Everything is a relationship

I met a girl at a party nursing a sweet sleepy 8 month old baby that openly pulled her boob above her neckline for better reach. She was no longer with the baby's father she told me. "I am sorry" I said. "That must be hard." "Yes but we still live together" she responded. "Also we are starting a bussiness together." "So in what way are you not together? I queried as if this situation seemed strange or foreign to me despite my obvious recent schooling into the world of emotional detachment. Are you just withholding sex from each other for sport? He is a comitment phobe she later described, the kind that goes leaping from windows for fear of being caught inside.  Unable to handle anything that could be mistaken for real these types prefer disposable plastic prototypes. 

Everything is a relationship. There are just different kinds. What kinds do you have? What kinds do you want? I have a relationship with my cat, she sleeps in my bed and trys to steal my pizza crust from the box. 

I text nearly daily with my comitment phobic friend as he maintains his distance in Cambodia. Keeping a country between us for protection from possible infatuation. We swap nuanced indications that we will still be in each others life. "I will have a go at beating your son at chess when I get back." He says dodging real expectation or direct affection. 

This is my relationship with him, him coming and going and dodging more than Mohamed ali in the boxing ring. I pretend not to care. Everything is a relationship. 

I had lunch with a sweet gay man who is becoming my friend. He is dating someone in a serious way but admits they have only ever been in the same place on vacation. He now struggles with what will happen to thier magic if they share a space or even the same Island. They boldly admit to being in love but unreasonably resist any urges to share the same Country for periods that outlast thier holiday. Next stop sking in whistler. They have a holiday relationship.

Everything is a relationship. The exchange of bodily fluids has no magic in marking time. Ok so lets not have sex and call each other mate. Now we have a relationship without sex. This was your idea. Well done.

Over the many years of my fidelity my emotions betrayed me even with good solid airspace between me and a man. I have been more intimately involved with men I have never touched than this one now. 

Even my 21 year old self who didn't want to marry because it would somehow prevent divorce was trying in vain to phychonavigate lifes truths with fowl smelling logic. You can get a divorce without getting married. I now know this to be true. You can't twist logic like a pretzle and make it true. Divorce without marriage, love without sex. Like newton's gravity this falling apple will eventually knock you out cold. 

Everyone is in a relationship. 

Keeping company

A girl I just met as I told her about my divorce and how the hardest part was sleeping alone said "I would sleep with you."

It was a generous offer. It was a statement in the conditional tense that implied there were other impeding factors, but I believed her sencerity. I believed that she would if she could and would ask for nothing in return. But she has someone to sleep with nightly, to keep company while sumbering, a boyfriend whose nightly presence is mandated after the human trajectory of years together. So thus the tentative use of would. 

On my birthday complete strangers organised a party for me. We ate roasted bone marrow with arugala, we drank real red wine and even sent it back for being chilled and exchanged it for proper rich warm shiraz. A drunken nameless man who claimed without real proof to be a 15% owner of the guiness beer company bought endless rounds of champaign. I relished in being at a table of native english speakers all with varrying degrees of seperation from the queen and corresponding accents. It felt normal. I had company, I was keeping it. 

A girl I never met who had a warm midwestern American accent, was thin and smart with soft long blond hair turned to me over the rumble of the dinner party and whispered "I like you, lets hang out." I decided right there that she is someone that if willing would keep sweet nightly company over pillows and under comforters. Would she keep my company? I was vaguely convinced that she might prefer whatever I was offering up over that of the british gentleman who clearly had her on his short list of the fleshly offerings at the party. 

I realised this week as I started to meet my crowd for the first time in awhile that keeping company can be diverse. It doesn't have to be the solitary marriage and family that I clung to for so long like gecko feet on glass. It can be so many things all in one messy day. I am no longer alone. I feel this lifting for the first time in years, like a damp dark fog rising with the sunrise. 

I spent half the weekend turning my nose down and frowning at men who plow thru women like a snow mobile picking up speed. All too suddenly I forgave them as if somehow this gave me permission to do the same. I came to understand somehow that they are just keeping company. 

The man who feels the need to insist publicly that we were never dating is off in cambodia trying to find more company to keep and suddenly I understand. Like a bolt of lightning this just hit me. Suddenly I no longer feel rejected by his need to seek out random strangers and make them need him overnight like toast needs butter. I no longer judge him for constantly searching for this like he is digging for clams. We all need many things in many moments. We all need different types of company and varying degrees.

My son who moved into my room after my divorce to comfort me while sleeping by using his sweet and generous eleven year old snuggles has just decided he wants his room back.  I have in the interim rented it out to a daily turnover of visiting guests. I will give it to him again. Sleep alone. 

