Matador offers a 12-week online course for aspiring travel writers and photographers. Their faculty and alumni write for paying travel blogs and magazines like National Geographic Traveler. I had been trying to figure out how I could pay for “tuition’ ever since finding out about their program. My initial plan had been to get a better job and save up, but that obviously wasn’t happening, and I could see myself putting off the course indefinitely in the meantime. I seriously considered charging it on my high-balance, consolidated-debt credit card, but I have enough trouble meeting the monthly minimums as is.

Instead, the crazy-making job I do have, after my many attempts to leave, provided me with the unexpected means. Go figure.

So I have taken the first step toward at least one dream.

**

The day before Christmas, I had a massive shock: I found Sam.

Online, that is. On Facebook. Through a mutual friend. He had been loath to join Zuckerberg’s internet playground back in the day, but his girlfriend must have convinced him otherwise.

Yes, I said girlfriend.

Given that Sam has never tried to contact me again, I didn’t attempt to ‘friend’ or even message him, but as the contents of his page weren’t hidden from me by privacy settings, I simply looked at his info page, wall, and photos. I guess you could call that Facebook stalking. Since I’ve known nothing about his life after he left, however, I don’t think anyone will blame me.

There was a relationship status and anniversary. Sam had apparently gotten involved with a young woman his own age eight months after leaving me. They are still together after a year and a half; living together, in fact. I like the look of the girl: she has that sweet, slightly bug-eyed vulnerability of a Jane Adams character, sweatshirt-clad, sans makeup, with a pierced lip that defies midwestern conservatism. She’s not the type to inspire violent jealousy in other females. Sam still looks ineffably Sam, of course: a sly smile flickering in only his eyes in one photo, breaking into an unabashedly happy grin beside the girl, who looks delighted to be with him, in the next. She should be delighted to be with him. In one photo he is kissing her, and I remember his knee-weakening kiss. I helped him perfect that knee-weakening kiss. I helped him perfect a few things. Blessed art thou among women, I think. It’s all hers, now. But Sam…he looks so terribly adorable, and so terribly Sam, I miss him all over again, and burst into a torrent of hot tears. Sam!

**

It is a bittersweet Christmas. I am both gratified and newly heartbroken. Finally I know where and how Sam is; finally I know Sam is never coming back.

By way of consolation, I find myself contemplating Dan Savage’s “campsite rule,” which has been summarized thus:

If you’re in a sexual relationship with somebody significantly younger or less experienced than you, the rule that applies at campsites shall be applicable to you: you must leave them in at least as good a state (physically and emotionally) as you found them in. That means no STDs, no unwanted pregnancy, not overburdening them with your emotional or sexual baggage, and so on. Younger partners and particularly virgins will often take everything given to them by an older, more experienced partner as being “written in stone,” and will carry around everything they learn from them for the rest of their life: so treat them right!

My young friend had, at the time I met him, only recently lost nearly half his body weight. He had had considerable social difficulties all of his life because of his extraordinary but differently-abled brain. I was, all things considered, writing on a fairly blank slate, one belonging to a boy of twenty-one who was far more vulnerable with me than any “grown man” had ever been.

I thought of all the positive reinforcement I gave him almost continuously, all the many ways in which I told him he was wonderful and beautiful and amazing, how sincerely I enthused about his marvelous natural abilities as a lover. I showered him with well-deserved praise. The feeling comes overwhelmingly back – that enormous, grateful love I could scarcely contain at the time, which overflowed in words as well as in kisses and caresses. I wanted to offer him anything and everything for everything he offered me. Our lovemaking was more deeply satisfying than anything else I’d ever experienced, nourishing both my body and soul. I loved it, and I loved him, and I told him so at every opportunity.

In the end, what Sam gave me even he couldn’t take away. And perhaps my loving words overwrote some of the noxious messages, some of the neglect and cruelty of his own past.

After all, here he is, two years on, in a longer and more serious relationship than I’ve ever had in my life, with a young woman who posts adoring messages on his Facebook wall even though she’ll see him at home later. Sam looks happy. She looks happy. They look happy together.

I’d like to say it’s a campsite rule epic win.

**

The kicker comes when I go back and read the emails I wrote to Sam in those months after he left, when his silence drove me to speculate wildly and to drink. I had expected them to be more oppressive and scolding than they were; I was startled to find some beautiful, heartfelt words that expressed sentiments even I’d forgotten expressing. I’ll leave most of it between Sam and me, but here’s the passage that contained the words (italicized for your benefit) that caused me to burst into tears one more time.

I thought: Whatever (Sam) has to do to reclaim, or save, his life, I’m all for it. I don’t even know if that’s what you’re doing. You once told me you didn’t care to get well. But so help me God, I would give anything, I would give you my blood, baby, I would give you up entirely, I would give you to another woman…if it meant you could be well and whole and healed and happy.

I guess I said it first, didn’t I.

I had no idea I was predicting the future.

**

One door closes. And then another. This week I learn that a girlfriend of mine is engaged to a widower who had caught my eye more than once. I hadn’t even known they were an item. Well, bully for her. One more possibility bites the dust.

Matador is, I suppose, my way of prying open a window – not quite far enough to escape, yet, but at least to let the air in.

Escape does not seem to be in the cards.

**

Escape from what, you ask?

Look here, people: I have tried to be good (even though Mary Oliver tells me in “Wild Geese” that I don’t have to be). I have not indulged thoughts that could easily have taken over my idle hours. For well over a week, I did a decent (at times excellent) job at work while Dan was absent, and I took the aforementioned steps toward my future as a writer. I didn’t wallow. I didn’t obsess. My sexual fantasies consisted of syndicated reruns of The Best of Sam — at least until Christmas Eve. I flirted with the Asian Adonis, who returned to the call center a few months ago. I tried fantasizing about him instead.

None of this seemed to matter when Dan came back. Nor did it matter that he’d cut off his beautiful thick hair, or that he told a lame poop joke, or that he has a paunch in lieu of Adonis’s veiny arms and tight little body. My struggle doesn’t stem from lust for his physical attributes; it’s not made more difficult by intellectual accord; it’s not even quite such a matter of emotional attachment, at this point, because I prevent myself from confiding too much in him. Seriously, I’m clutching the reins so tight, I’m drawing blood.

No, it’s as if there were a magnet inside of each of us, some kind of subtle gravitational force that keeps drawing us back together. If I stay away from him, he finds me (and so help me God, I’m happy to see him). Break time the other day found us standing together in the hallway by the credenza, munching on our respective apples, through absolutely no effort of my own. I had actually deliberately gone somewhere he was not. But when he came toward me, grinning affably in his way, something in me rejoiced in spite of myself.

Don’t think it’s Dan being “bad,” either. He’s not seductive or a flirt like Ted. He’s not seductive at all. That’s not his modus operandi. He just apparently really likes being around me, probably without even knowing why. I really like being around him, too. At the time, it just seems to flow so easily. It’s no big deal. He treats me like a good friend, a buddy, telling me about what he and Mai did over the holidays…but I know we can both feel the magnet. Don’t ask me how I know that. It sounds insane, even to me. But I understand now what people mean when they say “It was bigger than both of us.”

**

I could always write off married men before, no matter how charismatic or handsome. A ring on a man’s finger was tantamount to an electrified fence as far as my crushes were concerned. (My fondness for my friend Ben paled in comparison to my grand Greg Schulz obsession, anyhow.) How harshly I judged people who couldn’t restrain themselves! I thought they were being willfully stupid. All of that drama, it seemed so avoidable.

“The heart wants what it wants,” said a disgraced Woody Allen by way of explanation, after breaking an even stronger taboo. “What you resist persists,” cautioned Dr. Jung, who failed to resist his troubled patient Sabina Spielrein. In the Whole Foods restroom, I happen to hear my old buddy Melissa Etheridge, who wrote the soundtrack to my agonized twenties, growling and howling over the sound system

Now we make our choices

Doing what we think is good

We deny our own dreams

‘Cause we think we’ve been told we should…

She looks up to heaven

And wonders why love is so cruel…

Can’t stop the wanting of you

Even Sonny weighs in, quoting Kierkegaard in his Facebook status: “To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.” I can’t help but wonder what it was like for Sonny to meet Elyse, his on-again off-again girlfriend of almost seven years, the willowy, stunning kids’ yoga teacher who precipitated the end of his fourteen-year marriage.

Personally, I think I summed things up best in a comment on my last post: “All of my malaise of the past several months can be attributed to the bitter realization that someone else has married my husband.”

**

Soon after writing that comment, I dream that I am wearing a gorgeous white wedding dress. There is a wedding happening, and it’s Dan’s, in a facility that looks less like a church or government building than Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory (of the 1971 musical). A setting I’ve associated since early childhood with wishes and dreams, with finding that mythical golden ticket. (The song “Pure Imagination” puts a tear in my eye to this day.)

Even though I’m in a wedding dress, I am nevertheless aware that my job is to walk Dan down the aisle and give him away. The bride-to-be is nowhere to be seen at this point, and I’m passing time with Dan outside before the ceremony. The one person who is around is a woman from work who I’m certain (given some barbed offhand comments) has grasped what’s going on between Dan and me. She can be a bit catty, and seems jealous of him at times, in that competitive alpha-female way former homecoming queens can have about them (despite being married, with a baby), but (unlike me) she’s not one to be shy to speak her mind.

For my part, I am suffering tremendously and at length over the concept of “speak now or forever hold your peace.” Oblivious, Dan is talking to me like I’m his best friend. Maybe I’m the Best Woman? Liz, the coworker who can tell how I feel, gives me a tight hug of support in passing. In contrast to waking life, I feel like she’s the one person on my side. But still I wait, and say nothing.

At what seems like the last minute, I blurt out to Dan that this joyous occasion will, in fact, go down in history as the worst fucking day of my life. Dan looks stunned. I flee.

I run right into Liz, and tell her that I’ll be drinking a bottle of wine by myself tonight and crying my eyes out. She shocks me then by telling me, very sharply, how disappointed she is in me – she had thought I had more ‘fight’ in me than that – and stalks off in disgust. Dan has still not walked down the aisle. I start to meander tentatively back toward the wedding, but at that point I wake up.

**

Don’t ask me to interpret that in detail. I will point out that it’s the first dream I can remember having in which I’m wearing a full white wedding dress. It was strapless, as I recall. An elegantly simple, satiny, form-fitting thing. Quite lovely, really. I felt like Audrey Hepburn.

I do think it all points back to my lack of a sense of entitlement, and the fact that I’ve always felt forced to “give away” the men that I love…whether the man was León in my teens or Sam in my forties. Liz probably represents the part of me that’s disgusted by the way I just lie down and roll over. There’s no ‘fight’ in me at all. I don’t believe I’m deserving…and even if I could believe that, I still wouldn’t believe I could do anything but lose in the most humiliating manner imaginable. I’m not the kind who would ever stand up in church and stop a wedding. Easier for me to buy a bottle of wine and go home, get drunk alone, and cry.

**

Not that I don’t believe I did right by Sam. At least I have one thing I can be proud of. If nothing else, I seem to have left his “campsite” in such primo condition the next visitor decided to stay permanently. In general, I try to leave people better off than I found them, although the Jeannies and the Elis of the world, who are probably off somewhere right now feeling aggrieved, sometimes can’t be helped.

León used to claim that I saved his life, even as my experience with him left me licking the stab wounds for years. I let Jeannie tear me down mercilessly without even putting up a hand, despite the cruel words I could have thrown in her face like acid. Somehow it’s always me who winds up in the worst sort of pain, regardless of whether I did the “right” thing. I wonder if I shouldn’t do the crime, once in a while, if I’m going to do the time.

Bold words from a coward. No matter how much Dan may like me, he has a nice, comfortable life he probably likes a whole lot better. I’m not the woman men want to run away with, anyway; I’m the one who gets left behind without a backward look. I’m Jen, not Angelina. Or is that just what I believe?

**

But here’s an interesting exercise: read my dream again, just as it happened, and ask – what if the bride is actually me?

My first official boyfriend, and first halfway reciprocated love, was killed by a massive heart attack on the 9^th of September. I found about it through Russ and other Facebook friends in the wee hours of the following Tuesday.

I’ve told some damning tales about León, the first man (outside my family) to truly break my heart, and at one point I even believed he didn’t wish to be in contact with me. I was decidedly wrong about that. He found and friended me on Facebook, and for the past year and a half we had gotten to know each other again, exchanging private messages and interacting almost daily in the more public forum of news links, photographs, and statuses. León had a so-called “bleeding heart” and a finally tuned sense of outrage, so we were nearly always in agreement politically. In private, he was warm and affectionate, reiterating how glad he was to have reconnected with me. I felt the same way. He had only in the past couple of years finished a doctorate in Art History, and gotten married.

At long last, he told me, he was happy.

**

It took a few hours for the shock to subside and the exposed nerves to begin screaming. I wept in my bed nearly all night long, falling into an exhausted sleep just as pale light began to show behind the curtains. When I resurfaced into consciousness, and into the terrible realization of what had happened, the feeling of awfulness returned in the form of that giant jagged wound in the chest I had only recently been rid of, that feeling that someone was trying to cut out my heart with a rusty saw.

I cried on and off uncontrollably all day, calling in sick to work and staying glued to Facebook, where many of us had virtually come together to mourn and reminisce. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Nathan Roth, who had been one of my closest friends freshman year, and who had also been the boyfriend of my “close friend” Cheyenne. She was the girlfriend who, for about a week during our sophomore year, believed that she and León were meant to be together. (Never trust a California-bred woman with a precious name.)

