Tag: Love

Untimely Spring

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

The madness of my upside down relationship with Aquarius II continues. The waves of euphoria and sadness crash upon my head with rhythmic regularity and the dullness of my existence seems to be punctuated by sunshine spells of our coffee meetings.

Sometimes the coffee break stretches into a two-hour lunch break and I lose sense of time. I laugh often as I get lost in the depth of his eyes. Most of the time there is joy, and a strong erotic undercurrent to our conversation that brings flutter to my stomach and renders my knees weak. He speaks of sand between his toes, of touching a cashmere sweater or a box of mosaic and I melt at the sensual descriptions. There is some banter about sex as well, in broad daylight on office cafeteria premises, and somehow it is sweet and exciting and never dirty.

When he is traveling alone we text often. We exchange endearments like old lovers or share sweet nothings, virtual kisses and hugs, like a pair of teenagers. Why did I fall so hard for this man? I am often asked by the rational part of my brain, the part of me that likes order and logic, and organizes everything in a sets of yes/no switches or 0 and 1 binary codes. This whole thing does not compute, I tell myself.  And to be honest, this time there was no choice at all in the fall. It just happened, because of chemistry, timing and fate, a deep connection that I feel, as if I am part of this man, and he part of me. Even though we might never even kiss. I did not want to fall for him, and perhaps that was the reason for my tears at the outset and the initial heartbroken reaction. The reason why I felt so bereft (one of his favourite words) at the thought of giving away my heart to him.

Last week I told him in text “I decided that you might as well keep it”,  “Keep what?” he asked. I replied: “The heart you have stolen, I think it might be safer with you than with anyone else”. And so it is, I do trust him with my heart, and I know that between us there are no lies or jealousy -at least from my part. When, or if, he stops caring for me I am sure I will know because for some reason I think I can read him clearly. I know things about him that he never told me directly just by watching him, listening to him and tuning in to him. Coffee with him has turned into my drug of choice, as it brings me to unprecedented high. If by chance our fingers touch, the warmth reaches to my very core, I somehow know that if I ever kiss him I will shatter and explode into thousands of flaming sparks.

It is a pity that I spent more than half my life spared this sweet torture of love, and now I am living this relationship in reverse, where the heartbreak came first and I am now enjoying the flush of first love. It is a pity that in those scant and far-between loves and near-loves I tended, I never felt the “rushing waves” of passion in my moments of ultimate closeness with the men I loved. I lived more than half my life thinking I am a bit on the frigid side. The physical closeness never figured as an important part of my life. With the exception perhaps my first love (which was as innocent as the one I am living right now) I never remembered kisses or sexual encounters with fondness or even missed them. I thought that sex was overrated. Now, in this celibate relationship I am rediscovering myself again as a woman, and I am melting at his mere words or in the blue flame of his eyes. Sometimes it makes me sad, an untimely spring so close to winter, and I keep picturing what the coming frost will do to this out of time eruption of youthful bloom. At other time I try to enjoy the energy, the sensation of being alive, loving and loved, along with the inconvenience of unfulfilled longings and desires. And there are also times when I laugh at the cosmic joke that presents me with the rush of innocent first-love, when I have already embraced middle-age and anticipated menopause.

Dear providence, thank you for the gift. Bittersweet as it is, I like it. I am learning to appreciate it. And if it was your idea of a joke, I can take a joke even if it was on me.

 

 

A Confession

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

Falling for Aquarius II is one of the best and worst things that happened to me this lifetime. It is the worst because it will take me a while to get over him, and other men will cease to exist for some time, who knows how long. It is the best because it was a surprise, a reaffirmation of feelings I thought I was no longer capable of carrying in my heart. I have known infatuation and perhaps even lust, but I have stopped believing in love decades ago. So I was quite taken by surprise by this blind and beautiful emotion. And although it is scary to fall like a ton of bricks for the man, it is also exciting. I feel young, light and desirable again, after I got used to considering myself middle-aged.

I have tried to deconstruct this, demystify it, and call it by other names. I am still too shy and too damaged to call it love. But it comes with all its properties. I am losing sleep, I forget to eat, and I worry endlessly about him. I miss him the moment we part and get butterflies in my stomach when we finally meet again. I can sit for hours in silence just lost in the depth of his eyes. I recognize how adolescent and immature this sounds, but I am past trying to explain or reason it by hormones or insanity. I now sit back and get high on this rediscovered drug. I think I never had enough of it in the past 30 years.

