Suspension of disbelief and other magical thinking

A friend just told me of her new relationship. That she is in love, moving in, signing a year lease on a vacation house. She informed me that despite having spent only six weeks in his company, despite him having just ended a seven year relationship just two months earlier, despite having had only a long distance relationship for months, she was in love. Because I am a logical person I wanted to tell her she wasn't thinking this thru. I wanted to tell her that in all fact she doesn't know this man well enough to be in love. She can't really even understand the depths and complications of the relationship he just removed himself from, maybe isn't totally disentangled from. Skype doesn't transmitt the smell or feel of dirty laundry left on the floor. She has no idea what the future brings, but she is willing to fall, to let go. To totally suspend disbelief to the point where it doesn't exist. This is what love requires, this magical thinking that makes you ignore the bad in someone. 

The other night I went to dinner at this same womans house. This was the kind of scene one could only find in Bali. The house was oppulent and rustic at the same time. The table was piled high with freshly made balinese food. Classical music playing in the background. There was brief banter about whether the servant cooking dinner would join us at the table. This conversation and its surrounds was a stark dichotomy with the stringy haired hippy sitting in front of me. These were the kind of hippies who had money and servants and time to arrange well apointed sceances. 

The dinner progressed and the conversation quickly turned to gurus. These are people who have them and believe in them. There is apparently a hugging guru. A fat lady from India who is known to hug 1000 people in a day. There is another who gives strict instructions about whom to marry and when. 

Apparently what people want from these gurus is to be told what to do with thier life. Apparently if you give over control to them they will run your life completely.

I understand this need. I understand wanting someone else to take the steering wheel. To drive for awhile. 

Being frozen, afraid to make choices for fear that they will be wrong. This makes everything impossibly hard. I wish I believed in hugging fat ladies as the solutions to my problems. I wish it was that simple for me. 

Believing in fat hugging gurus to know more about life than you or believing the guy you just met could be your soulmate. It is all the same. It takes ignoring most of what is in from of you. It takes selectively liking and seeing only certain bits. This is a skill. One that has been honed by most people. This is how I am broken, this is the ability I lack. I am a realist. I see the messy bits, the trainwreck before it happens. 

I think this is why the romantic beginings of relationships are impossible for me. I will never be able to suspend disbelief long enough to fall. 

Conflicted clusterfuck

A friend described my life at the moment in this way. A conflicted clusterfuck. I can't move forward. There is no backwards. It is a traffic jam, a constipated baby, a dry river bed waiting for rain. There is no movement. None. 

Some one just told me a story about the traffic In Jakarta, the capital city in this country I call home. Sometimes the traffic jams are so bad that they last all night. Women are in the streets crying because they can't return home to thier children. They are just stuck in the street surrounded by cars that can't move. Each can't move because the other is there. I didn't ask but am left wondering, how is this resolved? What happens in the morning? I believe that the cars must eventually move. Slowly inch by inch, and then eventually picking up speed untill everything is freely flowing. 

My life is this right now. Nothing moving and no possibility of escape. At somepoint something has to shift. The morning has to come. 

He is getting on a plane with her today. A visa run to kuala lumpur. He shared coffee and tried to fix my computer befor he left. The strength it takes to accept and even love in the face of this is extreme. He hugged me and told me he loved me as we do. Then he drove away. He is not mine. I have to be strong and let him go. He is becoming something, I have to give him the space to become. 

I have given up on online dating. I deactivated my account. Focusing on my relationship status is the wrong thing. This is too insane. 

I will keep dancing and searching out the things in life that are me. I will try to beat back the aloness with a stick. The morning will come, things will start to move again one day soon. I have faith in this. 

Ours, yours and mine

I made fried rice out of the leftovers in the fridge, added an egg. This is yours, I forgot it was. You reminded me that this is what you used to do last time I saw you. 

I painted your walls butter yellow befor you met her. You still wanted me then. Now these walls are yours. These yellow walls. Other people compliment you on them. You say thank you. No credit given, no credit required. She doesn't even know they are mine. That me and your son picked the color with love and painted them for you, using our own two hands while you were away. 

Remember that city in mexico when our son was a baby? Remember all those yellow buildings? We were there. Can't we return to that moment?

You cook our food for her. It was mine first but over the years it became ours. First when I was pregnant and couldn't stand the sight of raw food. Me lying on that old garage sale couch nautious and directing you in the kitchen. You slowly becoming a cook.  

You have pickles on your shelf that you made. They are my pickles. My recipe. Can I take them back from you? I cannot. 