**

Yes, that’s an old and tired story: girl meets boy, girl falls hard for boy, girl loses boy to friend who, it turns out, didn’t really want him anyway. It all played out in a particularly painful way – and not just for me – with Cheyenne breaking up with León over the phone (to go back to Nathan) while León was home in Nebraska at his disabled brother’s funeral. He returned to school a shattered man, and in the midst of my own reeling betrayal and emotional disintegration I hovered by his side, trying to gather up the pieces. Our band of friends had fallen apart, splintered into hostile factions. León just couldn’t cope with all the loss. He packed up and left school; I took to my bed with a gallon jug of cheap wine, skipping classes and contemplating a fatal jump into the Chesapeake. Life seemed over. I never spoke to Cheyenne again.

(What was it about her? I asked Nathan the other day. What was it about this liberal-arts-school Helen of Troy that caused such a destructive war? “I don’t know,” he answered. “She was stupid…and not very attractive…I guess I just wanted to be in a relationship.”)

**

But before all that, before all that…there was just León and I.

In my post about destroying my old notebooks, I shared my first impression of him as some pretentious class clown, some egotistical attention whore. Avoid At All Costs! That was at freshman assembly. He wound up in my seminar (evening philosophy class), where he failed to disabuse me of my negative preconceptions by holding forth windily without saying much. Then one day, not long after that, this annoying character sat down at my table in the dining hall, across from me…unavoidable.

In person, he turned out to be disconcertingly warm and personable, even down-to-earth. Everything about him up close seemed to belie the impression he gave at a distance. Not only that, but he had the most beautiful almond-shaped green eyes I had ever seen, transparent and vulnerable-looking, with a glimmer of sadness in them. I felt a weakening flush when he met my eye. Uh oh.

At a weekend “coffeeshop party” (a rock dance party in the basement café for students) we wound up dancing together into the wee hours. I specifically remember grooving to “Play That Funky Music” with him, stealing his felt top hat and putting it on my head. He walked me back to my dorm room and kissed me briefly on the mouth before bidding me goodnight. I stood there watching him go, still wearing the hat, a smile spreading slowly across my astonished lips. No one but a friend’s mother had ever kissed me on the mouth before, and that obviously didn’t count.

Interestingly, in the days to come, I completely freaked out. I already had a terrible crush on someone utterly unobtainable, an exquisite little prude of an upperclassman named Titus who ran around with the all the pretty (if closeted) gay boys on campus. Titus was impossibly beautiful, and clearly not interested in me…and I had another golden opportunity to fall into one more hopeless obsession with an idealized god-man, which was familiar, or to start something with this far less perfect oddball of a fellow who might actually be interested in me.

The latter was unfamiliar — uncomfortable — an actual risk.

León took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in town. My ambivalence was snowballing by that point. In brief, I blew it that night. I turned León down, pre-emptively, in a way that he found utterly insulting. When he was good and mad and not speaking to me, then suddenly I was filled with panic and regret. But of course.

It took some doing — apologies, tears, virtual prostrations — before he was willing to so much as spend time with me again. When he finally did, we wound up staying up most of the night in one of the campus common rooms by its huge stone fireplace, talking about our pasts and our worldviews and our fears and our dreams…the kind of Before Sunrise conversation I’d had with Jonathan on the tour bus. Nothing else happened that night, but on a subsequent evening in my dorm room, I confessed to having growing feelings for him, and he confessed to the same — and then he kissed me. Really kissed me. I had had no idea up until that point what exactly could happen in the body when lips met lips. I was innocent to the point of retarded. León had this incredibly sensuous mouth with soft, full pink lips, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He was the PhD of kissing. He flipped my switch. He turned the oven on. It’s all his fault, really. He awoke the slumbering beast.

After that, he pretty much owned me.

**

Before long I found out why León’s eyes looked sad, and why his humor tended to be of the gallows variety. His family’s secret burden was a mentally ill brother so miserable and self-destructive he had jumped in front of a truck to kill himself, but had succeeded only in needing 24/7 care in a hospital bed for the rest of his life. León’s was not a family that processed trauma together or openly; his cultured, old-country doctor father coped by making bleak existential jokes of the Woody Allen variety, and his mother was all brisk pragmatism.

In addition, I wasn’t León’s first love – that honor belonged to his high school girlfriend Michelle, with whom he had had a very passionate and volatile relationship. Their parting had been difficult. He still pined for her. I was jealous.

Nevertheless, we had a couple of happy months of relative reciprocity, although it pains me to think of the times, out walking in a group of friends, when I dropped or avoided his hand simply out of acute self-consciousness. He took it personally, but I was simply clueless about how to act, how to be a couple in public. I had never done it before. For his part, he would sometimes wound me with offhand but barbed jokes about women when we were hanging out with “the guys.” Typical adolescent posturing and inexperience, but I was tremendously vulnerable. It was, after all, my first relationship.

We did attend the college dances together, the formal “waltz parties” in the Great Hall, and I was seldom happier than when we were doing a breezy swing while Frank Sinatra crooned a tune like “Witchcraft.” The only time I was happier was when we were alone together in his messy, undecorated dorm room, on sheets that smelled of him, listening to Depeche Mode or Kate Bush and continuing my remedial tutorial on the birds and the bees. Thanksgiving week I could barely wait to get back to him after the break, hungry for the taste of him, running down the hall of his dormitory and waking him up from a nap. He was tousled and unshowered and redolent of his own skin. I wanted to eat him alive. I thought he was so beautiful, this skinny Argentinean boy from Omaha, with his wispy dark hair and sad eyes. I had forgotten all about Titus.

Everything changed after winter break. He had seen Michelle, and what had happened between them confused, angered, and upset him to the point that he didn’t think he could continue with me. He was violently jealous of Michelle, and furious with her for moving on, even though he appeared to have done exactly the same thing with me. In the following months, we would come together and apart several times. His flirtations with other women were excruciating for me to watch, but he seemed to feel I was unentitled to my own jealousy and was angered by it. León’s double standard! Doggedly I courted him, wrote him poems, pined away, listening to “our” music.

By the end of the school year, however, we, had kissed and made up. I was loath to go home for the summer.

**

The rest of the story has essentially been told already: girl loses boy.

Now girl has lost boy for good.

**

The grief has been complicated and intense. Complicated because the experience with Cheyenne scarred me deeply, intense because I was so young and impressionable and full of desperate longing. I loved León; I saw things about him he hid from others, and I hungered so hard to take away his pain that my ribs ached. I would listen to the gorgeous Depeche Mode song “Somebody,” a song to which he had introduced me, and yearn to be León’s Somebody. That Somebody with whom he shared his innermost thoughts and his intimate details, who helped him see things in a different light. I didn’t want him to turn into the bitter, lonely old man he fully expected to become.

What I understand now, at forty-three, is that only time and experience would temper and mellow the suffering he was grappling with when we were barely more than kids. I tried to make things better for him…and he chose someone who made him feel powerful (his explanation) instead. Who, after all, doesn’t want to be the rescuer? It’s always easier to see the other person as the needy one. It might have behooved me back then to need help more openly and often, and let León be the hero once in a while.

But back in the day, I believed I was ready to endure any amount of pain if it meant León wouldn’t have to. (I probably endured a lot of pain unnecessarily that didn’t do either of us a bit of good.) In the end, León survived all his youthful turbulence and tragedy, and got to leave the earth at the point of arrival at fulfillment in work and love, at actual contentment. Whereas I’m the one left struggling with vocation, singlehood, and this terrible grief, weeping at my kitchen table alone.

That fiercely loyal (and probably unhealthily selfless) nineteen-year-old would cry: So be it!

I’d been so worried about León. My worry, as it turns out, was unwarranted.

**

Unable to return to the brutality of fundraising calling for a week (don’t ask me how I’m going to pay next month’s rent), I took a long walk in the early autumn rain to the art-house theatre to see Midnight in Paris. It was a spirited, funny, and entertaining film not unlike Allen’s earlier work, free of the lethargy and dark redundancy I’d found in more recent films where he seemed to play the same one-note, never-satisfied protagonist.

What struck me most about the film’s time-traveling aspect was that it underscored how incredibly quickly time passes. I couldn’t help but think of how these once-vibrant partygoers and artists of 1920s Paris had long since grown old and died. In the present moment, here was the young Ernest Hemingway sitting before Owen Wilson’s Gil, drinking whisky and dispensing manly advice; the cessation of his existence seemed an unthinkable distance away. But in the morning, Gil would be in 2011, and Papa would be dust. Everything was so ephemeral.

It seems to me that my vivid memories of León could have happened yesterday, the intervening years have slipped by with such alarming speed. That first night after the news came, as I lay in bed sobbing, I said out loud, over and over, “I have got to change my life.”

**

Moving out of the late summer of young adulthood into the early autumn of middle age, I want to do so many things I haven’t done. And I don’t know how. Still living on the periphery like a nineteen-year-old student, I am always just few hundred dollars away from getting kicked out on the street. I send out inquiries and feelers this way and that toward the dreams that I have, and I tell myself that my small actions are baby steps toward the life I envision. But León’s death makes me wonder: am I doing enough? Am I stuck? Am I a coward? What would I do if I knew I had a week to live?

I know that at heart – my Canadian coach Lisa Lane Brown helped make this very clear to me – I don’t believe that I’m qualified, that I have what it takes to “make it.” I don’t have the requisite self-confidence or belief in myself to trust that I can make things happen. In a world increasingly framed as full of ferocious competition, the only thing I’m certain of is failure. I want to change this. I have to change this.

I have a stack of library books on my kitchen table right now about how to change the core negative beliefs you carry around about yourself that sabotage you. Even if they can’t help, I don’t imagine they’ll hurt. And maybe I’ll learn something.

Because if I’m going to keel over at the age of fifty from a massive brain aneurysm, I’d like to do it by the shores of the Mediterranean with my beloved husband by my side, and be mourned by the hundreds or even thousands of people who were helped by something I wrote.

The horror of death, said Norman Brown, is the horror of dying with unlived lives in our bodies.

I suppose that’s the bottom line.

___________________________

Note: the post title was taken from a poem by George Gordon, Lord Byron, one of León’s favorite poets. The full text can be found here.

A bitterly pessimistic assessment of the show’s central character by a cerebral, cynical materialist (in the scientific, not consumer sense) who was forever attacking or picking apart her less intellectual husband for looking for a greater meaning in life and for becoming fascinated with various spiritualities, like reform Judaism or Maggie’s Quaker faith. (His final insult to her, or so she imagined, was his choice of a mystic Rumi ode for his burial.)

George Sibley, Nate’s stepfather, and a man of science himself, was far more generous, and perhaps more accurate, at Nate’s funeral. “Nate was an idealist,” George mused soberly but kindly to the assemblage, “and he struggled, all through his life, to be a good man. He wasn’t perfect — but then who among us is? — and he never gave up on himself, the people he loved, or even love itself — in all its vexing, beautiful forms.”

This reduced me to tears. I loved the character of Nate, because he didn’t have answers, but was always trying to find them. He made mistakes, and he made a fool of himself, but he did try to do the right thing, even as he let himself be pulled in the direction of his longings. He behaved as if growth and change were both desirable and possible. (Even Brenda, despite her know-it-all cynicism, was forced to admit she needed help with her compulsive behavior, and her decision to pursue a career as a psychotherapist showed some kind of belief in the necessity of growth and change.)

**

Maybe I’m an idealist like Nate, running after the latest glimmer of promise, but a couple of weeks ago I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Not because anything external changed — Sam is still incomunicado (though I do have news of him), and I’m still laboring away in a punishing job I now unequivocally hate — but because I decided to listen to someone whose email dispatches have been trickling in over the past six months, whose approach has been the first in ages to make any sort of new and unexplored sense to me.

My falling-out with Doc was a gift, in a way, because over time I’d become passive, pretending I was making progress when I was clearly just spinning my wheels. Of course he had been working with me pro bono, and of late his own health issues had become his overarching concern, so he was distracted and could probably have used this break from me as well.

In the interim, because of some other personal-development email list I was on, I had been encouraged to sign up for Lisa Lane Brown’s newsletter, so I had. Lisa is a former ringette champion who plowed her way through all kinds of programs, courses, books, and psychological whatnot to try and figure out why she often “choked” at critical moments — during games and otherwise.

Normally I don’t go for the “motivational jocks,” those former basketball players et.al. who morph into successful business owners and write peppy bestsellers, but what I noticed about Lisa’s newsletters was that she wasn’t parroting the same-old, same-old about positive thinking, getting in The Zone, or self-discipline. She wasn’t talking about “attitude” or “the law of attraction” or any of the usual buzzwords. She was talking about things that had resonated powerfully with me before (like Martin Seligman’s work on learned helplessness, which I mentioned in this post) as well as some things I’d never considered before that resonated powerfully with me now. When you’ve ingested as much self-help gobbledygook as I have, to come across something you haven’t heard yet is nothing short of remarkable.

During my two-month bender, I made up my mind to try her special-offer 30-day downloadable course once I’d finished drinking and wallowing and watching the entire series of SFU. If nothing else, I reasoned, she might be able to help me move out of my dead-end, draining chore of a job. Her words were the first in a long time to ignite a flicker of hope about my future.

**

My main intention was to tackle my lack of motivation, confidence, and competence as it related to work and vocation. (Thus far, I’ve completed the first exercise and gotten some excellent feedback from Lisa — she provides personal email support.) But Lisa also supplied, as part of the package, a downloadable CD on relationships. I listened to it immediately, the same night I received it, while sewing up holes in my threadbare socks. (You can see why I need a new job.)

Lisa used a visual image that suddenly made sense, for me, of a multitude of situations — from my extensively chronicled difficulties with my mother, to my various obsessions with elusive men, to my blowout with Sam. Without making me defensive.

