The Write Thing

Love is a complex feeling.  The intoxicating hyperactivity of its arrival is normally followed by the person’s natural magnet attraction to the loved one and her otherness, triggering the creation of an exclusive vacuum in which the two newly-connected beings finally generate a relationship.  At the time of conception, relationships go without much thinking…which is fine and adds spice to the whole game of lovemaking in and out of bed.  When relationships evolve, the thinking process begins and the lovers’ minds attempt complete the ellipsis of their significant other.  The goal is to fill in the gaps in our lover’s past and the windows of her present that we do not see, because life gets in the way through work or other obligations.  Will she be thinking of me right this moment?  What will she be doing?  Perhaps preparing for work?  She’s out with friends…will she lose track of time and delay her return, lost in conversation?

The inevitable comparison between the things we give her (or we think we give her) and the things others could give her can be heaven or hell.  If you are in the evolved species of people who are not jealous, you know that life is a bitch and then you die, so you can’t be bothered worrying too much about what is going on in between your incomplete present happiness and your future death .  But if you are the jealous type, the comparison between yourself and the rest of the world surrounding your object of desire and love becomes excruciating, and you feel that you are going downhill into the abyss of psychotic despair.  A typical reaction is to seek control, of yourself and of the other and her otherness.  What friends does she have?  What do friends do for her? How close are they to her that they might be or want to be more than friends with her?  Everything you don’t know about her eats out your flesh like a bad case of scabies.

In a long distance relationship, jealously has to be tamed unless you want to go mad with rage and anger at what may be happening, is happening or has already happened.  You cannot control anything, so you have to be wise and find the right dose of doubt or certainty about the other half of yourself doing things that you may or may never find out about.  Too much certainty makes the relationship a dull, predictable partnership.  Too much uncertainty makes the relationship hell.  Yes, you have to strike a balance.  Of course she might not be picking up the phone because she’s too busy exploring someone else’s mouth.  But she could also be as busy as you are at work now, or as you often are with your kids or with your former partner in Turkey or elsewhere.  We all have a past and a present that goes beyond the object of our love…and that is simply all right.

Jealousy makes us unreasonable, and it comes to haunt us when our insecurity is such that reality becomes anything but.  In a way, jealousy is a denial of the other’s love and a mechanism of self-defense.  However, it is completely our problem because we think we do not deserve what we have, instead of accepting that we have it.  Jealousy breaks whatever vacuum your magnet attraction to the other created.  It calls into question what is already unquestionable and unmeasurable…it is per se a futile task.  There is no measure for love and no way of knowing who loves more and who loves less in any relationship.  That is a primary rule in the game of love, but people forget because — silly them — they need certainty and reassurance that things will unfold according to a specific plan.  Yes, of course you can take someone, marry them, have kids with them and tick all the cases on your Miss Goody Two Shoes’ list.  But you can also fail, because anybody can plan, but not everybody can love.

Saturday March 10.  It has only been 11 days since a string of signatures on cluttered pieces of papers signaled my entrance into the world of home ownership.  This is the US and it is where I could do it the way it should be: no need for anyone to die so that you can inherit the start up for a bigger loan or the cash to buy it upfront, the way you would have to if you were living in my native Argentina.  Here, there is only the need to prove you have a steady job and your employer kind of likes you, that you have a credit score that is decent or can be marginally improved, and that you are not fooling around with the idea of becoming indebted above your means.

Yes, I am finally a home owner.  It cost me years of suffering, tears and the sense that family is better left miles away from me than nearby.  It took the courage to look ahead and dream about it little by little, when others accessed their dream and inspired me.  It took growing up on my part, knowing that now I will have to put more of my money to a house rather than to average savings.  I do not complain about it.  I am happy that I can risk and dare to undertake the responsibility of monthly payments that absorb a lot more cash than I would have liked to give, and that the decision means I will have to sacrifice here and there in order to meet my obligations and not lose the dream.

No matter what happens, whether a hurricane hits me or I no longer can be responsible for my decision, I am a homeowner…or at least I will once have been one.  It is huge when you come from nothing and your own family has turned their back on you because they did not want to deal with banks.  When you have been had by your own next of kin, you know that trust should be a hard currency.  I wish I had known that four years ago and I wish I had learned my lesson well.  I did not.  As was to be expected, you were not here with me this special weekend, in a house together.  I know someone once told me I would move into a house with you one day, and that would be my destination after the rented garage apartment at Cortlandt st.  They were wrong, unfortunately.  Maybe life is less glamorous than it seems from the runes.  Maybe life is constantly in flux, the way you are, unable to hold a steady feeling that will see you through the maze in which you trapped yourself.  I do not know.  I just know that it would have been nice to have a house with you, the way you do with someone else, even if that had meant my own crusade of going against my fate would have been solved with a shortcut of two salaries going against mortgages instead of one.  Oh, love…you have taken yourself so far away from us that now I do not know how or if we will ever come back.  Perhaps this had to be so.  Perhaps it was my own quest and my own holy grail, and you were there just as the vehicle that would make me believe a change of life was worth it.  Maybe, perhaps, who knows?  After all, this is what life is all about.

It is a cold night in Houston, with temperatures dropping below zero degree Celsius. My eyes hurt with the sting of the slow tears that have accompanied me throughout the day. Yes, I am in pain.

I was never drawn to drama, so I am not sure how I got myself into this. I am trapped in an icy prison, like that Dead Man Walking the Houston Grand Opera decided to revisit with Flicka Von Stade as the mother of the convict. I’m probably a dead heart walking, only that mine still beats, despite myself. I wish it did not. I wish it were free…to death or to a happier fate, if something like that exists.

I was recently watching the last movie version of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, with  Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes starring as the lovers whose fate is doomed by a too likeable husband (somewhat like a Brief Encounter type, with more screen time) and by the mother of all fates and relationships: circumstance.

Timing is always an essential ingredient to relationships, and yet lovers take it for granted. Perhaps because I am behind these prison bars now, I can look at happy couples with a renewed eye, knowing without their sharing in that knowledge how lucky they are to have fallen for each other on a tabula rasa, with no past to pay dues to, or to feel they have to. I did not know how much circumstance shapes facts and options until I met you. Perhaps it was because of the extended suspension of disbelief that accompanies the anesthetized initial romance, or the pursuit of seduction as a game, as an option, that fleeting moment in which we think we know where things are going, and when “inevitable” seems like an infallible word.

Oh, well, I’ve learned that “inevitable” is a nice umbrella word to cover up for the fantasy of thinking that we know, when we really do not. We do not know the secrets, the hiding, and mostly the lying that accompanies each strategy of seduction, the moves behind the scenes  to get what we want, not thinking of the future because it scares us, because it is too far to think about. Greene’s Maurice Bendrix is consumed by jealousy for what he cannot change and he cannot understand…for what he cannot see. In my version, there is only emptiness, as my side of the story becomes a tepid version of Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black.

And now add to the tragedy of a lover’s plight the fact that you may be ill, and then the terror of hearing the worst prognosis is superseded by the certainty that I will be external to you in any process, as you let circumstances take over the fragile texture of a life that a radiologist’s report can change forever. I know more than you do, despite your technical expertise and the medical degree that probably decorates some wall in an unreachable house. I know that rotting out is not paying homage to whatever is left of your time anywhere, be it long, fruitful years, or the sad and lonesome count of a calendar the family you think you are protecting imposes on you. Rotting out is another kind of prison, one that you build around yourself, one that is hard to resist without real love if real love has come to you. And I know it has, and I wish you could stop fighting it like a disease.