? I don't know... but somehow I think i am something else. but what?

Who are you?

Think I have you figured out, solved you like a puzzle. Each piece a long hunt and a slow fit.  Some of the pieces I have somehow been unwilling to accept until now as they were mixed amongst your sweetness. Like ants stuck in honey, small enough they could nearly be ignored and swallowed whole. At least some of the pieces, took awhile. I never would have described myself as naive. I guess everyone is in certain corners of their life. I can haggle bitterly for the right price and quality of a grass roof. Standing my own strong and savvy against balinese men sporting long pinky nails and batik sarongs flowing in the wind as they try to swindle me with every slippery trick in the book, but dating, well I guess that is uncharted waters. I am adrift in the dark until suddenly things are illuminated as they are now.  I feel gutted as your sweet kiwi self would say.  A feeling that slowly sinks into my stomache as this new light shines plainly on what is and has only been hiding undiscovered in plain sight since I met you. 

All of my new found dating life has been an interesting series of experiments that I don't totally regret, but won't repeat. Sadly with each experience my heart closes just a bit. collapses in grief and looses the will to give itself to another, not sure it will survive much more. With each wound the scab grows thicker. 

A friend said that after you get used to dating awhile you can pick the different types of people out a mile away and you don't let them in emotionally again. 

So next time I can at least say, oh you. I know you, married, serial lier with an internet sex addiction, sweet as apple pie with icecream on a hot summer day, hard not to be tempted, but ya gonna pass. After all I was the one that let this happen. I said oh you lied to me and are married. Oh and yeah as a bonus you didn't share the fact that you have been for years on fling-finder looking for randoms to feed your lust like a cocaine addiction. This addiction that requires the selling of the family jewels piece by piece to fuel your will to secretly snort white powder up your nose. But instead of cocaine your drug of choice is giving yourself orgasms on your family's sofa as your wife and child sleep in the other room. One could argue, I knew this, sensed it but I was too high myself on this oxytocin laden frenzy to say no to the cocaine pusher, so I said oh never mind lets have an affair. I was allready knee deep in mud at that point, just didn't realize that I was sinking. I guess I was under a spell. Isn't that really what love is? just a shared delusion? a magical spell, a cocaine like drug that you would sell your mother into prostitution for?  I think if we were in a real relationship and you meant what you said that sex even with other people was something that you always would share with me, well I would probably trust you to do anything your twisted carnel mind could dream up. We could play games till we were crazy because it would be just us. We could convince that girl that works at H & M that you think is hot to sneak out early from work and join us in some singapore hotel on orchard road to play with us like a toy, but we would let her go quick and spend the night talking and laghing it away. We could make mad love in the jungle wet and muddy while hiking where anyone could see.  I would let you have me like a partner in crime, like a prop in your productions, if only what you said was true that I am always on the inside, in on your secret. But this will never be. 

The thing that I have come to realize is, it isn't shared, its you having solitary experiences one of which is me. This is the hard and cold realisation that I have slowly come to, like the drunkedness from red wine, the fogginess only engulfing your head after the the warm richness of the third glass hits your tongue. Slowly, but then suddenly. The puzzle pieces once put together, paint such an undeniable picture. I looked at you online. spied on you really. last online 8 hours ago. moments after you said work calls, if I count backwards. Who made you cum last night? a stranger in a chat room? Is that what I am to you? someone that just makes you cum? How did she make you feel? Did oxytocin get you? chase you down like a relentless predator? Will you meet her again tomorrow in that dark internet land? 

How can you be cheating on me when I am in real fact your virtual imaginary mistress? In six months we have spent a meager 5 real days together. Amazing days, tangled up escaping shape and form and staring magically into each others eyes. Fireworks, yes there were fireworks and all the magic movies teach us we should be the rightful owners of. Despite these precious moments of skin on skin lust, hardly a day has passed where you have not connected with me across oceans and countries thru our small digital portals into each others realities, whispering I love you in text form after you tell me about your day, about your stress or the child that you love. The swim lesson, the details of the mundane. Its not all sexy GIFs, there was just the one. A cyber gift from me to you. Mostly we support each other thru the trials of daily life and are there in the dark as quiet company. Me alone on a tropical island, you alone in the midst of your busy corporate life we are together as one, day after day, night after night when there is no one else. Your wife, she lays innocently next to you asleep as we talk. She sits across the room even as you text me. You betray her daily with your notes to me even if we stay far away from our imaginary stories of passion. 