I still cry sometimes. The tears were in fact one of the earliest gifts of this strange connection. I was keenly aware of the built-in loss, and unable to comprehend why I should rediscover love here, where there is no hope. Wasn’t I better off in my blissful ignorance, frozen in my voluntary isolation? I was happy, I kept telling myself.

Help comes somehow when you reach out. A friend who offers wisdom and a kind word, who tells you are not going insane or weird, merely crazy about the one you love. Take it as a gift, she told me, don’t shut him out of your heart, or lose him because of your need to protect yourself. Her advice gave me comfort. Now I meditate, read, breathe and learn to live with the twin joys and sorrows of my devotion.  It is not for me to question anymore. I carry on, and take the gift.

I met Aquarius II two days after my birthday.  I would like to believe that God has perhaps given me what I needed, rather than what I wanted. Perhaps I just needed to see and know one decent human being, who does not lie to me, as other men did, who does not take advantage of my vulnerability and weakness, as other men did, and who loves me to the extent he can, without compromising principles or breaking trust. It has to be enough for me.  I would rather carry on having coffee with him than relive any of my previous relationships.

My Foolish Heart

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

For a woman who prizes her rationality and cool head I sure mess up big time when it comes to matters of the heart. I still stand by everything that I said before, but sometimes life tests you by throwing a badly curved ball.

I go through this foolishness once every few years, but this time my failure is more spectacular than anytime before. The man in question, thin, bald, older, and married, is breathtakingly different from me. He has more traits in common with my horrible Ex than I can count. If he had been better-looking or younger, I think I would have put up my defenses more quickly, but with a passing resemblance to my father, a shiny bald head and a funny self-deprecating style, contrasted sometimes with terrible arrogance, he stayed under the radar until it was too late.

It all started one day as I was quietly reading my book alone while having coffee. He came out with his lunch and asked to share my space (it happens often enough in my chosen lunch/coffee spot because of scarce table space). Instead of eating his lunch and minding his own business, this guy was nosy, asking questions and making conversation. So after a couple of fruitless attempts at getting back to my reading, I closed my book and we talked. He took my number and texted me right after. Next time we met again by chance and he came and talked to me. I think I was curious about him, he has an interesting line of work that brings him into troubled areas of the world including my home country.

Later he would text me and we would meet for lunch. Over the past few month we had many funny conversations with some flirty undertones, it was all fun and games. Until I discovered that I probably care about him more than I should. He also hinted that he “liked me too”.

I am fully aware of my foolishness. Yet, when I see him it is like somebody turned on the sunshine, and when he is not around, I sink into an abyss of despair and loneliness that I have not known in years. I cannot explain this in any rational way. For one, I have no illusions about the differences in our personalities and how this alone has already sentenced this connection to utter doom. I am not attracted to him physically, at least I do not think so, he is not attractive in that way. It is just an emotional mind-fuck whenever I am with him. If he holds my hand, I feel the urge to take him in my arms and breathe him in. I am sure I never felt this way before. I have never even kissed him except on the cheek but there have been two memorable incidents of closeness while I was in hospital recovering from a minor operation. I can perhaps put this effect down to drugs, because he was around me when I came out of full anesthesia.

He has been on vacation for a few weeks now and I am driven crazy by missing him, just wanting a text from him. I have blocked his number on Whatsapp and blocked him on messenger because I kept checking his log-ins. I am not proud of this behaviour but these few weeks have been real long. I don’t want to miss him, I want to forget about him. However, it is way too painful. I find myself feeling like crying in the middle of the day for no reason. Sad music makes me cry, thinking about him makes me cry.  At my age, this is really embarrassing.  I am not a social butterfly and will never be one, but I am very busy. I go jogging almost everyday, I work long hours, I have family responsibilities, and many interests. Yet when I finally put myself to bed exhausted at night, I fall into fitful sleep and wake up at odd hours to the pain in my foolish heart. It takes me ages to go back to sleep again, and the lack of sleep does not help my overall health. The only positive outcome of this is that I am now losing appetite and weight (maybe I am actually sick and not heart-sick).

I am not even sure how I will behave when he comes back. Will I have the strength to carry on our light-hearted banter, or will I choose to run away and avoid him until I stop missing him? I really have no answers. I know this will not go anywhere, I do not want this man on any level in my life. He already turned the once happy space I had into a feeling of sad emptiness. I want my independent, single and carefree life back. But I cannot help the way I feel. I can only control what I do about it. I will do nothing, for now, and see what happens.

