Category: Relationships

The Resilience of Longing

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

The English language in its practical and innovative usage, and in its diverse richness of synonyms comes up short sometimes in expressing feelings. In my profession as an Arabic translator, dealing primarily with technical and scientific subjects I am often frustrated with the opposite problem in my native language.  Arabic often fails to deal with practicalities while it has oceans of words for feelings.  For those who are interested in the subject there are apparently 14 degrees of love in the Arabic language, some scholars have named even up to fifty. I often bemoan the shortcomings of my native language in my professional capacity, but when I am feeling nostalgic, blue, or when I am struck by deep longing for my lost love, I always listen to Arabic songs, or read love poems in Arabic.

I am sure the classical English poets have burnt through their papers with ardent poetry about love. There are many well repeated and quoted sonnets, describing in detail the intertwining feelings of love’s joy and pain. But the terminology of feelings comes sometimes lacking and borrows much from imagery or from other languages. The English, it seems, have no word for the deep longing that the Arabic expresses in those many synonyms for love, they even fail to express it as poetically as the Germans do in the expressive term “Sehnsucht”. The single word combines longing with obsession and addiction, and mirrors the torture of pining for someone who is not there, or no longer there.

My longing for the presence or even the sight of my beloved has been the hardest to overcome. The resilience of this longing continues to surprise me as I am never sure when or where it will spring from. It could be triggered by a word carelessly uttered, that reminds of something he often said. My son could show a sudden dislike of bananas and it will remind me that he hated them too. Or I would hear a song I have always loved and realize for the first time that its opening features the sound of the saxophone, his preferred instrument.  I never know whether the longing will be a passing thought, or a stab in the ribs. I never know whether it will bring on a smile or a deluge of tears. But it is still there, and its longevity after my last meeting with him, is always a source of wonder. I just allow myself to feel it and acknowledge it as part of love and loss.

 

Walking Away from Love

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to love, it is either given or returned. It is neither forced upon someone, nor taken. It can be perhaps learned, and practiced, and willed into existence like a forgotten habit. It can also wither and die without sustenance.

My love for Aquarius was a force of nature, a phenomenon all itself that I was not prepared for. Its singularity left me without options, I wanted either to embrace it or abandon it entirely to embrace instead the full grief of its loss.

While I gave generously and completely, my beloved was pleased to receive my adoration. He shone in its warmth but was not prepared to return affection in the same way.  I could not force him to acknowledge the depth of my love and reciprocate it. Even though I knew that I could have pressed my advantage, exploited his weakness, and the emotional need I felt he had for me. I did not want to be just a passing fancy, a fling, or a quick answer to an unfulfilled desire. I loved him too much to settle for this. I would have settled for the role of an occasional or temporary lover, I would have taken the love affair, with all its guilt and inevitable breakup. Love though would have needed to be an acknowledged part of it, not the close friendship he wanted it to pass for.

Perhaps I am paraphrasing Gibran when I say that love gives only itself and grows by the giving. And only a heart that completely gives itself, and opens itself to pain is capable of thriving in love, or at least truly appreciating its force. Many people approach life with a closed heart, whether in the interest of self preservation, or to protect the self or others from pain, and those will never uncover the mystery of true love.

I still grieve over my love, that was never meant to be. I still cry sometimes over what I could have had. But I am comforted with my conviction of freedom in love. I always accepted the choice of those who walked away from me, and exercised the choice to walk away myself when love ceased to be enough.

It is easier to remember the callous, self-absorbed, and constantly complaining Aquarius, when I do not have to gaze into his eyes. His eyes always told me their own story. Through them I looked into his gentle soul, and peeled away at the layers of pretense. My beloved’s true substance, I felt, hid under all these layers of opinionated adherence to certain form, style, physique and diet. If I do not see his eyes again, I can no longer interpret the subtext of his soul, or misinterpret it.

