I’ll share a favorite scene from Chapter One, set during the Becker family’s first summer vacation dinner at the pensione (inexpensive rooming house) in Paraggi, Italy. Mom is in the middle of saying a typical (i.e. very long) grace.

**

In my heart I said, “Please, oh please, don’t let Lucrezia come to our table to ask if we want wine with dinner while Mom is praying!”

Lucrezia was the owner’s daughter. When she cleaned the rooms with her mother they both wore blue housecoats over their day clothes. At night she was the pensione’s waitress. She wore a white apron over her black pleated skirt. Her starched apron strings hung down to the hemline behind. Lucrezia wore her silver crucifix outside of her white blouse when she served us our dinner. It made her look very Roman Catholic.

Lucrezia was standing at our table. “Vino? Rosso–? Bianco–?” she said.

“Please, Lord!” I prayed.

Mom kept right on praying.

“Vino?”

Couldn’t she see we were praying? Would Mom interrupt the prayer and look up?

“We thank Thee for this food and we pray for those who live and work in this pensione that they might come to know Thee as their personal Savior…”

“Vino?”

Mom opened her eyes, looked up sorrowfully, blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light, then smiled ruefully at Lucrezia. Poor girl, she didn’t know the Lord. In fact, here we were praying, and she didn’t even wait until we were done. Probably she didn’t even notice. I guess she thought we were staring at our food while Mom talked to herself with her eyes shut. We had pity for Lucrezia and all the unsaved Italians. Roman Catholics thought they knew the Lord, but they worshipped Mary, not Jesus; they did not trust Him as their personal Savior but tried to merit salvation by works. I knew they were lost, but, just the same, I wished we didn’t have to pray in front of them.

“Vino?” Lucrezia was starting to really wonder what was going on. She tried English. “Wine? Red…White…Yes?” She smiled. Mom smiled too. Mom’s smile was full of compassion.

“No, Lucrezia, no, we won’t be having any alcohol to drink.”

“No wine.”

“No, thank you, we’re Christians, just some water please.”

“Acqua minerale?”

“No, just natural water…acqua naturale.”

It was Lucrezia’s turn to look sorrowful and to smile wistfully. Mom took her smile to be an expression of longing to know the Truth. I knew Lucrezia just felt sorry for people who drank tepid tap water at dinner when a hundred and fifty lira would buy a bottle of Chianti or Orvieto.

When Lucrezia walked away, we bowed our heads to finish our interrupted prayer. “And, Lord, we pray for dear little Lucrezia. We pray that You will give one of us an opportunity to share Your love with her and an opportunity to witness to her. In Jesus’ precious name we pray. Amen.”

I love how Calvin’s mother says “we’re Christians,” in characteristic evangelical insider way, like they and only they own the word — as if “you unsaved pagan Catholics obviously don’t know anything about it.” Schaeffer nails it.

**

I may never accept Jesus as my personal Savior, but I’ve found a Salvador.

Well, Salvador is his name, anyway…a sweet, round, 37-year-old Mexicano divorced father of two who works for a Spanish language network and broadcasts our baseball games on the radio en Español. We met via a free online dating site. I’m not at all sure he’s The One — I’m kind of disinclined to think so — but he possesses just the sort of crazy creative and risk-taking mindset that’s generally been missing among my circle of close friends and associates. Only Meg Ferris, that globetrotting writing coach who showed up at my yard sale last year, hatches anything like the sort of “harebrained” schemes Salvador comes up with — and makes work. This is a man who got himself an interview with George Lucas’s creative team in Los Angeles simply by setting up an attention-grabbing Web site.

He claims to have no expectations about us, and I believe he’s sincere. “Perhaps I am here to help you now,” he said at our lunch meeting, “and then, someday, you will have an answer I need.” Salvador was raised Catholic but has become enamored of Buddhism and Eastern spirituality. He teaches martial arts to kids in his spare time. (I can almost imagine him punctuating his sage observations with “young grasshopper.”)

I’m glad, at any rate, to have found a new friend with his breed of unrepentant cojones. Wasn’t I just saying I had no idea how to break out of the box?

**

A separate foray into the online dating world, this time for a Match.com free trial, has yielded equally interesting results. A gentleman my age, whose photo and profile I had skipped right over while perusing my daily matches, sent me a message. It was so warm, witty, and complimentary, I felt compelled to respond. But first I clicked on his profile to get a better look.

What I read there got me a little scared.

Not creepy scared, but scared in a way that Jason’s and Salvador’s and some of the other guys’ profiles hadn’t, because they essentially gave me a list of interests and what-I’m-looking-fors that more or less fit me or didn’t. (Online dating thus far has been like looking through a catalog and picking out the style and color that suits me best. The list approach, again.)

William’s profile struck a different chord. And not because of his vocabulary or his writing skills, which were excellent. Not because he was a law student focusing on international human rights law. Not because he was nice-looking in a supporting-actor kind of way, or because he’d rather watch a foreign film than climb a fourteener. What came through his carefully chosen words was a good-humored generosity, authenticity, and lack of ego. Here was an educated man who didn’t take himself so deadly seriously, who admitted to not having all the answers or all the confidence in the world, and who felt a strong sense of responsibility toward (and interconnectedness with) other human beings. His sense of humor was not unlike my own. (My best friend of twenty-three years, listening to me read his “In My Own Words” section, exclaimed, “But that’s you!”) I wish I could paraphrase a sentence or two for you here, but he took down his profile when his paid month expired.

After several rounds of increasingly personal email exchanges, William and I chatted amiably on the phone for over an hour. We have yet to meet. He’s leaving for Nigeria on a school-related mission next week and will be gone for three weeks.

I’m almost too freaked out to meet him, to tell you the truth.

Like me, he has deeply conservative parents, who hail from the same state as my mom. And Sam. His trip has become somewhat controversial: the faculty advisor who backed him for this Nigeria project just got fired. (Apparently the University doesn’t want its law students inserting themselves into the affairs of third world countries.) I’m inspired and humbled by his humanitarian passion and commitment, which goes way beyond the often ineffectual rallying and canvassing that wonky political progressives like Eli and I do on weekends, however well-intentioned. Talk about walking the talk.

I think: could he be…? Do I deserve…? I don’t dare finish the sentence.

Suddenly I’m not so sure I’m ready for prime time.

**

On the same day that I read William’s first, flirty message, a yoga friend posts a call on Facebook for interested parties who might like to get coached for free in the “Calling In The One” process. Rebecca has just finished Katherine Woodward Thomas’s relationship-coach training, and some of her friends in the program need “practicum” guinea pigs with whom to complete their certification.

Within 24 hours of responding to Rebecca, I am talking with Beth, a fledgling “Calling In The One” coach in California. Just like that. And for free.

You tell me that’s not one hell of a coincidence, amigos.

After our introductory phone session, however, I find myself awash in ambivalence.

**

At work, a tall, slim young trainee with jet-black hair and tattoo “sleeves” is looking at me. I noticed him his very first day: he resembles a young “Camelot”-era Robert Goulet, at his peak of tastiness, when they were saying he might be the next Elvis, before the cheeseball ’70s moustache and the Greatest Hits 8-tracks. I meet his gaze; he holds it for a provocative moment with his deep-set brown eyes, then looks away. I flush. We exchange furtive glances throughout the shift. One of us seems always to be sneaking a peek at the other through the cheerful, hefty matron sitting between us.

Suddenly the call center seems full of delectable young men again. A lean but muscular half-Asian with creme-caramel skin and huge hazel eyes whose name is really Sam (honestly!) makes me forget to breathe when he goes out of his way to introduce himself in the parking lot. He’s no taller than I am, but he has the torso of Apollo and the face of a Filipino matinee idol. Mama Maria.

I suppose there have been a few lovelies around in the past few months, but these latest afternoon delights are actually giving an eye to this tired old broad. Why, I have no idea. I think I look kind of fat and mousy at the moment. Go figure.

But it all comes surging back, all the forgotten intoxication and hunger. In between calls, somewhere in my graphic imagination, I’m nuzzling the tender brown nape of Apollo’s neck and running my fingers all over his taut, smooth, inconspicuously magnificent body. I’m pulling Young Robert down the stairwell to G3, the parking level where no one ever goes on foot, and pushing him up against the wall, thrusting my tongue between his lips, pressing into him. I get lightheaded with lust; my knees weaken. Not enough blood is getting to my brain or my feet, and…hello, may I please speak with Jane Smith?

**

I talk things out with Jeannie, my closest girlfriend in town. I’m beating myself up and working myself into a state of despair for being “superficial” and apparently losing my newly acquired, less visually-oriented perspective. I don’t have any impulse whatsoever to drag sweet, eager, decidedly stout Salvador, reeking of cologne (I hate cologne), down a stairwell, as swell as he is and as much as he seems to dig me.

I tell Jeannie that I don’t expect the guys who inspire lust in me to be the same ones who are good for me. Probably quite the opposite. But now I’m not sure I’m ready or willing to give up the hunger.

Jeannie, a counselor by trade, gently suggests that it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. If I’m not turned on by someone, I shouldn’t force myself just on principle. Sam #1 didn’t elicit from me the same Greek-god comparisons as Sam #2, but we still had an intense, undeniable, potently pheremonal chemistry that made me want to eat him alive. With a spoon. Every day, if possible.

Who says you can’t love the right guy AND feel “the hunger?” she muses.

I start to feel a little more hopeful.

I think it’s great that you’re so sexual, adds Jeannie. I love that about you. Maybe what you need right now is to have a fling. Maybe you want to have a little sumpin’-sumpin’ with one of these youngsters before you get serious and look for something real. Have you talked to Beth about these feelings?

Of course I haven’t. Not yet. It may have been our decision to work together, after all, and the renewed prospect of successfully “Calling In The One,” that triggered this little midlife crisis.

**.

I struggle to complete my “homework” — not for Beth, but for Salvador. His questions for me are: what, exactly, do I want to write? And where do I want to be?

Finally I email him an answer. I don’t know! Frank Schaeffer makes me want to write a novel. But I’m not even sure I can do it; I’ve never managed to write a sustained work of fiction. (Of course, at the time, neither had Schaeffer.) I know I can do something like a personal travelogue competently and love it, and I can meet deadlines when I’m doing expository-type writing, so there’s that…but do I want to live abroad, or just travel? Where on earth do I belong?

“Don’t worry, just be patient, even a tree can’t speed up to grow,” he writes back. “Step by step. You need to relax, be quiet so you can start listening.”

Probably excellent advice all around.

**

My assignment from Beth has me stymied as well. I’m supposed to set an “anchoring” intention for love, in my own words. And answer the question: who would I need to be, to call in the love I desire?

All that comes to mind now, for the latter question, is: Someone else!

Jeannie, who dearly loves me and always sees the absolute best in me (you’re brilliant, you’re beautiful, you’re hilarious, et cetera), genuinely believes that these mouth-watering boys are a viable, if temporary, option, but you and I know that I’m only a legend in my own mind. When it comes to initiating anything with anyone who inspires that kind of unbridled lust, I’ve historically managed to project all of the allure of a skunk at a picnic. Out of dozens of fantasy partners, I’ve managed to snag only two or three (Lord only knows how) and pull them over into the reality of my bedroom.

The clincher of course is that the fantasies — to be brutally honest now — have nearly always proven to be better than the reality. Not to diss anybody, but just because something looks like a Porsche doesn’t mean it drives like one. When your nose is pushed up against the glass like the Little Match Girl, however, whatever’s going on inside is an imagined paradise. In the mating dance I’ve generally been a wallflower with two left feet, so I’m prone to thinking I’m going to miss something somewhere (the greener-grass syndrome) no matter what.

But the fevered imaginations of those who, like me, live too much in their heads can really short-circuit actual experience. (Case in point: the strange phenomenon of fans wanting to literally check out of life on Earth and go live in James Cameron’s Avatar universe.) Not everything is what it appears to be. Jeannie, a fellow vegetarian who makes a lot more money than I do, likes to take us out to the kind of candlelit restaurants that have white tablecloths and $20 entrees, where we’re routinely disappointed by the risotto al funghi. Conversely, we’ll sometimes wind up at a tiny storefront with plastic flowers on the table in a dingy strip mall on one of the ugliest thoroughfares in town, and slurp the best coconut curry soup anyone has ever concocted for a mere $4.95.

If there have been any pleasant surprises along the road of amore, it’s how the physical intimacy with Sam just kept improving. I went from not being sure I wanted to get him naked to wanting to keep him that way all the time.

So maybe what I need to do first and foremost is to let go of the stubborn and thoroughly unfounded belief that I understand anything at all about how this mating business works, and embrace my own unknowing.

Maybe “who I need to be” is just someone with a beginner’s mind.

Match.com and Chemistry.com are still sending me matches daily, but I have a gut feeling I won’t meet “The One” online. My few Web flirtations have fizzled, strangely thwarted by inopportune multiple power outages and Internet problems.

Without any romantic prospects to distract me right now, and becoming increasingly alarmed at my diminishing funds, I’m faced once again with the perennial questions of work, vocation, purpose, and the constraints of survival fear.

**

The Plan fell through. The Plan was to get a certain salaried 30-hrs-a-week state job (with benefits) that would pay well enough to allow me to hire Lisa Brown to take me through her “Live Your Dreams” program. I didn’t land that job, however, after months of testing and jumping through hoops, and now four months later I’m burnt out and underemployed at the call center, sending out resumes willy-nilly to jobs I merely imagine I could tolerate, and watching my last thousand in savings (the European Dream Fund) slip away like sand in an hourglass.