Why Am I so Cynical about Love ?

~ marobbie ~ 2 Comments

I am not one to dwell too much on the past. At times I am grateful that I committed so much of my story to the blog. At other times I shy away of the visceral pain I experience when I read one vignette of the past. The pain I feel is not about lamenting lost love, it is about the amount of hurt and injustice I suffered at the hands of the disturbed person who used to be my husband. It is no wonder at all that I have sworn off men completely, apart from a brief relationship I had in New York.

When I met M. in New York, I was attracted to everything that contrasted him sharply with my ex. I fell hard for his dark, thin, and scruffy look. I was impressed by his poetic use of language,  more imagined in my head than real. He told me about his rural upbringing and his large family, his immigration to Canada, and his life as a perpetual student before starting work at the organization with me. Even given my few accomplishments in life, I was far more mature than he was. However, I wasn’t yet completely cured from my chronic low self-esteem. I still felt that this man was more accomplished and would never look at someone like me just because I was divorced and a couple of years older than he is.  For a time I oscillated between hope and despair, then finally convinced myself that this could work. A friend of mine even invited him along with me to dinner once, accepting us as a dating couple. For cultural reason we had to keep our involvement a secret at the workplace. But fortunately I did not have to keep this charade for a long time. It was exhausting for someone not used to telling stories, and lies.

Things quickly changed, when my beau became increasingly controlling. Once I arranged to meet with him but my former sister-in-law was in New York for a short visit and spent time with me, my son and my mom. I could not get out of this meeting soon enough for us to have time together in the afternoon, and he did not accept my apology for this delay. At another time I spent an hour or so chatting with friends in the cubicle next to his and did not come to see him at my usual time, and he was offended that I preferred others. The final straw however was when one evening he called me inquiring what I did with my afternoon. I was puzzled because I am usually very pressed for time between work, errands and caring for my son. I recalled going to the bank in the building next to our office, then picking up my son from day-care and going home. He insisted that I tell him again and again my exact movements. At the end it turned out that he saw me leaving the office to the bank that afternoon and later saw my only male friend, and the husband of my New York sister and colleague, heading in the same direction a few minutes later and he came up with his own sick version of how my afternoon proceeded having a tryst with my best friend’s husband.  This accusation was so shocking to me that I completely lost all respect and love for him, it was the equivalent of throwing an ice-bucket over my lovelorn self. I was completely cured out of this crush. Shortly after this I flew home to South Africa and on my return I was able to break off with him completely. It took some time of course, but I no longer went out to him or spent time at his home, and in the end he understood. I wanted us to stay colleagues and maybe friends but his passive aggressive reaction was to stop talking with me completely and surprisingly this did not hurt much. I have been single since.

I still experience the occasional crush, but if the person I fancied was involved or uninterested I quickly forget. I am not young anymore but I get hit on by younger African guys, and I let them down easy. An affair, a fling, or a purely physical relationship will not work for me, I know. I have learned to look at the people I fancy with a critical eye, and as my male friend from New York advised once that I should, I have become better at reading danger signs. I now try to trust my instinct more.

It is not an easy task, when the intuition is miles ahead of the intellect. I now accept that my reasoned assessment of people is flawed. Out of all the people I fell in love with, there is perhaps only one, my childhood sweetheart, that I consider still worthy of romantic love.  Thirty years after our brief romance, he is still a person I would like to talk to, and above all he is a good human being and a wonderful father. When I fell in love with him, my instinct recognized these qualities from the start. But instead of believing my intution I went with an analysis of all the artificial differences that separated us. Thirty years later, the imagined barriers are ironically all gone and we now have similar lives, albeit on different continents. He also has a partner who appreciates him, having gone through a divorce herself.  He became the person I envisioned by intuition, and a true father to her children before they had their own together, I have never lost respect and appreciation for him as a person. Even after my broken marriage led to adventure, brought me places and gave me true independence. Sometimes I wish I chose intuition over intellect.