So how can you cheat on me? How can you seek this out night after night with strangers online after you have left first her then me to our sleep? Because you are an addict. This is the only conclusion I am left with. Last online 2 hours ago it says on swingershaven. This is you. I must force myself to see it clearly like a cold shower on a winters morning this fresh vision is what is needed to separate the wheat from the chaff. You are not just the sweet man I see. You are an addict. I was once your cocaine. Won't you inhale me again? 

So now I have to come to terms with trust. Can I trust you if you hide your darkness from me too?  You are a thief in the night. You are not what you seem, a shape shifter of ailien form. I can no longer let you linger in in the corners of my mind as a safe passenger. You are nothing but a spy who will only take from me just as you manage to  find more stollen secrets from others. stollen? maybe or simply swindled like cheap grass roofs sold by shady balinese men. It appears you are not capable of full disclosure and complete honesty, you have become too accustomed to hiding your dark bits from those you love. keeping them tucked under mattresses like a teenager's copy of a tattered playboy magazine. Your dark greedy lust is a forbidden relic that no one can see.  

I tried my best to talk honestly about what I was feeling and seeing but you were unwilling to respond with even a single word. "Are you doing ok?" was your neat response to my long emotionally raw note to you. We are way past the casual point where I merely smile at you coyly from across the table. We have passed all points really. like a car facing a road washed out by a storm we are left to stare blankly ahead with no way forward. 

I would have taken you as you are, all of you.  Do you know this? All I ever asked for in return was full disclosure and honesty. I only asked that you willingly dump all the pieces of yourself in my lap to hold and love and sweetly kiss.  Bold naked honesty, that should theoretically suit someone like you favors sex in the wide open. Naked in public. But naked honesty you dress up, put clothes on and hide in plain sight like a muslim woman bearing the brunt of afghani life, but why? You omit the details and walk the lines between truth like you are avoiding cracks in a sidewalk. 

Omission is lying too you know, even if that is the easiest kind for you. You can't fly to Bali to see me and indulge in what you know would be the best of romances on one of the most romantic islands because that feels like lying. You can't have me in clear pools overlooking lush green jungle vistas, because for this distinct pleasure you would have to pay with the cost of looking your wife in the eyes and making up a story a lie. Meeting me in Jakarta on a bussiness trip in the generic beige hotel that your company has booked for the occasion, well this is just an omission. I can be cleanly erased from this scene with a large pink eraser without changing a single detail of your trip.  Omission you have made easy peace with and has fit into your life like the daily subway you take to work. Regular and on time. I have come to believe that despite what you tell me, these omissions to your wife are not something you do just for me, because I am special, but instead are nothing more than a long standing habit. Like coffee in the morning, no thought, just habit. Am I just one of a string of relationships like this for you? My friend (the falanderer who knows this behavior well) has argued all along to me that this is not about me, its a trap set by a spider who knows how to lure women with flattery and desire. Is you giving me what feels like some extreme sport of love and emotional intimacy just part of your sticky cobweb? Is this real for you or just a part of this game? I guess I won't ever know for sure and I have to make peace with that. I have to stop chasing this cold case trail like a detective obsessed with a truth that will never be found. 

I have to take the bits of the puzzle that I have found and turn them over in my hand, This is what I know for sure, this is what is true. I am not ok with all of this and I promised myself after my last relationship with the emotionally unavailable but eternally present aussie that I would not accept masqueraded mistreatment from men even if it felt like a fair trade for good company at times of loneliness. 

Anyway I think you are ready to let go of me too. The constant need for me that showed itself plainly in the stream of messages all day has slowed to a trickle and now barely a drip. like a water starved desert surviver I am sucking desperately at your dripping faucet hoping you will once again release the flow. Even plans to meet in real life have now been canceled too many times to count. I don't think you have any intention of seeing me again but won't tell me this. Our next trip in the beige Jakarta hotel room is always on the horizon like a carrot that keeps moving just out of reach. 