Draw a circle, she said. Put the other person’s initials within that circle, and yours outside it. As long as you stay “outside the circle,” the other person will want to be around you, will appreciate you, may even pursue you…but insert yourself inside that circle, and he or she will want to evade or get away from you, may get angry with you, and may even forcefully push you away. It’s very important, in relationships, to stay outside of the other person’s “circle.”

The circle, of course, as I recognized, symbolizes the other person’s boundaries. All at once I saw that this principle isn’t about learning to play games, it’s about learning to respect boundaries. Over-pursuing, the way my mother does with me, and the way I’ve done with Tony and Sonny and so many other men, is one way to violate another person’s boundaries and make him or her want to get the hell away from us.

With Sam, who generally ran toward me with equal or greater force, my fatal mistake lay in the way I came on so strong about the brakes situation, trying to take over and tell him what to do (I also then proceeded to call him too many times about it). As Lisa points out, attempting to control other people violates their boundaries just as surely as over-pursuit does.

So I got inside Sam’s circle, all right, but not via the route one might (and one reader did) expect.

Intuitively, I already knew this principle. But these realities of boundary-dynamics had always been framed in such strategic or manipulative ways before that I considered any advice about navigating them to be nothing short of exhortations to inauthenticity. Lessons on How to Play the Game, instead of on How to Effectively Cultivate Your Connection With Another Person. Lisa’s presentation, however, was clear-eyed, authentic, and somehow empowering. She outlined what we often do wrong, as well as how to “get outside of the circle” — essentially by backing off, and in some cases owning up to our errors.

As you well know, I’ve said why, why, why for two whole months, and marinated in confusion and utter helplessness about Sam’s absence and silence. It was actually a relief to accept some responsibility, and to pinpoint an unidentified dynamic I’d actually set in motion that probably resulted in his craving for distance. I am not, after all, the boss of him. (Even if he was briefly the boss of me.)

**

According to the laws of boundary-dynamics, the only damage control you can perform when it seems your loved one no longer wants you is this: to accept it.

I wrote to Sam one more time, owning up to my controlling behavior, and accepting that he no longer wants to be in the relationship. No more pleas, just an indication of what I would prefer (I’d still prefer to be with him)…as I go on with my life. Plus an invitation to tell me where else I went wrong, for future reference.

After this, I leave him alone.

Relieved of all the pressure (and “no one responds well to pressure,” observes Ms. Brown) Sam has more freedom to respond — or not — but in the meantime I’ve gotten outside of his “circle” and started acting like a self-respecting adult who can function without him.

**

It’s not that I’m disowning my desire to be connected to Sam…in fact, one of the things I like most about Lisa is that she emphasizes that we not disown our desires. Too many other approaches take the sour-grapes route, resulting in the suppression of inconvenient feelings and desires (e.g. “He probably wasn’t the right guy for me anyway.”). She doesn’t think we should “just get over it,” or “relinquish attachment,” or distract ourselves with TV, or work, or substances, or exercise…or even, I would venture, yoga. I’m pretty sure I’ve known people who used yoga to avoid inconvenient or painful feelings. I may have even worked for one or two. (By the way, did I mention that my old friend Ingrid abruptly left the studio, in a mysterious exodus not unlike mine?) The more we try to suppress those feelings, even when it’s in favor of things like affirmations, forced “positivity,” or the “fake it till you make it” philosophy so popular among fitness professionals, the more we alienate ourselves from ourselves.

No, Lisa encourages us to fully feel and accept our desires and our longings, even the ones that we feel helpless to fulfill. What we need to unlearn, she explains, is psychological leaning. That unconscious tendency we all have to put pressure on other people to validate and approve of us, unwittingly invading their “circles,” without making clear or direct requests.

So I’m trying to implement the practice of “self-acceptance,” accepting my feelings without judgment. Even when I feel like hell. Which I have for the past several weeks, between dreading getting on the phones at my job (just to get yelled at by “donors”), and dreading the visit of my uber-religious parents during this depleted time (my mother, of course, will invade my circle — and try to bring Jesus with her). And then there’s what I found out about Sam from Rob on Friday.

**

Yes, I finally approached ole Rob, Sam’s good-lookin’, man-lovin’, very politic and ambitious buddy, whom I never quite trusted (and who lately seems always to be chatting up the comeliest boychiks among the new hires, alleviating some of my anxieties from the last post). Ever since Obama announced he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, I’ve been beside myself, thinking about what escalation could mean for civilian contractors. Bombs. Landmines. Snipers. So I bit the bullet and swallowed my pride and asked Rob point-blank if he knew where Sam was. Was he somewhere where he could get blown up?

“He’s not overseas,” said Rob, to my astonishment. When it was clear I wasn’t going to probe, and instead told him gently that I didn’t mean to put him on the spot, he divulged even more information. Sam was back working in his home state. He never made it through the screening, so he never took the job. Up until a couple of weeks ago, he and Rob had been communicating regularly via phone.

All this time, Sam had been here, in the States, fully capable of communicating. “I think he just wanted to cut the cords, you know?” Rob offered helpfully. I knew. But he was going to cut the cords with people like you, Rob, I thought, not me. I recalled the part in Crossing the Unknown Sea where David Whyte points out that the root within the word humiliation is humus, earth, or ground. I had been brought straight to the ground after believing I’d be the exception.

But Sam had led me to believe I’d be the exception. That was the worst of it: when Sam told me he was leaving, my immediate reaction was to prepare for the end. “Well, I’m really glad we did this,” I started to say, already calculating mentally how I might best ready myself emotionally to part with him. Sam interrupted my train of thought, protesting that he would only be gone a few months, that we’d be in communication. Nothing was going to be over. It was he who cranked up the intensity, wanting us to learn as much about each other and spend as much time together as possible in the time remaining. I was so reassured that he intended to be around long-term that I divulged to my mother — my mother! — that I was in a relationship. Big mistake.

Now I’ve really complicated their Christmas visit, at a time when I don’t feel like taking questions.

**

“Anger is desire contaminated by helplessness,” says Lisa. When I finally got home from work that day, I cried. And I raged. What was my helpless desire? There was that same desire, as always, to be connected to Sam…but there was also the desire to be treated as a person of value (who deserved communication, consideration, and at the very least closure) by this person who had been of such inestimable value to me. He had treated me that way in the past; obviously, it wasn’t happening now. And there wasn’t much more I could do about it, now that I’d put myself “outside of the circle,” except to accept my anger, and the thwarted desires underlying the anger, intolerable as they might feel.

The pain and weight in my chest, when I allow myself to feel the grief of Sam’s disconnection and/or loss, seems crushing to the point that I can hardly breathe. The other night I opened the window in single-digit weather; I thought I was suffocating. It’s a different order of suffering than my longing for the various guys I never got the chance to really be with, even those I slept with or dated. In those cases, I was missing something that had not yet come into existence (and, as it turns out, never did).

“In some ways, I feel like he was my first love,” I wrote to my closest friend of twenty-three years, who has heard literally everything about my more successful relations with men as well as my many fruitless obsessions. She knew León, that catastrophic college beau, as well as Max Vujevic. She had listened to me moan about a guy named Greg Schmidt for six years.

“I feel like he was your first love, too,” she wrote back.

**

In my more lucid moments I also realize that much of my suffering comes from “psychological leaning” — obsessing about whether he hates me now, how love could turn to hate (or worse, indifference), what he thinks of me now, and going over and over happier memories. (I just deleted a whole long, unnecessary paragraph of reminiscences!) I want Sam to go back to thinking I’m okay.

The obsessing itself, as Lisa astutely points out, is, indeed, another form of escape. Out here, I experience helplessness about the situation; in my head, I make an attempt to gain some semblance of control. I’ve retreated into my head all my life, the way other people might retreat into things like TV or shopping. The biggest problem is that whatever you achieve in your head doesn’t have much to do with “out here” unless you know what to do “out here” about the helplessness. Which is why I decided to listen to someone else who sounded like she had a clue.

When I stop “leaning” for a second, I know I still want (and deserve) word from Sam. But I also remember that he was twenty-one, and that his life here had already become unbearably chaotic — even more so than usual for such a differently abled and gifted human being. It was like inserting Powder into the middle of a tangle of competing electromagnetic fields. I don’t even know that we could have survived, that I could have stayed with him amid the chaos, if things had continued on the way they were. I’m actually glad he got out the hell out of Dodge. Maybe the only way Sam knew how to simplify his landscape was to torch every bridge (Rob’s simply being the last to burn).

I’ve done all I can, anyway, by putting myself beyond his boundary and relieving any pressure. As much as I’d rather avoid moving forward (still looking over my shoulder), I still have the same life dilemmas waiting for me, about how to make my way in the world, make a living, maybe even make a difference. Believe it or not, that’s the primary thing I’m working on now, with help from Ms. Brown. Having the guidance of someone who actually knows something firsthand about success, and understands how things like learned helplessness and boundaries work to hinder or assist us, gives me a little more confidence that I might yet be able to make constructive changes. Even at my advanced age.

After all, just seven months ago I would never have believed I’d have the most amazing, if brief, love affair of my life with that supervisor guy Sam.

It could never have happened had I not been able to truly change.

]]> http://whatthehellisthis.net/2009/12/06/let-the-circle-be-unbroken/feed/ 13 AlienBaby http://whatthehellisthis.net/2009/10/20/gone-daddy-gone/ http://whatthehellisthis.net/2009/10/20/gone-daddy-gone/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:33:28 +0000 AlienBaby http://whatthehellisthis.net/?p=294 ]]> Lately I have wondered if I am in fact crazy, or going crazy.

My young manfriend has still not contacted me in any way, shape, or form. “Looks like he disappeared,” Doc commented glibly, almost jocularly, on my voice mail over a week ago. At that moment (and every moment thereafter when I thought of it), I felt a flash of blinding and uncontrollable rage. I wanted to punch Doc in the face for that. I wanted to put my fist through a wall. Or, better, a window — to feel that sharp, searing jump of exposed nerves, to see the ribbons of blood striping my hand and arm. All at once the adolescent female phenomenon of “cutting” made sense to me: the overwhelming emotion is so fucking intolerable, you feel you need to bleed.

In lieu of violence against myself or others, my solution (so far) has been to drink every night. Isn’t that enlightened of me? Not hard liquor, mind you, I have such a wussy-ass system I can’t take Jack Daniels every day. And beer and red wines overrun my system with yeast. So I drink cheap white wine. Lots of it. It blunts the pain, and helps me go to sleep. I feel like warmed-over shit in the morning, but I do get some relief, at least for a little while.

I’ve also been watching back-to-back episodes of Six Feet Under, a show I turned Sam onto. Alan Ball, god bless him, knows rawness — he knows what happens when you get the lid ripped off all your seething emotions. I watched American Beauty again, too, and discovered that Lester Burnham’s fuck-you attitude matches my own. Instead of throwing a plate of asparagus at the wall, or calmly blackmailing my bosses, I’ve scandalized my conservative Christian family with over-the-top liberal sarcasm, and started refusing to pay my student loan payments. I’ve even more or less told Doc to fuck off, for the time being, for his insensitive comment. Every emotion, including my usually buried anger, is bubbling up to the surface, and I don’t give a damn.

**

Sam has communicated with Rob, but not with me. I found this out last week when a coworker asked both of us if we’d heard anything. I said no; Rob then told us where Sam was (what state) and what he was doing (training). It was a pretty humiliating moment. I would have liked to have had a convenient hole to crawl into.

I have really got to find another job. Or leave the state. Or leave the country. Or leave the fucking planet.

Just seeing Rob, now, every day, fills me with indescribable shame. I can’t look him in the eye. Much of the time, I simply want to find that hole to crawl into. I want to hide. I want to die. I imagine I read pity in the faces of the other guys who knew about us: Poor thing, he was just fucking her. (With Rob, it’s the same, only without the “poor thing.”)

Some days, walking through the dry leaves in the fall sunlight on the way to work, I feel almost okay, almost as if I can survive this just fine; but once I enter cube-land, under those fluorescent lights, and see Rob, and Sam’s former party-buddies, and am required to read coercive scripts for hours on end to hostile or argumentative strangers, all the while being judged on my now very spotty performance, I get the overwhelming urge to fellate a Smith & Wesson. (Now that would be a real blow job.)

I want to escape, to run far, far away, and try to recapture my former enthusiasm for living and writing abroad, but I feel trapped here by my chronic lack of funds and my need for this tedious, repetitive, nerve-wracking job in a depressed poverty economy.

Gerald Three Rivers says I deserve better. A heavyset middle-aged Native American Libertarian who was one of Sam’s closest friends and mentors, he’s been one of the few people to check in with me on a daily basis and to be concerned about my well-being. I’m grateful for that, even if his strenuous exhortations to “move on” make it sound like he has his own agenda. Which he may have. (If he says that to me one more time, actually, I may lose my shit on him too.) Gerry’s always had a thing for me, or at least talked that talk. I have no doubt he’d change his tune, however, if I were suddenly available, if I suddenly “got over” Sam, and decided to exercise the willful blindness indulging him would require. (I’m not talking about being shallow about appearances, either: I’ve seen Gerry’s obstinate streak, in abundance. He’ll simply stop listening to other people, and reiterate his point of view over and over and over again. Even I know that’s not a good sign.)

Some things look better, baby, to borrow from Elton John, just passing through.

**

Along those lines, I discovered another choice tidbit this week: my college boyfriend León, who “friended” several of my friends on my social network, has ignored my friend request — and blocked me.