My track record since that first innocent love has been dismal. I am hopelessly attracted to interesting types, with problems. Men who charm me with their adventure, intelligence, or mysterious pain. Then, they turn out to be show-offs, sociopaths, or irresponsible womanizers. I learned to be cynical about my feelings. I simply see the signs, tick them off, and wait until the penny drops. It usually happens within a few months. Now I only have lighthearted crushes that never go very far beyond flirting. I enjoy the sense of power this gives me, sometimes I even enjoy the lightness of step, butterflies in the stomach, along with the curiosity of getting to know someone, and the sleepless nights of thinking about them. Those feelings make me remember again the flush of first love. In the end, however, they all fizzle to nothingness when reality sets in. My hard-won cynicism about love is vindicated, when the man in question turns out to be a player or a cad. I am safely again agnostic in matters of love, as I am agnostic in faith.

The upside is that I do not do heartbreak anymore. I haven’t experienced this desolation since my first relationship some 20 years ago. The downside is that I became doubtful of my capability of romantic love.  That said, I am still human, and despite everything I said here, a small part of me hopes that my reason will fail one day, and that I will know love by intuition, and lose the cynicism.

A Yearning…

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I want to slip into a fold of time, and steal away a man from my past. I want to come back to this moment, to having him beside me, and the children we could have had. I want him to tell me that he lives through their smiles, and without them his life, is not a life that he wants. I want to raise our kids. I want to grow old with him, a man that I knew for more than half my life.

I want to be where desperate questions have become a certainty. Where I know that he is with me because we are, because we belong. Not because of fear, or lack of options.

I want to fast-forward the groping, the learning, the exploring, the desperate tug of war for boundaries. I want to know and be known to him like the palm of his open hand.

I want to be young again, and choose the right man, and still retain, the place where I now am.

Relationships: The View At Midlife

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

As my life starts to get into some semblance of orderliness and my son slowly outgrows his attachment to mommy, my mind starts to wander and think about relationships and whether I am ready for a new one in my life.

Since my divorce I have put myself completely out of that market-place, and Cape Town is notorious for being the wrong place to put yourself on the singles market if you were a straight woman. A straight man meanwhile will have lots on offer for his person, my ex can testify to this as he had started “seeing someone” before I even left. I remember asking him very offhand about another woman a week or so before I was pushed into leaving, and he went ballistic.  His rage was so animated and full of pointed fingers, it shocked me into noncommittal silence, and told me more than I really wanted to know.

My ex is perhaps the strongest factor putting me off a relationship, because in all honesty there nothing that I miss about that marriage. For me it was a short step away from a wasteland in every way, and every year that passes gives me more reasons to celebrate rather than regret my divorced status. Celibacy is fine once you get used to it, and Arab women are well-designed to cope with and accept frustration on that front, so I have no reason to complain like many of my female friends do when they spend a long period of drought in relationships and sex.

An Arabic saying goes: Solitude is better than the unworthy companion, and I spend my evenings living this wisdom. My days are filled with my son and life is good, so far. Still sometimes I wonder, should I ever venture into this territory of relationships, what is there for me to find? What do I have to offer? After all, I have half of my life behind me.

Sometimes I feel sad when I contemplate all the things I have missed. I have had a childhood love, a first love, and a committed love and they have all failed for me, and in this failure I have become more cautious, afraid and cynical. I believe that I will never have the same capacity for giving in a relationship as I had in the past, and I fear that I will never really know the next man in my life. After all, it took me nine years and a divorce to truly know my ex.

A friend of mine has been with the man who is now her husband almost forever. She knows this man’s feelings and quirks like she knows herself, it must be such a great comfort to sleep next to a man who you can trust, whose history you know, who was your best friend’s brother or just the guy next door whose mother is your mom’s friend. You might have gone to school with the first girl he dated, or you might have giggled and gossiped about him with your girlfriends long before he wriggled his way into your heart and your life. The circumstances of my life did not allow for such a relationship. I grew up away from my birth country and the summers were fertile times for fantasy and short infatuations but these do not survive over long distances and do not outlive the volatility of teenage feelings. Another impediment in my character is that I am not easily impressed by the guys I meet, and even in my younger years I gravitated towards older men rather than boys of my age.  In forty years of life, my heart fluttered for no more than half a dozen men. Some of my loves were platonic and childish, others were merely one-sided crushes whose only product was love-lorn sighs and a heightened sensitivity to love songs. Ironically, my lack of experience in relationship dynamics were often brought up by my ex as one of my key failures.