Our last rendezvous in Singapore was canceled at the last minute, my hair already blown dry, me waiting as you told me that your family had food poisoning and you could not see me. So as consolation you met me the next day in the airport and we discussed nurf guns with my twelve year old for 20 minutes, without so much as a kiss. Our relationship has desolved in the last month, we had a good long run but now we have nothing more than a thin thread that even our imagination can barely support, so maybe its time that I stop waiting for your messages. Time that I stop hoping that this is the week you will make time for me in real life. I think I need to say goodbye and cut the emotional thread. I still maintain that I love you. that I fell in love with you. that for me this was not imaginary but real. but I also know that with anyone you have to decide what you will accept regardless of love. You will always have a piece of my heart and as crazy as it sounds for someone who I have only really known online, I love you as fierce as I have ever loved anyone. May we both be blessed with this kind of love again but may it be real and not imaginary and may we get to keep it. I love you. 

theft and other sins of the heart

I have never met you, I have never seen you laugh or heard how your accent sounds. I don't know how you mother and have never witnessed how you behave after your third glass of wine. I can only spy on breadcrumbs of your family photos left public on facebook. I contemplate your choice in earrings and try hard to read the emotion in your eyes.

My intention was to write an apology to you, to the woman I will never meet whose husband I am borrowing for the week. I wanted to say sorry for the pain I would cause you if only you knew. I know this pain myself intimtiately, know its shape and its form like I know the way my cat sleeps curled on my lap. Your ignorance only further sprinkles my guilt with tiney grains of pain. Like salt on a wound, because I know the explosion of hurt that is waiting silently around any corner for you to find. Did you hear my orgasm over skype in the guest room as you slept the other night? Did you notice his smile over coffee as he texted me? 

I wanted to say that I was sorry for wrecking your home, trying even to tear apart your family for my own selfish want. A want that is so great, that I would do almost anything to feed its hunger. 

I intended to say sorry for all that and more but the sad truth is that this appology that you will never actually read, feels like a lie. See I was once you. I was only two short years ago trapped in a marriage whose small amount of love we had conjured at the start had burned out out like a camp fire dwindling slowly in the cold night air. I was once casting daily daggers of bitterness towards the man whose bed I shared nightly. I was once contemplating how it would be possible to cut off my third arm, this appendage that I drug around like dead weight but that none the less had become so firmiliar that its forced amputation felt like it was medically impossible. No you would argue if you only could, I love this man. He is my heart and soal and partner in all things. yes, this too I know. I know how it feels to not live in the world of black and white contrasts where everything seems clear. I know what it feels like to enjoy morning coffee and sweet family moments together and still at least once a week remember why you love him. Its confusing isn't it? 

so I will say I am sorry for my theft but I will still steal anyway. Today at two, the man who belongs to you will knock at my hotel room door. He will kiss me and tell me he loves me. We will makes love, and talk and wrap ourselves up in sheets and then he will return home to you, make dinner and bath your daughter. I will spend the night alone wandering the streets of singapore. But the next day we will get on a plane together and share long intimidate moments for two indulgent nights. 

I want to say I am sorry for stealing, but I want more to ask you, do you want me to steal him from you? Do you want to be freed from the burden of letting him go? 

Truth revealed.

I wanted to take stock of all that we are. I am mad for you, the kind of madness that makes me want to plunge off emotional cliffs for you. I find it hard to make the sum of our parts add up. I find it hard to understand intellectually how it is that I feel I have known you all my life or that I know exactly who you are without you saying a word. Like I can feel your core and it somehow matches mine. But I also know that I am under the influence of powerful drugs. That I can't even see straight right now. That the chemical cloud we are floating on is so thick that you and I may as well be passing our days lounging on low tables puffing pipes in an opium den. We would make love all day amongst the cushions. I know we would. 

So I decided to exercise my left brain and make a list. This is my small list of the tangibles. The stuff that makes us something together. The stuff that we both are. The shared little bits we have in common. The stuff that is beyond the core of just getting and loving your soul, the you inside. 

This is what I have at the moment, I know there is more. Lots more. 