I am in bare-minimum survival mode. I don’t like being in this mode. Lately I’ve been thinking about the mental frameworks we live by (that define what we believe is possible for us), and rereading the Zanders’ book The Art of Possibility. I started to think about the last time I busted through my own internal fear-constraints to enter into an experience that was better than anything I could have imagined.

It was, of course, when I was grappling with my ambivalence about going forward with Sam. I revisited that comments thread and found some wisdom there.

**

Chris the coach had asked me what my hesitation was in going forward, and I did my best to answer.

It’s like being afraid of setting anything in motion, like a chain of dominoes or a snowball rolling downhill. You don’t know what all’s going to happen, or where it’s going to go. What if I’m a disappointment to him? What if he’s a disappointment to me? What if one of us is more smitten? I almost don’t mind being the one “on the bottom,” as my ex-therapist used to put it…I’m just so loath to be the cause of injury to anyone. Or what if it really does turn into something? Am I prepared for that?

I was taking inventory of my every fear of every unwanted outcome — which is the way I typically approach everything I undertake. I learned this early on: my dad for one was sure, with his incessant quizzing, to instill the proper anxiety in me about every possible thing that could ever go wrong. If I missed something, after all, the worst would surely happen, and then not only would I be up a creek, but my stupidity would be a proven and public fact .

My loyal German reader had a parable for me, in response, borrowed from experimental psychologist and “eco-philosopher” Peter Russell:

We are like a person holding on to a piece of rope.

He holds on for dear life, knowing that if he were to let go he would fall to his death. His parents, his teachers, and many others have told him this is so; and when he looks around he can see everyone else doing the same.

Nothing would induce him to let go.

Along comes a wise person. She knows that holding on is unnecessary, that the security it offers is illusory, and only holds you where you are. So she looks for a way to dispel his illusions and help him to be free.

She talks of real security, of deeper joy, of true happiness, of peace of mind. She tells him that he can taste this if he will just release one finger from the rope.

“One finger,” thinks the man; “that’s not too much to risk for a taste of bliss.” So he agrees to take this first initiation.

And he does taste greater joy, happiness, and peace of mind.

But not enough to bring lasting fulfillment.

“Even greater joy, happiness and peace can be yours,” she tells him, “if you will just release a second finger.”

“This,” he tells himself, “is going to be more difficult. Can I do it? Will it be safe? Do I have the courage?” He hesitates, then, flexing his finger, feels how it would be to let go a little more . . . and takes the risk.

He is relieved to find he does not fall; instead he discovers greater happiness and inner peace.

But could more be possible?

“Trust me,” she says. “Have I failed you so far? I know your fears, I know what your mind is telling you — that this is crazy, that it goes against everything you have ever learnt — but please, trust me. Look at me, am I not free? I promise you will be safe, and you will know even greater happiness and contentment.”

“Do I really want happiness and inner peace so much,” he wonders, “that I am prepared to risk all that I hold dear? In principle, yes; but can I be sure that I will be safe, that I will not fall?” With a little coaxing he begins to look at his fears, to consider their basis, and to explore what it is he really wants. Slowly he feels his fingers soften and relax. He knows he can do it. And he knows he must do it. It is only a matter of time until he releases his grip.

And as he does an even greater sense of peace flows through him.

He is now hanging by one finger. Reason tells him he should have fallen a finger or two ago, but he hasn”t. “Is there something wrong with holding on itself?” he asks himself. “Have I been wrong all the time?”

“This one is up to you,” she says. “I can help you no further. Just remember that all your fears are groundless.”

Trusting his quiet inner voice, he gradually releases the last finger.

And nothing happens.

He stays exactly where he is.

Then he realizes why. He has been standing on the ground all along.

And as he looks at the ground, knowing he need never hold on again, he finds true peace of mind.

Somehow this tale eased my misgivings. My friend Russ the Librarian added, “Sometimes it’s best to just let that insecurity go and dive in head-first.” That image, of “diving in,” brought up a memory for me of facing my fear of heights as a teenager:

I’ll never forget the time on a camping trip that I jumped off a bridge (with an inner tube) into a river. My fear of heights had me absolutely paralyzed. The longer I stood there, the harder it was to jump. Finally I just did it…and the fall and the dunk and the bobbing up was exhilarating and fun.

It taught me a lot about my tendency towards overthinking.

**

Benjamin Zander in The Art of Possibility demonstrates the puzzle of the nine dots. The challenge is to connect all nine dots with just four lines, without taking pen from paper.

Most people, of course, see a “box” here, and cannot fathom how to connect the dots within the box with less than five lines. The answer is, of course, to use the white space around the dots (to “think outside the box”) and create an arrow figure.

Says Zander, “The frames our minds create define — and confine — what we perceive to be possible. Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.”

If you learn to notice and distinguish (the invented stories you tell), you will be able to break through the barriers of any “box” that contains unwanted conditions and create other conditions or narratives that support the life you envision for yourself and those around you. We do not mean that you can just make anything up and have it magically appear. We mean that you can shift the framework to one whose underlying assumptions allow for the conditions you desire.

These are some of the stories I tell myself: I am all alone, with no one to rely on but myself — no one will help me; I am not fit or competent to do more than survive by the skin of my teeth on my own; no one wants or values my talents and gifts; if I run out of money, I will either have to go back and live with my parents (the ONLY ones who will take me in) as a failed Prodigal child, in that insanity-inducing religious environment, or live on the street. (Or kill myself.)

These are all part of a narrative of scarcity and terror, of consistently giving myself (not to mention my so-called friends and loved ones) C’s and D’s, even F’s, in life.

**

“All of the manifestations of the world of measurement,” says Zander,  “the winning and the losing, the gaining of acceptance and the threatened rejection, the raised hopes and the dash into despair — all are based on a single assumption that is hidden from our awareness.”

The assumption is that life is about staying alive and making it through — surviving in a world of scarcity and peril. Even when life is at its best in the measurement world, this assumption is the backdrop for the play, and, like the invisible box around the nine dots, it keeps the universe of possibility out of view…

On the whole, resources are more likely to come to you if in greater abundance when you are generous and inclusive and engage people in your passion for life. There aren’t any guarantees, of course. When you are oriented to abundance, you care less about being in control, and you take more risks…in the measurement world, you set a goal and strive for it. In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold.

As an alternative to the measurement approach, Zander espouses the practice of “giving an A.” We are so used to being evaluated and compared to others from our earliest years, he explains, that performance anxiety can short-circuit our best efforts and shrink our creative horizons.

Zander’s radical solution, with his own music students, was to grant everyone an A for the year, but require them to write an essay — dated the following May! — explaining what they had done over the course of the year to earn this grade.  This exercise opened the door for the students to envision their best abilities coming forward and developing, rather than causing them to obsess and compete.

Getting feedback later on how the class felt about doing this assignment, Zander heard from one of his more reticent Asian students. The young man’s words reduced me to tears.

In Taiwan, I was Number 68 out of 70 student. I come to Boston and Mr. Zander says I am an A. Very confusing. I walk about, three weeks, very confused. I am Number 68, but Mr. Zander says I am an A student…I am Number 68, but Mr. Zander says I am an A. One day I discover much happier A than Number 68. So I decide I am an A.

As the author says,

Giving an A is a fundamental, paradigmatic shift toward the realization that it’s all invented — the A is invented and the Number 68 is invented, and so are all the judgments in between. Some readers might conclude that our practice is merely an exercise in putting a “positive spin” on a negative opinion, or “thinking the best of someone,” and “letting bygones be bygones.” But that is not it at all. No behavior of the person to whom you assign an A need be whitewashed by that grade, and no action is so bad that behind it you cannot recognize a human being to whom you can speak the truth. You can grant the proverbial ax murderer an A by addressing him as a person who knows he has forfeited his humanity and lost all control, and you can give your sullen, secretive, lazy teenager an A, and she will still at that moment be sleeping the morning away. When she awakes, however, the conversation between you and her will go a little differently because she will have become for you a person whose true nature is to participate — however blocked she may be.

**

The call center is a small, boxed-in universe run by anxious authoritarians who live and breathe the world of measurement; creative deviation from the “call process” is sharply reprimanded, while performance quotas are monitored closely. No wonder I feel like I’m suffocating there. (It occurs to me that Sam’s genius as a leader was that he naturally “granted A’s” to callers and treated them as collaborators rather than misbehaving children.) At the same time, it fully reflects my present desperate survival orientation toward the world: in conditions of scarcity and peril, one takes whatever one can get, no matter how much one is required to give (in opposition to one’s nature, at that) for how little return, even punishment.

I have been in this “starving” mode since I was nineteen and left home for good, feeling that it was all up to me, alone, and that I was, in actuality, hardly up to the daunting task. I imagined a life of washing dishes in restaurant kitchens and other entry-level grunt jobs, making an honest if poor living.

Now that my back and knees and shoulder are giving me trouble I can’t even take care of properly, I can no longer rely on this forty-two-year-old body for physical labor. This, along with my deteriorating condition, frightens me. I never had a backup plan.

To tell you the truth, I always expected I’d be dead by now.

**

A college friend hitting the bottom of the barrel basically tries to drink himself to death, and dozens of people respond immediately. A small army of close friends keeps a vigil at the hospital and then rents a hotel room while others clean house (clearing out bottles). From afar comes a massive outpouring of expressions of love and support. Everyone cares. Everyone wants to help.

Is it sick of me to be envious?

Maybe the problem is that I’m too proud to disintegrate publicly, or to show any real fear or neediness. My mother’s (unhappy, complaining) mother intruded upon every fragile boundary of my adolescent self when her disease forced her to live out the rest of her days in our living room, and from that experience I conceived a lifelong terror of “being a burden” to anyone. I would literally rather die. I usually have to be at my wits’ end to ask for help.

The bottom line here is, I guess, that I don’t believe I have the freedom to fail. I’ve never taken big risks because I’m certain there’s no net beneath me. (Sometimes I’ve wondered what it would have been like to be the young woman whose wealthy parents paid for her entire education and regularly sent large sums of cash when she needed it…or even to be my brother, who lived at home after college and got his first big career break with a man from our church.) It’s all up to me, I have no one to rely on but myself, and I’m not the kind of competent that leads to merit-based success in life.

**

At the end of all this ruminating, I find myself returning to the rope, and jumping off bridges, and the puzzle of the nine dots, and Ben Zander’s A. I stepped out of the box once — I took a genuine risk that genuinely worried me — and I did find, in the end, that I was already standing on the ground. Sam may have been a confused kid who did too many drugs and ultimately left me, but he also left me better off than he found me, because he knew how to give love. I went beyond the nine dots when I fell for a man because of the quality of his heart.

Of course, in this case surviving in the world is what’s at stake. Is there really ground beneath my feet? Are all my assumptions mistaken? Will someone be there to catch me if I risk and fail? Am I so certain to fail? I’ve given myself no better than C’s (and others even lower grades) thus far. What if I believed that others wanted what I have to contribute, and that they were happy to help me? What would that even look like?

And what would I do now?

I did express trepidation to my friends, over and over again, that the longer I stayed here, not following my intention to live abroad, the more momentum I would lose, and the more likely it would be that I would become embroiled in some new drama on the local level that would suck up all of my energy and motivation. I wasn’t wrong. Candy-loving AlienBaby got a job working alongside some tasty boys, and wound up, once again, in a metaphorical Shanghai.

**

But there’s more to it than that. I realized something earlier this week when my cannabis-clouded friend was unusually clear-headed: there is something entirely palpable between us. I know that he has strong feelings toward me. I can see it; I can feel it. For my part, I simply soaked up that life-giving energy while it was present, adoring him right back (which wasn’t hard, as he really is fricking adorable). I’m glad I made the most of our time then, however, because he disappeared into a bleary-eyed fog the next day, before literally disappearing.

Within this certainty, I’m much more comfortable extrapolating that, as he never planned on having these feelings toward me, he’s not okay with them…or at least a significant part of him isn’t. At the risk of seeming like I’ve gone from one extreme (of severe self-deprecation) to the other (of insufferable conceit), I think the problem isn’t that Rick doesn’t want or care about me. The problem is that he wants and cares about me a lot more than he wants to want or care about me. And that is a problem. Just ask Psyche. It’s the age-old story…déjà vu all over again.

I was a little afraid, myself, at the outset; I felt vulnerable, overwhelmed by his radical differences in habits and lifestyle, and ambivalent about his appearance. But one of the most poignant things about this young man is that he has — throughout so many of the experiences that make men hard (and not in a good way) — retained a certain childlike wonder about the world, and an open, curious, friendly attitude toward other people. I feel as if I’ve had the rare privilege to have touched a heart that’s known far less love than it deserves, and is far less armored than one might expect. How could I not love this person, regardless of the package he came in? Sure, I may think he’s the most gorgeous thing alive now — but my faithful readers know he was not what I had in mind. And there were so many reasons for it not to work on any level. In spite of all that, when the moment came for me, I surrendered.

For a man, however, that kind of surrender may mean intolerable weakness, or public humiliation in the ignoble tradition of the hand-wringing Mark Sanfords of the world. The seductress Delilah cut Samson’s hair and robbed him of his strength; every worldly warrior since has been wary of her. She tied you to a kitchen chair/and she broke your throne/and she cut your hair/and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah, wrote legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen, a man who could easily be described by detractors as “whipped” and who actively savors that kind of surrender.

I mean Rick no harm — I mean him anything but harm (and I love those long black waves of his) — but the argument could be made that he’s better off not getting mixed up with me, a substantially older woman intending to move overseas. (I do have the occasional thought that he could always come along, as he wants to see the world.) Maybe it was better for James not to get mixed up with me, either. I don’t know. It’s just too bad if what was better for them didn’t involve me getting a little sumpin-sumpin.

