Tag: Love

An Onscreen Love Story Gets Me

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I am spending my holiday with family in Germany. My father is retired and my mother is semi-retired as she only does a few hours a week, helping out a lady who cares for her severely disabled partner. I enjoy my parents’ company and therefore I readily join them around the television to watch the offerings on German television.

The programming seems to be specifically designed for retirees, with long-running German telenovelas, and dubbed American series from the 1980s and older. I usually get into the telenovelas quickly, occasionally asking about the fate of some characters that have disappeared since I last watched. And I always manage to catch episodes I have seen before when I watch old  American series such as The Twilight Zone. As for the repeated movies, my father said jokingly “We only watch the movies we know” and so it happened that I caught a glimpse of one of my favourite movies “Die Brücken am Fluß” which is the German title for Bridges of Madison County. I was not in the mood to weep so I did not watch it in its entirety. Unlike my father I am not a fan of watching a movie I have seen before, least of all the ones that open up the wounds in my heart.

My mother talked me, however, into watching the movie Love is All You Need. I watch very little television, and I probably see less than half a dozen movies per year. I acquiesced this time because my mom praised this film so much and said she had seen it twice already, once as recently as last week. Also, the male lead was played by Pierce Brosnan, a handsome actor I had a crush on back in the 1980s when he played the mysterious detective Remington Steele, and I followed almost every season of that series. And while Remington Steele appealed to the romantic minded teenager I was in the late 1980s, the older Brosnan, is definitely more attractive to the middle aged woman I turned into now, and the character he played even more so.

The movie is simply a love story in the stunning setting of an Italian villa surrounded by lemon orchards, beautiful blue skies, and clear turquoise waters. The female main character Ida is a Danish hairdresser who has just finished a course of chemotherapy and has lost her hair to the cancer treatment. To add to her woes, she walks in on her husband having sex with a younger co-worker. The couple were supposed to attend their daughter’s wedding in Italy, and Ida decides to travel there alone. She runs into different problems on her way there, and is further humiliated when her husband shows up with the young airhead he is having an affair with.

The wedding location is a villa that belongs to Philip, the father of the groom, who also owns the lemon orchards surrounding it. He is a widower with a sour disposition, and he has several run-ins with Ida, who is brilliantly portrayed by a Danish actress Trine Dyrholm. I have never seen her before, but she was utterly convincing as this optimistic, and gentle soul, whose indomitable spirit shines despite her suffering and perhaps as a result of it. Philip finds out about her illness and has seen the bald head she hid under her blonde wig, but he is attracted to her optimism and thirst for life. This was my undoing in this love story. A man who is attracted to the woman’s soul rather than her body. A man who reassures her that no matter what her prognosis is, whether they will be together for ten minutes, a few month or many years, what is truly important is that he has the pleasure of her company for the time they are both given.

I have felt like this, so I know. I was married for almost nine years, and I remember very little from the decade I lived beside my ex husband since we first met in 1998. The years of my marriage seem like a vast empty space punctuated by decisions on home locations, careers, business, and finances. Except for a few words uttered in anger, there is almost no trace of left of the intensity of feeling we shared, if we ever did. I was living in an emotional wasteland. By contrast, if I added up all the moments I spent with my beloved, and included even the occasions we exchanged texts, the temporal will add up to a few days. The physical will amount to me kissing him on the cheek, and him kissing me on the forehead. We joined hands a couple of times, and I think I put my lips or cheek to the surprisingly soft skin of his palm. Yet the emotional intensity of these few encounters was, to me at least, worth years of methodical and loveless spousal couplings. I remember nuances of speech, and whole conversations exchanged without words. I have lived a lifetime of feelings, in a few texts, in mundane details exchanged. When he once lent me his jumper I felt it as an embrace, and when our eyes met and held, I felt him holding my very soul.

Life is not about how many breaths you take, or how many years you live,  it is about the moments that take your breath away. I now treasure those moments, whether lived, felt or remembered. Some love stories capture such moments, and those are the ones that get to me. The movie ended with that love declaration. I am sure that everyone who has ever loved understands it. Whether for a moment, a month or a few years, true love deserves to be treasured. I wept at the end of that movie too.

How to Read a Love Story

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

In my quest to exorcise the thoughts of my beloved from my mind, I started some months ago to read all the books that he raved about. I thought that once I finished them all, I will finish with him too.

First I read the English Patient. Perhaps I was not in love with the imagery and language as he was. He said he usually read it slowly to savour it, and always went back a few pages to re-read them when he dipped back into it. However, I did relate to the brokenness of love and heartache. I fully understood it on an emotional level.