We have these things that are ours. This is how it is. Now you are sharing them with her.

Is that you outlined in a shadow in her Facebook profile picture holding those pickles next to you and her? She doesn't know they are mine does she? 

Then of course there is our son. He is the perfect equal combination of you and me. Yours and mine. Your face, love for books, astronomy and a dry wit. 

My snuggliness and sense of adventure. 

These things are so intertwined, so jumbled. After this many years, we can no longer pull apart these pieces. I am always a part of you and you are always a part of me. I just have to accept that you are now sharing those parts with her. I have to accept this without feeling like a jealous toddler who is unwilling to share my toys. I have to release you. Release all that was shared. Give you away. Give it all away, to you, to her. 

Date #2 and #3

Date number two was an Australian. Wild curly hair and tall but with a stylish conservative button down shirt. He was the first intellectually oriented person I have met in this small town. We had a lovely debate about capitalism and micro economies that was stimulating. This should have been enough all by itself. After a drought of lonliness one would imagine my brain would have jumped at this dance. It was a good start to feed my hope that someone could be possible but not enough to satisfy me beyond dinner. 

It is strange what you sort for in a friend, a lover or a partner. The right combination of things. I kept looking at this man across the table thinking he is smart, a journalist, he is a bit alternative, we are having a nice intelectual debate. What is missing?

Ironically after my first date with the man I spent my whole life with I wasn't sure. He was just nice. At 20 this was enough, to be just nice, or maybe it wasn't. All these years I was unsure if just nice was enough. Now I think that maybe all relationships are grown. Watered and fed untill shared experience makes them real. Maybe there is always a blank slate from the start. Maybe there is nothing else. 

Date number 3 was different. He was brazilian and alternates between working on oil riggs and surfing. I could have been on a date with Vinnie from the bronx, if I could just ignore the portugese accent. He asked me if I ever wore high heels. He liked really high ones especially.

 "I live in Bali," I replied. Heels? I have not even seen them in years. 

I made it thru my coffee, just barely. He was tan and muscular and I had always liked latinos. I could no longer be in his company, not for a single moment more. How is it that this only makes me feel more alone? 

Is funny and charming with some intellegence, a sense of adventure and fiscal independence too much to hope for in one person? I want my old very flawed life back. It was mine. 

The father of my child, my partner in all things life sat and waited in the school parking for a parent teacher meeting. We had driven on a motorbike together for one hour without talking, thru balinese ceremonies, traffic. Him fuming and smoldering over the fresh knowledge that I had a date, that in fact I was dating. This my only recourse from running into him and his girlfriend while buying bananas. It still felt like a betrayal somehow. 

"Let's just drive to the airport and get on a plane and never come back to this godforsaken Island that ruined our life" he said in a tone that lacked conviction. I imidiatly thought of real life. "We have property to sell first" I said. That was the wrong answer. I am still my practical non romantic self he declared. 

I don't believe its what he wants. I am not sure it is what I want. Not sure the genie can be put back, that the pieces can be glued back together. Would I respect him anymore now than I did then? Would I be able to get over his physical intamacy with another woman? Probably not. How can I be sure?

He is caught enjoying his new life and still missing his old one and feeling guilty about the dichotomy. I am stuck alone with no way forward. I am stuck trying to get thru 15 minutes of coffee and hoping that the next one will make me want to at least stay for dinner. What would someone have to be like to make this true? 

First dates

A man whose profile picture is him sitting at a desk cleaning guns would like to go out with me. We live in Indonesia, guns are highly illigal. No I will not go out with him. I will also say no if you have tattoos, are holding a beer or are flashing a hang loose sign. Also strangely if you are surfing. Odd I know. I think surfing could be fun but somehow if this is your profile picture I don't want to date you. I can't really say why. 

Last night was my first date. Online or otherwise in 18 years. I thought company with anyone would be nice. An attractive gentleman, who speaks three languages, has a masters degree and likes to travel enjoying the sunset with me. This should be preferable to the aloneness that has been stalking me daily for over half a year now.  Turns out I was wrong. 

What makes someone tickle certain spots inside your soul? Spots that makes you want more of them. More just over coffee or more that makes you want to bring them into your bed. This is a topic that now seems so nuanced and complicated as to be unsolvable. I don't know the answer for myself.

This gentleman didn't tickle anything for me. Not my mind, my heart, or my loins. He drove in a taxi for over an hour to have drinks with me based on some photos and a brief description of my life. God bless him for at least making me feel wanted for a minute. 