I don’t know how anyone can condemn such a thing as the lack of history, especially when it is such a transient state in anybody’s life. I have missed out on meeting the man whose history I would become, I was just a station in the life of my husband, he came to me from a history of another marriage and went on -I presume- to his future as a brooding single man, whose mysterious sadness and misfortune in marriage would intrigue and touch the hearts of many unsuspecting women as it did mine.

Please do not get me wrong, dear blog. I am not actively seeking to complicate my life with a relationship. At the moment I am content to put my head to the grindstone. I work to pay the bills and forge a decent future for my son. The joy I have in life almost exclusively revolves around him. Occasionally, however, I do catch the passing interest of a person, from the straight male variety, but they mostly spell TROUBLE in red capital letters for me. There is the balding middle-aged guy who greets me every morning as I make my daily trip to Robert’s school. He must be well off I tell myself because he has his breakfast every day at that fancy coffee shop cum deli in Green Point. Perhaps he does have a wife, or a couple of ex wives who are glad to be rid of him, who knows. There is the journalist and media specialist I met on one of my assignments, I went out with him for coffee once, and he makes no secret that he has a family somewhere out-of-town. I exchange friendly chats with him every once in a while but I do not see this going anywhere past amicable friendship. There is also the businessman I met on my flight to Geneva, he is getting a boat built here in Cape Town, and he will sail it one day towards Europe. He is smart and wealthy but he reminds me too much of my ex, someone who can tell a thousand and one stories about the world but is uncomfortable divulging information about his private life. This man also has an ex-wife, with grown children, and a two-year-old daughter by another woman. He did not say whether she was also an ex or a current partner; I am more than familiar with this type of omission.

These poor possibilities of relationship may seem sad to anyone else but I am a realist. Also since I was raised in the Arab misogynist society I am less likely to question the fairness of partnership equations when it comes to long-term relationships between men and women. In my culture as long as a man can financially provide and can function in the bedroom then he can marry any woman he sets his mind on; age and compatibility in minor things such as education are not a consideration.  Rich men in oil kingdoms are well-known for fathering dozens of kids by teenage wives well into their sixties and seventies. This was before the age of Viagra and co, and I am sure modern Arab men can continue to break records in the next few generations. My birth country is not one of those rich oil fiefdoms and people generally have a hard time providing for one family, and this is perhaps the only reason Syrian men stick to one wife, although many of them can and will be unfaithful at some stage.

I left my birth country at 28 to go and work in the United Arab Emirates. While I was at home I still got offers of marriage from reasonably aged and decently educated men. Things changed when I went to the playground of the wealthy and would-be wealthy. An octogenarian with whom I had a professional conversation while I was working as a secretary started hinting at marriage, and a colleague of my father’s whom I know to have a wife and family in rural Egypt also tried to make me consider relocating with him to the land of the Nile. Thinking back at how depressed these encounters made me, I feel lucky that I said yes to my ex husband. At least he was younger, better-looking and more educated and intelligent than my other suitors. So if this was my lot at 28/29 years, what can I expect as a single mother of 40? Not much.

I cannot rewrite my history or unlearn what I have learned over the past decade, so the next man in my life will have a woman who cannot love as freely as she did before, which is really a shame, and my previous experience makes me shy away from any man with a past, and the only solution I find is to look for a younger partner. I don’t know why this is such a bad idea, especially in my society. History tells us that Mohammad’s first wife was a woman with history and many previous husbands. She was rich and perhaps offered stability and comfort to the younger man. Early Arabs did not have qualms about a woman marrying a younger man, it is only modernity that made such a partnership unacceptable.

Of course this is only fantasy at this stage. I cannot think of one good reason to venture again into the uncertainty of partner search. We all know that the good ones are already raising their children with their blissfully happy wives. The good-looking widower who is a single father to a child? This is a figment of the imagination or something that we saw on Sleepless in Seattle and even then he would go for the single woman who never married.

Not even escape literature has a willing partner for the 40-something single mom. All heroines of romance novels seems to be blushing virgins (not the case for the males of course). That said, perhaps there is a niche market for me, writing trashy escape novels for desperate middle-aged females.. My first novel will feature a 40-something single mom and the 30-something single hunk who falls for her; dreams are free.

Inside Dialogue – Ways of a Strange World

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

There is a full moon outside, and it is the last full moon I will see from this window. I remember seeing the one just before Robert was born, and thinking that when the next one comes I will be holding a baby in my arms. I spoke up my thoughts and dreams at the time to Ron, and I thought he shared them.