Anyhow, without further ado, here are my reflections on that not completely dissimilar episode.

______________

PART FIVE: LEAVING OZ

I have stolen something from Centro d’Ompio.

A virtually useless item, cheesy-looking, and broken to boot, it has no value to anyone but me. It’s a Christmas mug with a broken handle. Most people drink their tea and coffee from glasses up at Centro; only Bisetti has mugs. But there was a certain working guest who absolutely had to take his tea in a mug, and this particular mug somehow found its way up the mountain, where it dwelt in a secret hiding place near the dishroom. And now I have taken it. HA.

Maybe it’s extremely third grade of me, but nevertheless. It’s all I have. No shirts no shoes no jackets no blues, to borrow from the old Mel Etheridge song “No Souvenirs.” I never even got a picture of the bloke.

*

Here’s one for the May You Live In Interesting Times file: I got an email from my mother, who has no idea what’s really been going on. As you may recall, she and my father are ultraconservative born-again Christians. She told me that they have been praying I’ll have “a very memorable experience” here. You can imagine the laugh that one gave me. Be careful what you wish for, Ma.

There were some definite bright spots my last week. Last Saturday night we had a barbecue at Bisetti. Marjorie and I were drinking a potent dark rum with coke; she got “leathered” and fell out of the hammock, to everyone’s amusement. Eddie, the newest working guest, a student in international relations from Long Island who resembles the young Daniel Johnston (not that that may mean much to most of you), is now Finn’s roommate. He’s a funny kid, and he and Finn get along extraordinarily well. That night Cosmo (in typical Cosmo fashion) had called Eddie “Herman” by mistake, and Finn was especially tickled because “Her Mann” in German means “mister man.” Finn and Eddie started bantering back and forth drunkenly…Finn harassed his roommate about his tendency to snore, and Eddie countered by accusing Finn of yodeling in his sleep. Somehow or other, the two of them eventually decided that they should be in a band together called “Herman and the Yordeling Snodelers.” Maybe you had to be there, but the two of them made me laugh harder than I have since…well, you know. I was definitely inebriated, myself, but it was the first time I’d had such knee-slapping fun since before my escape to Orta.

Eddie’s got the New Yorker sarcasm that never fails to crack me up, but I’ve been most grateful for the arrival of Finn. The man is a blessing, like sunlight — his mere presence can make the difference in the tone of your day. He fixes you with these serene green eyes as clear and pure as glacier water, and grins widely before erupting into uninhibited laughter that jumps two octaves. Such unabashed, high-pitched giggling from a man betrays a striking cultural difference; Centro’s Swiss groundskeeper Gerhard has a similar unselfconscious titter. American (and English) men wouldn’t dare sound so “girly,” but truth be told, it’s completely infectious, and a joy to be around.

Finn’s girlfriend will be arriving at Centro on the day I leave Italy, and I regret not being able to meet her. She is undoubtedly an amazing person. Sitting beside Finn at lunch and watching him talk, I considered what an incredibly lucky woman she is. Socrates would have pronounced Finn kalos, a word meaning both beautiful and good (of the highest kind).

One day at the bar I told him, “We should clone you, and repopulate the world.”

His response was to giggle happily and to respond in his incomparable Viennese accent, “But who then would there be, to love Finn?”

*

We were talking about attachment at one point. He’s definitely on the side of the yogis and Buddhists, and believes that we cause ourselves unwanted suffering by clinging to our experiences. He never takes photographs for this reason. This is one way in which we differ, although I couldn’t precisely articulate my disagreement at the time. But while sweeping bamboo leaves from the gravel path outside Centro, I thought of the famous Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, who founded the school of logotherapy. In Frankl’s view of the world, there is no doing away with suffering — what is important is the meaning we derive from it.

I realized then that I don’t believe it’s necessary, or even desirable, to try to banish suffering from our lives – it seems, to me anyway, to be an attempt to escape our inescapable humanness, much like what those Western White Males were trying to do in subjugating or denigrating the Feminine. What I find that I need to do instead, more than anything, is to make some sort of sense of what happens.

I suppose that’s why I started writing in the first place, and telling these stories. Every culture on Earth has its stories and its storytellers.

This is one thing that appears to be universally human.

*

Hanna and Alessandro, perhaps intuiting that I would want to hear them (there have been no open discussions of what happened), shared some James stories with me. Alessandro told me about their trip to Florence together early on, where they enjoyed bloody, juicy steaks (very welcome after Centro’s strict vegetarian fare) and spent the evening talking with a couple from one of the Dakotas. The man was a fan of British television, and he and James apparently had a fantastic time together. Alessandro said he’d never seen James laugh so much. “He seemed really happy that night.”

Hanna told me about going to the nearby Ameno blues festival with James and Robert. Robert told the ticket booth that James was a journalist from Rolling Stone magazine, and that he was the photographer. Hanna, of course, was a groupie. Unbelievably, the gullible staffperson bought this shameless bullshit story and let them all in, free of charge.

*

Cosmo left on Monday, and I forgot to say goodbye.

Cosmo was frequently unintentionally, side-splittingly funny with his misunderstandings and mangled versions of English expressions.  He was an offbeat character to begin with, having gone through younger incarnations as a hippie and a Rastafarian; earlier this month he even visited an Aquarian community. James thought he was a total flake, naturally — when Cosmo and Mila were having problems in the kitchen, he said “Mila doesn’t seem like one who suffers fools gladly” — but I got a big kick out of him. And he coined my favorite catchphrase of all. One night when I broke a beer glass in the dishroom (much to Robert’s dismay), Cosmo came in, surveyed the mess, and pronounced sagely, “Shits happen.”

He didn’t understand my ensuing hilarity, but at appropriate moments thereafter, I would turn to Eddie (who had been my dishwashing partner) and repeat Cosmo’s wise words.

Christian and Marjorie left Monday as well. On their last night, I found out from Marjorie her actual age, which is thirty-seven. I couldn’t believe it. She’s almost twice Christian’s age. She could be his mom, for crying out loud. But that didn’t stop them from embarking on their little foreign affair.

Now I’m truly envious. Some people I know have trouble with a decade.

Alessandro stayed another day, and left at five in the morning by taxi. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him, either (though I imagine we’ll be in future contact). The night before, Gina was in Bisetti again, and I just had to get out of there and away from her. The last time I saw Alessandro, he was sitting beside her on the stairs. Her shiny black curtain of hair fell over one shoulder as she smiled up at him, almost leaning in to him. I wondered if she meant to give him a similar sendoff, the incorrigible little puttana. In Alessandro’s case, I actually hope she did. He could seriously use the boost.

As long as it didn’t come with a rash.

Me-ow.

*

On my last night at Centro, the group on retreat known as “The Libido Group,” who had been doing primal dances in the pavillion all week, had their going-away party. It became my going-away party, too. Robert played his best dance music, and I got decidedly drunk on a bottle of wine. Elke, Bettina, Finn, Eddie and I all danced to Marvin Gaye and Tom Jones. I even let a soused Hanna cuddle me and tell me I was “so cute.” She confessed drunkenly that she and Robert have been carrying on all this time (which everyone knew anyway), but my fifty bucks says she’ll be living with another woman before she’s thirty.

After most of the staff and working guests had gone, things got kind of wild. Juanita, one of the retreat-goers, a sprite-like African-American woman from Santa Barbara, got up on the bar with a slim blond German man, a German woman named Marta (who can’t be a day under forty-seven, but has a firmer body than I ever will) and a cute Indian guy named Ajit, and started dancing. Marta was the first one to take off her pants, and the others followed suit (or un-suit, as the case may be). Soon they were all topless, and by the end of Tom Jones’s cover of “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” they were all as naked as the day they were born. Robert had offered me a toke of some quality weed earlier, which I had, for once, smoked, so the entire thing felt completely surreal. And yet it wasn’t that sensational once you got used to it. Yeah, naked people. Dancing. Hey, this is Europe — big deal.

*

Finn was up early the next morning, and made me a cup of Earl Grey tea. I sat on the smokers’ porch with him eating cornflakes as some of the others roused themselves and started moving about. Eddie, Hanna, Mila, and Elke all came to hug me goodbye. Finn carried my luggage to the car and gave me a long, tight squeeze and his card. It was like he was kinda attached to me, or something.

Bettina drove me down to Pettenasco station. The train was twenty minutes late, and the waiting and waiting was a déjà vu. I felt nostalgic, there on another bright Italian morning, at that abandoned stazione. I knew I would never step in that river again. It was bittersweet as I hugged Bettina goodbye.

I had to change trains at Novara, on the way to Milan. There was so little time between trains, I wasn’t able to buy as much as a postcard. I wish I had gotten at least one, to commemorate the place where I was so beside myself with joy, if only for a day. Novara. Mia Novara. I don’t have any photos, and I disagree with Finn about them. I want to remember the place – how it was, and what it looked like, that one summer when I was thirty-eight and met that beautiful young Englishman in Pettenasco, the one who accidentally stole my heart. “It all goes by so fast,” I tried to explain to him, that long night in Bisetti’s kitchen. Ten years are nothing. When I come back here — if I ever do — I may have blue hair and dentures, and romance of any kind may be a distant memory.

Bettina and Finn both expressed the opinion that Mezza Coda chose her “time” because she was incredibly happy. Several of us were picking her up and cuddling her on a regular basis, Finn had taken to feeding her and keeping the other cats away until she’d finished, and Padma had gently cleaned her dirty fur on the day that she disappeared. According to them, the little kitty more or less said to herself, “It doesn’t get any better than this,” and gave up the ghost. It seems like a feasible theory. I wonder: is it possible for us two-legged mammals?

I mean, think about it. I don’t know about you, but if I could choose, I’d prefer to throw in the towel after a day like Novara.

The problem is, how do we know when we’re done?

*

Before I left the U.S., life seemed better than ever. I was (finally) focused, hopeful, living with intention, cultivating new and thoroughly healthy habits, feeling like I was getting somewhere. I started to experience a sense of trepidation (and some outright anxiety) about my Italy trip at some point, as if it were a tangent, or worse, something that might derail my fine progress, change everything that was good.

In a way, I turned out to be absolutely right. I mean, here I am, slacking off on my yoga and meditation practices, drinking more than I have in the last six months together, depressed, a bit lost, a tad hateful even.

Would I take it all back?  That’s the million dollar question.

Probably not.

Sometimes you live with intention, and sometimes life just grabs you by the collar and shoves you in the boat and takes you to Shanghai.

I actively resisted going. I did. I remember trying hard to keep my pulse down, that one day early on, when the cute English guy flipped up his shirt to show me what was apparently a newly flat and muscular stomach (he was so proud of the recent loss of his “loov handles”). That trash-talking rascal could look so inexplicably hot in a dishwashing apron, showing me how to turn the glasses over to let them evaporate, and giving me hysterics all the while. Jesus, there was just no way I could have ever helped myself. I was doomed, totally doomed, from day one. And secretly so thrilled, later, when he took to calling me “loov,” an endearment English women usually take as insufferably patronizing, like being called “honey” by your male boss. No matter. It made me unbelievably happy, James calling me this, with a tone of affection behind it. Almost as if he meant it.

Riding from Novara to Milano on the train, I had time to contemplate how often I’ve found that the old stereotypes are a lot of bollocks, and that it’s straight men who are frequently constrained by some kind of internal chastity belt. Put simply, you can’t get into both their hearts and their pants. At least not in that order.

My roommate Elke, as it turned out, understood a lot more that one might have thought about what happened, despite the language barrier. She had seen everything. She knew without my having to tell her, and I have to say I was gratified that she had only distaste – grimacing and shaking her head – for Gina. “Sometimes the men, they just want the sex,” she offered tentatively.

I had to laugh at this. That’s exactly where I got myself into trouble. It was me who wanted the sex, Elke dear.

It was my fault, in a way. I went and got greedy. Coming back from Novara, I experienced a kind of bliss, simply being there with James while he dozed. We were in the process of developing a quite wonderful bond, but I was the one who started to want more. I relished that growing ache of lust, that hunger that makes you weak with anticipation and need. It’s a bit addictive, no?  I thought I could have his warm body as well as his warm regard. But with men like James, you just can’t have both. I’ll never forget his nervous laugh when I told him outright that I wanted him — how young he looked all of a sudden, and how uncertain. It was as if I had betrayed him by changing the rules in the middle of the game. How dare I, indeed. First I make him start to give a fook about me, and then I want to touch his willy. Dirty play, that.

But by the end I didn’t even need it. I just wanted him to know how much I cared for him, which was the most unforgivable sin of all.

It amazes me, in retrospect, how little time it took to fall so hard and to have it end so abruptly. At the risk of exposing my abject geekiness — I feel like Jean-Luc Picard in that episode of “Star Trek” where he lives out an entire accelerated lifetime in another dimension, while unconscious for only fifteen minutes on his ship. Centro d’Ompio has been like that other dimension, and returning home will be like waking up. This has all been an episode in a parallel universe.  Or maybe a technicolor dream I had, after getting smacked on the head during a tornado.

*

But now I’m in Rome, and I’ve been walking all over town looking at all manner of buildings and eating all manner of food. I’ll try hard to make number six about my final aventuras in the citti d’Italia, since I know you’re probably getting weary of hearing me go on and on about my beautiful lost limey bastard. You know how I am, though. Such ruminations are part of the package. And besides, I never planned on any of it.

You know how it goes. Shits happen.

And I’m already exhausted, between the tremendous internal pressure I’m feeling (increasing as the days go by) and the strenous efforts I’m making for hours every day to brainstorm possibilities and contact possible allies and research possible leads. Now that I’m finally open to anything and everything, opportunities don’t seem to be just magically appearing, the way the rah-rah intention people promise they will. It’s stressing me out.