I am starting to rewrite his memory, it is my way of forgetting what I felt.  The English say, out of sight out of mind. In my Arab culture this saying goes, literally, “Far from the eye, is far from the heart”. This literal image fits my situation perfectly. His eyes were his way into my heart, and by walking away from them I am trying to set my heart free.

 

Still Missing You … Fifty Days On

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

You remain my beloved, even when you rejected the opportunity to become my lover.

Everything I know about love, are the feelings you have taught me. I will never reach out to claim you, steal you or borrow you, but I keep you within me, and missing you is my silent companion. I feel like I belong to you, and as time passes I wonder whether the thoughts of you will ever set me free.

Before I met you I neither knew nor touched the depth of my intensity. During my first year in Kenya, I met a young Kenyan man, who was attracted to me physically. He claimed that he felt my intensity, the way my eyes spoke, he called it. I almost laughed, and considered this some innovative pick-up line. Eventually, I let him down easy after two dates. He was married and much younger than me, and I did not want to complicate my life.  I always thought that men mistakenly felt this vibe from me because of physical attraction or plain lust. Then I met you, and your eyes were twin mirrors reflecting back the intensity of my own soul. If I had imagined this, I would have never stayed for that first coffee, and avoided meeting you again. But I got addicted to that connection, because I recognized you, beneath all your uppity exterior and snobbery. You are my emotional twin, a mirror to my soul.

One night last week the pain of missing you made itself felt again, and I lay awake torn apart by longing. The hours dragged past, as I tried to breathe slowly and deeply through the agony. Eventually sleep arrived, but not rest. The next day I caved in again and texted you. You were your usual nonchalant self, speaking how you are sick of having lunch alone, and you even mentioned your solo birthday lunch. You will never know how much it cost me to say no to meeting you on that day. I spent the lunch hour outside in the office garden, away from people. I put down a mat on the grass and lay face down in the afternoon sun, weeping silently into my folded arms.

You offered me coffee again, and said that you will be happy to see me “when you feel better”. What if I never feel better? I know that I cannot meet you anymore in the open, without letting my arms reach out to you, without hugging you so tight that I crack my ribs, or yours. How dare you try to make a friend out of me when you are my beloved? It is not fair. Love is still steering my course, I set it free, I breathe it in and out, and send it out to you on the wind, with every silent tear. I send it out to you at night when I put my head down to sleep and in the morning when I first open my eyes. I do not resist it, nor resent it, I just accept it along with its suffering.

My longing is deep and powerful, and I treat it like a wild and unpredictable animal. I let it fight and pull against its restraints, I let it act out its wild nature, in the hope that it will become tamer one day. Sometimes I wish I was dealing with something as natural, primitive and elemental as lust. Because physical desire is a wild animal that I can understand. It just needs to be fed and satisfied. My longing for you defies understanding, and it can neither be fed nor forgotten. I try to survive one day at a time as Zen teachings dictate. There is no past and no future, I just need to survive this moment, without you.

One day I will stop counting the days since I last had coffee with you, but today I still know, it has been fifty days.

 

 

 

 

The Memory of my Beloved

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

My son has had a belated fixation with the Titanic for some time. Because he was born a mere decade ago, he missed all the hype that ensued decades ago, with the exploration of its wreckage. He was also a bit young on the centennial of the disaster. I remember we went to the Titanic Exhibition held at the Cape Town Waterfront in 2015, and he was only mildly interested in it then. We both held reproduced tickets for actual passengers of the Titanic and looked them up in the passenger list, whether they survived or died on the day. We also tested the temperature of the water in which the last people on board plunged into after the ship foundered. It was a dramatic expo, but he spoke about it for a few days and then it was forgotten for a while.

Recently his interest was revived when he watched a few YouTube documentaries on the ship. He looked for the artifacts we got from the Titanic Exhibition and wanted to watch the Titanic movie. I was surprised by his stamina a few weeks ago when he stayed up for the full three hours of the film. Later he rattled off trivia and information about the ship, and its captain Smith who perished with it, and was supposed to retire after its maiden voyage. Of course I knew the movie very well from decades ago, and did not want to watch it again, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed seeing it with his younger eyes, and I was also struck by the emotional effect it had on me again.

