The Write Thing

The year is unfolding in surprising ways. Where I expected continuance, I am now seeing sad but necessary closure, by marriage, distance, or both. Where I expected briefness, I am now seeing the inevitable development of a relationship. I bet the gods are amused at the dice they cast. I thought I knew, I thought I was wise. Until recently, I even claimed to have an instinct, an ancestral memory that rarely failed. To my disappointment and, in a way, to my relief, it does fail, and the truth now dawns on me. I have to come to terms with the fact that there is a day-by-day quality to whatever we do, despite the long-term frameworks in which we technically see things. I am caught in the certainty of uncertainty, and I’d better like it, or else I’ll have to contend with my own ghost when fate decides for me.

However, no matter how much life insists on contradicting my instinct, I cannot help seeing it in action again. Perhaps that is why, one afternoon in a day of recognition and lovemaking, ages ago in a dreamy Mexican town, I turned around in bed, held her hand in mine around my waist, and without looking at her I said: “I have this sense of…arrival with you”. If I am home or not, or if the gods are just fooling around with me again, I will claim not to know. I will breathe in deeply, count my blessings and hope that my instinct is right.

A few hours ago, at the ice cream parlor, I saw a couple. These girls were so connected in the way they were dressed, in the way they talked to each other. One of them had no difficulties in going onto PDA mode, which I found bold and wonderfully avant-garde for someone in her twenties. I looked at them out of the corner of my eye, enthralled by their nonchalance, and the self-assertiveness that accompanied that defiance of the world. After all, we are in Buenos Aires, who is only gay-friendly in name, but in practice is really closeted.

I thought of this, and had a sudden flash of emotion and relative epiphany. I saw myself in that connection, so many years ago. Alas, no longer. We are now entering what someone very sage called The Silent Phase. It hurts like hell. I simply have to let go, not of her, but of me in the us we built once, so long ago. There are so many ways of loving. My way now is that of a sister, not a lover. So it must end… until, hopefully, one day, something will be constructed out of the sparkle of beauty that we generated, unknowingly and beautifully, of our own accord.