He still might like to snuggle me asleep from time to time he says, but is ready for a bit more space to stretch his growing soon to be teenage legs.

I need very little space from people compared to most, but what I realised this week is that I don't need to feel lonely because of this, I just need more people. If I collect small moments from each one in dribs and drabs like water drops in a bucket I am no longer alone!! 

Some men, some women, some to hold me and snuggle me, some to have passionate cloths flinging trists with, and others for lingering chats over coffee or wine.  Some for close up sweaty spinning and dancing and still others for muddy adventurous fun. It is all possible. 

I am not alone. I have company, suddenly they are all around me.

I will have dinner tomorrow night with the blonde woman with the sweet voice, I look forward to finding out what type of company she would like to keep:)

No one to hold back my hair

I am sick. I am vomiting. There is no one to hold back my hair. 

I remember getting this sick at 21 just weeks after starting to date the man who became my partner of 17 years. I had smoked one joint and drank two drinks with vodka and grapefruit juice. I was sicker than I am right now because of some stray Idonesian parasite. This man who I barely knew left the party and spent the night with me in the bathroom holding back my hair. This is what true love looks like. It is messy and kind all at the same time. 

We should all be so lucky to have just one person to hold back our hair. I was that lucky for awhile and yet somehow wanted more. Damn that want is hard to reconsile in lonely moments of vomit on cold tile floors. 

Thru the looking glass

Memory is like a looking glass, it plays tricks with the mind, like Alice down a rabbit hole of make believe. Life painted in reverse becomes sunny meadows and lazy sunny afternoons. The birth of my son is the best example of this crazy phenomana I can think of. Thought of thru years of daily dizzying parenting haze, all is perfect and sweetly sentimental as I gaze backwards at this moment frozen in time.

Even with my most focused recollection all I can see is a pink wrinkly smiling boy staring up at me with clear deep blue eyes. The pain of delivery has all been erased.

I remember extra-large fuzzy blankets just out of an electric warmer. The midwives wrapping me over and over in their warmth as I screamed, while simotaniously cursing and ignoring my my deeply rooted agnosticism by invoking jesus's name in deep large gasps. I remember the warm wet tub of water that enveloped my bulging belly as I pushed for hours to no avail. The sweet hands of my mother and my partner. I remember mouthing the words to norah jones and the dixie chicks silently grabbing at something to transport my mind out of my body. I remember these things as if they were small gifts of comfort. The backdrop of pain exists only in theory now. Time has washed it all clean.

My marriage, now only wreckage on a distant beach is the same. I remember the happy memories, like vacation photos uploaded on Facebook. Smiling happy people. No photos of arguments or skinned knees. All the morning coffee, the long trips, all the excitement of new ideas boiled and concocted together. The daily sweetness he gave willingly without anything demanded in return. 

I need to force myself to feel the other bits so that I feel no regret for my choices. I need to burn the dark portraits of forgotten moments back into my memory so the truth can let me find peace and seek out happiness in every crack and crevice while sorting through this messy rubble of life.

I need to remember the fat dreary man who sat mostly on the couch for years inhaling dry desert weed out of a long glass tube, or in the later years possibly drunk on hidden vodka kept anonymously in his bag.

I need to remember what I said to the lovely tan blonde danish girl while we stood knee deep in ocean water on the most perfect of white sand beaches off the coast of Thailand. Her complementing me on my beautiful family, "I never really fell in love with him." I said "He wasn't the one I should have stayed with." I said it as if I was confessing this secret to a priest in a confessional. I confessed it to her as a stranger who would take this sad fact with her as she left the beach and store it in her cold northern homeland for no one else to see. Remove this truth from my otherwise perfect tropical sun drenched nomadic life. This fantasy life I alone created, dragging him along nearly unwillingly, a mere passenger on my ship. Wilted soggy lettuce left on the sandwich of our life, going thru the motions of our day without the vision to appreciate what we had. Me writing research papers for money while sipping cappuccino on exotic beaches while my son frolicked in the sea. Him with time to do whatever he pleased. He chose nothing as his clear best option. 

I should remember that I whispered this same dark truth over the years to anyone who would listen. Even the year we started dating I felt this. I said this to my best friend. "He is not Indiana jones." I said. "I want Indiana jones." Wet lettuce was not enough for me, but I accepted it as all that was possible while saving my imagination for the rest of my life. I was afraid to be alone, left to wait. Stoned wet lettuce that was sweet to me beyond words was a fair replacement for loneliness. But just as time is generous, we grew together and he grew to be all of my life and love.