Twenty years ago, I watched it on the big screen. I remember I visited a movie theatre in Dubai, or Sharjah, and took myself there alone. At the time I had my fresh heartbreak to process. My first boyfriend got married and I had to leave the scene because I could not stomach becoming the girlfriend on the side, or the other woman. It was no surprise that I was touched by the love story, and the idea of having a lasting connection with someone even after their death. I do not know whether I internalized the love story to my own situation but I know that even then it struck a deep chord in my sentimental and romantic nature, otherwise I wouldn’t have paid three times to see it in the theatres.

Titanic was a great movie for its time. My son recited to me many facts about how it was filmed and how long it took to produce the special effects at a time where computer graphics lacked their present sophistication. At it heart, however, it is a cheesy love story, that appeals to lonely and broken hearts. I could have watched it perhaps a year ago without shedding a single tear, but I sobbed when I watched it for the first time with my son and then cried a bit again when he repeated it this weekend. I wondered about the universal hold that love has on the heart, and how perhaps there are some types of connections between people that survive parting, distance and even death.

When I wrote about the Emotional Affair, I found many articles that treated it as a form of infidelity.  Most counseling sites argued for the preservation of the married relationship and advocated for actively trying to connect to the long-term partner, investing in this partner emotionally, rather than expending emotional energy onto the outside emotional connection. One article in particular thought that love, or at least the real and lasting form of it, is similar to stirring oatmeal; a comforting, necessary and simple activity that promises nourishment and has elements of meditation and requires some effort. It might not produce any form of excitement such as the flush and attraction of the affair. The article goes on to state that people who jump into the excitement of affairs are those who read books like The English Patient and Bridges of Madison County, where the great love makes a larger-than-life entry and then leaves in an emotional storm, never to be seen again. I blushed while reading this because both stories affected me deeply. The story of Jack and Rose is a cheesier version of the same theme, a great love that comes and goes but leaves indelible marks on the life of the person who had experienced it.

So who is right? Does true love really leave an indelible memory in the heart, or do we idolize only the loved ones we have lost? I am undecided on this matter. I do believe, however, that time is the answer. The men I loved and lost previously did not leave their marks in my memory. I do not take refuge in nostalgia for the memory of my first boyfriend. I do not lovingly recall us lying in each other’s arms and crying over the sad words of an Arabic love song. I do not remember the look in his eyes, nor the thrill that it once gave me. When love is mentioned there is only one person that comes to my mind. The heartache is still fresh, I know, and I hope that it will fade with time, but I fear that I will remember him for a lot longer than the heartache. For me, he might be the one love that I will remember and long for into old age.

Time might heal the pain of true love but the memory will stay. There are millions of love songs, and love poems that speak about love being deep and endless, they cannot all be totally wrong.

 

“And think not you can direct the course of love…”

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

When I was young, it was easier for me to fall in and out of love. I also found it easier to recover. Even when the first man in my life decided to get married to his fiancee and I carried the guilt of our relationship with me out of my home country, I was sure that I will love again. I cried endlessly, and I disintegrated into a thousand pieces every time he called, but all this never obliterated the certainty that somewhere there will be love for me again.  I was only 27 and my whole life was ahead of me, with endless possibilities. It also helped that I had a future career to look forward to, and no burdens. My only responsibility was to guard my future and mend my heart.

I am finding it much more difficult to recover from the love I found unexpectedly, later in my life. Now instead of looking forward I can only look back to realize with dismay that all the things I felt before were small tremors of the heart. They do not compare to this major earthquake. I had long given up on the notion of romantic love, content instead with the love for humanity in general, the love of my child, my family and my friends, until I was struck with this lightning bolt. I was a love agnostic, an atheist even, and then god chose to speak to me. I still try to reason that this was only an illusion, something that my wishful thinking has conjured up, but my heart knows it was real.