We each had a coconut. We enjoyed the jungly view that is Bali. It turned out that the restaurant I chose was the location of a speaking engagement and a honeymooning couple joined us at our table. Then minutes later, the genteleman I am scheduled to go on a date with the following night) who I had not met online but in person) showed up. He blindly stumbled into my date unaware that this was my scheduling conflict that made me push him forward another night. Awkward, but I suppose unavoidable when trying date en mass in a small town. 

I sat thru polite resume like converstation with my date and included the honeymooners in smart discussions of religion in Bali. I played by the dating rules that I have been advised of by those that know me too well, flaws and all, and love me anyway. Let them do most of the talking, don't talk about divorce or kids or other relationships. Keep my phone off and in my purse. 

In the end I knew within minutes that there was nothing wrong with him but he did nothing to make me want more of him. He was not funny, or intellectually challenging. He didn't even overpower me with some masculine trait like ordering my drink for me. Something that allthouh my feminist self finds dispicable my hormones find hard to resist. 

So with this, when my phone rang I broke one of my rules and answered it. I faned an emergency to leave. It turned out it was the father of my son calling about kid birthday plans tomorrow. I took the moment to tell him I was on a date and allthough this guys resume was better, he was not funny nor smart. Both of these areas are what make him and I still want time together even now. Funny smart conversations are part of what tickles me and makes me want your company. Unfortunately, there is more too. It was the intangible "more" that started the domino affect that brought me to this first date. I should have tried and and made him jelous but I didn't. It brought the missing back. That dreaded missing. 

Tomorrow night is another night, another date. I allready know how this one will go. But I am going to be generous and contemplate if there is something more there. Eventually with sheer numbers of dates eventually I will want to stay thru dinner, right? 

Lost in grief

Last summer I worked in a refugee camp in the remote mountains of Thailand. The goal of the research project I was running was to understand mental health and coping strategies of the refugee population and ultimately to deliver a tidy report to those paying my salary. 

In the process of wandering around and discussing mental health with the population there, I was brought to a small bamboo shack deep in the isolated jungly part of the camps. There was a woman sitting on her platform made of bamboo. There were no walls and only a roof made from thatching large leaves together. This was her home. She was wearing a beautiful handmade skirt in bold black, red and white that she had made with her own two hands. She didn't speak but sat and rocked, not even looking up when we joined her. I was told by my translators that she had lost all of her family during the terror inflicted on those in Burma. She had experienced so much pain that she was a frozen person. She could no longer move or even just be, she could only rock. 

If she had yarn, she would weave colors together to make a pattern. She lamented in barely audible burmese that the weaving was her only comfort in life but she had no yarn. I imagined the extreme predictabiliry and control involved in taking each string and putting it in its place. Making sense in an otherwise senseless world. I sat there aware that this was what extreme emotional pain looked like. Embodied. I arranged to have yarn sent to her. I did this because intelectually I knew it was the right thing to do. I however could not deeply empathise. At the time I had never experienced emotional pain that was anything more than a surface wound. 

For the past four months, I have become my own version of this rocking woman. I am aware that divorce and the pain of watching the man that I spent my whole life with starting a new life with someone else compares little to loosing your whole family. But for me this is the pinacle of my own personal emotional threshold. 

I am not lost to the jungle, not totally consumed by it and my own grief like this woman. I still go about my day. 

But last week while buying shampoo in the super market I suddenly felt seering pain in my chest and broke down with tears flowing freely. My ten year old son comforted me and said "let's just get home mom." 

The loss of my family as a whole complete unit, the loss of someone that knows me and loves me anyway, who accepts me after everything. This loss does impobilise me for long moments in my day. It stops me in my tracks. It inflicts real physical pain. It takes away my ability to breath. 

Four months have passed since I floated down that jungle river in Borneo crying uncontolbly as I sat company with fresh loss my broken family still in tow. Since then the tears and pain has been unquantifiable. Deeper and greater than I thought possible. After years of no emotion and no tears this grief feels like an infected pimple that burst letting out all of the built up puss of the past. In this way the pain hurts, but also has no choice but to come out. 

Grief is something that you can either let pass thru you or consume you. The burmese woman I met had long ago been consumed. Like a stone statue that had been overgrown she was lost to this grief.

I now have to find a way to let the grief go. Let it pass theu me. I have to find a way to not be lost in this grief stricken jungle. I have to walk out of the forest and look at the sunshine. 

Liminal Space

Liminal Space is a concept often used in Anthropology to describe the grey areas of life. The space between two things, where one ends and before the other begins. This term was originally  introduced by a well-known representative of French positive anthropology Arnold van Gennep. He describes it as a threshold, boundary, passage between two different places. 
 This is the space I find my self in now, in this passage between. At the end of an 18 year marriage, searching for life's edges to gently trace with my hands until some solid form emerges. Looking for footholds to snag a new path, a new way forward. The world has become this grey space, this in-between space, this liminal space. It is appealing to make things black and white, grey is hard. loving someone or not loving someone. Wanting someone or not wanting them. keeping something sacred or smashing the whole thing to the ground to break. In between this is never clear. This in-between space is which I am lost.

Last night I went to a party, the first for me in some while. People were dancing and drinking and smoking. I expected that I may see my partner/lover/baby's daddy/best friend of 18 years there with his new girlfriend/lover/fling standing in a dark smoky crowd, seen only from a distance. I chose to go anyway. I decided to dive into that darkness and let it all sink in. This is all still fresh, I am still wounded by the knowledge that what was, is now not. I almost wanted to see them there, to feel the pain burn, to let it sear the grey space into something more black and defined. I didn't see them. Instead, I danced with strangers, watched people much younger, go through courting rituals of drinking and flirting that seem more foreign than the rituals of animal sacrifice all around me here in this foreign land. I watched and observed and wondered if there would be an after to what feels now like only a before.

There is the before I realized that he was sharing a bed with a woman that I can only see or know  in facebook posts, learning only that she both teaches yoga and smokes. A dichotomy that in the abstract I find both respectful in its duality and pitiful in its contradiction.

There was before I ran off to Paris to cope with my new choice to throw out the person I shared all of my adult life with.  Walking bundled in heavy coats and boots borrowed and scavenged to protect my thin tropical skin. Walking arm in arm in the company and solace of the only person I new who could accept my grief as she had her own. We walked thru grief filled graveyards and wandered the halls of the Louvre witnessing the paintings that kept company with mona lisa. We ignored it all and only wept and walked.

There is before I threw him out of our house and told him that he needed to find a life for himself beyond sitting and drinking and not doing, so I could grow to love and respect him. He wept daily and pleaded for a return to our version of normal, vowing that an absence of a life purpose his only crime could be redeemed. But I punished him with dis-missle to an abandoned building in mid town that once carried a vision of reconstruction that was ours to make together. There he slept alone amid rubble in the dark, trying to piece together a life.

There was the before I spent months contemplating if love could be shared among many, if I could love her and him, if love was big enough for us all. Before the night that she sweetly invited me to sleep all three of us together in their marital bed sideways in a row like children as if nothing could happen that would cause any future damage. Him cleanly showered, eyes sparkling, her soft and sweet and sincere. I wanted to see what it was like to love the two people who had become my family, Love them both at the same time, both together, all abandon to the wind. I wanted this. I declined and instead let her wrap me in his raincoat and drive home on my motorbike in the rain. I did this not for lack of want but because I imagined the grief and anguish I would cause the man sleeping at home in my bed, our bed of 18 years.

There was the before I spent months contemplating if what I had was enough, if there could be more, if love was something beyond shared space, if it had anything in common with sparks and fireworks or if like an old red wine it was content to sit. That man sitting on my couch, sharing space with me, was he happy? Did diving into the sea of chemicals that are created when two new souls who have never met play with pheromones be worthy of some trial in life's long list of experiences? Is there any real harm in letting someone play with my pheromones from across the room? These were questions that ate at my day, and slowly unraveled me and what remained of my relationship. Was anyone responsible for this unraveling? Should I place blame? 

These questions that now seem akin to wondering if trying that first sip of whisky as a teenager might be a good idea or have some larger context in all the experiences in life. In the morning when the dark lifts you realize the whisky just made you drunk and you now have a headache. There is nothing important or meaningful to have come of it.

Before all of this there was just us, together. Together in everything. Together feeling trapped in what must be, enjoying the bland taste of comfort. Not appreciating the simple gift of a warm body that would accept you and hold you and take you every night as the cold set in. Not acknowledging that there is nothing more beautiful or important than ears over coffee that know you and and understood that your words were just theirs to hold and keep and not judge or diminish with opinions. These simple gifts became unappreciated with time and tarnished by the daily wear of life.

I am not yet to after. I am stuck. I am in this liminal space. lost in each of the things that came before. wondering if any of them can be erased. As there is no after,  I left the stable structure of before and I am still not yet to the transformed. I only take solace in the fact that this means the story is not over.