Next I read  “An Equal Music” by Vikram Seth. My beloved is a musician, or at least a former musician, and he shares some common traits with the protagonist of the book. It is true that they play different instruments, but they are both of working class background, and hail from the northern parts of England. The book character also finished his music studies at the Royal Academy of Music in my love’s hometown. Without even reading the story, I suspected that he also related to the character on an emotional level, in the tragic and besotted way he fell in love.

The book was never a bestseller. Perhaps it did not find a large audience because chamber music is a part of its plot. But strangely enough it was one of the books I owned. One that survived the cull of several moves, from Johannesburg to the Eastern Cape, to Cape Town to New York until it finally settled on a bookshelf in Nairobi. It was still on my To-Be-Read (TBR) list, when he mentioned it me, as one of his favourite books. I was amazed that we managed to agree on this obscure title too, one of many subtle connections we shared.  Please stop here if you intend to read the book because I will speak about it next, and might spoil the plot for you if you read any further.

In a nutshell it is a love story. One that does not have a happy ending. The protagonist, Michael Holme, meets the woman he loved and never managed to forget. The chance meeting happens ten years after they part ways and lose touch with each other. Next comes the resurrection of their love, which is a bittersweet interlude that threatens to unsettle both their lives. Julia is married, and is trying to conceal the fact she is going deaf, a terrible ordeal for a pianist who relies on her sense of hearing for enjoying music and presenting it to the world. Micheal himself is an accomplished violinist in a chamber music quartet, but I got the sense that he was still drifting aimlessly in his artist’s life, when he found Julia again. I accompanied him on his journey and understood its suffering and inevitable resolution.

Some books take you on a journey of knowledge and discovery, others on a roller-coaster ride of nonstop action, and the third type are the ones that invite you to accompany the characters on their emotional journey. This book is one of them. Since I discovered my own emotional intensity, I can appreciate and commiserate with the feelings of similarly broken characters. Michael and Julia are not perfect, each of them is flawed in his way, yet their responses are raw and real. Michael especially struggles with accepting Julia’s decision to stop seeing him, and this drives him into self-destruct mode, with a few tantrums thrown in for good measure. The book does not end in total disaster, there are small measures of joy, acceptance and redemption in Michael and Julia’s life. They survive, in their separate lives.

It was quite interesting that both love stories my Englishman recommended featured a forbidden love affairs that ended tragically or miserably. In both stories, the emotional bond survived separation or even death. At a previous point in my life I might have mocked either or both narratives. But today I know that those who wrote about love from first-hand experience never lied. The genuine descriptions of love whether in poems, songs or novels always speak to human feelings, and go on to become bestsellers. Love is essential to our lives. It is shared and expressed universally across cultural, spatial and temporal divides. At its best it is like an internal sun, that illuminates from within, lends glow to the eyes, and gives lightness to the steps. At its worst, It is a heavy piece of flint carried under the ribs, or a giant’s fist wrapped around the throat. Days, months or years might pass where the offending objects diminish until they are almost forgotten. Then, something shifts and the flinty stone would expand, hot and sharp to stab your insides and stop your breath. The fist would tighten its grip to choke the throat. Anybody who has ever grieved a lost love would relate to this pain, as I related to the heartache in the English Patient and An Equal Music, and to the emotional turmoil in half a dozen other love stories I read since I was similarly afflicted. The scars will always remain.

Such is the sentiment of a poem quoted in An Equal Music. You part from the one you love but they always leave their mark:

But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining –
They stood aloof, the scars remaining.
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.*

 

* Fare Thee Well by Lord Byron.

 

 

Trying to Heal My Heart

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

It is over a year now since I first met my beloved, and I now admit that I have initially underestimated the depth and resilience of my feelings.

The last post I wrote took a while to compose, I wanted to mention that on that day I met him again, but then the serious issue of the post took over, and I found it hard to bring its tone down by going back to the sore (and now sour) subject of my heartache.

Even though love itself lacks reason, there are certain qualities that first drew me to my beloved. The one I appreciate most is his empathy and his genuine desire to stand for what he feels is right and just, to champion the weak and marginalized and stand up for them. So it is natural that he shows up in an event against homophobia. I know from experience, that once I see him, whether face-to-face or in passing, the damage is usually already done, I know that I will be in for a day or so of sadness and despair, so I might as well speak to him and face the consequences. So I met him head-on, and gave him a little rainbow flag to stick in his shirt pocket. He kept looking at his phone and commenting that he was texting people and urging them to join the event.  He also wondered about his Christian colleagues and where was their love for humanity. These are some of the small reasons why I love this man.