As its newly converted disciple, love opened me up to joy and pain, in ways I never imagined. It was as if I lost a layer of skin, and started to feel everything more keenly.  Pleasure, pain and loss magnified to a point they became unbearable. I now see beauty more clearly, and feel deeper empathy.  When I cry now, I cry not only for myself but for everyone who has ever loved and lost. I even touch the pain of the boy who once read me a poem he wrote to my beautiful eyes, about how much he loved me, and whom I rejected and laughed off as silly. I now know how he felt all those years ago.

Sometimes I miss my ignorance, and my dismissal of love as a passing ailment, no more destructive than a hailstorm in the middle of spring. I was content in rejecting it as overrated and unnecessary, before I figured out that I have been passed a sugar pill instead of the genuine drug. Now, instead of my cynical dismissal, I am left with despair of ever finding it again.

Now I think that love is exceptionally rare. You have to quit looking for it to find it. It has to find you, and when it does all you can do is just surrender to it. Whether you get over it or not is a matter of destiny.

Khalil Gibran — ‘And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.’

 

 

Foolish Little Thing Called Love

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

When I wrote the post about how cynical I was about love, I think I was already half in love with Aquarius II, and in denial about it.  Since then I have experienced all the symptoms that I once thought came about only in romantic novels and women’s fiction. Yes, I did have butterflies in the stomach and stars in my eyes whenever I met him. I felt euphoric and fully content just looking into his eyes. I became bereft whenever he left for a longer trip or mission, and I lost all of my excess weight because of heartache over him.

I wish I could say that my intention of not seeing him has alleviated some of these ailment, but no, it did not.  At least on two occasions, I felt my heart drop into my stomach and start racing when I thought I saw him during the first few weeks of avoiding him.  Even now, I am not sure what my reaction will be if we ever meet by chance.  Yesterday I was very sad after his impersonal text, and today I saw him from afar, walking past the window of my office. He was his usual tall thin self, texting as he walked down the path. I have no idea why he thought he needed to be on a diet. I watched him, taking in his usual pastel-colored shirt, his tailored pants and brown expensive shoes. He was too far away and I could not discern the expression on his face, but seeing him from a distance made me happy. He was there, we were within each others line of sight for a few seconds, and then he disappeared around the corner.

How foolish can you be when an impersonal text from your love makes you sad, and seeing him from afar makes you happy? And I did not even mention watching out for his “online” appearance on messenger apps, letting your fingers glide lightly to caress his screen name, or profile picture. Crazy I know. But I do it like a bleeding teenager.

I am still trying to get over him, but there is no treatment regime for the foolishness of love. There is no rehab for its addiction. There is no therapy to replace the sweetness of its drug, and there are no medicines to alleviate its pain.

I still miss him, and it is now day 36 since we last met.

 

 

I Hope You Are Ok

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I got a text from you today. You just said: I hope you are ok. I replied that it was not the common cold but I was getting better, although I still missed you. I asked how you were. Good you said, you just wanted to say hi, and you were trying a no-carb diet. I said you must be suicidal since you did not eat meat either and added that I  hoped you were not sick. Not sick, you replied.  I told you what I was up to, gym instead of lunch, a lot of reading, and I suggested you read the Lucia Berlin book, adding that it was just powerful stuff and not literary snobbery like the English Patient (I cannot resist those barbs, where you are concerned). You thanked me since you always needed something to read. I ended by saying that I appreciated you checking in and that I always thought about you, as I was sure you knew.

Apart from opening old wounds and resetting the counter I keep of days passed without contacting you, those texts are bittersweet. They tell me what I already know, that you care, and that you probably miss me too, even though you do not say it.

I will cry again today with the pain of regret, the knife that twists in my heart with each “what if”. Even through this little text, I feel you close to me. Like the day you lent me your jumper, it felt like a physical touch, a tentative embrace.

In our short acquaintance, I felt as if I held your heart between the palms of my hands. It trembled against my fingers like a frightened bird, and as much as I wanted to hold it in warmth and comfort, it had to be set free. My heart breaks daily because I know that behind all your snobbery and pretense there is a soul, a twin to mine, a soul I have glimpsed through your eyes and recognized. Where do I go now after I recognized you as my own heart?