After this odd revelation (I thought we parted on good terms), I started searching for old crushes or flames of mine, and realized that almost every one would do the same. Most have already ignored my attempts at reconnecting. Tony would, for sure, even if he’s safe in Sweden now. Greg, without a doubt — he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. Max, oh yes, he barely even looked at me the last time we met, at a friend’s graduation. Eric, probably, especially after the letter I wrote him back in 2003. Definitely Damien Moreau. Oh, Lord, Damien Moreau! I sent him a gushy letter after his biggest independent film…he most definitely did NOT respond. Although after September 11, I sent him a brief email at his Web site to make sure he was alive and well in New York City — he sent me about six unpunctuated words in response (something like: okay tired helping out down there). He lives in Morocco now, with an accomplished French photographer who looks like Audrey Tautou, and their adorable blond daughter. (A high school friend sent me their Flickr link.)

What a stellar record. I never want to see you again. The freak, the crazy stalker, the abomination. Get thee behind me, Milton! At least Sonny kept me on as a “friend,” even though we never communicate anymore…not since I called him out on what I called him out on. (At some point, like I said, I stopped making endless excuses for Sonny. Maybe people actually respect you more when you do that.)

I recently had a very frank and revealing conversation with Drew, that good-looking astrology buff who had been trying to get me to date him. He openly admitted that if I suddenly changed my tune and were as interested in him as he fancies himself to be in me, he couldn’t get away fast enough. He blamed his “Leo” nature, his inability to take anything seriously, and his relish of the chase over the apprehending. (Be it noted that León, Eric, and Sonny are all Leos.) He agreed that things are better off with us the way they are — as an ongoing, good-humored flirtation, nothing more. This way we get to remain friends, and nobody gets hurt.

You see, dear readers, I don’t willingly chase heartbreak. I thought Sam, even given his age and station, was a far better bet than my past gambles. (And for a while, he was.) In the beginning I was actually worried that he was more “into” me than I was “into” him.

Silly me! That is never, ever the way it plays out. Now I actually find myself wondering: if I had loved Jonathan Goldman, who’s to say he wouldn’t have spurned me too? Who says I wouldn’t have been left sobbing and alone at prom to be comforted by my pink-taffeta-swathed girlfriends in the ladies’ room?

Maybe those high school peers should have voted me Most Likely to be Rejected and Abandoned. Wouldn’t that have made for a nice byline in the yearbook? At any rate, I should have a T-shirt made, like the shirts Sam used to give out as prizes, that would serve to alert all the men who think they’re interested in me: “I Look A Whole Lot Better At Arm’s Length.”

**

Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart

I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain,

And lie disheveled in the grass apart,

A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain,

While rainy evening drips to misty night,

And misty night to cloudy morning clears,

And clouds disperse across the gathering light,

And birds grow noisy, and the sun appears,

Had I bethought me then, sweet love, sweet thorn,

How sharp an anguish even at the best,

When all’s requited and the future sworn,

The happy hour can leave within the breast,

I had not so come running at the call

Of one who loves me little, if at all.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

I’m reading Millay, Dickinson, Rilke, Rumi, seeking comfort, seeking understanding. Ultimately I find myself drawn to Carol Gilligan’s book, The Birth of Pleasure, yet again, to that age-old story of Cupid and Psyche, of men and women and the loss of love.

She speaks to me of trauma, and of that dissociation I’ve resisted (on Merton’s urging) since adolescence:

Trauma is the shock to the psyche that leads to dissociation: our ability to separate ourselves from parts of ourselves, to create a split within ourselves so that we can know and also not know what we know, feel and yet not feel our feelings. It is our ability, as Freud put it in Studies on Hysteria, to hold parts of of our experience not as a secret from others but as a “foreign body” within ourselves.

I’m not even sure I know what I know, anymore. I feel crazy, because the lover who promised, so tenderly, not to “disappear” has been completely eclipsed by other, conflicting versions of him: by Rob’s harder-edged party buddy, by the aloof stranger largely ignoring me in the office that last night, by the all too familiar story of rejection and abandonment that Gerry and Doc seem to embrace as the true narrative.

I stumble upon Gilligan’s definition of patriarchy again, which is very different from the charged interpretations my previous discussions of the term seem to have engendered:

Patriarchy, although frequently misinterpreted to mean the oppression of women by men, literally means a hierarchy — a rule of priests — in which the priest, the hieros, is a father. It describes an order of living that elevates fathers, separating fathers from sons (the men from the boys) and placing both sons and women under a father’s authority.

Both the women’s and the antiwar movements were antipatriarchal movements, according to Gilligan, because within the latter, the draftee “sons” of the new generation were starting to question the wisdom of the commanding “fathers.”

“The foundational stories we tell about Western civilization are stories of trauma,” she writes. She talks about some of the great Greek tragedies, like Oedipas Rex and The Oresteia. “When we focus more closely on what actually happens,” says Gilligan, “we see that a father or husband’s authority is challenged.” In the end, of course, his (culturally sanctioned) version of order and rectitude must prevail.

Her starkest example is that of Iphigenia, the daughter king Agamemnon sacrifices in order to gain the winds that will carry the Greek army to Troy — all to avenge the honor of a husband (Menelaus). Iphigenia and her mother both plead with Agamemnon, trying to appeal to the bonds of parental love. “It’s Greece for which I much sacrifice you, whether I want to or not,” the king replies. This sacrifice must be made on behalf of the honor of men and nations. It must not be derailed by the emotional pleas of women.

Imagine the dissociation that Agamemnon, as a parent, must have forced upon himself to be able to kill his child.

Euripides’ female chorus has this to say when the shamefaced Iphigenia aligns herself with her father’s murderous wishes (saying “it’s more important for one single man to look upon the light than a thousand women”): “Your intention, young girl, is noble. But what is happening here..(is) sick.”

Asserts Gilligan, anything that establishes “hierarchy in the heart of intimacy, is inherently tragic, and like all trauma survivors, we keep telling the story we need to listen to and to understand.” Jung likewise recognized that such power-politics had no place in love. “Where love rules,” he famously observed, “there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking.” Just as Rilke spoke of a “more human love” than one that simply “flows from man to woman,” Gilligan says

If feminism is understood not as a battle in the war between the sexes but rather a movement to transform a world in which both men and women suffer losses that constrain their ability to love, then the story of Psyche and Cupid is a feminist tale.

Perhaps the bottom line is this: that what Ms. Gilligan calls “patriarchy” is, essentially, a form of dehumanizing dissociation that many cultures force upon its children; something that divides and separates us, and allows us to effectively detach from, exploit, and even, in extreme cases, kill one another.

**

The mix CD I made for Sam included, as its penultimate song, the quietly gorgeous Tom Waits classic Time, which always struck me as his exhortation to hard-luck, hard-drinking loners like himself to forego the unnecessarily tragic posturings of maleness (the boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the street), put down the bottle, and come in from the cold.

So put a candle in the window

And a kiss upon his lips

As the dish outside the window fills with rain

The band goes home, the bar closes down, it’s raining hammers and nails, and your woman is waiting for you at home.

And it’s time, time, time that you love

And it’s time, time, time.

**

“He’s just being a guy,” says my friend Theresa over breakfast scrambles at the vegetarian restaurant. “When men don’t know what to do with their emotions, they create distance.” Theresa has had many more relationships than I have, and has been married for the last eight years to the man she’s been with for eleven.

I don’t see her often, now that she has kids. Today she’s brought Rudy with her, the baby. He just turned one this month. I keep looking at him; he’s an adorable little boy. But it’s not just that. Something about the shape of his head, and his dark eyes, and those long eyelashes…I always thought Sam could have passed for Theresa’s brother, and now her child looks like the child that someone could have had with Sam. That I could have had with Sam.

When I pick him up, he clings to me like a koala cub. I melt. I kiss his soft-haired little head with a series of tiny pecks. He likes this, and gurgles. I have a lump in my throat. I never wanted babies, but I want this baby. I want to take him home. Again I feel that ineffable sense of bottomless loss.

**

Carol Gilligan reminds me of what I instinctively know: that love is pleasure, one of life’s most basic pleasures, and a shared one. This shared joy, communion, tenderness, bonding, sensuality, play — it renders us vulnerable, because we are responding from the core of who we are, like children.

I revisit our old friend Eileen, Gilligan’s client, and her intuition about her distancing husband Rick: “My hunch is that he really is connected with me, and he’s confused about that.” Later, talking about her young sons, Eileen speaks of “that tender piece of them that they sort of have to set aside to be what they think they are supposed to be.” Another client, Jude, talks about “the two Dans” she lives with, the man who will suddenly embrace and kiss her in the hallway, and the man who sits withdrawn and uncommunicative at the dinner table.

“When (Dan) closed himself off from her,” writes Gilligan, “(Jude) felt that he had slammed a door in her face, and she blamed herself, assuming that he had seen something in her that drove him away.”

Eileen and Jude, like me, ask endlessly: is it me? Am I, are my flaws, or my actions, to blame? Am I the girl Most Likely to Be Rejected and Abandoned?

Gilligan’s book reminds me that something else is at play — that we’re up against some deep-seated obstacles, created by this hierarchy-happy, martial power-culture inimical to feeling that punishes its boys and girls for being too human. These obstacles are so invisible and inherent, like the air we breathe, it’s no wonder I feel crazy trying to name them out loud. The responses I’ve generated just broaching the subject only make me feel that much more like some wild-haired Joan the Baptist crying out in the wilderness in an animal skin. But I know I’m far from alone in my experience.

**

Gilligan asks Jude, “Why would pleasure be followed by absence?” Neither woman directly answers the question. I wish someone would.

Cupid leaves Psyche at the moment when she falls in love with him. And Psyche falls in love with Cupid only when she has broken his injunction against seeing him or speaking about their love.

“When Psyche cannot see or speak about what she knows,” Gilligan says, “she has no way to frame her experience. And without framing it, she cannot tell her story, or counter the stories that others have told her.”

I find myself in an analogous position. I wasn’t supposed to let anything show at work after the director hassled Sam (Hush, hush/Keep it down down/Voices carry), I’m still not sure how much I should talk about us, and I have a feeling Sam wouldn’t be happy about my writings here, even with  the anonymity. There is still all this secrecy and shame surrounding our relationship — especially now that it looks as if I’ve been summarily abandoned.

Now, the story seems to belong to Rob, if he wishes to tell it. He can tell the homeboy version, with a bunch of his wasted buddies, passing the bowl, talking smack. Yeah, he was just fucking her. You know, she’s, like, 40, or something. Cougar town, right? And I have nothing current or relevant to offer, to counter that more macho and thoroughly derisive version of reality.

Like Psyche, all I knew was the pleasure of feeling, intimacy, sensuality, love, all those delicious and vulnerable things, in our hours alone. Maybe all of that was supposed to stay in the proverbial cave in the dark. Maybe I was never supposed to have challenged Sam in any way, even regarding potentially self-destructive decisions. Maybe I was never supposed to write, or speak, about the relationship. I feel as if I’ve broken rules that (unlike Cupid’s rules) were never even clearly outlined for me.

Psyche, according to Gilligan, by disobeying Cupid’s orders and lighting a candle to look at him, “…had betrayed him, she was not the woman he thought she was, she was not the woman he loved.” He would punish her now “merely by leaving.”

If Sam felt that way, leaving was certainly punishment enough.

**

No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are live-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of very sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are. — Rilke

Whether or not any of these musings is even relevant, I’m sure of one thing: I’m tired of hearing it from people who talk to me as if this should have been cheap, safe, and sure, like a public amusement…and if it wasn’t, then I did something wrong. Or who try to sell me the equivalent of Arundhati Roy’s “Love Laws” from The God of Small Things: laws that lay down “who should be loved. And how. And how much.” Sam was too young. I was too serious. What did I expect. Blah blah blah. It’s time to “move on.” You move on. Shut the fuck up.

Granted, if you play your cards right, and don’t go overboard, you won’t ever be in this kind of pain.

But shit, people. I fucking loved Sam, goddamn it. Being with him was like starting to live, at last, after some forty-year exile in hungry-ghost purgatory. I have never been happier or more satisfied with anyone: not with an older man, not with a taller man, not with one who could have worked as a male model (or porn star). I finally received everything I had been afraid to even yearn for anymore — with a big red bow on it — and it wasn’t disappointing, the way your begged-for childhood Christmas gifts sometimes were when they turned out to be nothing like the Sears catalog. Lifelong recurrent dreams about frustration and privation simply ceased, and have not come back.

Sam changed me. He changed my whole way of seeing other people. I was starting to fear that maybe I was addicted to shiny, sexy surfaces like SFU‘s Brenda Chenowith, or possibly Sonny, and that I wouldn’t be able to love a real person with real imperfections.

And there’s no one else who can hold me and soothe me the way Sam’s embrace soothes me. I melted into his warm, familiar body. Hand in glove. Now I’ve been torn away from him, with jagged, bloody bits of me missing, but the shape of him is still here.

**

Do I have a point? I don’t even have a point. This week’s rambling thesis can meander all over creation, can wonder about men and dissociation, and whether or not I have a grip on reality, but it can’t solve the burning question Doc and Gerry (and probably Rob) seem to presume they have the answer to: Have you abandoned me, Sam?

Why have you abandoned me, Sam?

I regret now all those impatient mornings I dragged Sam, unwilling, from the warm, dreamy womb of our shared bed and out into the cold, harsh light of consciousness and our separate obligations. Every day, now, I’m re-born like a preemie, squalling and kicking to have been ripped too soon from a secure, secret paradise and stuck in a bright, sterile box where I can be gawked and poked at.

It’s too late, but I want to hit the snooze alarm. I want just five minutes more, nestled against the aromatic fur on Sam’s chest, breathing him in. I never went for hairy guys before, but Sam completely redefined my world. That’s what happens. The ‘list’ goes out the window.