Let me remind myself of this past, let me forgive myself for smashing it all. For letting a strong Russian man befriend me, flirt with me relentlessly without even a kiss as condolence for need. Let me forgive myself for sneaking out at night and letting him buy me cake without asking, for liking it. For spending that long night over wine with the power out and candles blazing. Each of us pretending to care about our conversation as we danced with thick desire. Each daring the other to leave the restaurant and find a bed, until closing time arrived and it was clear that neither of us had the courage to betray our family or my best friend, his wife. Rinse and repeat for months, years even. Over and over again until this mad torture made me plunge wildly off a cliff and demand the man who fathered my child to leave our house. Little did I know our marriages were both already long expired, like milk that had soured and was only left in the refrigerator waiting for someone to throw out. Let me forgive myself for wanting that male strength, for wanting that unordered cake. Let me forgive myself for smashing my family and leaving myself alone. 

But let me also use this bitter memory to remind myself of what can happen when loneliness is left to comfort itself with what is near. 

Last night I left my son with my parents who had just arrived from Bangkok exhausted from having spent the previous night in the airport. I left all the best people who unconditionally care about me the most so that I could steal small bits of time with a man who sees me daily and lets me share his bed but won't admit publicly that we are anything more than good "mates".

 I arrived at his house for dinner and a movie not to find the man who occasionally shows up to meet my imagination but his polar opposite. He was not the dashing freelance journalist who looks like Lenny Kravitz if he cared more about academics. He was not the witty and sweet and easy to talk to Australian. He was instead clear as day, the recovering alcoholic, who was drinking coke having just smoked a cigarette. In his funnier moments flashing his newly found fat belly and in his darker moments finding things to poke at me about like he was using a sharp hot stick. I could search out no witty retort. I sat across from him receiving no pretense of affection and wondering why my  loneliness was trying to convince me he was something I needed. As I walked away with a hug that I alone gave, I pondered why I continued to torture myself in this way. What was I getting but the promise that he would have a good night and want me and hold me. I walked away from his company on stolen time even lonelier than before. I had smashed vast quantities of love given freely and this is what I stumbled into after years of wanting something more. I stay in constant anticipation that he might once reach out his hand to me. As I left he apologized for his mood. I forgave him, I wait with baited breath for the next moment that fills me up. I need this like I need water after a long dry night. I am thirsty. Why can't he give it to me?

Tomorrow is another day, but let me remember that this is real and true, don't let the rose colored glasses of time wipe this away. Birth is painful, my marriage was not all joy, this man with his curly hair and warmth has more to him that is dark than I want to admit. This is true, remember it. Don't keep walking forward blindly. Find light, seek it out, you just have to look for it. Remember the pain as it was. Real. 

Intimacy and ice cream both melt

I wake up in the middle of the night laying next to you and you are still awake. You are reading on your kindle and wearing your thick framed glasses. In that moment, you look like lenny kravitz if he were a professor of literature. 

We start to talk about intamacy and what it is for you. 

How your longest relationship of two years ended with you just disappearing for two weeks. This girl who you refuse to admit was quite possibly the love of your life left feeling like she was not enough for you. Left with empty space to fill. 

How did I end up in your bed again? It was late and raining and we forgot that we both arrived on your bike together. I said goodbye and walked out key in hand with no motorbike to ride. I suggested I could sleep next to you with all my clothes on as my personal barrier against lust. But then, you surprised me with the obvious. Just as I was asking if I was allowed to hit on your friends, you stuck your curly head up to my chest and I melted into you, enjoying the sweet comfort of much needed affection. I need this right now damn you. Fuck the future. I just need you to hold me in this moment.  You are my friend, let that be good enough. Just like scrambled eggs on sunday its not fancy and perfect but it will make me happy and full. 

You told me earlier that you had slept with someone. I held you with this knowledge. I saw that you unfriended her on Facebook. She looked like a rounded version of me, holding a glass of wine while lounging on pillows. Yes I digitally spied on you, how could I not? You declared we were over and then ran off without speaking to me for a week. 

I kept this image at bay and held you. Pushing back the flashes in my mind like a broken movie reel that only sometimes lets in a visible frame thru the light. I still wanted you even though you are tainted goods. You are a spoon on someone else's dinner plate. You are a cup with lipstick smears and a bit of orange juice left in the sink unwashed. I tried not to think about it. She was just one of many before, this was now. You are always just now for me.