I did appreciate you contacting me.  But it still hurts, and I forgot to ask you, since you were an expert before me in matters of heartache and heartbreak, will it ever stop hurting?

When you texted today, I told you to quit worrying and that it was all part of life, but the simple truth is this: No I am not ok.

 

The Language of Heartbreak

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I have been taking refuge in reading and writing. Sometimes I come to type my thoughts here. I also keep a daily counter of the days spent without my love addiction. The need and the craving are all still there, but at least I am keeping to my intention, no seeing him, if I can help it.

The trouble comes when I remember him. An image passes before my mind’s eye, or I cave in and let my eyes roam over his public Facebook photos. I read or hear something and it reminds me of something he said. I see his name somewhere, a curse because his first name is quite a common one, and I feel the stab between my ribs or the fingers of pain and regret squeezing my throat. It happens daily and I just need to breathe and let it pass, just like withdrawal symptoms of drugs or alcohol. It is quite painful to let go, and it will take a long time. For a recovering alcoholic even a single drink risks a return to addiction, so I might also be in for a lifelong battle.

My reading journeys are taking me into other people’s stories and lives, some real and some imagined. I have discovered a new empathy for the dysfunctional and heartbroken. Now it seems that there is a new language I understand, that of heartbreak, and I find myself quite touched by the stories of love and loss, especially love of the variety I found with Aquarius II. I am painfully aware of what I have lost, and I can empathize and recognize when one of my fictional characters is about to experience the same loss, whether they themselves realize it or not.

I have spoken before about my reaction to The English Patient. Aquarius II told me he loved the book and read it more than once. I loved it too, and this is perhaps a testimony to our twin emotional disposition. But even before I experienced my wild attachment to Aquarius, part of me hungered for a deep love connection. I was still married to my emotionally distant husband when I saw the movie Bridges of Madison County for the first time. I watched it on late night television, while my husband slept in our room. I should add here that this did not happen often, because he rarely allowed any light, television or any other noise or activity after his chosen time for lights out. Fortunately,  the movie was gentle and quiet, so I was able to finish it without disturbing the sleeping husband. When it ended, I quietly wept, knowing that I also craved these feelings, a love that transcends its temporal limitations and lives in the heart long after the lovers part. I might have eventually got my wish. Pity though that my love affair was completely devoid of love scenes.

The latest book that hooked me with its raw emotion is a collection of short stories entitled A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin. I usually find story collections hard to get into but these stories read like scattered experiences from the author’s life. After reading some, one begins to recognize the author in her many guises, her dysfunctional family, her lovers, and her wild and free life. Her creativity is electric, fueled by a free spirit and substance abuse. I admired her courage in raising four sons, while working odd jobs (including as a cleaning woman, ER nurse, receptionist, and teacher) and battling alcoholism. I was also emotionally bowled over by her experience of love. The fleeting love affairs she had with a Mexican diving instructor, the love of an older student in her university days, or the affair she had with a much younger man. All this, in addition to the men she married. Those lovers were not perfect, there were one or two losers and at least one addict, and all were broken and imperfect. Nevertheless the love itself is perfect in its time and place, in the way two people connect and become more than the sum of their individual selves. I am slightly envious of her emotional experience, and her abiding faith in the power of love. She describes the singular power of love even in the face of death. Her sister is experiencing and enjoying love even while having chemotherapy sessions for her terminal cancer. In almost all her stories, however, the hopefulness of love is intertwined with desperation. Lovers sometimes abuse, betray or abandon. And love does not survive poverty and abuse. The stories are sometimes strange and funny but they mostly left their emotional imprint. They spoke to me in the language of heartbreak.