Now there are no more future plans for us to share, no more dreams. The pain is intense, it tears at my gut, and along with it there is furious anger that wants to claw out at his eyes, and tear his heart out, like he did mine. Anger and pain alternate in waves, and my head throbs with their intensity. At the end of the day, I feel drained, yet sleep eludes me. It is hard to sleep next to a stranger, and harder still to lie next to a loved one who has become a stranger.

I lie awake and think, of words, intimacies, and laughs we shared, and I wonder how many of them were contrived. For two years I was very happy, but my castle was built on sand, and it crumbled as all sand castles do. I will need time, to sift through the rubble of this marriage. I was married to two different men, and someday I will know which of them was real. Tomorrow we put an end to this. I will try to get over my feelings of bitterness, anger and disappointment. I do not want to waste further energy on destructive emotions. I would rather put my energy to better use. The most profound hurt, though, is the fact that I still love Ron. I know it, because I am still capable of making excuses for him and his behaviour. I am being too kind on him, though. There are other people out there, who come from broken homes and abusive families; people who survive violent crime, wars and torture, and can still rise above their pain, and give back to humanity. In fact, strong people can move on beyond the hurt of their past. They make it good, by breaking the chain of hatred and refusing to pass it on. The weak are the ones that wallow in the misery of the past and spread it like a disease. At this juncture of my life, I don’t want to pass along the pain, indignation, hatred and disappointment onto others, especially not onto Robert; I will not criticize, vilify or degrade anyone. The passage of time will be the greatest test, and the future will tell on everyone, as it did before.

This month among my close friends there was the wedding of Jason and Fiona, and in a few days’ time, a little girl ‘Olivia’ will be born to Monique and Bart. My friend -and future house mate Jackie broke up with her boyfriend, and I am getting divorced. I remember the irony of Ron saying that 2008 will be great. “What was he thinking?” I ask myself, and it is a question that will keep coming up for some time, and in relation to much of his actions in the last two year. 2008 is a leap year, and in my culture leap years are billed as difficult and unlucky. I do not agree with this theory; I think that a leap year is a period of adjustment and purge. It clears the slate and heralds new beginnings, and things that are waiting to happen tend to occur. Ailing people die, and also ailing marriages; people tie the knot after long engagements and babies are born. We are just part of the dance of human relationships, on simple or leap years. Change is always part of life.

Round and Round

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think that I can ever write in this blog with my real name. People might think I am a lunatic or something. This project started with the intention of mapping my life near the Cape of Good hope, it turned out into a study in hopelessness. It has been almost a year since I wrote here, and ironically it is again the season of heartbreak in Cape Town ! I feel edgy and unhappy, and confused.
Since my doomed crush on Aquarius went nowhere, I got cold feet regarding my breakup with Husband. I pulled the plug on the divorce, and coughed up the lawyer bill.
In the divine wisdom of pop culture : “Love The One You’re With” (If you can’t be with the one you love).
So this was great, I swallowed a big wallop of my pride, and begged Husband to get back. He left for a few months home to Canada, then came back, called the moving van and shipped loads of stuff to Cape Town. The furniture has been in storage ever since, awaiting the time when it can be set up in a place we can call a home.
The past few months I was happy – I think – living on makeshift and 2nd hand furniture, and having very few possessions. We spent lots of time together or in the outdoors.
At the end of October we moved from the old flat, gave away the old rickety ‘furniture’ or whatever you might want to call it.

Yesterday it was the day, the day we were supposed to get our nice things, and put it in our home. Yes, the furniture arrived yesterday, and along with it came the foreboding. I do not know what is up with me. All of a sudden I see the expensive things, the box of old love letters, the diving equipment and the sport bags — his things, and again there is nothing of me here, just a few crates of books, and suitcase full of coloured threads that I wanted to knit one day into and afghan, and a black emotionally disturbed cat.
Years back, we bought some things together : A bed, a leather sofa ( his dream was always to have one) and a desk for me, but Husband has had almost everything else longer that I have been with him. He calls these nice pieces a legacy, and now they are incompatible with one of the few things that I do care about … Petey my cat.
The cat is sleeping in the closet now, he is disoriented and sad to lose his home, and I do not know why I relate to him so much. I will have to figure this one out.