In this version of now, you were suddenly so affectionate, holding me tight. Wanting me. We have gone thru this a few times, so I could allready predict the future. The first night we had sex twice and you held me as if you wanted me. Drinking me in. The second night, not at all, less snuggles. You texted me when I left after two strange days together to let me know that the retort to your landlord was "it was nothing serious" when she asked if we were "back on". You informed me unserimoniously that you would finish the movie we were watching together on your own. Not save the ending for another night in bed. 

Intimacy scares you. You build walls against it. You make rules. You routinely vote against it on the premise that it is dangerous. Like broken glass in a yard with barefeet. It could hurt someone.  It could hurt you. Danger Will

Robinson there are hearts involved. 

Intimacy is so much more than sex. Intimacy are those moments that we share late at night when neither of us can sleep and we talk while staring at each other across the pillow. Intimacy is what happens when two people share thoughts and feelings. Why are you tryinging to stop it, to block it? Why question it. It, like all things will pass. Just like the night, the morning always comes even if you can't sleep. We will both wake up from our heady ocsytocin laden cloud and declare that neither is enough for the other. In the mean time, pretend this thing we have is ice cream in the sun. lets eat it befor it melts.

You are broken my sweet friend. I forgive you for this defect. I imagine you as a baby crying it out in the other room as your parents weened you on the urge to need them. You sleeping in a bed on your own and not snuggled up next to your mothers breast. Enacting the modern myth that a flannel blanket is enough to replace human skin next to human skin. Is this what did it? What ended all possibility of enduring human connectedness for you? I don't know. But I no longer take your rejection personally. I no longer chase this want like I am chasing butterflies with a net. Escaping my grasp just when I almost catch it. I now simply enjoy those moments when you let down all guard. Those moments you let me in. Those moments when affection is what you give freely like peanuts at the zoo. Those moments I enjoy beyond words. Just moments. Let's eat them before they melt sweet friend. 

Judging judging judgers

Yesturday I was at a small social gathering. It was a coffee tasting party. There I met a skinny man from new jersy who was wearing a polo shirt and decidedly pompous as to his successful IT business. He chose to chat me up about my life in Bali while sipping coffee from an overly small cup. 

Now lets be clear from the start. I was judging him. I didn't really like him or enjoy his company, I was just talking to talk. I judged him for being conservative, for being from new jersey, a state that in adition to being the home of my exinlaws is also all that is wrong in America. I judged him for cutting his hair too short and for thinking that San diego was better than Spain or Bali simply because there were no holes in the sidewalk. I judged him straight off and kept judging him, but I also kept talking and imagined he thought I was witty, facinating and a cultural odity worthy of exploration. It was enough in that moment that he liked me. My ego swelled like a pregnant cat. He was genuinly enthrawled with my discussion of construction methods in Bali, mixing tales of bargaining with scrappy balinese men for gravel and finding distant tribes to built boat shaped rooves for my villa. He seemed facinated until I tried to explain how many meters were in an "are" of land and clearly got it all wrong. I was for way too many minutes struggling to decide if this arbitrary metric of land measurement amounted to one or ten meters squared. A difference that is so large as to make me look clownish. In that moment his opinion of me hit the floor and I was suddenly in one fell swoop an ignorant bastard who clearly was a fraud. In reality I am good at many things but numbers is not one of them. Should he judge me for this? Sure, and I will still judge him for being from new Jersey. 

A friend of mine who struggles to find guys she likes or who like her told me a story of meeting a charming entrepreneurial man on new years eve. She liked him untill he started to bitch about his day and then she was done with him. She left him standing there holding his drink. He was still smart, successful and hansome but now there was a flaw. 

Last weekend I did the hash with a friend. The hash is a run thru the rice fields following a paper trail. The man is a friend who I have slept with on and off. We still see each other and each time we meet, I see his mind turning to evaluate wheather he could like me enough to overcome my flaws. We are evaluating each other, still. Wheels turning, contemplating all the bits and pieces.

We were having a stunningly lovely afternoon full of amazing scenery and great conversation. We walked thru green and muddy fields past rivers and thru jungles. At somepoint in the conversation I used the word "drug" as a past tense for "drag". Suddenly I watched first hand as my intelectual stature in his eyes was reduced to hick. Bill clinton is fond of that usage I later messaged him, its a southern colloquialism. He is Australian what does he have to say about it.

Later that evening as we played poker with friends, me for the first time, I bet money to the end of the hand even though I had no worthy cards. I wanted to see what would happen. He frowned at my stupidity from across the table, clearly making small check marks in the against column on the imaginary chalkboard in front of us. I had my own list about him. He was drinking again, surely this was worse than bad grammar and terrible poker skills?