This Online Dating Thing

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

A month or so before I decided to stop my emotional affair, I downloaded and paid a subscription for some online dating platforms. It was a distraction I thought. Now, whenever I am terribly heart-sore and missing him I get to swipe NO on the good, the bad, the ugly, the sexually deprived, the searcher for sugar mommy, the wanna-be mysterious (no photo no details only initials), and the gross (photo of a badly beaten up face – I have seen this yes). I have also learned to swipe left on people with selfies of bare torsos, lying down in bed, and selfies in mirrors or with huge glasses. In addition to all these, I systematically reject anyone wearing a pilot uniform. I reason that these are usually looking for a stop-over hookup. I am not into that sort of thing, although sometimes I wish I were. It is as uncomplicated as it gets. You sleep with the pilot, who is probably married and has done this sort of thing countless times, he flies away, you never see him again. Good riddance.

Occasionally I swipe right on somebody who looks half-decent or somebody who is mysterious but interesting. But even then there are the people who put you off from the word go. Someone once started his messages to me “Hi Beb”. I never responded. See I have this thing about good grammar and spelling.  Moreover, sweet-talk and flattery puts me off instantly.  Another guy started saying: You are so beautiful. He never heard from me either. I know I am above average in looks but I dislike it when men lay it on too thick.  I still entertain the distant hope that someone would be more interested in my mind than in my body. I found this in my hopeless love connection, and it moved me deeply. I now know that a profound emotional and intellectual connection is the only type of love that will work for me.

Most guys on those dating platforms are liars. Once I engage them in lengthy conversations they sometimes get caught in their web of lies and stop talking to me, also good riddance. Other worrisome types are those who come across as too needy, excessively romantic, and want to find a soul-mate immediately. These people bore me quickly and I find their sentiments insincere at worst or irrational at best. If you are a hopelessly romantic type, please consider that it took me 30 years of my adult life to be truly moved by love, and you think that you have found it after chatting with me for two minutes? There is no good way to tell you this: You are delusional, and we have very little in common.

I have been online for almost two month now. I met two people who could become good friends for a coffee and chat. I will never find love with them. Not the love that will make me forget my heartache. When I look at these people I chat with, a stifling sense of futility comes over me. I have chatted up this anonymous person whose handle is Aquarius and whom I found a bit interesting and witty. We banter back and forth, and I do not know who he is. He wrote for a living he said. And I caught myself wishing that he was my Aquarius trying to reach out to me again anonymously after I turned away from him publicly. I examine this secret (and futile) hope in my heart, and it saddens me. I think the online dating thing is part of my sickness, and definitely not the cure.

 

 

The Emotional Affair : It IS a thing

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

Grief has been the hardest things to wrestle with in my strange emotional connection. I do not think I have experienced so much heartache in decades. Not even my divorce was so full of sorrow and helplessness. I know that I was gutted when my first boyfriend decided to marry his childhood sweetheart and long-time fiancee. But even then I found the strength to quit my home country and turn my attention to other projects.

My past relationships have played themselves out somehow, and have been completed so I managed eventually to deal with my grief. I now realize that I probably fortified myself with the shields of anger (in the case of my divorce) and guilt (in the case of my first boyfriend). Strangely those emotions were helpful in the short-term outcome for my sadness. Some counterpoint to concentrate upon other than the sadness and sorrow. Here on the other hand, the overwhelming emotion is plain unfiltered grief.

This weekend was particularly hard on me as I pondered again what I largely consider an unresolved relationship. It was never a love-and-leave situation, not in the traditional sense. We shared coffee and an intense emotional connection, that was it.  I could not understand why giving this up was harder and more excruciatingly painful to me than the breakdown of my marriage or leaving the first man I loved. I did not understand my endless weeping over a love that lived only in my mind. Fortunately there are writings about this online and elsewhere, and it appears that physical relationships are sometimes easier to process and get over than pure emotional ones. You see an emotional affair is a thing, and it takes courage and a lot of pain to get over it. The emotional affair has all the hallmarks of addiction. Its unresolved physical aspect makes it live on in the heart and mind, fed by imagination and fantasy, and the constant sad refrain of “What if?”. It is also a form of betrayal to the spouse. As I read on a website: What would hurt a spouse more, what their cheating partner does with his genitals or what he does with his heart?