I’m trying to just walk through it, breathe through it.

**

Although I’ve resolved to blow this cow town, I’m still looking for short-term work (doing things I would never have considered in the past, like cold-call fundraising) in an effort to ease my mounting financial worries. I will be completely cleaned out of every last dime in my existing bank accounts if I stay here through the month of June without working, and that’s barring any and all unforseen or emergency expenses. As it is, I hope to be here only through May. Then, perhaps (in the least desirable case scenario), I’ll have to load my pared-down belongings into someone else’s car (obtained through one of those companies that lets you drive cars cross-country for other people) and roadtrip back to my kinfolk’s state on the East coast, hopefully with enough money left in my pocket for gas, food, and cheap motel lodging.

There was a time when such a prospect would have driven me to leap out of a tenth story window. Now, however, being in this curious place of having released just about everything to which I was formerly so attached — including my beloved 1973 VW Beetle — dying along with my former life seems redundant and unnecessary.

My best friend back “home,” bless her heart, is busy trying to line up a place for me to stay other than at my fundamentalist parents’ house, but I really would rather avoid that eventuality altogether. Today a longtime friend called to tell me that an always cheerful and caring former co-worker of ours, only a few years my senior, had collapsed at work with a massive blood clot to the heart. (She’s currently in intensive care and in need of a heart transplant. Visitors and calls are being discouraged.)

**

I haven’t seen Rachel in years, but this couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. Or to a man sweeter than her husband, who lost his younger sister to suicide many years ago. Talk about devastating loss…

Suddenly it’s thrown into even sharper relief, how fragile these bodies of ours are, and how little time we have on this mad, whirling planet to do what we will.

When I feel pangs in my legs (I’m a prime candidate for clots myself) and the odd palpitations from my idiosyncratic little heart murmur, I have weird intimations of my own demise. Nate Fisher of Six Feet Under may have been a fictional character, but he was a kindred spirit: I always appreciated and identified with the way he grappled with his own mortality, ultimately to be dispatched by AVM (yet another circulatory disorder) at the age of forty. I honestly don’t think I have the constitution for longevity, either, and like our friend Russ, half expect not to complete another decade. So I’m no longer unconcerned about wasting time.

Going back to where I came from smacks of wasting time. As does staying here. I’ve been treading water in this place for a long, long while, feeling like I don’t quite belong…but waiting, hoping, for years, for certain outcomes that never turned out.

All of a sudden — with my growing discontent egged on by online self-helpers and coaches who essentially contradict the laissez-faire spiritual teachings (about non-striving and such) I tried for so long to embrace — I find that certain long-suppressed (not necessarily “reasonable” or feasible) wishes and longings of mine have re-emerged, clamoring at maximum volume, with an urgency that won’t allow me a day’s rest or a minute’s peace. I’m casting my nets wildly in every direction, driven to tears by internalized drill sergeants who hammer and hammer and don’t care that I’m doing the best I can with no fucking clue of what I’m doing. As if my life were riding on my ability to spin gold from straw alone and overnight. Where’s that fool Rumplestiltskin when you need him?

I’m looking for a way, and I needed it yesterday.

**

Today I heard back from the American University of Paris. They won’t accept applications from foreign workers who don’t have their work papers in order. Yesterday I was on the phone for forty-five minutes with my aforementioned friend Talia, who is an associate professor there and would be happy to put me up in her spare room, but she was as discouraging as the University about coming over without the proper work visa (which is apparently a bureaucratic nightmare to obtain). France is tough. Italy, from what I’ve been able to find out, is equally tough. Apparently the entire EU has tightened up its immigration laws a lot in the past few years. You used to be able to cross over to Switzerland for a couple of hours after your 90-day no-visa visit to Italy was up, and then come back for another 90 days. No more.

There are still some shortcuts available. If you’re a student, you can obtain a student visa and work up to 20 hours a week legally (of course there are also some under-the-table cash jobs around, like au pair). If you’re an entrepreneur planning on starting a business over there, they make it much easier for you to get your working papers. If you’re in a highly skilled, high-demand field like IT and get hired by a European employer, they also pretty much wave you through. I’ve read on blogs that Ireland’s immigration authorities don’t care that much about illegal Americans, so some employers (particularly in the tourism and food and beverage industries) don’t care that much, either.

I’m definitely leaning toward Ireland, but then again, I was already. Surprised? I thought not. Every time I listen to Damo now I feel this deep if irrational conviction that I need to go over there, with an inexplicable certainty that “soul-honoring,” mythically inclined authors like David Whyte and John O’Donohue and Thomas Moore would encourage me to trust. (Are any of you readers in Ireland? Need somebody to tutor your kids or hoe your garden? Wash your car? Write your dissertation? My email is right there on the sidebar. Seriously. Help me out.)

My highly skeptical friend Karl, probably the biggest pessimist I have ever met, tried to dissuade me from my mad notions by reminding me of the global recession and how difficult it is to find jobs anywhere — but I still managed to find out that he has a good friend in Dublin, and got him to agree to put us in touch. I didn’t try to enroll him in my crazy scheme, I just asked him for a favor. (You have to choose your battles.)

There are some volunteer opportunities over there with Simon Communities for the homeless, as well as with an international Catholic group assisting the disabled…they give you room and board for your troubles, and a tiny spending allowance of 50-65 euros per week. Frankly, I’m not so keen on going that route. I was a VISTA volunteer when I first came out here, so I’ve been there and done that. And twenty years of living on a shoestring has gotten pretty dang old. A girl needs non-holey socks and underwear, for crying out loud. Besides which, keeping basic cell phone service could eat up at least one-quarter of a month’s stipend.

Yahoo has a decent-paying Web editor job over there (and I bet they help Yanks get their legal ducks in a row), but you have to be fluent in at least one European language besides English, and even my strongest secondary language, Spanish, isn’t very good. I don’t think I could fake it. Should I apply anyway? Lord knows, I’ve been searching everywhere for jobs for which I might be qualified, through international recruiters and international job sites and even EU government sites. I spent five hours Saturday updating my profile on Monster.com (making very clear my desire to relocate) and doing just this kind of research. Today I was online for at least another four, clicking around and brainstorming, while also lining up possible buyers for what’s left of my poor VW and setting up a job interview at Telefund (ugh).

I’m effing wiped. And I’ll wake up tomorrow in a cold sweat and do it all over again.

**

Last Friday I started reading through my 2006 Italy diaries again. And I thought, damn, these are pretty good. I had the time of my life, really, living those singular experiences and then translating them to the page to share with my closest friends. In many ways, I felt like I was doing what I was meant to do. I loved it. Sonny even said to me (and I forget this, but it makes me pause and wonder whether he loved me more unselfishly than I loved him) that I should remind myself of that more expansive time, and try to get back to the feeling of what it was like.

So bittersweet: both being with him and being over there were wonderful, but mutually exclusive, dreams come true. He told me he was happy I found someone to laugh and love with — meaning that ultimately rejecting English s.o.b. — the memory of which makes me want to cry my eyes out for another hundred years or so.

(Cough.) Moving on…

Anyway, this is one case where internet research quickly became demoralizing. My coach recommended that I look into travel writing, so I started doing some searching, and turned up innumerable articles and blogs that basically all conclude “Don’t expect to be Rick Steves” or “Don’t expect to make a living at this.” My scarcity prejudices were heartily and repeatedly reinforced. The world and the Web are overflowing with wannabe travel writers, and there’s no demand and no market for all of you. The best thing to do, apparently, is to write those little 200-400 word “shorts” for magazines and Web sites at $25-50 a pop, and hope for the best, but keep your day job.

So fuck me, I guess.

**

But speaking of fucking me — on a lighter note — a quite young man (23, to be exact) I’ve known for several months seemed to be pitching me totally unexpected vibes the other day. I found myself perspiring a little, and feeling very Anne Bancroft. He’s an attractively geeky, bespectacled vegan philosophy student with a self-deprecating sense of humor who (now that I recall) once tried to buy me a drink at the coffeehouse/bar where we both sometimes hang out. I was on my way out at the time, but now I’m sorry I didn’t take him up on it. Damn.

Given that I could have a stroke tomorrow, and that I may wind up moving back to my birthplace or a whole other country within the next couple of months, maybe a little carpe diem is in order. Or should I say carpe vegan? Seize the vegan! (I just put a really filthy joke about eating meat here and then thought better of it. You can make up your own.) I haven’t laid a hand on anybody since you-know-who. I haven’t really wanted anybody, other than that impossible Brit. But Dexter (I’ll call him that, it seems to fit) really is pretty hot, in his skinny, brainy hipster sort of way. And he’s so fricking young! I’m absolutely floored, if that was actual electricity I felt crackling in the air. I don’t know that he’s not spoken for, but he was complaining that women don’t exactly flock to philosophy majors. (He should have gone to my college.) Holy crap, how many more years do I expect to be able to attract snackable young things like that? What am I waiting for?

What do you think? Shall I invite him over for some quinoa pasta and fill him up with organic wine? Steal up behind him as he’s looking around my apartment and nuzzle his slender neck, murmuring Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

**

Looking around this apartment myself, I imagine I’ll start my possession eliminations with things like the television, which is all but useless without a digital converter box. The hardest thing to let go will be books and CDs, but they’ve got to be scaled back if I’m going to ship them cross-country or stuff them in a car. Scanning the kitchen, it makes me vaguely anxious to think about having to start over from scratch after how long it took to build up a decent stock of spices and secondhand dishes and utensils…but that’s assuming I’ll always be as poor as I have been.

It’s strange to consider that just six months ago I was still trying to acquire things for this apartment, to turn it into an inviting place where I would hopefully entertain a certain more-than-friend, eventually. I got art for the walls, and a desk, and a baker’s rack for the kitchen, and a new comforter and duvet (all, I should add, with a little help from my friends). I do love this space, it’s one of the nicest and brightest I’ve ever lived in on my tiny budget. If I were going to spend my life in one room, like Emily Dickinson, I might stay here. But I also know I can’t stay here forever, and it seems like Big Change Time is now or never.

The voices of pessimism start in, and tell me that things will get worse rather than better…that I’ll be lonely…that I’ll miss my friends…that I’ll be sorry. And I can’t tell those voices that I know they’re wrong. But I’ve let them hold me in suspended animation for far too long.

**

This evening I waved from the steps as the pleasant young couple who had just given me three hundred dollars for my rusty and problem-ridden Beetle pulled out into the street: he driving, having just gotten the motor running again, and she following in their battered pickup. They crossed the intersection, and I watched as they disappeared up the hill, the unmistakable put-put-put-put of the VW engine fading away for good.

I have had a recurring dream that I’ve somehow wound up somewhere very, very far away with that car — usually my state of origin — and I start to panic about not being able to get it back home (here) in its dilapidated condition. One time it rolled down an incline into a lake, and I was trying to pull it out of the mud even as it sank! Such symbol-laden dreams, telling of anxious, encumbering attachments to things that don’t last, and the lifelong horror I’ve had of getting stuck back in New England with my fervently religious family. I would wake up depressed and fearful every time.

Now my most dreaded relinquishings are becoming easy. After the job, after the community, after the man, the car is a piece of cake. Nonattachment will be forced upon you, whether you like it or not, and when it comes…

Well, maybe you’ll sleep better, after all.

No doubt anyone with a distant, indifferent, or downright cruel mother will think that what I’m about to expound upon is a self-indulgent non-problem, and that I’m a horrible, ungrateful child. But those who grew up with mothers who behaved in an over-involved, invasive, controlling, or obsessive manner, all in the name of love, will know exactly what I’m talking about. And know exactly what Summers was yelling about. “Oh mother dear, please listen, and don’t DEVOUR me!”

Far on into life, the umbilical cord is still wrapped around our necks, and we’re suffocating.

**

Psychology that makes use of myths and archetypes, particularly Freudian and Jungian psychology, posits as one of its primary characters the dark counterpart of the loving, nurturing Good Mother: the devouring, engulfing annihilator of identity Jung called the “Terrible Mother.” Terrible not necessarily in the colloquial sense of “bad,” but powerful and demonic: a woman driven by fear, anger, and/or insatiable emotional hunger, seeking to overpower and bind her offspring to her forever.

How confusing for a child to be presented with both mothers at the same time. Love becomes confused with control and manipulation; independence and individuation become like a major insurrection. This is actually not too far afield of the characterization of God that Bible-believing Christians are required to worship. I am the personification of love, so it goes. If I love you, I must control you; if you separate from me, in your selfishness, I will pursue you and blot you out. The destruction is not literal in the case of the Mother (as it is with the Father-God), but more of a smothering of the separate self.

Boys are forced, in the process of becoming men, to separate more decisively from Mother than girls are, an initiation that can prove emotionally crippling and affect all of their later relationships…but girls often have what are called “merged attachments” with their mothers that aren’t exactly healthy, either. Mutual over-identification can result in a claustrophobic lack of boundaries and the snuffing of any conflicting differentiating thoughts or desires. (What gets snuffed, and stuffed, however, doesn’t go away — it just winds up in the pressure cooker of repression, slowly turning to rage that may one day blow the lid off.)

While sons may sacrifice relationship to become autonomous adults, daughters will sacrifice becoming autonomous adults to maintain relationship.

**

I’ve been experiencing bouts of rage, and falling into ancient feedback loops in my brain about the futility of trying to live my own life as an adult, ever since my mother joined Facebook and began hovering over my every move. Not only does it cramp my style and inhibit my self-expression, but I’ve been bombarded with messages inquiring about my cryptic status updates and making judgments about my subject matter. She writes on my wall and comments on my posted items. (My friends, in the meantime, fall silent, and the ones from whom I most want to hear say nothing for weeks.) She even downloaded a photo from my page, blew it up, and began obsessing about whether or not I was eating enough. (What doesn’t make sense is that it’s like pulling teeth to get the smallest financial assist from my parents, but she can waste hours and hours of a day fretting herself into a lather about my imaginary starvation.) She hasn’t said anything publicly humiliating, at least not yet. Most of her public comments sound like the quintessential supportive mother. And she does have those Good Mother qualities: when I was completely dependent and undifferentiated, she was completely loving and nurturing.

But she has become, in effect, my stalker.

There are several good reasons why I moved two thousand miles away from my family of origin. One was to stretch the apron strings to the breaking point, which worked, mostly, for a while, at least in terms of minimizing fresh incidents. But now, thanks to the miracle of the Internets, my mother can pick up where she left off twenty years ago, and virtually micromanage me to her heart’s content.

Could I have ignored her friend request?

**

When I was growing up, she would go through my notebooks. This is how she discovered a “dirty” story I had written in the fourth grade with my best friend Maria. That incident prompted the most humiliating lecture of my entire childhood, with my tight-lipped Puritan mother uttering innumerable uncomfortable euphemisms regarding the sacredness of holy matrimony. (Ever have one of those moments where you wished the ground would open up and swallow you whole?) Maria and Judy Blume were almost entirely responsible for my sexual education. If my mother had had her way, I probably would have believed babies grew from a seed in their mommy’s tummy until I was twenty-five and married to some poor God-fearing boy who would have to break the news to me in our post-nuptial motel room.

But I’ll come back to the subject of sex later. My mother’s snooping also enabled her to find the hidden bus ticket I’d bought during my senior year of high school to visit a prospective college a second time. She went into hysterics, as was her wont, thinking I was running away. (I had been planning on telling them at the last minute, with a friend waiting outside to take me to the station; it was the only way I thought I had a chance of pulling it off, in that household.) Ultimately my father decided to let me go, and in the end I wound up attending that college, but ever after I kept all my most personal notes and diaries with me at all times. I carted them to school with me every day, knowing that if I left them at home she would find them and read them.

**

She was always so full of fear, my mother. Maybe it comes naturally with the territory of parenthood, but in her case I believe it was excessive. It could only have been exacerbated by a terrifying belief system in which sinners have to fear falling into the hands of an angry God, and wayward children can wind up in the torturous pits of eternal fire. I took it in through my umbilical cord; I was nourished and weaned on the chemicals of perpetual anxiety. As a child, I was severely punished for going to the corner convenience store alone, and educated with Bible and religious stories about the unrepentant wickedness of the godless world. It’s a wonder I ever learned to go anywhere alone or try anything new. Peril, peril, peril was everywhere; Satan and his demons were hiding in the shrubbery. (Even today my mother is constantly forwarding those viral email alerts about home burglaries and identity thefts and people breaking into your car.)

Ironically, parental overprotectiveness couldn’t prevent me from being molested by a sixteen-year-old neighbor when I was eight. He didn’t do much of anything to me — he mainly wanted me to do something to him — but I never told my parents. For one thing, I didn’t even understand what had just happened, and for another, I didn’t have the language to describe it, thanks to their outstanding sex-ed program. (Parents take note: ignorance does not preserve innocence.)

I have to remind myself how afraid she is, when I get so angry with her…and when I find myself dominated by mostly imagined terrors myself. She seeks to control me when things feel out of control for her. I don’t want to continue that legacy.

**

But I promised we’d come back to the subject of sex, and here we are.

One morning at my grandmother’s house, having stayed overnight on the way to what would be my freshman orientation at my “secular” college (where I’d be on my own), my mother and I were seated at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee. During a lull in the conversation, my mother gazed at me with that solemn, prissy expression that took over the shape of her mouth on those rare occasions she felt compelled to speak about “private” matters, and said, apropos of nothing,“You know, no man will ever satisfy you.”

I just stared, then shrugged, quietly and utterly mortified. What she meant to imply, I’m sure, was that no mere human being could ever fulfill me the way Jesus — if I would just let him — could fulfill my petulant agnostic ass. But her pronouncement had the gravity of a malevolent old wives’ spell. (Later, I would mention this ominous utterance to my more sophisticated and thoroughly atheist best friend from high school, and she would burst out laughing and say, “That doesn’t speak very well of your dad, does it?!!”)

I had no idea then of the difficulties that awaited me. If I had, I would have concluded that I had definitely been cursed. What a damning statement for a mother to make to her sexually emerging daughter! I know it’s superstition to blame those words, and not genetics, for an appallingly (still) misunderstood condition I share with Alfred Kinsey’s wife (one which set him on the path of sex research almost ninety years ago), but a part of me still believes that she and her petty, jealous God were determined to ruin my secular, non-marital sex life. This was meddling of the highest order; even my meddling mother had outdone herself.

The question you probably have reading this is: if it’s genetics, did she suffer from the same painful condition? All I can answer is: it’s likely, although it’s unlikely I’ll ever ask her. (I’ll take a root canal over that conversation any day, thank you very much.) Childbirth could have forced a resolution, but I can’t imagine my mother discussing the problem with anyone, including her doctor (who wouldn’t have understood it anyway). The women in my family are martyrs, gritters of teeth, towel-biters. My ancestors, as the old joke goes, walked ten miles to school in knee-deep snow, and it was uphill both ways.

So her doomsaying may have been based in her own unhappy experience. (It was certainly clear growing up that my parents didn’t have an even remotely passionate relationship). All along, however, that same shred of me that maintains a shred of belief in her angry God felt as if this were some kind of punishment — or perhaps a not-quite-perfect answer to her overbearing prayers to preserve my premarital purity. Eventually I figured out what was wrong (one positive about the advent of the Internet) and how to overcome it without the help of the paleolithic medical establishment…but my pet myth will forever be Anderson’s fairy tale of the little mermaid who, in exchange for legs — and by extension everything between them, with which to love her human beloved — has to endure the sensation of walking on knives for the rest of her physical life. (I wonder if I will ever truly feel like a Real Live Girl, to steal from another children’s story, and not just a duct-taped broken doll cheating her way to legitimacy. A cruel joke on someone practically born chasing after boys — like the clubfooted girl who wants only to be a ballerina. Why would a man like Sonny want a broken doll when he could have his pick of Real Live Girls?) This irrational sense of divine persecution still adds to my self-destructive despair during my more suicidal moments.

I would come back for visits during college and find pamphlets like “The Hound of Heaven” on my nightstand, the message of which was that God would hunt you down, like a tireless bloodhound, no matter what you did. The narrow, exclusive, punitive God she believed in, that is. You could run, but you could never escape.

My invasive, fearful, controlling parent wanted nothing so much as for me to believe in her invasive, fearsome, controlling deity…with Whose help she would seem to have successfully sabotaged my budding sexuality. Is it any wonder my shaky twenty-three-year-old self had to get as far away from her as possible? I broke and ran. The Good Daughter sacrificed relationship for the sake of self-preservation.

Unfortunately, I had internalized them both.

**

“And every girl I go out with becomes my mother in the end,” Andy moans, his voice cracking with despair. My fear isn’t of dating my mother, it’s of becoming her. I have a horror of driving away the hapless objects of my affections with that same hungry, devouring, engulfing energy, that fearfulness that becomes controlling, the I-love-you that becomes I-annihilate-you. Psychologically speaking, coming from where I come from, I honestly don’t understand how any man could want to have sexual relations with a woman. How could she not remind him of the terrible Mother-Destroyer who could swallow him up forever in her ravenous maw? (Perhaps you gentlemen can enlighten me.)

I wonder sometimes, too, if my exercises in supernatural communication and “manifestation” aren’t as unwelcome, unfair, and controlling a psychic invasion as my mother’s fervent prayers and intentions for her Prodigal child’s return. Or as unnerving as when she tells me she had a sense that I was crying, shortly after one of my dark nights of the soul. I shudder; it’s like having her reading my notebooks again. Even on the spiritual plane, it seems I can’t escape her omnipresent tentacles.

I realize, in my more lucid moments, that she’s simply driven by a natural desire for love and connection, gone dysfunctional and somewhat mad with unaddressed need. And perhaps the unique position of mother as germinator and source instills a built-in sense of ownership and entitlement: I made you, therefore you are mine. Her God, after all, created us to alleviate his own boredom.

But I once joked with a friend that my romantic tendency is to respond to a snowball with an avalanche, overwhelming constitutionally wary males of the species with a glut of sudden emotion. I become fearful; I obsess; I’m jealous. Not unlike my mother and her humanly insecure God. I have my own stalker tendencies, and have been known to Google like a private investigator. I’m not proud of this. It’s constant work, unpacking my own fears, owning my own projections, asking myself why I need to live through someone else. As I said, I understand that we seek to control others when things feel frighteningly out of control for us, and I don’t want to continue that legacy.

But I have no road map for the alternative. I wonder these days if I err too much on the side of caution, reining myself in when I should act. Then again, perhaps action would be just another symptom of my twisted Mother pathology…pursuing at all costs, when the other just wants to be let be. I sincerely don’t know.

What I do know is that the person I most want to hear from doesn’t communicate with me on Facebook (or elsewhere) anymore, while my mother has practically hijacked my homepage. It’s like a virtual drama by a millennial Jean-Paul Sartre, a No Exit of social networking. Hell as your worst online nightmare.

Having written this post to exorcise intolerable feelings and restore my own sanity, I can see the humor in it. It’s actually quite hilarious. As is that insane Police song. A recent visitor to this blog was convinced I was writing a tragicomic novel…and maybe that’s what my life is. My very own Confederacy of Dunces. Or maybe a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman.

I open the floor to you, friends: what should I call it? Mamma Mia is taken.

**

I guess I could have braved Sonny’s Super Bowl party, to which I was issued a Facebook invitation — along with 200 of his closest friends — but I feared I’d be sharing him with more than just the Steelers and the Cardinals. I didn’t want to take the risk of seeing him, for instance, lounging on the couch with an arm draped around the diffident NYU art student. I wrote a fine piece on jealousy a few posts back, but the truth is that I know this sensation too well: that ice-cold thunderbolt that strikes the innermost bowels, followed by an instantaneous flush of scalding shame that reaches all the way to the tips of the ears. That feeling that one has no right to even exist, much less to want what one wants so badly. To ask for anything at all would be unthinkable, now. No, no, the only thing to do is to flee and to hide — to hide one’s shameful, unwanted self from the real or imaginary judges of one’s embarrassing inadequacy.

Those who are either blissfully free or unaware of this feeling in themselves always look at me in disbelief when I express my fears — what’s the big deal about going to a fricking party? I don’t think they’d be too understanding if I told them that Sonny actually called me the week before last, and that I was too paralyzed to pick up the phone. It’s real time, you hear me, real time! an inner voice was screaming at me as the phone rang, like Angela Bassett in one of my favorite movies trying to get the leading man to live in the present. But I’ll say more about that shortly. My own writing could be seen as analogous to that film’s fictional invention, “playback” — a safe way to experience life in the past tense, a once-removed refuge from scary real-time reality. I won’t deal with this now; I’ll write about it later! Margaret Atwood put this preference for art over life in perspective with the brilliant lines

Please die I said
so I can write about it

But for me the retreat from “real time” always comes down to fear. (In my defense, I did call Sonny back after a while, and got his voice mail.) I’m like a dog that expects a vicious kick at every turn. This lead-heaviness that lives in my chest, the vast dimensions of the raw-edged pain I seem to lug along with every step…I have never been quite able to totally pinpoint how familial misunderstandings, peer rejections, and disappointed love alone could create such extensive and persistent trauma — wreckage you might only expect to see if you could take emotional X-rays of the hearts of war refugees. Am I really that much more sensitive than other people? Or did I come in with this?

**

“Fall into your heart,” my coach friend instructed me, to take my focus out of my endlessly ruminating brain, to try to get me to let go of what he says are limiting beliefs.

It’s always hard to move my awareness into a place that hurts so damn much most of the time — the request itself seems cruel — but I did. He asked me to imagine what it would feel like to receive everything I ever wanted. Such as: ample compensation for work I love to do…freedom from debt and want…enough of everything…plenty of money…plenty, perhaps, of Sonny.

My upper ribs feeling almost unbearably sore, I started to think about how that might entail feelings of joy and contentment…right? But there I was thinking again — not feeling. I was thinking in terms of “shoulds,” trying to conjure up the right emotion. I couldn’t feel anything, frankly, but that obstinate, accursed, age-old weight crushing my lungs, constricting my breath, making me ache.

I knew the answer, the feeling — I just didn’t know I knew it.

It came to me later that evening. It was right there in “Demolishing History,” the feeling I got watching Obama on Election Night:

…the sweet agony of relaxing the heart muscle into receiving kindness and respect after countless humiliations and cruelties have left it armored and tight…the raw, painful reawakening of joy after thousands upon thousands of deadening disappointments. You receive kisses where you were braced for blows; bread where you expected a stone.

I remembered, because I had actually felt this on a couple of occasions before.

**

Once was when, unemployed and in a panic over money, I received a notification in the mail that I had just won $45,000 in a sweepstakes, and I believed it. I sat down and sobbed for twenty minutes out of pure relief, thinking that a lifetime of poverty and struggle and debt might finally be coming to an end. (Only when I called the number and heard about the money transfer I’d be required to make did I realize I was being scammed.)

Another time was when I was awaiting the reply to a veritable dissertation of an email I had sent to our football-loving friend. As I’ve done so many times in my life, I had poured out my heart to him in writing, out of whatever foolhardy personal necessity compels me to fly in the face of all common sense. When his response finally showed up, bold black in my inbox, I was unable to open it for nearly an hour — instead washing all the dishes in my sink with trembling hands, sitting and chanting a comforting mantra on my bed, rocking, nearly crying, terrified of the killing words of men that can land like atom bombs in your soft center. I had heard so many variations of “I don’t know what you want from me (but you’re not going to get it)” and “I never asked for any of this” and “I’m sorry, but…” that I didn’t know if I could survive even one more of the same. (Icy thunderbolt, flash burn.)

I opened it. I love the email, it said. He promised to write more soon.

I started to laugh. I started to cry. I shook. I lay down on the bed and laugh-cried hysterically for over half an hour, as if thirty-eight years of unbearable tightness and tension, the constant bracing for more merciless blows, were being shaken loose from my heart and my body in thirty-eight minutes of unprecedented release. It was like a reprieve from execution. More than that, he loved what I had to say. I almost couldn’t handle that much grace.

And you wonder why Sonny is so dear to me.

**

“Fall into your heart” got “Fall in the Light” going through my head — what was probably my favorite track on one of my favorite movie soundtracks from one of my favorite big-budget Hollywood movies. I dug out the CD again the other day to listen, and then decided to rent the movie again. The song, as it so happens, coincides with a moment not too different from the one I’m describing.

Strange Days is, in my opinion, the best thing James Cameron (Mr. Terminator and Titanic) ever did, but it was also, unfortunately, one of his biggest box-office flops. It was one of those stories that seized me with the compelling potency of personally relevant mythology…a tarnished hero’s journey that contains within it a complementary heroine’s journey, and also addresses a much larger challenge at the heart of our collective existence. It’s dark, and far more violent than I usually like, but sometimes I’ll stomach scenes I’d otherwise avoid (like the brutal rape and murder of a prostitute) when the overall project is worthwhile.

The 1995 film, which boasted top actors like Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, and Vincent D’Onofrio, as well as inveterate character actors like Tom Sizemore and William Fichtner (not to mention a typecast Juliette Lewis), is set in a dystopian Los Angeles not unlike the lawless, chaotic, polluted L.A. of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, on the eve of the year 2000. Fiennes plays our flawed hero Lenny Nero (doing his best to downplay his scruffy, unwashed beauty in sleazy pimp shirts and leather pants), who fiddles while L.A. burns. A former vice cop, Lenny now makes a living selling “playback” clips on the black market, addictive slices of virtual reality that allow the “wired” person to experience someone else’s pre-recorded experiences within their own brains, as if firsthand, but without the attendant risk. He is himself addicted to clips from his own past, clips featuring his cherished ex-girlfriend Faith.

As the ironically named Faith, Juliette Lewis is poledancer-perfect as the kind of weak, fickle, hopelessly lost white-trash princess with bee-stung lips that well-meaning men have been trying to rescue from time immemorial. And Lenny is, at heart, a well-meaning man, a “goofball romantic” swimming around in the big toilet bowl of the underworld, as his good friend Lornette “Mace” Mason puts it. Angela Bassett plays Mace, a limouisine driver and bodyguard as hardworking and honest as her surname and as tough as her nickname. She’s the film’s moral center, a literal mother (she has a young son), the mature feminine archetype. It becomes apparent over time that she loves Lenny, despite his criminal status as a playback dealer and his obsession with Faith — but throughout the movie she has to play the role of the desexualized Sidekick, what Hollywood typically makes of African-Americans in movies with predominantly white leads. “You look good in that dress,” says Lenny at one point, adding, jokingly, “I mean, better than I would.” At least initially, it is she who comes to his rescue, metaphorically slaying the dragons who want him injured or dead.

Mythically speaking, if Lenny is a sort of Orpheus, wending his way through a Hades of burned-out cars and warehouse fetish clubs guarded by violent thugs to retrieve a sullen and resistant Eurydice, Mace may be Ariadne, holding out to his Theseus a thread to help him find his way out of an increasingly dangerous labyrinth — and being set up for abandonment. (I’m afraid I know that myth all too well.)

**

But here I must point out that the mainstream film industry is still pretty cowardly about interracial romance onscreen (Spike Lee and other relative outsiders notwithstanding). And no, I don’t count as some kind of landmark the success of that outrageous Halle Berry exploitation fantasy known as Monster’s Ball, which was unanimously praised by white male film reviewers everywhere, and universally despised by every African-American I know. (Way to not get it, Hollywood.)

Yet this movie does seem to be trying to tackle racial tension head-on. The plot pivots upon the execution-style murder of a prominent rapper and social activist known as Jericho One, which investigators blame (too easily) on gang violence. The film particularly distinguishes itself in its incidental details, like convincing fragments of the slain artist’s music videos caught on background TVs — fragments that possess authentic force and power. Cameron gives the character aggressive words and images that are unflinching in their Farrakhan-esque assault on the status quo. The soundtrack, too, atypically represents unapologetic black rage, with fictional band Strange Fruit magnificently howling “No white clouds in my blue sky!” and Me Phi Me (featuring Jericho One) accusing “Did you steal the land that you’re on?/And is my red brother nearly gone?/Took my ancestors from their homes!/Built your fucking nation on their bones!”

It really is a great soundtrack. The Deep Forest and Lords of Acid tracks sound a little dated now, but Skunk Anansie’s ferocious punk-metal numbers still blow the roof off (their badass lead singer was a bald black Englishwoman wearing tribal face paint), and even Juliette Lewis’s off-key caterwauling on a great P.J. Harvey song has its charm. Tricky is still trippy, and Kate Gibson glides honey-voiced through Leonard Cohen on accordion accompaniment.

But as I mentioned, “Fall in the Light” is my favorite. Graeme Revell, master of the atmospheric movie soundtrack (he scored “Until the End of the World,” among other things), uses Lori Carson‘s ethereal vocals over a dreamy shuffle to create a hypnotic sonic experience of transcendence. I used to get tears in my eyes at the bridge, where she sings

sweet, how it falls into place
sun through the haze
doesn’t it feel a little like grace?

There, as the music swells gently, just before the final verse, ascendant synthesized strings enter from below to embrace and lift you up on a wave of sound; you can feel the rising, as if some mysterious force were spreading your long-hidden, secret wings in spite of yourself. And you rise, rise, rise…

The first thirty times or so, I got goosebumps; sometimes I still do.

**

But to return to the film…during the last remaining minutes of 1999, in downtown L.A. amid wall-to-wall people and police in riot gear, the perpetrators are exposed, Lenny sees Faith for what she is, false friends literally fall away, and perplexing plot elements are solved — but not before a near race riot (reminiscent of Rodney King) and some bloody fights-to-the-death. There are at least three false endings (I love it when filmmakers keep you guessing), including the last one, where an exhausted and battered Lenny and Mace go their separate ways — she headed directly for the police station for questioning, and he headed in an ambulance for the hospital.

It seems only natural, in a typical Hollywood action film, for the black Sidekick to get in one vehicle and the white Protagonist to head for another, as the celebratory New Year’s crowds cheer and hug and kiss and confetti swirls around them. The striking of midnight is a beautiful, unexpectedly peaceful moment; the world doesn’t end, the confetti falls gently like snow, the background noise goes quiet, and we see a woman in a tiara embracing a National Guardsman, his gun lowered. But Mace’s face looks weary and resigned, watching Lenny walk away with a medic, and as she gets into the back of the squad car, I feel for her aloneness and her unreturned affections; this is the way my stories always end, too.

But wait (huge spoiler alert)! As the car slowly rolls through the exultant throng, the viewer’s eye is suddenly drawn to a figure, left of center, that seems to come out of nowhere, groping its way along the slow-moving chain of police cars. It’s Lenny, bloody and limping, palm thumping against the squad car window.

He pulls Mace decisively out of the back seat with his good arm, and they stand facing each other without speaking. Fortunately, these are some of the best actors around, so they don’t need words — Fiennes’ Lenny bleeds tenderness from his lovely eyes, and Bassett’s expression melts from confusion to one of a proud, almost regal sensuality. Mace always knew she was the real woman, even if he didn’t. It’s in this moment/hold on/when everything has come apart… Lori Carson’s voice lilts gently. It’s in this moment/right now/when it can come together…

**

The first time I saw their passionate, film-ending kiss was one of the most gratifying moments in my long history of moviegoing. Suddenly the Sidekick becomes the Leading Lady, as she always should have been. This long-suffering, loyal, strong, beautiful, incredible woman is finally seen by the man she loves. Identifying with the overlooked and underappreciated Mace, I felt my tightly bound heart loosening, expanding, with that painfully sweet relief.

But it was so much bigger than me, at the same time: it was a moment of hope that hinted at what we as Americans might be able to achieve together (perhaps in only another decade). Because after all of the preceding story’s racial strife and violence and darkness and brutality and chaos and trauma, we, the audience, find ourselves standing there with Mace and Lenny, on the cusp of a new millennium, man and woman, black and white, friends and equals, in a moment of love requited at long last. Tears streamed down my cheeks with an intimation of that feeling I would have one day, Election Day.

**

Here the camera begins to lift above Lenny and Mace, losing them in the happy, seething crowd, the crescendo of “Fall in the Light” lifting us with it into the streamer-laced sky, and as the music begins to ebb away we hear Carson’s angelic murmurs…Hold on…hold on…

Her last line before the fadeout is a whisper: you catch me.

Then, as necessity dawns, dread. Pulse-quickening fear. Ripples of anxiety burning through my gut like a sulphurous acid. What will I do today? What will I do tomorrow? How will I live? And what, exactly, do I have to live for?

I want to go back to sleep, but the adrenaline won’t let me relax. My racing thoughts are running a familiar track. Going over and over the abysmal loop about the little girl whose dreams never seemed to come true, who grew old alone, destitute, scarcely having lived life, as the world’s ecosystem and economy disintegrated around her.

At that point the only course of action seems clear. And it ain’t sending out résumés.

**

49:49:2. These numbers popped into my head the other day. My coach friend has pressed me to talk about my “dreams,” has encouraged me to run wild with my imagination, and I’ve had trouble explaining why this prodding feels so cruel to me. I might elaborate now that my life often seems to me to have consisted of 49 percent daydreams, 49 percent suffering, and 2 percent actual living.

You see, from the time I was a very young child, I have always been able to vividly imagine the way I would like things to be. And I typically suffered (from feelings ranging in intensity from mere disappointment to heartbreak and total despair) when what actually happened around me — nearly all of the time — was radically different from what I envisioned. (Woody Allen dealt with this conflict between imagination and reality brilliantly in The Purple Rose of Cairo.) Those rare times when there was a match, or more accurately a near-match, between what I wanted and what really occurred, make up the other 2 percent. Some might call me lucky for ever hitting that 2 percent. Some might say, “Welcome to the real world, sweetheart!” Then there are those who would fault me, like the Christians with their mustard seeds, for not having faith enough.

I wonder, in response: how can a young child who believes in Santa Claus and the resurrection not have faith enough?

So I can’t help but react viscerally when asked about my dreams. Especially at times like these, when everyone wants to know what I intend to do with my life. If I could even tell you, friends, would it matter? At 41, is the question even still relevant?

All this historic angst resurfaces when the routines and relationships and duties that have defined me and paid my way for a time are completely stripped away, and I’m left with the pressing immediate question of survival — but also the perennial (and still unresolved) question of life purpose. While the clock keeps ticking.

**

“Unknown” called again on my cell yesterday. “Unknown” has been calling me a lot lately.

If I pick up, I know I’ll most likely hear Officer Frank Lipinsky from the Fraternal Order of Police or Sargeant George Dodd from Disabled Veterans of America or Something Somebody Something from the Society for Blind Homeless Mormon Puppies making a persistent guilt appeal to me for money I don’t have.

If I don’t pick up, I can pretend it’s Sonny (to borrow an old alias of his), calling to see how I’m doing, if I’m okay, if I want to meet somewhere. He’s blocked his number because he’s not completely sure he’ll be ready to talk to me if I pick up. He didn’t respond electronically, after all, when I replied to his brief expression of concern with a heartfelt plea to stay connected.

So I don’t pick up. As usual, there’s no message.

You see how my imagination works?

**

I honestly don’t know what I mean to this man, now, if I mean much of anything to him anymore. I only know what he’s meant to me, and if you’ve been reading me attentively for a while, I don’t have to tell you. He did liberate himself, at last, from the clutches of one of those Fascinating Women who look supermodel-pretty from a short distance, but when you get close to them you see the perpetual discontent drawing down the corners of their mouths (rendering them oddly plain), and hear the chronic disapproval dripping from their voices. I extended her the benefit of the doubt way past its expiration date because I honestly believed she was contributing to Sonny’s happiness.

When it’s quiet at night I think I can hear the dull thwack of him rebounding off of half a dozen headboards around the city. I know the opportunities are there, attractive and ruby-ripe for the picking, and he’s definitely got the appetite (as well as some of the attributes) of a young Warren Beatty. Now that he doesn’t have to behave, he’ll probably be making up for lost time. (I once likened his pleasure-loving nature to that of a five-year-old boy left alone with a tub of ice cream.)

It’s all right, folks; I don’t own him. I know I’ve never had any claim to him in the slightest. None of us ever really do, even if we decide to play by the rules and stand up in front of a person of the cloth or the law and repeat after him or her. We made that stuff up to create a safe boundary, to protect our vulnerability, to not have to relive the irrecoverable losses of our helpless childhoods. The fact is that people are born free, and if what they really need to do isn’t what we would have them do…well, if we love them enough to want them to follow their bliss, we’ve got to let them go. (Once in a while, as happened for the fortunate Joseph Campbell and his wife, two people decide that being together is folllowing their bliss.) From almost the very beginning, three years ago, I knew I’d found a soul brother I would have to wish the best, even if he wound up breaking my heart into a million bleeding pieces.

You may not want me to feel the way I do about Sonny, either, but that’s what I’ve elected to do with my freedom.

**

A friend and I go to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Brad Pitt, comely as he is, has never been my favorite actor, but the film is deeply affecting because it’s essentially about change, and, ultimately, loss.

The title character, a man aging in reverse, weathers everything that happens to him with a sort of melancholy equanimity. Raised in a home for the elderly, he becomes used to seeing his companions vanish and new ones take their place. When Benjamin, in his wizened early twenties, finally comes to know the father who abandoned him at birth, he brings the fatally ill man out to the lake where he was happiest. One of the film’s most memorable quotes occurs as son and dying father watch the sun rise over the lake: “You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went, you can swear and curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.”

I don’t know about you, but at twice his age I’m still having trouble with that.

Benjamin knows, too, when to exit stage right, when his lifelong love Daisy is obviously not open to being with him — first at a smoky, boozy dancers’ after-show party in New York City where she is surrounded by male admirers (he walks away), and later after a crippling injury in Paris robs her of her livelihood and her pride (she sends him away).

Eventually they will “meet in the middle,” when he has grown substantially younger physically and she has grown substantially older emotionally. Of course Benjamin has no way of knowing if their time will ever come; that’s one thing that makes his surrender to the inexorable conditions of the present all the more admirable.

I can let my time at the studio go, the way Benjamin let his father go: mad as a mad dog at the way things went, swearing and cursing the fates, yet knowing when the end is the end.

But Sonny…I can’t go there. Not now. I can only hope for Benjamin’s equanimity, the gracious exit stage right after seeing the crowded room and the competition (and, perhaps, the injury). The time isn’t right; we aren’t welcome.

Maybe someday.

**

Like Benjamin, my life’s trajectory has been shaped more by haphazard coincidences and personal connections than by some grand overarching plan. His early years were played out on small stages: a house, a tugboat, a hotel — while mine were equally circumscribed by classrooms, kitchens, bookstores, and coffeeshops. I was 38 when I left the country for the first time and traveled to Italy. (That was my “2 percent“ year, the year of exceptions, the year I met Sonny. I could write an entire post on that spring, broad and sunny with possibility like the early years of life.) I honestly can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone who knows exactly what she wants to become from childhood and spends her life pursuing that path. My ideas kept changing: today, a nurse; tomorrow, an artist; the day after, a veterinarian; or, on second thought, maybe an actress; a mother; a pilot; a poet.

The only constants along the way, truthfully, were a burning desire for approval, and an even fiercer desire to be loved by those who elicited my own affections.

Which is funny, really, given the way things have turned out. As if everything that has happened since was meant to teach me that in order to maintain my integrity I might have to relinquish those very fundamental desires. Just as an example, I can introduce you to a few people at my former job who definitely don’t approve of me (!), but I didn’t submit to their bullying in order to be liked — did I?!

As for the second part…well, I’ve discovered along the way that it’s true what the otherwise astringent Christian mystic Anthony DeMello postulated: that the human spirit needs to love more than it needs to be loved. (He identified our two basic existential needs as to love and to be free.) For sure, not getting what you were after from the people you think you love will inevitably teach you the meaning of “unconditional.”

**

A fairly random, heart-driven existence, with no great accomplishments to cite: this has been my résumé, much like that of the curious Mr. Button. I only wish that I were aging in reverse right now. My chronic pain has been intensifying recently, perhaps as a response to all the new stresses. A friend of a friend who does Network Spinal Analysis has just told me that I’ve stored multiple traumas, both physical and emotional, in my spine, and that the blockages are cutting off my healthy nervous system functioning. (This is also, apparently, the reason why I’ve spent so much time in the overstimulated state of fight-or-flight.) It could be treated, if I had several hundred dollars to spend, but right now I’m more likely to be treating every dollar like a plank in my life raft, and seeing what I can cut out of my grocery bill.

The uncertainty and anxiety of poverty and unemployment in dismal economic times, the specter of encroaching physical breakdown and even disability, the prospect of being forced to give up my home and return to the bleak Northeast to live stifled within my relatives’ claustrophobic closet of millennial Puritanism… all of these things have driven me, in recent days, to the handrail of George Bailey’s bridge, staring at the water, wild-eyed. (Where’s that paunchy, bulb-nosed angel when you need him?)

**

Which is where we began. TAKAHO, my best friend from college always says: Tie A Knot And Hang On. I know my body can’t withstand another bruising stint in food service. The prospect of cubicles and fluorescents and sales calls gives me waves of existential nausea. I don’t even know whether I should put the yoga studio on my résumé, or how to talk about what happened there. The mere thought of paging or clicking through classifieds and job boards, attempting to find a round hole I can try to force my square peg into, is enough to make me break into a sweat.

The world of cold, hard survival is no place for choosy daydreamers.

And yet…the little girl still daydreams. Of kindred spirits and of giving help, of creating, of contributing, of having enough.

What she needs right now, frankly, is a miracle.

**

Sonny once wrote to me, “ask and you shall receive” — the irony of which was utterly lost on him. It’s a thing I have only found true, myself, that lucky 2 percent of the time. It’s hard to hear that particular Bible verse quoted, at any rate, when part of you is convinced Jesus fast-forwarded through all your fervent, begging childhood messages, including that one about Grandma’s cancer. Nevertheless, like those raving Secret people, I try to visualize the checks coming in (from where?) and to imagine fortuitous meetings and life-altering chance encounters. We can’t all be Forrest Gump, but poet David Whyte has mapped his life that way in the past, and he’s not exactly a member of the rah-rah manifestation crowd. The angel intervened when George Bailey was at the end of his rope and out of ideas (except for a very permanent solution to a temporary problem). If ever I needed a freakish coincidence, the time is now.

So I’ll refrain from drinking bleach for the moment, and let myself surrender and fall. As if there really are forces working in my favor. Even if the forces amount to nothing more than my belief that forces are working in my favor. I just don’t know. Maybe, sometimes, you simply have to trust that the net will appear.

As Benjamin’s adoptive mother Queenie was fond of saying, you never know what’s comin’ for you.

*

From the time I was a wee slip of a girl, I’ve suffered from searing jealousies so powerful they seemed to bring with them the threat of annihilation. Perhaps there was originally an instinctual element at play: to be neglected or forgotten by one’s caretakers as a completely dependent child, after all, can mean one really doesn’t survive. The underlying fear, anyway, feels that deep and primal. It’s not just run-of-the-mill fear, it’s visceral terror. Inspiring some uneasy nausea to boot. Over this nearly intolerable baseline emotion there’s an equally painful acquired overlay of shame, of self-blame: Why am I not deserving? What fatal flaw do I have that prevents me from mattering?

I can look over my elementary and secondary school years and see how having these emotions percolating in my young psyche created an infinite regress of reactivity, a heightened propensity to take every instance (and later every intimation) of not being the chosen one as a fundamental threat as well as a core criticism. Having my little playmate Caitlin decide she wanted to play with Laura, for instance, rather than with me, felt tantamount at the time to taking out a big eraser and rubbing me off the planet. And that barely even approaches the degree of pain and humiliation I experienced in my teens when my friend Katie was perennially preferred to me by our clean-cut church cohorts. So when my first love started spending quality time with one of my best friends, I looked the other way — dreading but at the same time refusing to entertain the worst. The mere thought was intolerable to me. Of course the inevitable happened, anyway, and I was in such an agony and felt so worthless I wanted to throw myself in the river and drown.

Time and time again I found myself confronting these same overpowering emotions as an adult. Granted, I could have decided to actively avoid situations and people that would bring them up; this is often considered the healthy thing to do. Find friends and lovers who don’t evoke your jealousies or will never do anything that threatens your sense of security. This is what my mother did, I think, in marrying my father. She wanted none of the drama of her parents’ endlessly painful marriage; she longed for safety, and she found it in a partner who would never even do anything unpredictable.

But transcendence can’t come from avoidance. Safety doesn’t necessarily bring about growth. My soul, at least, knew what it wanted. It wanted to face down and even befriend its dreadful green-eyed monster, not lock it in the closet.

I didn’t consciously figure this out until recently. For a long time I blamed myself (as is the trend) for gravitating toward everything and everyone “wrong.” When in fact everything was all right.
*

“If you do not love too much, you do not love enough,” said Blaise Pascal (or so quoth Rob Brezsny), a man so sour on human relations I would have thought him incapable of making such a statement. Women Who Love Too Much: that was a bestseller by Robin Norwood full of cautionary finger-wagging about catering to The Wrong Men. What does it mean to love too much? And are these two talking about the same thing?

I doubt it. Obsessive behavior, groveling, desperation, and tolerance of abuse may be considered manifestations of “love,” as well as misguided efforts to change the other person, but I don’t think that’s what Pascal was talking about. No, it’s something other than the compulsive enslavement to one’s own unresolved emotional dramas and residue that can act as the golden thread, leading one out of the labyrinth of neurosis.

But it takes spools and spools of it.

Byron Katie spins out the gold simply and beautifully in one of her workshops with a participant upset by the interest the man she’s been dating has in another woman.

*

Woman: I want Roger to break up with Francesca…
Katie: Is that true? Go there (laughs). Just a question.
Woman: (Pause) I don’t know.
Katie: Do you care about him?
Woman: (Long pause) Only if he does what I want. (Audience laughter; Katie and the woman start laughing too)
Katie: Is it beginning to make sense why he wants another relationship? (Everyone laughs uproariously)
Woman: (Laughing) No!
Katie: (Laughing) Not at all! You want him to break up with this woman. Is that true? Is that what you want?
Woman: No…I don’t think so.
Katie: So how do you react when you pretend to believe that thought?
Woman: Um…pretty hysterically, pretty dramatically.
Kate: Isn’t it juicy? Don’t you love it? (They laugh)
…

Woman: Roger shouldn’t fall in love with another woman….
Katie: Is that true?
Woman: (Long pause) Mmm…that’s a hard one…(sighs)..God…
Katie: He shouldn’t fall in love with another woman. Can you really know that that’s true?
Woman: No.
Katie: So how do react when you believe that thought?
Woman: Oh…God…I want to kill him. I want to kill myself, actually. (Starts crying softly.)
Katie: (Gently) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really understand this. You know, that’s why I’m a lover of what-is. It’s so painful when I’m not. How do I know he should fall in love with someone else? He does if he does. There’s nothing we can do about it. It is what it is. And where the pain really comes in is, we’re all lovers of reality, we’re just not aware of it yet. We want what is. And the term is unconditional love, you know. I call it just “sanity.”

*
We tell tales, we write stories (often based on our past), and leave out at least half the truth. Radical honesty like Katie’s dismantles that frame, dissipates the plot, allows us to see without those superimposed interpretations. Can we really say we know what’s best? Would we honestly want someone to be with us if it weren’t the right thing for them, or for us?

Freed up, we become more generous with each other. We recover that initial “too-much” love that led us into a full confrontation with our vulnerabilities.

*

When you dive fully into a feeling that’s unpleasant and fear-based, like jealousy, surrendering to the waves, at first it seems like a vast ocean that will drown you. Who would want to swim in that cold, cold water?
‘
But when you don’t actually die, you become curious: what is this I’m feeling, and where did it come from? The emotional reaction always has, for me, had its source in those vulnerabilities from a much earlier time — episodes of humiliation or of being left out (e.g. by Caitlin). Once I’ve really let myself feel the original dramas, the ancient terror and the shame, I find that the present becomes much less overwhelming and much clearer. Now is not then, and you are not my daddy. What I am so desperate for is back there, on the playground. The nightmare fades in the light of day, and I see you for the first time.

Taking the emotional charge off whatever is happening, de-personalizing it, I can look at everyone involved as themselves rather than as characters in my tragic story. I can better see their own fears and their own needs, and feel compassion toward their own situations. Seeing them, I can relate to them as something other than my highly charged and unresolved projections.

Like anyone, they just want happiness, after all, an end to fear, and to be loved. Single mothers may worry whether they’ll be able to provide for their children, and if they’ll grow old alone. Other women may struggle with their weight and a cultural image of beauty that largely excludes them. Still others may hide beneath independence and a brassy exterior a deep woundedness. A man, for his part, may fear for his freedom and yearn for a greater purpose — unsure, perhaps, what any further entanglements will cost him (emotionally and otherwise) and whether he is viewed as a mere commodity.

Relieved of my intense vulnerability, I find that I want them all to be happy, not to be afraid, and to feel loved.

I want the man to feel free…as free as my overwhelming love for him is. I want him to live his adventure, whether or not I ever get to caress his beautiful loins again. How do I know he should fall in love with someone else? He does if he does. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can only bless him, and wish for the best outcome for everyone. This “sublime generosity” (Rumi) wells me up until I’m full from the inside out.

The next time I dive into jealousy, I find that I am only swimming in a pond.

*
The common wisdom is to contract rather than to expand, to protect against further triggering of old pain. Reject those who seem so much as inclined to reject you. Don’t go there! Don’t let it happen again! But I consider turning around and walking toward my demons to be a spiritual practice. Once again I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke:

And if we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

My green-eyed monster is only a very scared and hurt little girl inside me who needs my love and compassion. And the wolves and sirens and pirates that appear to threaten me in others are, at heart, just other small girls and boys trying to find their way the best way they know how. There is no dragon. There are no bad guys. There is only us.

Happy New Year, everyone. May you transform all your dragons.

**

This week an older woman friend, who represents for me that unconditionally loving, Divine-mother figure we all secretly long for, was trying to recall the ending lines from David Whyte’s poem “Sweet Darkness.” She intended to cite them in reference to the distress I was feeling at my job.

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

What she had meant to communicate, she explained once we had found them, was actually something more along the lines of anything or anyone that makes you feel small is too small for you. I had been brimming with practical suggestions regarding the latest problem at work, but my immediate superiors seemed to be more or less ignoring my impassioned input. I even got into an argument with one of my managers, who was quick to put me back in my “place.” So I did feel minimized. And angry. I fretted that if I were in her shoes, I would be doing things quite differently. I started playing armchair CEO, mentally cataloguing all the things I thought she and the rest of the management were doing wrong. Believe me, they were legion.

Until, that is, I had the thought — so what if I were in charge here? With the multitude of responsibilities that entails? Would I really be prepared to take it all on? Would I want to? Would I put in long hours, and sacrifice my evenings and weekends, my sleepy Saturday afternoons writing at the coffeehouse? I really went there for a minute and imagined it. And I had to admit to myself, with brutal honesty: I am, in all probability, too lazy to manage a company. I love my down time and my freedom. I like being able to leave my responsibilities at the door. And as much as I dislike being bossed, I don’t really want to boss anyone else, either.

With those thoughts, my righteous indignation and bitter grievances dissipated like a vapor. Telling the whole truth can do that.

Why was I complaining? I had in all likelihood dodged a bullet, by my own admission.

It was a revelation.

**

But this same sort of radical truth-telling was long overdue in another area of my life that is even more fraught with stressful feelings and grievances and always has been. The first admission led naturally to the second — that I am likewise unprepared (and dishonest) when it comes to a certain kind of relationship I generally don’t have to manage, either. This particular brand of unpreparedness isn’t much talked about, but I suspect it may be more widespread than anyone thinks. Of course, I can only speak for myself, and project upon famous dead people who aren’t around to defend themselves.

But let me back up and tell you a story I could call “Playing Chicken with Damien Moreau.” (That’s not his real name; all names on this blog have been changed to protect the innocent or guilty.) Damien was a young man Destined for Greatness at my gargantuan and cutthroat Boston-area high school. Before graduation he was already a playwright, actor, director, award-winning writer, and world traveler, a Harvard-bound skate punk who spoke three languages and penned spare, melancholy prose. I had never paid much attention to this skinny kid with a Gallic nose until we shared a homeroom senior year. I can’t even tell you what first happened to plunge me into a life-altering, poetry-inducing infatuated madness (an obsession I have to credit for honing my writing skills) other than a taste of his dark, Beat-influenced, existentialist universe, following closely upon the loss of my sunny Christian one. Damien visited extremes that none of the good churchgoing boys I’d ever known would dare set foot in. (Since then I’ve always seemed to fall hardest for men who, like Dostoevsky’s Karamazovs, are as prodigious in their breadth of spirit as they are in their iniquities. But I could write a whole other post on that.) His ideas, perspectives, and behaviors were edgy, anarchic, and colored by a postmodern bleakness. He became my new hero, and the arbiter of everything worth knowing.

In short, I made a god of him.

And wrote a sort of prayer, of both praise and supplication, in pencil, on college-ruled paper, which I passed to him after English class. My heart was hammering wildly in my throat. The effect of this act on my digestion was so dramatic that I skipped the rest of my classes that day, lying on the couch in the literary magazine office one door down from the girls’ room. I had never felt more exhiliratingly alive, or more excruciatingly vulnerable. I was so terrified by what I’d done that I couldn’t even imagine encountering Damien again.

He didn’t come to homeroom the next morning. Or the next. When he finally appeared in English class, just before the bell, I could barely look at him, and felt as if I would faint. When I did dare to glance his way, and caught his eye, he gave me a sort of Mona Lisa smile. I felt a current like a thunderbolt pass through my entire body. Still viscerally terrified, but jazzed and emboldened by the electric jolt, I caught up to him after class and asked him what he thought about my note. “I don’t know…I don’t know…” he muttered, hurrying away, not looking at me. “I am not competent.”

Which was a hell of a thing for Damien Moreau to say. (Not to mention an exceedingly gracious thing, especially seeing as he happened to be the highly ungracious age of seventeen. Bless his punk little heart.)

What I could never quite admit to myself is that in addition to a gigantic letdown, I felt relief. It really was something like a game of Chicken, though I didn’t see it that way at the time. There I was, rushing headlong like a headbanger’s Camaro toward poor ambushed Damien, propelled recklessly by my 275-horsepower adolescent passion, yet with a dread fear of actually colliding. And he swerved out of the way first. He got to be the “chicken,” and I got to walk away feeling like the crazy-brave one.

But what would I have done if he hadn’t “swerved?”

**

No, Damien wasn’t the only one who felt incompetent. Let me let you in on a little secret: I have never, in the throes of overpowering emotion from the inside or overwhelming stimulation from the outside, felt like I knew what the hell I was doing or should do. In my last post I mentioned High Autonomic Reactivity (HAR), a nervous phenomenon that, as Dr. Hyatt explains it, makes sense of most of my life. I have no idea how widespread it is, whether I’m a freak or whether other people just don’t talk about it.

I was the kid who spent the first two weeks of nursery school under the crafts table. I’m not kidding. When the world is too much with me, I retreat. I hide in my apartment the way Emily Dickinson hid in her upstairs room. And once in a while, when life actually bothers to confront me with an opportunity I say I want more than anything, I back down. I swerve. I completely understand what biographers are talking about when they write about the reclusive Dickinson’s “retiring nature,” and I think I know why Kierkegaard invented theoretical obstacles to make marriage with his beloved Regine impossible. These were highly sensitive people, bundles of walking nerves who felt everything painfully deeply, and simply living in the world was difficult and frightening enough without the added challenge of navigating a passionate confrontation that made them feel even more vulnerable. Perhaps for them, as for me, it was just too much. I’ve shed tears almost every time I’ve read the Dickinson poem that begins

I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf

because I have so often felt that “I can’t do this, it’s real Life,” in all its terrifying unpredictability, unfamiliarity, and ability to flatten me, and that it’s always been and will always be “over there.” But only when the strongest emotions are involved.

My life coach friend marvels about how the majority of his female clients have gotten into relationships with men mainly for economic reasons. (See “The Inner Bag Lady” for an exploration of why this may be so.) There’s none of this scary stark-nakedness; they “take off their clothes/to reveal other clothes,” to borrow a brilliant line from Margaret Atwood, and complete what is first and foremost a business transaction. Call it an even trade of goods and services. I get that; I’ve had “transactions” of my own that never touched me, that never much threatened or excited me in any way. But I don’t consider them “Life,” either, even if to the outside world there was an appearance of something happening. Ultimately I always resisted settling for anything or anyone that didn’t “bring me alive” — I would rather soldier on alone than be a unenthusiastic kept woman — but when I think of that David Whyte poem, I wonder if my metaphorical eyes are bigger than my metaphorical stomach. In other words: what if my problem is that I’m too small for what brings me alive? What if I’m constitutionally incapable of the fortitude it would require to reach behind that shelf and yank Life out by the good parts, in those moments of abject fear?

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” wrote Anaïs Nin, and she knew what she was talking about. As with my job, I can moan and groan about the way things are, but how honest is that? I know how much I like my lazy time, just like I know how downright inadequate I feel to the demands of sustained contact and engagement with anyone who without effort dismantles my wobbly defenses and exposes the child under the table. Put up or shut up, right? If I’m not up for the big leagues, I should reconcile myself with my solitary upstairs room, or else arrange a less risky transaction that may buy me some moderate gratifications and at least the semblance of less loneliness. In the end, the responsibility is no one’s but mine.

I must mention, in my defense, that this under-the-table toddler did leave home for good at nineteen, endured wild frat parties full of predatory upperclassmen, moved two thousand miles from home to a city where she knew no one, ventured into downtown clubs and dive bars late at night and alone to hear bands being covered by a certain local music critic, traveled to Italy by herself, and wrote a lot of poorly received love letters. She approached men she considered totally out of her league. And she was terrified the entire time. (Beat that, Emily!)

And yet, when it comes to the things I claim I want most…it was not so very long ago that I sat on a sofa in a coffeehouse beside someone whose presence and proximity made my knees quake. He was talking about a book by Rilke I had given him, and how it had made him wonder if he really deserved love. I gazed mutely at him, this radiant, messy Karamazov of a man, who was rarely absent from my thoughts or my half-assed agnostic prayers, to whom I would have happily given all my earthly goods and possibly a kidney. Did he deserve love? The boundary gate had just been thrown wide open. Confronted abruptly with an unmapped frontier, where the very next moment could mean being lost in unknown and unpredictable territory, my brain froze; my tongue seemed to stick in my mouth and refused to work. Eventually I managed to blurt out some forgettable inanity. Then we were interrupted by another friend. Later, I would write my courage often fails me at pivotal moments. I had swerved. I had Chickened out, yet again.

Next time, next time, I reassured myself, betting on that future that never materializes.

Can’t you see it? It’s over there, behind the shelf.

What I found was a large dragonfly, maybe four inches long and a glittering silvery-blue color, flinging itself against one of the window panes in a vain attempt to get out. I propped open the room’s door to the outside, and with a sheet of paper gently guided the exotic critter to the opening. It took flight immediately and disappeared.

This occurrence was extraordinary enough that it made me go straight to the computer and Google “dragonfly spirit,” as if the dragonfly’s appearance were some kind of augury. On a personal website that depicts certain Medicine Cards, I found this about The Dragonfly:

Look within and feel the sense-of-self energy within yourself. Notice if it is ebbing, and find the point in time when you were deluded into believing that you would be happier if you changed because someone else wanted you to. Misery is a prime clue that you lost your will and personal validity when you bought into someone else’s idea of who or what you should be. The illusion was that you would be happier if you did it their way. In forfeiting what you know is right and true for you personally, you give away your power. It is time for you to take it back.

A few other sites yielded strikingly similar themes.

The thing that hit me like a truckload of bricks today is: I have always been unacceptable to somebody. And it was usually someone pretty darn important, starting with the big guy in the sky himself. The Ultimate Father Figure.

Sure, evangelical Christians will fall all over themselves telling you how God is love, love, love, baby, so much love you won’t even be able to stand it, but if you actually read the Bible and pay attention to the theology you get quite a different picture. That some chick 4000 years ago ate the wrong kind of fruit now means that, on your own, you are totally unreliable, and a worthless turd to boot, unless you prostrate yourself, beg forgiveness, and get neurotic about doing (or not doing) all the stuff this book tells you to. And in this book you get to read about what befell all the people who displeased God by bringing the wrong offering or showing up at the wrong time or even thinking the wrong thing. Shoot, Job didn’t even do anything wrong, and look what happened to him! So you just better watch it.

Yeah, as soon as I could understand concepts, I learned the concept that I was fundamentally flawed, lacking, unacceptable, and that if I was going to please the almighty Creator of the universe, I was going to have to change. My very survival depended upon it.

It’s not unlike the way a young child’s survival depends upon his or her parents. A young child can’t afford to be critical; a young child can’t step back and say, hey, wait a minute, this is whack. Mommy and Daddy are inconsistent, unkind, and possibly downright abusive to me. No, the child has to adapt — to anticipate, to obsess over cues, and to try to be whatever he or she thinks the parent wants.

This was the extent of my so-called “relationship with God.” And it was also, to a lesser degree, my relationship with my parents, who are to this day neck-deep in that faith, and lived out its assumptions in their James-Dobson-style childrearing. So it was actually communicated to me that to the three most important figures in my early life, I was unacceptable at my core.

When high school rolled around I immersed myself enthusiastically in my church’s thriving youth group. But again, there was something lacking in me. I watched both of the guys I had monster crushes on (as well as my beloved brother) go out with my victorious Christian girlfriend. She was breezy and bouncy and good at sports, but when I asked her what her secret was, she pretty much ontologically flattened me by offering up the made-for-Sunday-school answer “My identity is Christ!” Well, then! Not only was I not cutting it as a female, I wasn’t cutting it as a Christian, either. (Personally, I suspected it had more to do with her pouty bottom lip and her elegant jump shot, but whatever.)

Still, that didn’t stop me from mimicking her style of dress, her expressions and manner of speaking, her opinions on the faith, and her makeup preferences. I even went out for junior varsity volleyball, as she was captain of her varsity team. I was like some larger, lamer mini-me.

And it didn’t work. I was still me. I was still unacceptable to those by whom I most wanted to be accepted.

Here’s the simple truth, that I still haven’t seemed to learn after four decades: you can pretend to be someone you’re not, or you can be authentic, but either way there are absolutely no guarantees you will make anyone, no matter how “important,” accept you. So are you going to toe the line and squeeze your butt-cheeks, or are you going to break out and dance like the unabashed dork you are?

Timely dragonfly. There is still that young child very much alive in me, who truly believes that she will literally die, die, if someone important to her disapproves of her, if she says or does the “wrong” thing, if her unscripted actions manage to prove her unworthy of love. The reaction no longer fits the situation; I can cry for hours, like a baby left in her crib to starve. This vulnerability itself seems like a liability; who wants to be around that when you could be around shiny happy people holding hands? Although I suspect a lot of them are on Paxil.

But there it is again, that wish to be different in order to be acceptable. As if five gay guys could come in and make over my soul. In the end, it just ain’t up to me or the Bravo network. I’ll fumble along on my meandering path, and try to tell the truth, and maybe stick my foot in my mouth, sometimes, and if you love me, you’ll love me, and if you don’t, you won’t.

But damn if saying that doesn’t still make me cry.