The Write Thing

I am reading Emi’s post on Don Giovanni and I just realized how much I’m missing an opera night. Here in Houston the season will open shortly, but for now opera is unfortunately a wish. However, I have already told her I’d like to see one of the highlights of this season Madama Butterfly with her. That is when she shared with me that her mother, in the final years of a long-lasting illness, had expressed a wish to see that Puccini classic.

So I am now set off to book our seats for one of the performances in October or November, as fall here once again signals the beginning of a working year. Before then there will be Buenos Aires, her own Portland earlier on and Seattle for my birthday. However, there is that specific image that I keep replaying on my mind, her hand on mine, enthralled in the story of Cio Cio San’s love belittled by Pinkerton’s «butterfly« desire. It is that vision alone that gives the wait its meaning. And I have waited for you. And I will wait for you as long as it takes you to trust the love I bring, knowing that you may be Pinkerton to my hope, but you may also stand up to it like the woman I think you are.

Regardless of outcomes, life, or potentially thwarted plans, Butterfly’s final scene will remain with me, like the first time I listened to the opera, which I have never had the opportunity of seeing live yet. The final aria, Con onor muore is Butterfly’s goodbye to her son as she puts an end to her life in search of the honor she failed to have when she was alive, according to her own traditions.

I, for all life is worth, will prefer to live with honor, with the truthfulness of a word that does not falter, a love that remains and gives, and the belief in the you I know, rather than the dim hope of your memory.

Hurricane Alex, humbly downgraded to Tropical Storm only minutes before it hit the Galveston shores, made it to Houston. It is the first major weather event in Hurricane Season to happen in June for over 45 years, which suggests that this season is going to be heavy on mother earth anger and last-minute evacuations. I will think about that later, once I need to get ready to load the car, grab the dog, close the house and leave for a more benign Austin or wherever north begins to look like an option of well-being.

Because of Alex, Houston was flooded today. It happened much in the same way as it does in Buenos Aires when it rains heavily. Here the rain amounted to 6 inches or more, and it went on for a full two days, more heavily today.

I went to work, but was wise enough to return home before the rush hour began. Part of that was my need to pick up the dog from his grooming appointment, which he hates. So at some point we found ourselves in the car talking to the woman I still love and eating a sandwich a few blocks away from the apartment. It was good to get home earlier, as recommendations on the TV by the time we arrived were to stay wherever you were and wait it out.

So Houston treated me to its bad weather reputation today and, interestingly, it was not much different from some things I have already seen: cars stuck with water almost reaching the roof, people wading through heavy rain oblivious to whatever lies underneath their knees, well-buried in the water.

By the way, a difference is indeed that the Mayor spoke on the radio and she was later on TV, but at no point was her administration questioned on account of a storm, which is a weather phenomenon and not a capricious human decision. I could not but feel this was a more pragmatic society than mine, which expects her to do her job without blaming her for absolutely everything, such as the weather or World War I.

I personally cannot defend any single Mayor of BA I have experienced in my several years of life there. They have all at some point or another failed me or others. However, I have always been kind of alone defending the point that, if it rains heavily and the city floods, it is not totally a person’s fault…it is the weather. There are no subsidies on offer here for those who got their cars stuck in the water, or whose shops got flooded. You knew that it would happen when a heavy storm came, so you are on your own if Houston’s climate does not suit you.

This is America, right or wrong. This time, scary as it may seem, I have the feeling it is right.

It has been ages since I was last able to sit down and write for me instead of my clients. There is such a dreadful gap between what I promised myself I would be doing systematically once I landed in Houston and what I actually have done that I feel like an addict with no chance of recovery. I have promised myself I would be writing more, but I ended up spending most of my evenings working or deciding on furniture purchases.

It is only for the past couple of days that I have owned a rather pricey but charming desk with a banker’s lamp that I always craved and never quite indulged in. In Woolfian terms, I have only now secured a “room of my own”. So I might as well use it…although I must confess the couch and small Ikea table I got for myself simultaneously in May are tempting enough to write on. Parts of this place that I now start to recognize as my home are coming to life, designed by me and my taste (or lack of). It is a major step towards the overcoming my own homelessness, the snail’s shell inside of which I am finally free at my pace and with my choice.

Yet all of this housing independence — minus ownership — is happening while someone is by my side, albeit still quite physically removed to make anything simple. Perhaps that is the most obvious and challenging side of my freedom, the planning on my own while I know that we both might plan otherwise one day. I know the time for togetherness will come, and it will be the way it is meant to be. For now, my own time is this, set on Houston rhythm, with large roaches that hang on trees (like they did in Buenos Aires), with hot mornings filled with sunlight entering the kitchen, with her sleepy voice at the other end of the line when we can speak, with me retreating into myself for now, going without much thinking of the future, as if I was taking this for granted. It is not, or it may not be, but she and the space she gives me makes it all feel like home.