Although I was the unattached party, I felt instinctively from the start that there was something not quite right in the connection. He,  who should be the older and the wiser, was the first to venture into the murky water of emotions. He flirted shamelessly, made sexual innuendos, and even once or twice made subtle hints to emotional estrangement from his wife. It is true that he always spoke in praise of her endless understanding and patience, yet there were those subtle references to incompatibility, lack of conversation and his long ventures on activities that exclude her. When quizzed about it one day he denied making such hints, saying he is “usually very careful”. This leads me to suspect that he has tread these murky waters of emotional affairs before. Yes, I have seen all these danger signs yet my connection to him was so strong and intoxicating that I ignored them and went along. I never started our endless text conversations, and I would have never ventured into this territory if he did not lead me there. My aversion to this did not come from prior knowledge it was just sound instinct.

The sad thing about these connections is that once the line of friendship is crossed, there is no going back to it. I tried once to reset the content of our conversation. I told him that he should always imagine his wife at the table with us, but we kept slipping back to the forbidden territory. In the end I could not take it. The meetings kept building me up emotionally to anticipate a conclusion that never came, like a piece of music that keeps gathering up in sound while the ear eagerly awaits its final movement, then abruptly ends leaving the audience in confusion.  Finally, I decided to bring my own conclusion to the piece. I have always known that this will end some day. The only question was not if, but when, and whether we end it before or after physical consummation.

I must admit here that I wanted to have him to myself for once. To steal or borrow him briefly from his life as I always told him. I was only stopped by the impracticality and difficulty of the task. Because for me, it has to be planned, somewhere out of town, not my place, nor his. Not in car, or in any place that will make the experience feel rushed and cheap. Ironically, my conservative nature came to my rescue and I made the sin so difficult to accomplish that it became easier to abandon the thought altogether. Can you imagine me waiting with baited breath for all the time it will take for all these conditions to be fulfilled? I think hell would freeze over first.

The easier way turned out to be like this:  Send a short message on his birthday, one that wished him light in his life and lightness on his shoulder in the next decades (it was a decade birthday for him). The same day I claimed that I already had lunch when he suggested we meet for lunch. He then sent me a message that he was off for  a few days. See you next week he said. I responded: OK. enjoy. That was it. I thought that I would need to reject more lunch invitations but I think he understood the inevitability of my position. It has been a few weeks since that day, and I caved in only once. I texted him a book recommendation over one weekend. He knew that I was saddened by our affair and asked how I was. I responded that I am getting there although still sad. I have fought the urge to text him a hundred times since that day and I am sure I will continue to do so. I do not think he will text me again.

I have no doubt that what I felt for the man was real. I loved him truly and completely.  For him, maybe it was an emotional affair, or a planned physical affair that went wrong. I do believe that there were genuine feelings from his side too. He was however wrong by assuming that the affair did not involve cheating, because he (we?) did cheat. I never met his wife and now I am glad I did not. I feel a bit guilty towards her even now, and if we had ever met I have a feeling that she would have known how I felt about her husband.

I am hoping that this will be my final reckoning with this unplanned and unfulfilled love affair. I forgive the man, even though he was unfair to me by pulling me into his orbit, with words he does not mean. And I forgive him for looking at me with eyes that meant what he did not say. I forgive myself for falling for him and responding to his intensity with an intensity of my own. I will work through completing my grief process at losing him and hopefully one day I will meet him quite by chance and feel nothing. For now I will continue to avoid him. Fortunately we do not move in the same constellations, and we do not work in the same place. It will always remain a mystery to me why I fell for him, it was perhaps my perception, and my intuition of his feelings. He taught me how intense love could be. One day I will be able to take a chance on love again.

My failure this time was not my misinterpretation of the danger signs. I saw them very clearly earlier on. I just misjudged my capacity for love, and overestimated my immunity to its pain.