Let's start with food. Good place to start. We both like food, good food. Home made food. We like to cook. We don't know how much yet but both of us have this strong. We like coffee and red wine. I know you prefer craft beer but if we were in France you would drink wine with me. "Il etait une fois". I Saw this written today. You speak some French right? "Once upon a time" it means. This is how our story should start. It's better in French because it translates more to "it was one time" this is our time, our chapter in the book of life. It's a fairytale for me, it really is. And France... We would live there together by the sea. We both love this idea. But we would travel always to strange remote crazy places. We like adventures, even muddy ones. We like babies, babies that grow into amazing kids. We would make them together if only our genetics could find each other in the dark. Curly auburn haired babies with my eyes and your smile. 

We are both optimists, we know that everything is possible, if we can dream it we can do it. We believe in working hard and getting things done. We push past obstacles as if they were just simple rock walls to climb. Imagine if our forces were combined what we could imagine, what we could do? It's part of the reason I am willing to walk down this impossible path with you holding my hand. Because we know all things are possible with faith and hard work. For this reason we have the power to overcome even impossible romances. Mount them like black stallions and ride off into the sunset together. 

We are sensuous dare I say even romantic creatures you and I. We crave nuance and share some sort of taste for unusual passions of the senses. We have so much to share in this, so much to learn and experience  about this part of who we are together. This tangled mass of sex. 

We have some shared interest in biology. I like bugs too you know. You are just smarter about this than me. But I could certainly chat you up about these creatures invisible to the naked eye and their role in the immune system. The only book I own in bali is called "the art of fermentation". I make sauerkraut, you prefer wine but we like this I think for the same reason. This is life, alive before our feet. Science and magic together. 

I feel like there is more, it's not just an opium den we find ourselves in. We are real. Two pieces of a puzzle that have floated out to sea and found each other in the the dark. Found. 

I love you. You are no longer my imaginary boyfriend. I know now you are real.

Imaginary Boyfriend

You are my imaginary boyfriend. We have never met but I know I Love you. You told Me yourself that this was how you felt The other night as you drank one too many beers. That you were falling hopelssly thru the air, nothing to catch your fall. Your breath caught permenantly In your throat. 

You hold my hand as you walk me thru this imaginary world we create together. We are like avatars blue and capable of becoming anything that pleases us. 

"Is this just about sex for us?" I ask you earnestly seeking your answer. 

"No" you tell me and I believe you, but am suspicious that we are the victims of oxytocin's chemical intoxication. Heady And thick like lounging about in an opium den for hours as the smoke fills our lungs And makes the world outside slowly dissapear And feel pointless. 

We need each other. The kind Of need that is thick and sweet like honey. Dripping down My leg need. The kind Of need that makes my belly ache and my mind spin. We thirst for each other, its unquenchable, we keep drinking but It keeps coming. 

You seem to see me thru special glasses, rose colored ones, imagine I am more than I am. Describe me with superlatives that don't match my jean shorts and missmatched tan lines. I have one grey pubic hair, should I tell you this? A super model who is your biggest sexual fantasy. You feel lucky But I know I am. You make lasagne on a sunday For The week ahead you say. Meet me first and look at My frown lines close up I counter. 

But There is something There between us that goes back and forth. I like you. I like you in so many ways. You work hard traveling the world because you love your work. You will tie me up in bed and watch as I make love to another woman, in our minds, together, all befor morning coffee. We laugh, hard and long. I have not enough hours in the day to devour your mind. And then we drink The coffee. You just the right combination of sexy and requisite geek to satisfy my desires for a brain in bed and not just a body. But you are not here in front of me, you are but an apparation. A ghost. You will disapear as quickly as you have arrived. Return to your family and stop being my imaginary boyfriend.

Today I am flying on a plane to you. Crossing oceans and borders just to touch you. RiskingFlying from my island home of Bali to the big sterile city of Singapore. I will arrive at our hotel and change into tight jeans and heels, casual and just sexy enough. I will walk to a small bar and order a glass of red wine, warm and thick and In the perfect round wine glass It will keep me company as I wait for you. 

You are a stranger to Me. I have never kissed your lips nor have I touched your skin, but I know the inside if your mind. You have seen the inside Of mine. An old friend, a lover, that I have never met. 

I am a sure thing that you now get to devour without hesitation, But first you must drink wine with me across the table. Look at me here I am right in front Of you. No longer a screen In the way. 

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.