I’m finding it hard to write, now. The language is leaving me in silence…

**

The other night I watched Charlie Kaufman’s latest madcap and fatalistic opus, Synecdoche, New York. It was brilliant and depressing. Like much of the Woody Allen canon, it came from a place of unflinching pessimism about the human condition (we’re born alone, we die alone, and we’re on our own in between), and a nakedly obsessive-compulsive self-referential-ness. Kaufman’s protagonist (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) creates a massive and endless play-within-a-play, turning everything he lives into a representation. After a while this exercise made me queasy.

And it made me realize something.

What happened with Sam and me resists explication, formulation, re-creation. It was quite possibly the most beautiful, inexpressible, and real exchange I’ve had with another human.

Any kind of art is, of necessity, a way of freezing and fossilizing life. You choose what makes it into the picture; you emphasize certain aspects, and ignore others. (Kaufman’s choices definitely reinforce his bleak worldview.) For once I find that I can’t write about an experience of mine and do it justice. I can’t turn Sam-and-me into some kind of art for general consumption. I can’t even explain us to other people in a way that helps them to understand why his leaving is such a big fucking deal, and why I’m totally fucking incapacitated. But you weren’t together for very long. How well could you have known each other? It takes at least six months before you can really say you love someone.

**

My friend Elena, a circumspect survivor of childhood sexual abuse, used to speak disparagingly of what she called “instimacy.” She had good reasons for policing her boundaries and keeping her guard up. She had been cruelly invaded, at her most vulnerable, by someone she trusted.

What doesn’t follow from that, however, is to assume there’s anything inherently or universally wrong with someone choosing to fling his or her arms wide to embrace another person without reservation. To actually be as open as an undefended child.

Yes, it does take time to get to know other people’s reactivities, their sore points, their shortcomings, and the various acquired selves they’ve constructed to help them “get out of childhood alive,” as Ben Zander put it, and live in the world. Watch any given Woody Allen movie and you’ll see characters falling for one another’s personalities, tastes, quirks, gimmicks, and neuroses. It’s a cerebral exercise in attaching (and is perhaps why Annie Hall is so popular among intellectuals). When I made a list of what I wanted in a man, and Sonny came along and embodied that list, I was still laboring in this vein — approaching the question of love quantitatively, almost like a comparison shopper.

I didn’t fall in love with Sam because of his fondness for Dr. Who (even though it made him cute in a nerdy sort of way). I wasn’t prepared for everything he taught me about his night life. And I’ll admit I couldn’t have predicted how he was going to react under extreme stress, or toward my pressure regarding his brakes; that threw me for a loop.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t know who Sam really is.

**

Earlier this year, as I mentioned in another post, I lost the man I regarded in many ways as my moral and existential father.

Ron Devert became my philosophy teacher in high school not long after I flushed my Christian faith. His choice of texts, and the themes he had us explore therein, had a lasting impact on my impressionable and searching soul. He introduced us to Saint-Exupery and Pablo Neruda, Lao Tzu and Thomas Merton. We read Zen koans and Harold Pinter plays, handouts about goddess-centered societies and antiwar poems by WWII soldiers.

What Mr. Devert tried to get across to us, at the end of the day, was that our lives would be more meaningful — perhaps even happier — the more authentic, and less stifled by convention, they were. (After having rejected the plasticity of born-again fundamentalist churchiness, I didn’t need a lot of convincing on that front.) He didn’t whitewash loneliness, despair, dread, or death — we confronted those subjects on a daily basis — but at the same time his outlook was far from nihilistic. While never promising us a rose garden, Mr. Devert celebrated beauty, courage, and kindness. Most of all, he celebrated love. Like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, his central message to his beloved students was carpe diem. Seize the day.

In other words: fling your arms wide, and embrace life, and love, without reservation. Be who you are fully; refuse to live within compromise and fear.

All these years later, the lessons I carried away from Mr. Devert’s class are still etched on the innermost tablets of my being. For decades afterward, I held onto an essay by Thomas Merton he had given us entitled Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message?

Having had little life experience to reinforce Merton’s words as a teen, I still felt their profound truth, and desperately wanted to live them.

I lived them when I welcomed Sam into my life.

**

But I want to let Brother Merton do most of the talking for me. I’ve said enough.

“Love is not just something that happens to you,” he writes, “it is a certain special way of being alive.” (Emphasis his.)

Life is not a straight horizontal line between two points, birth and death. Life curves upward to a peak of intensity, a high point of value and meaning, at which its latent creative possibilities go into action and the person transcends himself or herself in encounter, response, and communion with another.

This assertion, of course, is heresy from the popular Eastern/New Age standpoint, in which one is supposed to seek nothing of integral value outside oneself. As is the follow-up statement “We do not become fully human until we give ourselves to each other in love.” But I’ll come back to that point.

Even as a high school student, the following passage had such an impact on me that I became determined not to live a compartmentalized life:

Genuine love is a personal revolution. Love takes your ideas, your desires, and your actions and welds them together in one experience and one living reality which is a new you. You may prefer to keep this from happening. You may keep your thoughts, desires, and acts in separate compartments if you want: but then you will be an artificial and divided person, with three little filing cabinets: one of ideas, one of decisions, and one of actions and experiences. These three compartments may not have much to do with each other. Such a life does not make sense, and is not likely to be happy.

Devert and Merton helped shape me into a more integrated person, someone who “goes (her) way,” as Michel de Montaigne put it, “all of a piece,” and doesn’t cut parts of herself off from other parts. (Of course this also means that I’m rather useless at work at the moment. Compartmentalizing does have its uses in the corporate world.)

Yet it took me this long to really know the following, and to throw out my “list:”

We waste a great deal of time modeling ourselves on the images presented to us by an affluent marketing society. In doing this we come to consider ourselves and others not as persons but as products — as “goods,” or in other words, as packages. We appraise one another commercially. We size each other up and make deals with a view to our own profit. we do not give ourselves in love, we make a deal that will enhance our own product, and therefore no deal is final.

…Love is not a deal, it is a sacrifice. It is not marketing, it is a form of worship.

It occurs to me that my old friend Sonny and I suffer from the same strain of vanity. We both bought hook, line, and sinker into that whole Gen-X and Gen-Y preoccupation with fashion, hipness, indie rock, and funky packaging. While he was off literally charming the pants off statuesque yoginis in wispy Anthropologie blouses, I was running after pretty emo slackers with rock ‘n’ roll haircuts. But just because we thought we were being somehow countercultural didn’t make us any less consumerist (or shallow) than the “mainstream” kids in Abercrombie & Fitch listening to Beyoncé on Clear Channel radio. What Merton is saying is true: as long as we view other people like products on parade, we’ll always be on the lookout for a better value. We’ll always want the newest upgrade. And we’ll always be anxious about our own market worth.

Within this marketing-culture paradigm,

…the lover then becomes the beautiful glowing icon of self-satisfaction, the desirable, slick, and infinitely happy package, rather than the warm presence of one who responds totally to the value and being of the beloved.

It seems to me that Sonny is still trying to reform himself into that glowing icon, that infinitely happy and marketable package. When I read his frequent status updates about yogic bliss and transcendence, they inspire in me nothing so much as that anxious sense of ceaseless striving for an unattainable perfection. It’s so exhausting, to keep that up! God knows I’ve tried! It’s possible that he’s being genuine, and that I’m being unfair…but for me that stuff always seemed to turn into some kind of metaphysical pissing contest. I no longer have any desire to compete on the enlightenment “market.”

No, why bother with that crap when you can be, and have, the warm presence of one who responds totally to the value and being of the beloved. That line has glowed like an ember in my heart all these years. When I responded to Sam, I wasn’t responding to an icon, or a package, or even anything that might have been immediately apparent to our coworkers and acquaintances.

I think we both saw something else.

One of the reasons why love seems dangerous (is that) the lover finds in himself too many new powers, too many new insights. Life looks completely different to him, and all his values change. What seemed worthwhile before has become trivial: what seemed impossible has become easy.

As I said in my last post, “I think I like the ways in which Sam has changed me.”

The following is counterintuitive if you’ve steeped yourself in the latest spirituality and self-help literature — that “New Age standpoint” I mentioned before — most of which is aimed at alleviating suffering by teaching spiritual and emotional self-sufficiency. I embraced that rugged Zen independence for years, in solitude, but I have to admit It does taste like sour grapes now, after having tasted sweet wine:

My true meaning and worth are shown to me not in my estimate of myself, but in the eyes of the one who loves me; and that one must love me as I am, with my faults and limitations, revealing to me the truth that these faults and limitations cannot destroy my worth in their eyes; and that I am therefore valuable as a person, in spite of my shortcomings, in spite of the imperfections of my exterior “package.” The package is totally unimportant. What matters is this infinitely precious message which I can discover only in my love for another person.

I have never been as naked with anyone as I was with Sam. I left all the lights on, and I didn’t scurry to hide when daylight came — as deeply ashamed as I usually am of my marbled, old-lady legs. Sam never seemed to give a shit about that. And I discovered that the wholly superficial ideas I’d held about what I thought would turn me off (like hairiness!) were totally irrelevant. Shedding those beliefs was like shedding a parochial school uniform I’d mistaken for my own skin.

In accepting Sam just as he was, feeling accepted by him just as I was — rejecting that whole stupid consumerist paradigm, for once — I found my terror of aging was significantly lessened as well. I now actually see, the way children see (als das kind kind war), that it’s not necessary, nor does it mean much, to keep trying to present an eternally cute and youthful package to a capricious marketplace. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. I feel less like I’m bailing out the sinking boat of my desirability with a slotted spoon.

When people are truly in love, they experience far more than just a mutual need for each other’s company and consolation. In their relation with each other they become different people: they are more than their everyday selves, more alive, more understanding, more enduring, and seemingly more endowed. They are made over into new beings. They are transformed by the power of their love.

Together we really were different people. I was a version of myself, probably one of the most original versions of myself, that had never been given a chance to run around free. The unabashed and devoted lover inside me had been wanting out of her cage for a lifetime. For his part, Sam was an indescribably sweet, unarmored human being none of his bullshitting bowlsmoking homeboys would have ever recognized.

In reality, love is a positive force, a transcendent spiritual power. It is, in fact, the deepest creative power in human nature…it is a living appreciation of life as value and as gift. It responds to the full richness, the variety, the fecundity of living experience itself: it “knows” the inner mystery of life. It enjoys life as an inexhaustible fortune. Love estimates this fortune in a way that knowledge could never do. Love has its own wisdom, its own science, its own way of exploring the inner depths of life in the mystery of the loved person. Love knows, understands, and meets the demands of life insofar as it responds with warmth, abandon, and surrender.

As an adolescent, I had little frame of reference to go by, but I believed this fervently, as if it were my new religion. And in a way it has been, ever since. Funny that I should finally find it out with someone not long out of adolescence himself…

When I feel old and weird about that, I remind myself of Anaïs Nin, who met her second husband Rupert when she was 44 and he was 28. She was never one for convention, either. And they made it work for thirty years, until her death.

Sam and I made it work for a little over thirty days…but every day felt like an inexhaustible fortune. At least to me.

**

It’s too bad she won’t live…but then again, who does?

– Edward James Olmos’ character Gaff in Blade Runner

My emails are still unanswered; I suspect I may not hear from Sam at all. Every day that goes by, communication feels less likely. (When I worried, at one point, that he was blowing me off, the way so many other men have, when he didn’t call, he told me “Never worry.”)

You may find the prospect of my possible abandonment at this juncture cruel or incomprehensible, especially given all of the above, and I may be overreacting: I’ve been left crying in the dust so many times, I expect men to disappear. But I also know that Sam felt in a certain way abandoned by me. I know how much being with people sapped him, and how sorely he needed to get away from everything and everybody. And there may be still more to it than that.

Even if I do hear from him, there are no guarantees of any sort of future. Even if it were possible for us to construct our own unconventional happily-ever-after, it finally hit me — after his departure, and like a ton of bricks — that his chronic medical condition is, however slowly, killing him.

There are frantic moments now when I wonder whether he didn’t make the whole middle east job story up, after his last trip to the doctor, just so he could go home to his parents and fade quietly, away from our concerned and watchful eyes. Or whether he didn’t deliberately place himself in a “hot zone” overseas, counting on some insurgent bomber to make things fast and easy.

These and other dire possibilities go through my head daily, knowing nothing, hearing nothing.

But I have got to stop, or I will drive myself insane.

Whether our time is over — or can ever resume — don’t think I’m sorry about having started this. No. I let Jonathan slip away without ever having given him all the love he so amply deserved. If you recall, I resolved not to make the same mistake with Sam.

I’m glad I took the chance. And grateful. For what we had. For the most beautiful thing I ever allowed to happen to me. In exchange for that first night together alone, I’d suffer the fires of hell.

Loss is inevitable. Loving is optional.

Carpe diem.

It’s been a crazy time.

In a nutshell: Sam accepted a contract job doing physical labor in the middle east that will pay off his mountain of student loan debt — and keep him tens of thousands of miles away for the next nine months. For exactly one moment, I entertained the notion of going with him, but it’s not exactly the green hills of Ireland, and my own options would have been restricted to some pretty unpalatable choices. Besides which, as it turns out, my presence would interfere with one of his main objectives for going (more on that in a bit). We had talked about vacationing abroad together during his two-week break in four months, but apparently that possibility has been shelved as well. I guess. I don’t even know where we’re at now. All I know is that I’m bereft, and sad, and that I don’t want to go back to our stupid workplace. This has made me want to fly to my own far places again, find my own adventure.