Open Letter to Mr. Aquarius

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment
I don’t know why I am writing this. I feel drained and tired. My alarm clock startled me at 5:30 today interrupting yet another dream about you. I tried to banish the thoughts, turned on the radio, but there was Freshly Ground signing – What Would You Do. I just gave up and left the thoughts to ferment in my head. No use fighting what I can’t change. I don’t know why I keep torturing myself with this. I heard your message loud and clear, and I am not sure now whether I can still classify you as a friend. Maybe it is just as well this way. I do not trust irrational feelings either.When you came along in my life, I suddenly realized that the space beside me and inside my heart does not have my husband’s name on it anymore. So instead of living with an imbalance, I chose to clean-sweep my life. Start over, build something new from scratch. In the process I might have saved myself. I still have a few unrealized dreams, that I can work towards on my own.However, when you came into my life, you also exposed an elemental longing. An Astrologist would say that I am looking for my second half – my cosmic twin.
Trying to rationalize the irrational, I say to myself that I am more attached to the ideal than the person. You just had the questionable honour of being here at the wrong time.
For your character I painted: Quiet intelligence, latent but healthy sense of humor, sensitivity and probably most of all gentleness. Who knows maybe all that is in my imagination.
I never had a chance to know your vices, maybe they would have scared me away.

I suddenly remember now, that I know a person back home with exactly the same qualities I credit you for. He liked me very much, but I though he was boring.
I knew him as a child, knew his problems, his less than perfect family background, his insecurities, and his fears – there was no mystery there.
In the end another woman discovered him and he is living happily ever after. Happier than he would have ever been with me.

Moral of the story ? Maybe if I knew you better this irrationality will go away. Unfortunately I can’t speculate on this because it is not up to me.

In the meantime, I will try to stay away from the radio.

Cape Town Season of Heartbreak

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

Tomorrow, I will meet Ron, my ex, for the first time in over two months. I still cannot imagine myself rebuilding a life with him, but he seems to be dedicated to the idea. I thought I might as well give him the benefit of the doubt. I am interested to find out what my reaction to him will be after all this time.I am not the only one who is suffering relationship trouble these days. Three of my friends are going through breakup at the moment. According to my best friend, Jackie, who should be an authority on the subject, it is a seasonal thing in Cape Town. October and November, are apparently the Capetonian seasons for broken hearts. Summer makes people yearn for change I suppose. It is also the time when all the rich young guys from Johannesburg drive down here in their Lamborghinis and Ferraris.

One of the three breakups brought an interesting aspect back into my life. Mr. Aquarius is single again. I almost feel guilty that the thought cheers me up, but I tell myself that, of course I am relieved for his sake. His was one of those yo-yo relationships where the up and down come at regular intervals, which is nerve wracking and emotionally draining. I should know because I have been there. But I am not telling the full story.
The real story is that, shortly after arriving here, I developed a crush on Aquarius. For whatever reason, he became the new flush in my cheeks, and the spring in my step. I enjoyed every moment of it – the childish blushes, falling totally silent or resorting to diarrhea talk, whenever he was around. I was so obviously infatuated, yet I did not mind. When my friends bickered me about him I just laughed; I knew enough to appreciate how special these fleeting feelings were. Things were put into perspective shortly thereafter. He was not interested, he had a girlfriend, and what the hell was I thinking anyway. I kept him in my mind, in one of those small back corners, reserved for my rare brushes with madness.

Jackie and I met him today for breakfast. Before the food order arrived, Jackie excused herself for a minute to buy some medication, and that is when he brought up the subject of his breakup with the girlfriend. I babbled like an idiot for a few minutes, as I usually do when I am left alone with him, and mercifully Jackie arrived before too long. He must know the strange bend in my mind. If it bothers him, he will find a simple way of avoiding me. Eventually, I will grow up and act my age – like I always do. I have always been cynical and pragmatic even in matters of love. My moments of madness were very few and far between. Yet I come from a culture which recognises about 50 different degrees of love, and sometimes I think that the love I read about in those classics does exist. And If it does it isn’t it a waste to settle for the mediocre ?

Aquarius might not be the real thing, but maybe I can relive those feelings again, one day, with another man ? I doubt that it will be possible for me to feel them for Ron. I should be working right now, but I find my mind always going back to Mr. Aquarius. He has resurfaced from the dark recessess of mind, demanding my full attention. The timing is strange. Why should it happen now, when Ron is trying to make his way back into my life ? Is Aquarius my defense mechanism against the past ? It remains to be seen.