We have become a world of judgement. We banish people from our lives based on a single turn of phrase. We do it all day long, we do it without even thinking about it. If you are single at nearly 40 and have never had a relationship last very long it is because you seek perfection. There is no forgiveness for flaws. Like an episode of sienfeld everyone is either a close talker, a far talker, or a loud talker. No one can ever measure up. Seinfeld eventually got married. Did he get over it? 

Did he find someone whose flaws he was willing to overlook or did he just tire of caring. I don't know, but this year I will strive to judge people less and see them more as a complete package. Let them in as I see fit but accept them in the moment for all that they are. If you are from new jersey I will still talk to you

at least until you finish your small cup of coffee.  

This sucks and other explicatives

In the morning you excitedly texted me about how I could help you to build your future here. You joining me in the ranks of corporate refugees from civilization on this tropical Island. 

In the morning, things were good and fine and adequately imperfect. But in the evening you were suddenly fickle and I wasn't enough to butter your bread. As if the world is so overflowing with friendship that there is a surplus to be tossed out the car window without rolling it down all the way. 

Did you really want to start a bussiness with me this morning? The first hip place to drink and hangout in this small town. Was this my idea or yours? Did we really go looking for property, laughing the whole way? Exitedly examining abandoned buildings. What happened? I keep searching in my mind for the critical invisible threshold we stumbled across. Was the birthday cake we ate that evening so sweet that I couldn't measure up somehow or was it simply that I missed the moment to have reciprocated your flirtatious whipcream on my nose? 

I made the fatal girlfriend error of treating you like a friend. That's what we said we were, friends. I let you convince me that I should confide in you, as if we were two girls talking about boys, over kombucha at a cafe. Vomiting my bad day in your lap. I warned you that I shouldn't, that my "baby daddy" breaking into my house to steal our sons passport was one of many unsexy details of my life that in no way will illuminate me for the better. Only painting me as a critical character in an episode of jerry springer's talk show drama, girls in heals hurling chairs at each other in the background. 

Is this what did it, what tipped the scale, from good to bad? Maybe you were just never that into me. Never wanting to take me in the bathroom at a restaurant because the need was too great to let it wait. There was always something lurking in the background despite our endless hours of fun. Are you breaking up with me for sexier, younger girls with no children or ex-husbands? Girls who stand still looking pretty and laugh? Did you allready meet one? I don't know. 

As my friend I imagined you would listen to it all and still show up for coffee the next day. I guess as soon as you kissed me hard on the lips we were no longer friends, not really. I missed that distinction. That critical moment where from there on I should be coy, and charming and delete all the ugly bits. But I can't. Just like using whiteout with an old typewriter you can always see that there is something there, hidden beneath the illusion of paper. 

You suggested a walk, so thru the ricefields we went as my son tried hard not to go to sleep near by in my bed. Him wanting my company way more than you wanted mine in that moment. Me feeling guilty for selfishly wanting you, letting him go to sleep without mom snuggles. 

With iPhone flashlight aps protecting us from dark and snakes, we walked through the night sky looking at fireflies. You feigned interest when I described their romantic biological tale of sexy flashing. Instead, repeating like a mantra "we have really gone and done it, haven't we?" The question bringing the conversation back to the topic at hand. The insinuation that we liked each other too much. The lie to apease my heart from hurting, that this feeling of too much want was somehow mutual. Is that a white lie? Or a stray elephant? I think I have lost the metaphor for this type of benign betrayal that seemed harmless until minutes later when you turned on your own invented truth. 

We sat with our feet dangling in the ricefields. The crickets chirped. "I think I haven't wanted to end it because I didn't want to loose a friend." you said.

But really without using words you boldly wrote in the night sky that you don't like me enough. 

Fuck it, why not just be my friend. Is this such a terrible consolation prize? Right, I forgot, we can't. Somehow when we consumated what affection we had for each other, we opened something that can't be put back. Like an unruly jack- in-the - box whose lid refuses to close once he has popped out. Something that can't be put back.

The crickets kept chirping, but I could no longer look at you. 

The next day you couldn't talk to me either because you had gone to watch cricket by the beach. The odd drawn out sport that may or may not be named for the chirping animal that serenaded us as you broke up with me for the fourth time in as many months. 

I had thought we were just friends. But we were more. I will forgive us for not making it to friendship, for getting stuck in the "in-between" as you called it. Friendship is different than this. Friendship forgives all. It allows for bad hair days and unsexy moments of truth. Friendship is better than sex. Friendship is what I want more than sex. You however want it all and with the right person. I am not her. Good luck to you sweet man, may you find it.