Sam and I didn’t part the way I would have wanted, but I can’t regret what I did that precipitated his angry withdrawal. He may have been looking for an excuse to withdraw, anyway.

As if that would make it easier on either of us.

**

I don’t know what I’m going to do now, how I’m going to cope, waking up without Sam’s arms wound around me, without the rich musk of his sweat-dampened skin or the surprisingly sweet, comforting scent of his hot breath. My inner animal is permanently chemically bonded to him. And that’s to say nothing of the sex: unprecedented pleasure I had felt doomed to live largely without ever since my mother “cursed” me (“No man will ever satisfy you”), whether because of social or previously discussed physical handicaps. With Sam, I’ve felt like the pornographic version of Goldilocks, finding “just right” at last. (Who’s been sleeping in my bed?) Not only that, but Sam has proven to be every bit the lover most women will tell you they long for: attentive, accommodating, passionate but loving, taking his time, with just the right touch. (And Jesus, what an outstanding kisser.) I’ve loved everything he’s ever done to me, without exception. I cannot say that about anyone else. Not anyone.

I love Sam’s body now as if it were my own. Perhaps more: I still judge my cellulite and varicose veins ruthlessly, whereas everything about his body I don’t adore I simply accept. I know all of his smells and his textures and his sensitive spots; I know the landscapes of his black, wiry hair and his scars and his rippling stretch marks where he lost lifelong fat. It pains me, physically, palpably, how cruel Sam is to this body I love, treating it like a malfunctioning machine or a workhorse to be beaten into obedience rather than as the sacred and irreplaceable temple housing and expressing all of the beautiful tenderness and passion inside of him (and giving us both so much pleasure). He will sacrifice scores of cells to kill his chronic pain; he will inundate his struggling lungs with foreign toxins, and think nothing of repeatedly burning or cutting his wonderful hands. It makes me want to weep, and to kiss them. (As things are, this would probably piss him off.)

**

“Would you have his babies?” my life coach friend asked at one point. He always asks his women clients this to determine how much in love they are on a visceral, biological level. About Sonny, I said yes; about Rick, I said no.

Sam and I, STD-free, and with me on the pill, never used any protection. At first, this made me nervous, given the sheer quantity of unfiltered sperm he was pumping into me on a regular basis. But when I started my period last week, the week of his departure, I felt the pangs of a strange and ineffable sadness.

**

This young man, about whom I once felt so ambivalent, has effectively ruined me for other men. Now even the most devastatingly attractive stranger evokes the question: How capable would he really be of intimacy? and: How could he possibly be a better lover than Sam? Even my way of seeing has changed. In the office on Sam’s last night at work, greedily gazing at his hair, his face, his body as if to memorize every last detail, I thought him the handsomest man on the planet. I think of the beautiful poem by Peter Handke that runs through Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, “Song of Childhood,” beginning the film with Als das kind kind war (When the child was a child):

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.

Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

I seem to have exchanged what Rilke called “the adult’s defensiveness and scorn” for the wide-open eyes of childhood. Every person I meet looks different to me now. No one gets judged — any longer — against anything but him or herself.

I think I like the ways in which Sam has changed me.

**

Everything in my life has been disrupted lately, from my sleep schedule to my daily routines to my eating habits to my expectations of what a day or a night will bring. Sam introduced chaos into my life; I introduced calm into his. He fell asleep much more easily when entwined with me; my apartment was often the tranquil island where he shipwrecked at the end of a stormy night.

Before he left town, Sam was determined to share with me, as completely as possible, his secret second life, his insomniac’s nocturnal social circles and activities — some of which wound up making me feel akin to the girlfriend in “Twilight.” If I were to go into much detail about it here, most of my readers, except for possibly Russ, would engage in a collective hand-wringing session. Suffice it to say that, metaphorically speaking, one excellent reason for Sam to get the hell out of Dodge is to cut ties with the vampires — and to free himself of his own blood-lust. Sam was alternately defensive with me about his alternate world and pushing for me to be more upset about it. I tried to walk a fine line.

The past couple of weeks have been an uneasy education for sure. But as Rilke wrote (in the book I gave Sam), “if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which 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.”

As if in response to my initiation into Sam’s alien universe, I dreamt of a sort of vast nighttime carnival populated by a motley assortment of semi-costumed individuals exhibiting various degrees of intoxication. It was as if I had inadvertently wandered onto the set of a Fellini film. Strangely, I was not in the least bit frightened, but meandered among them, eventually turning toward a destination where I had heard some kind of movie or show was going on. Sam’s friend Rob was there (I seem to remember him with a fishing rod and a tutu), and I easily befriended some of the others who were unfamiliar to me. I was comfortable and at home in this bizarre environment, and was almost sorry to leave my new friends behind when I awoke.

But then I guess I’ve always gotten along better with the so-called freaks.

**

“He’s twenty-one,”  my coach friend reminded me. “Do you know what I was doing when I was twenty-one? Taking speed so I could whip through my job stocking candy machines, get out of there, and go party.”  Doc (a pseudonym I came up with thanks to Sam) met with the two of us the other week; he liked Sam a lot. Doc can handle all of the freakier truths without overreacting.

Sam is just young, he said. I grew out of all that shit, and hopefully he will too.

**

To know the pain of too much tenderness. — Kahlil Gibran

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone so hard.

From the outset, I’ve striven to honor the inherent, impenetrable solitude of Sam’s being, even though his deep and persistent sadness — the byproduct of an upbringing filled with struggle and privation and cruelty — makes me yearn to make it all better for him.

Sam is, at any rate, a beautiful and extraordinary person. He has a mind unlike the majority of other people, sharing many of the gifts, and also many of the challenges, of people on the autistic spectrum (Russ and bluemorpho3, take note). He urged me to read Born on a Blue Day, the autobiography of a savant with Asperger Syndrome, in order to better understand him, and I complied in short order. The author of the book, Daniel Tammet, has synaesthesia, too, a fascinating multisensory way of perceiving and ordering things like numbers and days of the week. (Wednesdays are blue, hence the title.) Daniel grew up withdrawn into a world of his own, and has always had difficulty with social interaction. Much as Sam has.

An aside: the book had the interesting side effect of making me think long and hard about my own math-whiz father — whose rationalistic and unemotional values always seemed to denigrate and invalidate my emotive, intuitive, empathic self (as “frivolous”) — and who is very likely an undiagnosed case on that same spectrum himself. My fossilized resentment began to dissolve as I realized that he probably couldn’t help himself, that it was easier for him to be friends with numbers than with his own daughter. I started to find myself relenting a little, being more able to find a scrap of compassion and forgiveness for his limitations, rather than seeing him as the towering and rigid authority figure he seemed to me as a child. Maybe he had simply done the best he could.

But back to Sam. I spoke before of what a terrific leader and manager he is because of his listening skills and his responsiveness. I had no idea at the time of how hard he has had to work, both to understand others and to respond appropriately. It’s no wonder he has a way of making people feel as if they have his complete and undivided attention. He has to intensely focus upon their words and their body language.

A fierce Libertarian, Sam talks the talk of unlimited personal freedom (and chafes at any infringement thereof), but walks the walk of a “bleeding-heart” caretaker who frequently assumes responsibility for the well-being of others (often at substantial personal cost). Miranda was far from his first emergency. People utterly exhaust Sam, but somehow he always winds up in the thick of the fray. When the assistant director got suspended from work, Sam wound up putting in a lot of extra time as the only person at the company who knew how to take care of everything.

His tragic flaw is that he can’t say no, at least not when friends and coworkers ask him for help. This leads to a whole host of other difficulties, including the extreme stress he suffered at the time of his leaving that precipitated our blowout.

**

I have never had any man let me so unreservedly and unequivocally into his life before, and share even the most unflattering and trying aspects of it with me. It’s as if Sam were as ready to find me as I was to find him. He frequently said that my timing was impeccable. I don’t know about that, but things did seem to fall right into line once I made up my mind to make my move. Sam’s pre-dawn dealings among the night-crawlers and his cognitive obstacles did create challenges for me, but I somehow located equanimity and patience within myself beyond what I even knew I had. And he fully recognized and appreciated this.

What makes me sad is to think he’s convinced himself that I don’t fully recognize or appreciate his own needs and priorities.

**

After an idyllic weekend, our harmony began to disintegrate in the days leading up to Sam’s departure for his childhood home in the midwest. He had planned to drive the 650 miles to visit his parents (and brother) before leaving the country.

Sam being Sam, however, he had agreed to take on numerous shifts, trainings, workshops, and other responsibilities at work that week, including closing on Friday night at ten o’clock (after which he would leave on his long drive!). He was quickly running out of time. On the phone, after I complained about him not returning my calls, he vented bitterly (and with escalating anxiety) about all the things he still had left to do, including figure out what to do about his apartment still under lease — which he had asked me if I could move into not long before, and I had said I couldn’t — and what to do about his truck, which still had no brakes to speak of. A relative he had paid to repair them had never come through. His anger, and the desperation of his situation, completely infected me with anxiety (how could I stand by and watch him drive away in a car with no real brakes?) and I offered to buy him a plane ticket or rent him a car. He was adamant about not taking any money from me, or anyone, and about not being indebted to anyone.

He informed me that he intended to get as much sleep as possible that night because he had to work all day the next day, Thursday. He had originally hoped to have all day free. (He even threw some of the blame for that at me, thinking he was taking a workshop or orientation I had begged off of, but that just wasn’t true. Another employee had gotten sick.) I kept asking how I could help him, but he just wanted to be left alone that night.

So I left him alone that night.

And stayed awake for most of it, weepy from worry and Sam’s curtness and trying to figure out what to tackle. I agonized over my decision about his apartment, even though I knew for certain I couldn’t live there. I appealed to my old absentee boss: “Help me help him,” I prayed, to whomever would listen. In the end, I realized that what was bothering me most was the truck. I couldn’t let Sam drive away in a vehicle that big that might not be able to stop. Flipping through the Yellow Pages in the wee hours, I decided I was going to get that damn truck to Just Brakes tomorrow, somehow, even if Sam never forgave me for it.

Except that Sam didn’t show up at work the next morning. And he wasn’t answering the phone, either. So I went over to his building, tossing pebbles at his window the way his friends do. Some facially-pierced skater kids let me in the front door, and I went down to his garden level apartment and knocked. I heard a door open somewhere inside, but no one opened the apartment door. I left Sam another message, reiterating my full intentions, waited in the hall awhile, and then left.

Sam called me in the late afternoon, fuming. He had been up all night dealing with shit and had been trying to sleep during the day…but “people kept fucking calling me, and throwing gravel at my window, and knocking on my goddamn door!” He had told me twice he wouldn’t take money from me. Why couldn’t I respect his wishes or trust his judgment? The Miss Cribb in me, who had surfaced over this issue, wouldn’t back down, even though the rest of me was trembling, and I told him I wouldn’t push so hard if it weren’t a matter of life or death, and if I didn’t love him. If anything happened to him on the highway, I’d never forgive myself. Still furious, he snarled “Well maybe at least THEN I’d get some peace and quiet!!!” (He didn’t see the humor in this.) Anyway, it wasn’t for me to worry about, it was for him to worry about, and I was just adding to his stress.

After his angry hangup I called Doc, crying. Doc talked me through it. All people in relationships fight, he reminded me. You’ll get through this, just like everybody else.

At work that night, Sam did seem to have calmed down some. He was still dealing with trainees when the rest of us were let go, so I called and left him a message while walking home.

He called me back, but was brusque and cold, telling me that I wasn’t one of the people who truly understood why he was taking this job in the first place, and that he hadn’t ever been able to communicate it to me. No, he didn’t want me to come over. He had too much packing to do. He ended the conversation saying “this could have gone more than one way”…meaning, obviously, that I had done something wrong, “blown” it. He was eager to get off the phone, despite my pleas for further communication. He said he’d see me at work tomorrow (his last day at work and in town).

Reeling from shock, I had a Three-Mile-Island-size meltdown.

Such irony. I was afraid to start something with Sam for fear I might break his heart, remember? And here I was, feeling rejected, abandoned, shattered. He had urged me before not to let him shut me out, but I had no idea how to break down this wall now. Sam was going away, and I felt he was corralling me behind the fence with all of his “unnecessary” people, the ones being cut loose. I curled up in bed in the fetal position and convulsed with sobs.

That jagged, ancient heartache I’ve often spoke of was not only present, but radiated outward, until every cell, from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair, throbbed with pain. I fancied I might fly to pieces from the internal pressure. Soon after the first wave engulfed me, there was a blinding flash of light, then the crack of thunder. An electrical storm raged outside. As the feeling ebbed, the storm seemed to do the same; when another wave washed over me, another flash of light illumined the room. I began to believe, with mad conviction, that the wildly oscillating electromagnetic field caused my my overwhelming pain was causing the storm, not unlike the way the sky is said to have gone dark as Christ writhed crucified upon the cross. And it did feel as if I were carrying not only my own anguish, but also the burden of all of Sam’s disowned and banished emotions. I thought I had plumbed the depths of heartbreak, but this was agony. I wept myself totally dry. I imagined that my hair might turn white overnight from the stress, or that I might otherwise physically transform.

And indeed, in the morning, I was confronted by a stranger in the mirror. My face was hideous. Both eyes were swollen beyond recognition: baggy frog-eyes with deep creases and circles beneath them, both eyelids drooping heavily. My left eye, half closed, made me look as if I had had a stroke. It was frightening. I looked like someone else, someone twenty or thirty years older. I can’t go into work looking like this, I thought. I can’t let Sam see me like this. What was I going to do? Recalling something I had read in a magazine about how supermodels alleviate eye puffiness, I smeared the affected area with Preparation-H. Then I got dressed, put on my glasses, and went to see Doc.