I do not remember much of what I said to him in return, but all I know is that in a room full of people I forgot about everyone but him. I was just lost in his presence. I remember he asked about my brother. A few days ago, and because my beloved would appreciate the irony, I had texted him that my brother was asking me for advice on how to make sure a girl likes him. I have found out since that my brother did not win his girl. But lucky for him and his clueless heart, he was not the worse for it. In fact he was quite amazed at how quickly he bounced back from the rejection. He was already on the mend that same day when his love interest told him she was not ready for commitment, how I envy him. I think I complained to my beloved how difficult it was for me to forget him. And even though he made fun of me and told me to listen to my mother and that there were “so many other fish in the sea” I could just look into his eyes and forget what he said and believe instead what his eyes were telling me. I might be delusional or clueless about the language of the eyes, but he told me that he was “bereft” that he did not have any books to read. If there is a word in the English language that would always remind me of my beloved Englishman it is this one, and it always brings back the feelings of loss that I lived with since I knew him. I am bereft too, and disassembled by loving him.

But since this is my life, where I am bound by some old-fashioned principles, the reality has to hit me even while I am fighting the depth of my feelings. I was standing next to him when his phone signaled an incoming call with the call ID of his wife, and in an instant I was brought back to the impossibility of imposing my presence into this script. I would never judge any woman who chooses to take a married man as her lover, if it is clear to all that the intention is to keep this as an affair, a love match that never gets formally recognized. But my feelings for the man are neither trivial nor transitory and I cannot degrade them in an affair that will inevitably taint my love with guilty and self-loathing. On the other hand, I know that an affair is all I could ever have, so I am done for either way. There will never be a “Bridges of Madison County” role for me, and it is best to walk and really mean it.

I have never loved anyone like I love this man, and I know my feelings for him are real, because I wasn’t out fishing when his love found me. I was not looking for a relationship and I will not even start looking now. It was foolish of me to think that an account on Tinder or OkCupid will help me solve the problem of accidentally falling in love with him. Because nothing will be solved until I heal my foolish heart. My problem is that love found me, where I did not want to be found. And as much as I am grateful for the colours it added to my life, for the depth of feelings that I became capable of since our first encounter, for the rebirth of my awareness of my appeal and sexuality, and for the renewed attention to my health, appearance and figure, as much as I appreciate and enjoy all that, there are times when I feel that I have given too much of my body and soul in return for a flood of tears and a load of heartache.

Maybe the happiness I had before was just an illusion, a sense of self-sufficiency that was thinly veiled by contempt, apathy, and cynicism. But I was content in my ignorance, and cushioned by my triumph over my past. Now I know that love exists, and I can no longer scoff at it nor deny it. But I cannot find full gratitude for its presence in my life. Given a choice, I might have wanted to remain ignorant.

So on the 17th of May this year, I decided to retreat into my shell. I wanted to disappear completely, and change my routine so that our paths never cross. I vowed to  keep a low profile and not go again to any event where he is likely to be present. I intended to reclaim the empty and peaceful space within my heart, hold in it only those who are already there, those who love me or need me, namely my son, my family, and my closest friends. I wanted to read and write again and maybe go back to school.

I am carrying this through to the best of my ability. And I am sincere in my desire to break free from the Englishman’s spell. I never venture anymore to any place where I am likely to meet him. I never drink coffee on his side of the compound. I spend minimal time in common areas, and mostly take my lunch at the office or in some other place where I am sure to be alone. I keep to my practice of meditation, as I turn to my nerdy nature and ask for healing from within.

Some days are easier than others. It helps sometimes when I am busy with work and my other regular responsibilities as a bread-winner and single mom. At other times the load gets heavy, and busy becomes swamped, and I begin to drop one or another of the many balls that I am juggling. At these times I feel so lonely and need a kind word, I miss him then terribly, because his eyes spoke kindness to me and promised a shadow of understanding and compassion that I was desperate for. And every now and then all the various disappointments, all the heartaches big and small, fuse together into a single red-hot point, and combined they choose to hit me in the solar plexus knocking me off my feet. In the grip of my sorrow, I am still aware that the Englishman is my illness and my cure. Because it is his shoulder that I need to cry on, and his arm that I want to hold on to when I stumble.

I tell myself that leaving was my only option. I reason that every day will get easier than the one before. On most days I do well, I can remember him without sorrow, but then grief hits me in the gut, and I have a tearful day like today.

I have not lost hope. And even on my worst days I still work on healing my heart. But I am not interested in the other fish in the sea. Love found me while I was peacefully drinking coffee alone and reading Dostoevsky. If it wants to find me again then it will, no matter how well I hide. By then I hope to have healed my foolish heart. By then I will know if it is the right love for me, and I will know not to mess with it if it was likely to burn me. I will wait, I have the rest of my life.

 

 

 

The Original Love is Blind Quote..

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste—
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste.
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.

Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream.