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.

Could it be a feeling of control over the situation? I wonder, because of how negatively many men have reacted to my desire made explicit, and because the ones I’ve had most success with sexually were either former or current habitual drug users who repeatedly sought out a certain kind of surrender. (Now there’s a sentence my mother would love.)

This is just one more reason why I’m grateful for my weed-redolent young friend Rick, actually. He’s an outsider in many ways already, and he responds unconventionally to my unconventional talk. Our wildly divergent habits make spending time together a challenge, but we’re still in the midst of a very honest conversation, with a great deal of genuine regard on both sides.

“Do you love him?” asked my coach friend last week. “Yeah, a little,” I answered with a sheepish grin. I’m surprised how much this unlikely character has come to mean to me in so short a time. He scares me a little, but I think I scare him too. Who knows what will happen next? He has resolved to at least refrain from drinking around me; I’ve disclosed how intense my sexual feelings for him have become. It may not be long before we act on them…I feel vaguely like Thelma in Thelma and Louise, hooking up with this funny, sexy young outlaw (and while Rick is a far cry from Brad Pitt, as far as I’m concerned he is rapidly becoming the Sexiest Man Alive). Then sometimes I feel like I’m in the middle of Say Anything with the hilarious and sincere underachiever Lloyd Dobler, while at still other times I think I’ve wound up in Buffalo ‘66 with a volatile but heartbreaking Billy Brown.

Yes, Rick is definitely lovable. And yet I don’t get the impression that he’s received a great deal of love thus far in life. I don’t mind giving him mine. I may have to stay mindful of my boundaries and keep my expectations at a minimum, but so far I’ve had almost unprecedented success with speaking my mind (and heart), a need of mine that seems to typically cost me relationship. Rick actually seems to appreciate that level of candor. For this alone, the endeavor has been worth the trouble.

But now I’ll give you what will likely be the last installment of my Italy diary, due to low hits and nearly nonexistent comments. I’m afraid I’ve killed my blog!!! What happened over in Italy with James seems entirely relevant, however, because it’s a perfect example of how my habits have worked so perfectly against me, at least with the majority of men I’ve known (Sonny excepted). I really was crazy about James. I sensed that he felt something similar. But I was left, as usual, swinging in the wind ass-out for confronting the situation the way I did.

__________

PART THREE: MORE THAN THIS

So. I’m finally over the raging cold I had for over a week, thanks to the hot days, cool nights, and the drinking of wine on those cool nights that makes one unaware that one is getting overly cool oneself. Fortunately Elke, my gracious German roommate, who speaks only slightly more English than I do German, brought along some homeopathic remedies, which she generously shared. Günter prescribed fresh ginger, which I took in hot water with lemon and honey. What would I do without the Germans? Ah, mein annen. (My ancestors.) I love to listen to them talking to each other in that singularly expectorating way, with all those patched-together words comprised of shorter words. Elke is delighted that my catchphrase has become Alles ist gut. It’s all good.

This cold kept me from going on a field trip with the others last Saturday. All the paying guests were gone, and the working guests went with some of the staff to Lago Maggiore, the big lake nearby that’s much better known than our little Lago D’Orta. Everyone raved about how lovely it was and what great gelato they had, but, as Bettina is fond of saying in English — what to do? I slept most of the day away. James came to find me in the morning, wondering loudly outside my door where that lazy American might be. When he poked his head in, I croaked from under my quilt that I wasn’t going to make it. He seemed genuinely disappointed.

Did I mention that I managed to fall madly, utterly in love with James?

I really didn’t come to Italy for that. No, really, I didn’t. I know people do, but I didn’t. The whole thing was completely unintentional.

You may have noticed that I was well on my way by the last episode. Alessandro, dear to me as he is, may as well be my actual nephew in his childlike and almost scandalous innocence. I’ve never met a young man in his twenties who was so utterly guileless and so oblivous to his own best attributes. You’d think his family had kept him in a shed in back of the house all these years. With Alessandro, what you see is what you get. Which should actually recommend him…there’s a lot to be said for someone whose thoughts flow unhampered to his mouth. If he thinks I’m a worthless piece of shit, he says “I’m a worthless piece of shit.” He doesn’t have to act it out so that you’ll believe it too.

But back to the matter at hand. I’ve read that an atom has recently been photographed as being in two places at once, so I imagine it’s not a theoretical impossibility for the human heart, either.

Life at Centro and Bisetti is definitely exceptional and intense, like summer camp in the land of Oz. You spend a great deal of time talking with your working guest comrades in this circumscribed but technicolor environment, amid green mountains and peacocks. Being a stranger in a strange land is a vulnerable position, and can make you more open more quickly than you might have been at home. My joke with James was that he and Alessandro were my Scarecrow and Tin Man. (I’ll leave it up to you to determine which is which. I suppose it’s not the nicest joke.) I recognize that this is all in fact like a dream, that I will probably never see any of these people again, and that my time here is precious. Ever since my little meltdown on the kitchen steps, I’ve held nothing back. What’s the point? I’m either fully here or I may as well not be here. Which means that I’ll also fully grieve leaving, along with all the departures and necessary losses that happen before.

James happens to be the first loss.

In “Lost in Translation,” a film James and I both loved, there is a poignant scene where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are out singing karaoke with some Japanese acquaintances. Murray’s character gazes at Johansson as he sings the words to Roxy Music’s haunting “More Than This.” More than this/there is nothing/more than this. These two English-speaking characters, afloat in a foreign land, separated by age and circumstance, act out a unique and unconsummated love story, and in that particular scene their unspoken yearning is palpable. At the time, it gave me goosebumps.

**

Obviously, it wasn’t difficult to be charmed by someone who has Denis Leary’s wicked sense of humor (as well as his potty mouth) and resembles Ewan MacGregor, even if I never considered Ewan my type (I’m more of a Johnny Depp girl). James and I spent so much time together, much of it involving me laughing uncontrollably, that I’m certain all of the other working guests thought I was getting colonized by the Empire. Eventually I had to put forth that possibility myself, seeing as I was technically bound by nothing at home other than the one-sided loyalty of my own heart. I had nothing more serious in mind than some good old-fashioned fooling around, because the cheeky limey was just so fookin irresistible, and the chemistry was so potent…

But as soon as I made the suggestion, I hit a wall.

Apparently James files women into two categories: viable relationship material, and shit. Actually, he called them one-night stand types, but really, they’re worthless. They must be reasonably hot, fairly stupid, and fail to amount to more to him than a stain on his shirt. I told him that I don’t really have categories anymore, I have priorities, and that beauty and joy have become more important to me than self-protection or sure things.

Thus began a two or three hour conversation in Bisetti’s kitchen, with James drinking more and more (he’s a real Englishman all right, I can’t believe how much he can hold). I’m sure he divulged more that night than he had intended. Essentially, without going into too much detail, I heard this young man’s court case against himself. He seemed to want very much to convince me that he was a sick, miserable, cold-hearted bastard, but all he did was convince me of the depth of his despair and the reality of his suffering. (Fathers and teachers, wrote Dostoevsky’s character Father Zossima, I ponder: what is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.)

As Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh observes, the more we understand such things about someone, the more deeply we begin to love him. So James’s tactic backfired quite spectacularly. What he said didn’t scare me; it didn’t suck me in; it didn’t shake my faith in the beauty of life, or even in the beauty of James. It was too familiar. I had been here before. Dostoevsky had distilled all of this anguish into the character of the Underground Man, and I had known this man. I had loved this man. I had even, in a sense, been this man. I’ll call his malady the Straight White Western Male Sickness Unto Death: a classic and distinctly macho nihilism communicated by the likes of Friedrich Nietszche, Blaise Pascal, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and more contemporary writers like Chuck Palahniuk and Norman Mailer. It’s what happens when you prescribe for yourself the most impossible and inhuman precepts for attaining manhood, and utterly reject everything that smacks of what Jung characterized as the Eternal Feminine. For the more spiritually oriented, what you might call the Source, the Great Mother, the God who is Love. In other words, everything in life that makes tenderness and connection possible.

If you cut yourself off like this, banishing half of your humanity, it will not only make your soul sick, you may wind up putting a gun in your mouth. James seems to see Hemingway as an ideal role model. Certainly, the man could write, but he’s an awfully shitty role model. (A man would be much better off looking up to someone like Nelson Mandela. Dignity, strength, courage, compassion…now that guy’s got class.)

To put it another way, if James were drowning (and I dare say he is, in several litres of alcohol every night) and the Feminine were a life preserver, he’d go under the waves yelling “Fook off, ya pussy shit, and let me die like a mahn!”

The next morning as I hiked up the mountainside to Centro, I felt full to overflowing with a love and a joy I wished I could bottle and pour directly into James’s beer. When did I cease to be an Underground Woman myself, and surface into the light of day? How did it happen, and how could I explain it? I thought of Esther, a wonderful yoga teacher I know who is fond of saying “It’s all grace,” and I felt as if I’d been bodily lifted from misery by unseen hands. I began to sing the chorus of “Amazing Grace” as I walked, emotion making my voice crack.

When I saw him at lunchtime, I was amazed that he was still talking to me. I fully expected him to despise me out of shame, but over the course of the day he warmed up even more. After dinner, at Bisetti, a group of us watched “What the Bleep Do We Know,” which, one has to admit (whatever one’s orientation toward that goofy Ramtha woman) has some compelling things to say about the way we talk to ourselves. James, having smoked some weed with his alcohol, seemed affected (surprisingly, calling the film “brilliant”), and I wondered if any of these things would stick.

(Editorial note: in retrospect, I wonder what would have happened if I had slid onto the couch next to James after the movie, and taken a hit myself, and lain my arm across the back of the couch behind his neck…but hindsight is 20/20! I probably missed my only chance.)

It was the next afternoon, when he was acting strange and distant again, that I divulged that I no longer felt I needed anything from him, and that I loved him, that it was fierce and unconditional. His response was an icy “How dare you say such a thing to me,” and, of course, “fook you!”

“I thought you’d say something like that,” I replied with a resigned sigh. He smiled a little then, almost in spite of himself, musing on my choice of words and liking the use of the term “fierce.” At least the guy appreciates my diction. In a moment we were talking about something else as if we had only just been discussing the weather. (In a little while, we would go with the others to a bar in Pettenasco, and he would demonstrate the extent of his panic by immediately beginning to seduce a friend of Raffe’s.)

Ah, the dreaded L-word. Tell me, friends, what is the big fookin deal??? It should be the most natural thing in the world for human beings to say to one another, but thanks to this macho bullshit crap, it’s this outrageous declaration, laden with all manner of weighty prerequisites (in order to even utter it), and bales of shame. What happened between James and me, the sparkling rapport, the give-and-take of mirroring and response, that deeply satisfying pleasure of relatedness, it was all real, it was all true. Everyone around us felt it, the chemistry of our connection. There are witnesses, although I no longer need them in order to believe in its veracity.

**

My own father is not unlike Pascal — he filled the hole in his soul with religion, but he has little respect for anything other than the intellect. I don’t believe, like some psychoanalysts, that everyone we fall in love with is strictly some projection of our original caregivers, but there is a degree of truth to this theory. Anyone could reasonably say I have tried to win his approval in the persons of these unhappiest of men…but in that case I have also attempted to redeem him, to save him somehow. Call it pathological, but I don’t believe the attempt is without merit. James Baldwin, the passionate, gay black antithesis of the spiritually ailing Straight White Western Male, believed that only a human being can save another human being, and that we create one another’s consciousness.

Still, what struck me the other day, sitting in a ristorante in Pettenasco eating an insalata with fresh mozzarella (and keeping away from Bisetti), is that I have lately stopped courting my father by proxy — this episode has been something of a retread of old, painful ground — and that I am the one who has been redeemed. My equanimity in the face of James’s rejecting cruelty would never have been possible if an old pattern had not already been decisively broken. They say that to do the same thing over and over again, and expect a different result, is insanity…but what if you meet that one rare gentleman who can hear everything you’re saying, and not panic? It’s difficult in Western culture to encounter intelligent heterosexual men not somehow hobbled by the legacy of Hemingway. Speaking from the heart is seen as foolish (if not outrageous), and even we women are regularly shamed out of it.

But I have been redeemed: by the warm and affirmative response of a decidedly straight man who is not afraid of me, or for that matter of feeling, or connection, or the Feminine. Even if we were never together again, even if he chooses to be with someone else, or things just don’t work out, what has been done cannot be undone. I finally believe that It’s Not About Me. I am not crazy, repugnant, or fundamentally flawed. If you’re reading this, my dearest hipster daddy, let me just say this from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. My deja-vu experience has deepened my appreciation for you, and for what a miracle of a man you are. You think I exaggerate…but a sincere seeker, who has already been to hell and back, and who flings himself at life with an open heart and without the distortions of pride, is a much rarer thing in my experience than fanatically self-censoring, contemptuous misanthropes who won’t allow themselves the pleasure of a natural emotion. And I have known them already, known them all…

**

In the sunlit and car-free square of Orta, breathing in the aroma of what smelled like a local cousin of the linden flower and facing the magnificent medieval monastery on the island of San Giulio, I ate a cup of freshly made, creamy gelato, but after the first bite I could taste nothing but grief. It’s like what I told Alessandro that day in the square: you buy now, you pay later…but at least it works the other way around as well.

I felt that James was already gone; everything was over, it was in the past, even with him still physically present, shagging the Italian girl he had charmed the other night at the local watering hole. His room was located diagonally above mine, and late at night I could hear her giggling like a schoolgirl on dope.

With “Lost in Translation,” the audience, at least, knows how much Bill Murray’s character cares for Scarlett Johansson’s, even when he picks up the blowsy lounge singer from the hotel bar for a tawdry one-night stand. There was slightly vicious comfort in knowing that James would only “stuff” a woman he finds stupid and doesn’t respect…but listening to the whole business wasn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy. I lay there feeling absolutely sick to my stomach, taking deep yoga breaths and trying to empty my mind. If I could have vomited, it might have brought some relief. I pretended that it was only a window on London, where he had flown already, picking up giggly blondes in dimly lit pubs. James was gone. It was time to let go, and to feel the loss of something that had been beautiful, if ephemeral as a mayfly.

Nietzsche, the proudest all-star in the Straight White Western Male Sickness Unto Death gallery, was in Orta once, with the highly educated and independent woman of letters Lou Salome. She ultimately rejected him, whereupon he promptly became despondent (and allegedly suicidal) and went off to write “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” This explains a lot to me, as far as the man’s nihilism and raging misogyny are concerned. Later Lou would become the lover and confidante of Rainer Maria Rilke, a luminous man so unlike poor Friedrich that one waggish writer called him “the world’s greatest lesbian poet.”

I ate my dinner at Leon d’Oro, the hotel where Friedrich and Lou stayed: pasta with aubergine and pomodoro in a cream sauce, accompanied by a half bottle of Valpolicella. The waiter, to my astonishment, resembled Rilke. I kid you not.

Gazing at the beautiful island of San Guilio, I paraphrased James in my head, copping his attitude. That evil harpy of a woman! How dare she have the unapologetic gall to love me, and the unmitigated temerity to say it out loud? She must be put to DEATH!!!! Wine-warm laughter bubbled up from within me as I realized the ridiculous, Pythonesque absurdity of his position. What the fook, James?

And then I thought, Good God, but I like myself. It’s taken thirty-eight years, but I honestly do. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to apologize for. I have been honorable and true with an open and loving heart.

On the long walk back to Pettenasco at sunset, I bought myself a chocolate gelato in the shop by the rotary.

It tasted delicious.

**

I made myself as scarce as possible at Bisetti until the morning of his last day. Leaving for Centro early in the morning (I had breakfast dishwashing duty) I slipped a note under his door. It explained my absence, briefly, as the unwillingness to subject myself to watching what he was doing. I loved myself too. I wished him luck and goodbye. Expecting that to be the end of it, I went about my workday in a vague funk of bereavement.

He came up to Centro at lunchtime to say goodbye to everyone. When I first saw him walking up the drive, my heart leapt into my throat. While I was back in the work area behind the kitchen, squeezing fresh orange juice, he came to shake Bruno’s hand. I didn’t expect to speak to him myself, and after he left the kitchen I let myself cry all over the oranges. I was washing the juicer parts when I heard him say my name.

I turned to see him coming at me with a politely outstetched hand, as if to bid farewell with an impersonal handshake. Seeing my wet face and eyes must have been what made him open his arms. I flung my arms around his neck and clung to him, most impolitely, and for a long time, as he said something about Robert having his email address. I said that I’d send him my travel diary (boy will he love this one). Finally he let go of me with an abrupt English “right,” and I released him, turning my head to kiss his cheek at the jawline where his beard grew soft and thick. After he had walked away (never looking at me directly) I finished cleaning up, and then locked myself in the handicapped restroom and sobbed violently and inconsolably for about ten minutes.

When I emerged, I felt as fresh and clean as Colorado air after a hailstorm.

**

You may ask me: what the fook, C? He told you to fuck off and then went about poking someone else right under (or above) your nose, and you still feel this way about him?

That night in Bisetti’s kitchen, I told James that no matter how shittily the men in my life have behaved, in the end what stays with me are the wonderful things, and how much I loved them, whether it was for five years or five minutes.

I won’t keep the sick-to-my-stomach feeling. What I’ll keep are things like this: the raffishly saucy look in his eye as he bit a cluster of shrimp off of my proffered fork in Novara (my pizza had come with shrimp through a misunderstanding); the way he would say simply “quality,” with a grin, when something pleased or amused him; the night we watched Günter’s DVD of “Shaft” on my iBook in his room, and I wanted so badly to kiss him; the private universe we could be at a table full of people; and the soft-focus, almost melancholy look he had at Centro’s bar one of those last nights, when Robert played a torchy Tom Waits song for us from his laptop. So close he was, so close and yet so far away, my beautiful English so-called bastard. There is nothing/more than this…but to quote another Tom Waits tune, I’m gonna take it with me when I go.

The first is a regular column with a nationally-based Web site that provides news, entertainment, and opinion articles specific to particular cities. It pays based on numbers of hits per page (which, in my city, isn’t much yet). The second is an informal contract job helping my Kundalini teacher rewrite the copy on his Web site — for pay. The last, which is only in the talking stages right now, is a blogging position with a popular local online magazine that probably won’t pay me a dime but would look great on a resume.

All of this transpired in less than a week.

**

Give me a sign, I had begged, just days before, of The Universe or The Gods or Whoever might be listening. Or as Tracy Chapman once put it, Give me one reason to stay here.

As you know, I recently lost my job. And with it, my spiritual home, my cherished community. I don’t own a house. I don’t have a family of my own. I’m not in a relationship. I love someone, but we’re not together, and may never be. Even my beloved little vintage Volkswagen has given up the ghost. I have friends here…but I have friends all over the United States.

I found myself wondering if all of this were itself an indication that I should take my ball and go home — wherever home is. Maybe I’d need to find a new one. Or fly to places unknown.

**

“You should come!” my beautiful Indian girlfriend Samira had said.

She and her bite-sized boyfriend Ken were preparing to embark upon a series of globetrotting travels of indefinite duration: first to India, then Indonesia and Thailand and Vietnam and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Nepal — not necessarily in that order. When she told me they were leaving, I cried. I love them both so much; I love being with them; traveling abroad with them would undoubtedly be a delight, even it meant being a bit of a third wheel.

After Samira made the suggestion, I found myself thinking about it in my most desperate moments — much like I entertain thoughts of suicide — as another way of leaving behind everything I’ve cared about for so long. Rushing headlong into the unknown, as it were.

Paying for such a splurge with next to no money would, after all, necessarily require maxing out credit cards I’d have no hope of ever paying off. Then I really would have to kill myself.

**

I’ve lived vicariously through Samira and Ken, through their obstacle-ridden but ultimately triumphant love story. It was only nine months ago that I was sharing a picnic with Samira in the park and listening to her fatalistic pronouncements about her feelings for Ken. “I don’t know why I even think about it,” she was sighing. “It’s never going to happen.”

She had met Ken in a teacher training, while attempting to struggle her way through an unhappy arranged marriage. Their friendship, and her growing attraction to her new friend, only increased her internal conflict. Now, a year later, she was going through a bitter divorce. Ken still had no inkling of her true feelings. Knowing Ken the way I did, I strongly suspected that he’d be over the moon to discover that this gorgeous creature was even thinking about him. But Samira wouldn’t believe it for a minute. Her “sensible” voice, the voice of self-preservation (informed by damaged self-esteem), kept arguing that he couldn’t possibly be interested in her. Ever the incorrigible romantic, I kept urging her to spend more time with him.

When they finally kissed, one night after sharing some wine, and Samira told me about it the next day, I literally jumped up and down.

Their love has only grown since. They’ve traveled and taught classes together and visited each others’ families in other states. Their happiness has been my happiness. And yet Samira almost talked herself out of the whole thing with her voice of so-called “reason.” So I have to take some credit, for always being such a damned fool.

**

The fantasy of taking off with these two felt to me like the second-choice Make-A-Wish of a terminally ill woman. People grieving major losses in life have been known to make similarly impetuous and haphazard leaps. It’s how I wound up out here in the first place. (And found myself depressed, lonely, and bored for a long time after, so I don’t believe a change of scenery is necessarily the magic cure.)

But the question persisted: should I leave? Move back East? Move further West? Is there anything left for me here? Whether I stayed or went, it seemed I risked missing something. Whether I stayed or went, I would still be dying little by little every day.

So I asked for some indication that I was in the right place. Here, now.

**

I look at my page on the Web site, and the feeling is indescribable. There’s my face, there’s my title, those are my words. Suddenly I have a public media presence. Suddenly, to the world outside, I’m somebody. I may not be Arianna Huffington, or the late Molly Ivins — not yet, anyway! — but I’m out there. And now two other people right here in the area are interested in making use of my gifts.

My high school obsession Damien Moreau wrote for Slate magazine years ago, and co-authored an award-winning screenplay. I always envied that ability to successfully make an impact, and a name for oneself, in the world; much of my overwhelming desire for Damien may have actually been envy. Seeing him acting on the stage in high school, and in independent films years later, I felt an ineffable yearning, like that of a groupie with pretensions to playing lead guitar. For centuries women denied professions did have to live through their men, so this confusion of desire and envy is probably nothing unique.

My own mother never particularly modeled or encouraged feminine achievement, and from my earliest years I felt instinctively that my accomplishments were less important to everyone than my brother’s. Men were the true masters of the world; I could only be elevated by association.

Jung was one of the first to point out how we seek out in others the missing or disowned parts of ourselves…when what we need to do, for the sake of wholeness, is to own our own capacities  — our own inner masters of the world.

**

An odd thing is happening. For the first time in a long time, I can look at the world without the dark filter of unworthiness and insecurity that has been coloring my every perception. My unspoken mantra for the past few months has been I’m not good enough, and much of how I’ve interpreted what has or hasn’t happened to me has supported that hypothesis. Naturally.

That mantra places you in a space of fear, a space of extreme neediness, where your very right to be alive can be challenged by how others react to you. I‘ve become extremely sensitive to what I perceive as my status as a community pariah; people who were once a large part of my life seem to have backed away, as if I suddenly contracted the Ebola virus by leaving the studio. Lord only knows what they’re thinking. (I will say that I used to believe that everyone who left there the way I did must have done something absolutely awful; the pure-intentioned, divinely inspired owner could do no wrong. Now I realize that those conclusions were most likely unjust…as unjust as the accusations that I was “negative” or “toxic.”)

A beautiful young man I dearly loved confessed to me once that he was close to suicide over the conviction that his ex-girlfriend’s circle of friends was gossiping cruelly about him. He was confused at the time about his sexual orientation, and for him, their damning judgments (or what he perceived to be their damning judgments) seemed an accurate assessment of his fitness to live. My emphatic insistence that he was a worthy and wonderful being fell on deaf ears. Obviously I didn’t know what I was talking about. He was fatally flawed, not good enough.

That mantra, that assumption, has also informed my reactions regarding a certain gentleman’s doings (and not-doings). In that space of unworthiness, everything is personal, and rife with evidence of my unworthiness (and inferiority, compared to other women). In that space of unworthiness, I’m desperate for him to validate me. Pretty soon, that’s all I know, and all I can feel. And that kind of dreadful anxiety leads in the exact opposite direction from any kind of love.

Without that dark filter, I can see myself as deserving…talented…even amazing. Without that dark filter, suddenly I feel like he’s missing out. How much better would Sonny’s life be with me in it? How is he, anyway? Is he okay? Maybe he’s having a hard time himself. Maybe he’s listening to the Smiths because he’s feeling as bad as I do when I listen to the Smiths.

When he’s not master of the world — or of me — he becomes human-sized again. He becomes my warm-eyed, affable friend in scuffed cowboy boots who has no more of a clue than any of the rest of us. (He’d be the first to tell you he has no more of a clue than any of the rest of us.) It’s not his job to validate me. It’s not my job to validate him. But I do remember why I love him.

**

Everything looks different when the proportions change. It’s as if we’ve been little children, looking up at others as the giants grownups seem to be when we’re knee-high. As toddlers, we really do live at the mercy and the whims of the giants. As adults, perhaps the most important thing we can remind ourselves is that there are no giants anymore.

Coming off the preschool autopilot, all of a sudden you’ve got to be a grownup and take some responsibility for yourself. I’ve said before, in not so many words, that I’m frequently a chickenshit when confronted with an honest-to-goodness opportunity. Hopefully writing this regular column will be the beginning of the end of some of that, career-wise…but as far as my gentleman friend goes — if he is, in fact, nervous, I’m petrified. Let’s not forget who couldn’t answer the damn phone.

If we did somehow manage to meet, it’s quite possible, based on past experience, that we could wind up at my place, or his, and if we wound up at my place, or his, it’s quite possible, based on past experience, that we’d be having more than tea (knock wood, no pun intended)…but what then? Honestly, we’re both like a couple of wild animals skittish about nets. I can’t project all of my historic ambivalence onto him, however convenient that may be. I should know by now that it’s not his job to carry everything I won’t own.

Way back when, I turned him onto Hesse’s classic about a wandering artist who makes love to every woman he meets and never settles down, and he loved it. I knew he would; I did. There’s something expansive and exhilirating about that total freedom, access to the endless variety of beauty, rapturous intimacy without routine or risk. (Don’t think that such scenarios appeal only to men, even if they’re more likely to act them out.) At the end of the day, Sonny and I are both just a couple of gregarious, warmhearted, lovable, imaginative, curious, restless, moody, passionate, sensual, ambivalent commitment-phobes. I told you he was my soul brother!!!

Dear God, I do love that man. Regardless of how fucked up either of us may be, at least in this lifetime. So sue me. Maybe we’ll get it right in 2095.

**

“Keep writing,” my coach friend advises when I ask him what I should do. I share with Samira and Ken what’s been happening, and Samira says that it sounds like things are starting to “come into alignment” for me.

I still wake up in the morning nervous that I have no real income (people keep asking me “Did you find a job yet???”), still feeling the wordless longing I’ve had for as long as I can remember. It’s hard not to reach for the usual strategies — poring over not-even-vaguely-intriguing listings of hateful-but-necessary jobs, and attaching to palliative fantasies about rolling around deliriously happily ever after in bed with my yummy but MIA kindred spirit. Having nothing but time, without the usual distractions of a job and a social hive, really does force you to confront yourself, much like a silent retreat at a monastery does. You realize how much you project into the future, hoping for something exciting or gratifying, or dwell on the past, remembering something exciting or gratifying. Anything not to feel your present discomfort! Linda, my coworker at the studio, used to say she would go crazy if she weren’t busy all the time. I think most of us prefer to be occupied like that.

Unease aside, perhaps this is a time to trust and relax, despite my skeptic’s inclination to think I have to earn every possible desired gain by the sweat of my brow (and even then, often not). Because, frankly, I haven’t a clue. All I know is that I’m doing what I love, what I do best, and finally getting some recognition for it. I’ve read literally hundreds of testimonies from people for whom things began to turn around once they started moving in the direction of their true talents. Why not for me? Stranger things have happened.

As for that other matter…who knows. Would either of us carrot-chasers ever want to belong to a club that would have us as a member?

What do you say, Sonny? We could book ourselves in at the Y…WCA…

I like it here, can I stay…and do you have a vacancy for a back-scrubber?

**

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.