**

“Yeah, yeah,” Doc said. “I know you think he’s so mature, but don’t forget, he’s twenty-one. Guys, when they’re twenty-one…when I was that age, I thought I knew everything, and I had that same kind of an attitude, like — fuck everyone, nobody understands me, and I’m going to go off and do my own thing.”

He chuckled. “You can’t take any of it personally. He’s under extreme stress, and just isn’t equipped at this point to handle his emotions. He probably has problems receiving, too.

“Look, you just love him. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

**

At work that evening, Sam came to get me, sat me down in the office, and closed the door. He smiled faintly. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m getting the brakes fixed tonight.” He had apparently used “the right threats” with his deadbeat uncle, who was going to get the job done for him at midnight, after which Sam would take off.

I gasped with relief. “Thank God,” I said. “Thank God.”

“I told you I’d take care of it,” he said, busying himself with a printout he’d made for another employee. I could have wept, if I weren’t already cried out, and told him so. He really didn’t want to hear about how I spent the previous evening, or what my eyes had looked like. He said he’d shoot me an email when he got to his folks’ place. I wanted to know if we were okay, but all he would say was “I’m leaving for nine months.” Then he shooed me out of the office.

But I was still smiling. I’d won the right battle. Sam would be safe.

At the end of the night, I lingered. There seemed to be a small posse of guys hanging around waiting for Sam to close up shop, and my fear was screaming at me that he didn’t want me there. I told my fear to shut up, went into the office, and sat down next to Rob. And gazed at Sam’s face, trying to memorize it. What else was important? My beloved was going away. Even if he didn’t love me, I was going to stay by his side until he chased me off.

When we did get out of there, it wound up being me and Sam and Rob and another guy named Brad in the truck, heading into the heart of the Hill to pick up something necessary to the repairs (I forget what). On Eleventh Avenue, we pulled over and piled out. Brad lived close by, and was walking home from there; Rob walked toward an apartment building, then turned to wait for Sam. I walked toward Sam. “I was just following you,” I said, shrugging.

“Right on,” he said. He and Brad said their goodbyes. As Brad walked away, Sam turned toward me. He pointed out that I wasn’t far from home, and I understood that I would have to get myself there. He went to embrace me — an embrace without any Sam in it — and began to say “See you…” but I interrupted.

“If this is over,” I said over his shoulder, “I want you to know that you gave me the time of my life.” I turned my head to speak into his ear. “Take care of this beautiful body I love.” (He expelled a quick snort, the way he did when I surprised him with an unaccustomed compliment.) I kissed his cheek, and pulled back to look at his face. “Take care of this beautiful mind that I love.” I kissed his lips. For once, Sam was virtually unresponsive. As we separated, however, I saw a flicker of the Sam I knew best in his eyes before he turned away. “I’ll be back in June!” he boomed heartily over his shoulder, walking toward Rob.

I started home, and the tears started again. But I felt no regret. I had said what I needed to say. And Sam would be safe. I could sleep well tonight.

**

The next day I attended to all the neglected things in my life, like buying groceries and an adapter for my computer. Coming back, I decided to catch the bus home over by Sam’s apartment building. Absorbed in Sam-reverie, I suddenly heard Glen Hansard burst into song in my pocket. It was Sam’s ringtone, “Falling Slowly.”

He was calling to tell me he had reached his brother’s town safely. I was elated, and thanked him for letting me know (especially since I’d never expected a call). He said his uncle had fixed not only the brakes, but some other things too. He told me some of the things he’d missed about the midwest, like the smell of cow shit. I laughed. He said this would probably be his last phone contact before leaving, but that he’d be on email. And possibly Facebook. Even though he hated Facebook. I told him he didn’t have to do Facebook.

It was a pleasant and upbeat conversation overall. I didn’t try to address the state of our relationship; I just slipped in a “love you” before hanging up.

**

I told Sam, in happier times, that I’d take a bullet for him. Maybe in the end the “bullet” I had to take for him was his rage and his rejection in exchange for his ultimate safety. I was ready to lose Sam to save him. Maybe I did.

Or maybe Sam planned this all along — to put distance between us before leaving, even though he insisted he wasn’t doing this to get away from me.

Because the fact is, I do understand why he’s going over there. To get the hell away from people. To “be a robot,” as he put it, at least for a while. To work his body hard, and give his overtaxed mind a rest. Our relationship was truly heaven on earth for me — it was what I had waited for all my life — but it may have been too much for a boy born on a blue day.

Then again, when someone gives you everything you ever wanted, and asks you for just one big thing in return, it’s only fair to give it to him. Even if what he asks is for you to let him go.

But part of me is still crying in the dust like Psyche, clutching after Cupid’s fleeing golden feet.

What appears to be derangement from observers is only a rearrangement of all parts of our personalities. Still, it seems to be so deeply disturbing to watch. Those who loved us, liked us, respected us, are watching a re-forming of a human being outside of the womb. Since this has always been a private domain, and since we are not concerned with what others think, our friends and loved ones watch in the kind of horror they would have if they saw us defecating in the middle of a boulevard. It is the saving grace of derangement that is has no cognizance or respect for the opinions of others.

For once in my life, I no longer care what other people think.

I feel as if I am finally being broken down, decimated like a condemned edifice; the cracked pillars of what once seemed so important, the crumbling foundations of outdated habits, are collapsing to powder under the wrecking ball of merciless truth. My endlessly sore heart is a yawning hole in the ground, the site of both devastation and potentiality. There are no more obstructions.

Death is the wrecking ball, the merciless truth; when the dust settles, the way is clear.

**

Over the weekend I received this decimating news: my childhood friend Jonathan Goldman had succumbed to non-Hodgkins lymphoma in July. He had been living with the disease for over a decade — unbeknownst to me.

The shock was like a shotgun blast beside my ear, rendering the world oddly silent and still. Jon? We had always managed to reconnect, to pick up where we left off, and I assumed someday we would again. Not that he would be taken away somewhere beyond the reaches of all the wireless networks as well as the International Postal Service. How could this be?

Numbly, I posted the news on my social network. Within an hour there was a response from Adriana, who, along with Jon, was one of my best friends in the fourth grade. The three of us always sat together — we were the top students in class, and the teacher’s rotating pets. “He was the first boy I ever loved, in kindergarten!” she wrote. “I’m so sad! He was smart and funny and I had always hoped you guys would get married!”

Suddenly my shoulders started to shake. Then I was sobbing.

**

Jon and I met in Mrs. Curtis’s first grade class. As I’ve mentioned before, I was infatuated with at least half of the boys in that class, and Jon was in that half. This apple-cheeked Jewish boy with a mild speech impediment was indeed, as Adriana observed, very smart and very funny, not to mention exceedingly tolerant. I cringe to recall my attempts to evangelize him in my six-year-old born-again fervor, but I definitely knew I wanted him in heaven with me. He listened to me patiently, finally trying to explain, “But I’m Jewish. Jews don’t believe in Jesus.” He had to reiterate this point a number of times, unfortunately. I never quite got it.

Another cringe-worthy moment came when a few of my classmates and I were aping some of the schtick we’d seen on reruns of Hogan’s Heroes. Holding our palms up high, we were running around exclaiming “Heil Hitler!” to our endless amusement. Jon was not so amused. Yet he calmly explained to me, again, why this was not cool.

Adriana remembers feeling like a bit of a third wheel with me and Jon in the fourth grade — “He was so in love with you back then,” she says. I remember being pretty enamored of him myself, but Adriana and I seemed to be forever competing for his attentions. Maybe that was a misperception. (I’m beginning to think my entire youth was a misperception.) Either way, he kept us in stitches, and kept us on our toes. The three of us were always competing for the perfect grade.

But it wasn’t until junior high that things reached a critical point. At the end of a chorus trip to New York, on a charter bus driving through the night, we sat together on plush reclinable seats and fell deep into conversation while our classmates slept. It was like an eighth-grade version of Before Sunrise. We talked about our childhoods and our families and our worries and our hopes and our dreams. I’d never experienced that level of intimacy with someone of the opposite sex before. But Jon wasn’t your average boy. Far from it. (In my little social-network obituary, I called him one of the finest men I’d ever known, and I wasn’t exaggerating.) Unfortunately, I started to notice that we were being noticed by other kids on the bus, and this bothered me.

Back at school Monday, I was teased about Jon. My response and solution was to put as much distance between us as possible (to poor Jon’s bafflement and hurt). He wasn’t one of the cool kids, after all; he was a “brain,” and a nerd, and I had other crushes, notably on a very cute Christian boy who looked like Luke Skywalker.

To remember this now, under these circumstances, fills me with the deepest shame and guilt for my ignoble, ignorant, cruel behavior toward the one person who least deserved it. I’ve misrepresented myself to you, my readers, through selective memory; it’s not true that no boy I ever loved growing up loved me back. Jon loved me all along. It was I who refused to be open to loving him, and all because of my foolish vanity and fear of what other people might think.

He even forgave me for my stupid, snobbish, misguided middle-school shunning. We were back to critiquing each other’s short stories the following year, and by senior year of high school he was one of my two best friends again. We would drive to the local arthouse cinema in his tiny, ripped-to-shit orange crate of a car, or take long walks through our suburban neighborhoods, talking for hours about everything under the sun. There always seemed to be some unaddressed sexual tension hanging in the air between us, but I steadfastly insisted on treating him like a brother. He went to work for the Appalachian Mountain Club for the summer, having become an enthusiastic outdoorsman and mountain climber, and sent me numerous postcards and humorous dispatches and, at one point, even a huge, shelf-like tree fungus.

When we went off to college, he continued to write wonderful letters, at one point sending me a long missive on one continuous sheet of paper, a la Jack Kerouac. His writing style was rather Kerouackian — blunt and vivid — and I think he’d tell you that On the Road shaped his adolescent self as much as it shaped mine.

We stayed in touch when I moved out West, at least for several years. But as he worked his way through MIT, and met the woman he would eventually marry, the letters dwindled. I had been thinking a lot about him last fall, and found his self-titled company through the miracle of Google, but the email I sent to the general email address (there was no direct email for Jon) went unanswered. Oh well, I thought, maybe he’ll show up on Facebook one of these days.

**

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,” Antoine de Saint-Exupery famously wrote. “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

As I rather shamefacedly admitted in a previous comment thread, I have rarely looked at things with the so-called eyes of my heart. I have gotten distracted by shiny wrapping paper and bells and whistles and what James Baldwin called the “cacophany of quotations” that we internalize from outside sources. I have been led astray time and time again by a noddle full of misgivings, or else by some glittering mirage off in the impossible distance. You weren’t exactly what I had in mind, Jon, and the other kids are gossiping, and I think I see something I like better, just over that hill.

Never mind that men like Jonathan are worth their weight in gold. Gold-men.

But it takes open eyes and an open heart to see that.

**

Last week, I tentatively suggested to Sam that we go out for a drink. He was all for it. Later that same day, he handed me a little card from the art museum that said “happy” in 1950s-retro lettering on one side, and on the other had a quote.

The quote was a particularly gleeful one from On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

Blissfully ignorant of what had happened to Jonathan, I thought of him momentarily, of our rowdy senior English class, and of how much Jack sparked our fertile, youthful imaginations. I thought about the ways in which Sam is like Jon: reliable, steady, precociously smart yet humble, unassuming, approachable, caring. Jon somehow knew, whether by nature or nurture, that being a man didn’t mean aggression or domination; he exuded quiet strength. So does Sam. Jon was a no-frills, no-bullshit kind of guy. So is Sam.

Jon would have liked Sam.

now the eyes of my eyes are open, wrote e.e. cummings, a favorite poet of one of our favorite English teachers. I would add: amid the rubble of my useless vanity and my ceaseless fretting about irrelevant judges, the eyes of my heart are open.

**

Today as I stood shakily with tears in my eyes for my lost beloved, Sam looked at me with an expression of the utmost concern and kindness in his serious dark eyes. And he was utterly, unutterably beautiful to my heart.

Shall I listen to the voices that scream he’s too young? Shall I listen to the shrill cawing of the gossips who are savoring the latest scandal and who repeat the old saw Don’t shit where you eat? Shall I date Drew instead, who is inarguably pretty and a sharp dresser and age-appropriate?

In the rare cases (and Sam is nothing if not rare), age is only a number. And while I adore the people at my job, I know it’s not where I’m meant to stay forever. It’s certainly far too small a pond for the likes of Sam. And I genuinely like Drew, but I’m not off-the-rails smitten with him because of who he is.

By now, and thanks to Jon, I know what matters.

And it isn’t what people think.

**

**

The above is what I read to Sam last night when he came over to check on me.

He stayed — for a long, nearly sleepless night of talking and lovemaking and copious amounts of laughter, at times simultaneous.

What else should I tell you, dear readers? He was delicious (I can still taste his sweet, sweet mouth), romantic, and infinitely tender. If I gave more details (which I am not about to), I would be the envy of my female readers (if they indeed exist). I made him unforgivably late for work, but he was loath to leave me. And those are words I doubt I have ever uttered about anyone.

**

In the early dawn, as Sam dozed with his arms and legs wrapped around me, I fancied I saw Jon sitting on the edge of the bed, dropping by for an impromptu visit like the late Nathaniel Fisher.

“Nice going,” he said.

Well, Chris Guillebeau is way more fabulous than I will ever be, and ten years younger. This kid kicks my ass to Saturn, and probably yours too. Clicking around his hipster-riffic Web site I’m less That could be me! than Why even bother? or maybe Why not just kill myself now? There are other people out there living my dream better than I ever could. Who am I to think I have anything new or necessary to say or contribute?

