“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.

 

 

A Month After

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I have a little journal where I scribble every day. I count the days that have passed since I last saw you. It has been 31 days now, and a little less since I last texted you.

The intention of walking away from you has been waxing and waning from the moment I met you, but even a month ago when I saw you before you traveled on your latest mission it was still a half formed thought. It did not take shape fully until your birthday in mid-February. It has been a fight since then. Each day I struggle with the urge to text you. Every morning I wake up to your memory and every night I sleep with emptiness of grieving over you.

Last night I could not sleep. I managed to nod off long after midnight. I still cry a lot. I have you inside me, beneath my ribs, in the tiny space that separates my lungs from my bones. You let me know you are there by the stab of pain that stops my breath in broad daylight. Like the stitch I get while running. I am forced to stop everything and tread slowly until the pain passes. You also have a habit of grabbing my throat, choking me into a tearful halt. I struggle to swallow the grief that comes with memory.

Yet, I do not have any shared memories with you. It is just that part of me that you took with you when you left. It is horrible to love someone this much. My whole existence has turned into a shadow. I watch and take in the shimmering wet pearls of newly wet grass after the rain, the birds chirping around me, the bright blue or dark metallic sky viewed through the lacy leaves of African trees. I observe pairs of geese waddling around a green pool or gliding onto its silent waters. I see all these things, yet the color has drained out of everything for me. I see beauty with my eyes but not with my heart. My heart is forever lost wandering around with you, wherever you are.

 

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.

To Be Disassembled

~ marobbie ~ 1 Comment

Is there a logic to sadness? How and why it gets hold of your throat and strangles you on a cool and grey morning or in the middle of a sunny afternoon? Is there a cure for missing someone in places that were never shared? How do you forget moments of intensity, that cut straight through the heart?

The rain will always remind me of you. Me and you sheltering under the umbrella of a picnic table, you averting your eyes and choking slightly as I silently wept. I still cry at the memory. We never said goodbye, not in words, but my tears have always known that I have to let you go. On that rainy day, I remember we shared little sweet tomatoes, and I promised to get you a package next week, when you returned from mission, sometime in the future. I never got to do it. Yesterday, I asked for two packages, and I am already choked up and saddened because I won’t be sharing them with you. I think I will have to let go of the sweet baby tomatoes too.

I have abandoned our usual lunchtime, went back to eating at noon. I eat chicken and meat again at lunch to spite your vegetarian gods. I never have coffee at the usual place, nor the usual time. I am going quickly through all the books you told me you liked, as if I am putting everything on a funeral pyre, to burn. I am incinerating pieces of my heart in the process.

If I had read the English Patient before I met you, I would have classified it as pretentious literary drivel. Who on earth would write a sentence like “penis like a sleeping seahorse” ?.  I still hate that sentence, but I mostly get the book. I relate to the raw pain of the broken characters that populated the story.  I also ask myself half a dozen times a day “How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled”.  In your absence you are no less present in my heart, like one of Kip’s sleeping bombs waiting to explode. I wish I had the talent to defuse your memory. So that I can stop the sudden explosion of sadness, the choking hold that grabs my throat at odd times. Most days I am fine, I can enjoy the sunshine, coffee, food, and my son’s company. But I do not have patience with new people. I prefer to be alone. At times I take a forest path, I sit at the water watching a pair of crowned crane flanked by a school of Ibis. I am outwardly calm and content but I never know when I will be hit by that overwhelming tide of sadness. Like today.

I let go completely on the hope that each new day will be a little easier. That my heart will heal eventually.  But the road is long, especially knowing what I found and what I was honor-bound to give up.  I was disassembled by loving you, and I fear that I will always be broken, and never feel whole again, without you.