**

It’s getting harder and harder to drag myself into work each day. My cubicled purgatory is still full of wonderful souls who smile and embrace me, and I love them, but without my beautiful boys the color and the pizazz as well as all motivation is gone. I’m living within an almost still life — as monochrome and sexless as the world of the angels in Wim Wenders’ imagination, longing like Damiel to cross over and take a big bite of the apple.

Thus the summer flies by. I thought I’d be elsewhere by now.

“You should come to California with me!” says my friend Drew, the amateur astrologer I previously called stocky and adorable, who comes around for his daily hug. He’s considering a move to the Los Angeles area to attend graduate school. Unfortunately he’s not driving there. If he were, I’d actually consider it, just to get on the road again (and the hell out of Dodge). I am fond of Drew, and he’s cute in his freckled redheaded way, even if his beliefs are a little out there for me. I’d consider biding my time with him the way I bided (bid?) my time with Seamus — although Drew has said himself that the Leo-Capricorn combination isn’t ideal. (His ex-wife was a Capricorn.) It’s not like I have a throng of irresistible fans lining up to take me out. Anymore.

**

A new reader points me to an online Zen expert. He’s a fine guidance counselor, Krishnamurti-like in his advice — “you have to decide for yourself what is best” — and gently compassionate in his outlook. He reminds me of the Buddhist therapist I saw for a number of years. I’ve always preferred Zen to most other philosophies and belief systems, even though it could be interpreted as directly contradicting what my own life coach and other live-your-dream types currently advocate. The “intention” and “manifestation” people, after all, tell you to desire, and to desire hard — the more the better! Which, I have consistently found in my own experience, only leads to more suffering when I invariably don’t obtain or achieve whatever it is I wanted.

Hence the appeal of Zen. Especially now. Of course, mine is probably the immature, sour-grapes version…kind of like when the Violent Femmes sing You know that I want your lovin/but Mr. Logic, Mr. Logic says it ain’t never gonna happen/so then my defenses say I, I didn’t want it anyway…yeah, I want to transcend desire and attachment and become one with Pure Being. But you know sometimes I’m a liar.

**

Samira emails me from India. I ask her how Ken is, and she replies “Great. Still HOT. Still sweet. My honey.” She, for one, isn’t helping to prove that so-called romantic love with another human is unfulfilling. But I don’t really want her to.

**

In my last installment of the Italy diaries, I wind up celebrating fleeting joys and fruitless desires, unapologetic about what I wanted and how I conducted myself. It’s kind of a pleasure to revisit, to tell you the truth. So here it is, the last of the series.

Part 6.3: MILANO (MILAN)

The next morning I boarded the 11:14 train to Milano at Santa Maria Novella station. It arrived at Stazione Centrale around two, and I wandered back and forth along Via Vitruvio until I located Hotel Bernino on Via Napo Torriani.

My room was smaller and darker than the one in Florence, but it was also half the price. After I dropped off my things, I set off down Via Pisani (a street of unattractive modern buildings that could have been in any city) toward central Milan in search of food. I was specifically looking for Asmara, an Eritrean restaurant recommended by Let’s Go that was supposed to be open for lunch until four.

After walking about twelve blocks I found the place, in what seemed to be a largely African immigrant neighborhood, but it was closed. Groaning and hungry, I walked over to the shopping thoroughfare Corso de Buenos Aires. Most restaurants were closed, observant of afternoon siesta time, and the snack bar on the corner was completely cleaned out. Across the street was a McDonalds, but I was not going to go in there. I continued down the Corso feeling almost lightheaded, fretting that I might soon pass out from low blood sugar (this is not an exaggeration, it’s happened before), when suddenly I had the calming thought (or heard the voice, depending on how you interpret it) — Have faith, you’re almost there.

Who knows what that was about? What I do know is that right around the corner, on Via Spallonzani, I found a piazza with a little snack bar full of Italians. I bought a piece of foccacia pizza, which they had in abundance, and a bottle of aqua naturale. The foccacia was melt-in-your-mouth delicious, but the story doesn’t end there. After I had finished I noticed that both the chalkboard outside and the painted words on the door said CANNOLI SICILIANI.

That’s the part that amazes me. I was complaining not long ago that you can’t get decent cannoli in my town the way you can in the Italian North End of Boston, and I had intended to find some authentic cannoli in Italy. But I had been in Italy almost five weeks, it was my last day, and I had located no cannoli. Antonio had insisted that Sicily made the best. Allora, this was kismet. I ordered one with a cappuccino, and when it came it was like a dream on a plate. The crispiest, flakiest shell, dusted with powdered sugar, was stuffed with the freshest, sweetest, gooiest filling (mascarpone, not ricotta!) and garnished with candied orange. Mamma mia. Mamma mia. It kicked the North End’s ass. I made all sorts of noises while savoring every bite, and licked my fingers afterward.

The local sitting in front of me talking to his buddy in Italian was wearing a shirt that said HEMINGWAY’S BAR across the back of it. When he got up I noticed that the front said “Mexico,” so it wasn’t just some Milano locale. What is it with these meaningful coincidences? Skeptics say it’s a matter of what we filter; others believe in synchronicity. I’m not about to say, although I do have a mystic’s tendency to err on the side of the mysterious. And this day in Milano was already turning out to be marvelously mysterious.

I followed Corso Buenos Aires until it turned into Corso Venezia, intending to visit Milano’s Duomo. This Duomo is the third largest church in the world, begun by Visconti in the 14th century and finished in the 1800s under Napoleon. I passed by the Giardini Pubblici, a park housing the natural history museum, as the Corso grew prettier and prettier.

Alessandro didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He discouraged me from going to Milano on my days off at Centro, saying that it was too industrial, and that there was nothing to recommend it if you weren’t a fashionista. He made it sound like a mixture of Los Angeles and Detroit. I should never have listened to a young man who can’t even see into a mirror properly.

Milano is a beautiful city full of gorgeous architecture like that of Roma, laid out in ways that remind me, again, of my hometown Boston. You could say Milano is to Firenze as Washington, DC is to Annapolis, Maryland. One is an imposing urban metropolis showcasing innumerable periods of design; the other is a pretty historic town full of cobblestones and charm. Of course, Annapolis is much smaller than Firenze, but It’s the feel of the place I’m talking about.

In an area overrun by expensive clothiers and tourist-trap restaurants, I found the Duomo. It was overwhelming. There’s something frightening about a structure that large with more apparent spines than a porcupine. From the ground, what you see are rows and circles of stalagmites growing from countless spires to reach sharply toward heaven. If anyone were to be cast out like Lucifer, he’d be in danger of getting gruesomely impaled on these things. The style is ostensibly somewhere between Gothic and Baroque, having gone through five centuries of architectural tinkering. Mercifully, this Duomo has a lift that takes curious tourists to the roof, where they can clamber up and down built-in stairs and take in birds’-eye views of Milano.

Before doing that, I walked around the cathedral, and saw the Piazza del Duomo out front, which looks like the Italy you see in movies, gray flagstone and pigeons underfoot, with the arched doorways of Renaissance-era buildings on either side and a monument of the ubiquitous King Vittorio Emmanuele II in the center.

I took the lift up with a petite and sunny middle-aged woman named Margret who was visiting from Germany with a tour group. We walked together on the roof for a short time, and she pointed out the rooftop garden restaurant where they had stopped for lunch.

From here I could see that the “stalagmites,” which had looked like sharp points from the ground, were in reality tipped with detailed statues of saints and other religious symbols. Truly an amazing, painstaking accomplishment. No wonder it had taken so long. Beyond them, the stately roofs of Milano stretched for kilometers in every direction; here and there rose the round green duomo of a lesser church.

Why hadn’t I come here sooner? Why hadn’t I taken advantage of the opportunity to wander this extraordinary rooftop before, when I could have come here on a day off with my wonderful new English friend?

But it might have been too much for me. A sublime and centuries-old work of art like this cathedral would have brought home to me the small, transitory identities of (AlienBaby) and James — whatever one believes about the soul — and made me want him even more, with that bittersweet carpe-diem sort of longing. I leaned against one of the turrets and felt the familiar ache in my chest. This is why some people, after falling once, won’t let it happen again: loss is a bastard.

Yet we have to say goodbye to everyone, at some point. How is it a solution not to love anyone?

I walked back to the side of the roof across from Margret’s restaurant. Somewhere in that building, music was blaring. What the world needs now/is love/sweet love/it’s the only thing/that there’s just too little of…

I bent to rest my forearms on the stone railing and listened, smiling to myself. I could not have made this up. Even better was the next thing on the playlist, “I’m Not In Love,” that ironically penned protest against the obvious. I’d like to see you/but then again/it doesn’t mean you mean that much to me…

Big boys don’t cry.

…

I now had a massive blister on my left pinky-toe and was limping slightly as I walked toward Viale Premuda and the Osteria il Giardino del Segreti, a highly recommended restaurant. I stopped in at one of the many Farmacias, marked with a green neon cross, to buy plastic adhesive bandages, and sat down at a trolley stop to apply one.

Viale Premuda is another Boston-esque street, reminiscent of Commonwealth Avenue where it snakes its way through Brookline, with quaint little trolleys running up and down the center of it and slightly run-down shops and restaurants on either side. It’s unfortunate to see graffiti on some of the beautiful 17th- and 18th-century buildings, but local taggers are probably blasé about their city’s history.

The Osteria wasn’t open yet — the man inside told me quarter-past seven — so I looked around unsuccessfully for an Internet point for twenty minutes. When I came back, they told me ten more minutes, so I decided to start back uptown. I was far from the hotel, and I wanted to be a lot closer when it got dark. (I found an Internet point within fifteen minutes once I headed toward the Corso, and checked my email.)  I decided to swing by Asmara one more time, just for the heck of it, and found it open.

Seated by the smiling Eritrean hostess at a white-tableclothed table beneath photographs of beautiful African women, I ordered a piccolo beer and the vegetariano special.

Madonna. It was better than even the best very similar Ethiopian food I’d had in the States. Scooping up scrumptious greens, potatoes, and lentils using the spongy bread, I was reminded of a certain non-date I had had at an Ethiopian restaurant with a certain non-boyfriend of mine back in the early spring. It was nice to think about a man other than you-know-who for a change. The memory is a wonderful one, a Novara all its own.

And I considered how this person, who defies any sort of categorization in my life, has been a blessing, and possibly one of the best things that has ever happened to me. How could I fail to remember that? He won’t even mind my saying so, that’s how radically different and how terminally cool he is. I actually believe that we will always be friends. I feel I can tell him anything without fear of judgment (hence his presence on this list). And when you don’t need to seek after or worry about someone’s acceptance or esteem — when you know that it’s already there for you — the need for reassurances, promises, or contracts seems to largely dissipate. At least for me, at least in this case. And that’s no small thing. In reality, it’s a pretty big, rare thing.

He has given me exactly what I needed from him.

Bless him for that.

EPILOGUE

As my plane prepared for takeoff the next morning, I thought about all the places I hadn’t been. Venice. Pisa. Naples. Sicily. The Amalfi coast. Cinque Terre. Part of my original idea had been to see the Mediterranean, and I hadn’t gotten anywhere near it. But there was no more time, and even if there were, I had no more energy or stamina. My health was starting to wane.

Then I remembered how, not long ago, I was talking with my good friend Ruth, and was able to sum up my most personal dream for her in a few words: to be somewhere beautiful, with someone beautiful.

I had lived my dream. I had lived it for only two weeks, but some people never even see theirs for a day. High on a mountain overlooking Lago d’Orta, amid the jasmine and the honeysuckle and the peacocks, I flushed with happy excitement to see a witty blue-eyed Englishman coming up the gravel path. What could have been lovelier or more magical? It was worth a hundred steam burns in the dishroom and peeling endless piles of carrots, just to see him smile, to gain the prize of making him laugh. Call him a first class asshole, call me a fool for falling for a first class asshole, but I’d do it all again in a millisecond. James may not have believed he was very attractive or very lovable (and isn’t that the root of all evil?) but to me he was bellissimo, bellissimo, beautiful in every way.

And who knows, really…there are many beautiful places in the world. There are beautiful places right here. There are beautiful, lovable, ineffably dear people everywhere, and the more intimate you become with loss — the more you befriend it –the less afraid you are to love them.

Of course, there’s loss, and then there’s loss. In Philadelphia where I changed planes there were televisions tuned to CNN, and I mistakenly thought that their BBC clip commemorating the anniversary of last year’s London bombings was current. Did that ever make my heart hammer. Such catastrophic dispatches from that part of the world will never be the same. It’s one thing to feel empathy and sorrow for strangers attacked in a distant city, and quite another to care passionately for even one person there who may come into harm’s way. “It’s enough for me that you are somewhere here,” says Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha at one point in Dostoevsky’s novel, and that’s how I feel, even though I don’t expect to ever see him again. To steal a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay, “More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.” I can live without James, but I do want him to live.

Günter was fond of saying, you never know. And you don’t. You never know what tomorrow will bring, or if there will be one. Lightning strikes, cars collide, the body fails. A close friend of mine from college took her own life. I regret so much about that relationship, and about my silence within it…that was part of what shaped me into the apparent madwoman I am today, who won’t shut up about how great you are, and how much she loves you. Most “normal” people don’t behave this way in the English-speaking world. Raffe was like that, but James didn’t take her effusions seriously, and besides, she was Italian. Still, I won’t apologize for refusing to be cautious, for saying the things I said, or for trusting my own heart. Because you never know.

My flight companion on the way back from Philly turned out to be a delightful sixtysomething Englishman from Surrey. How perfect is that? He lives in Paris now, and we discussed some of the better French films and actors, much the way another Englishman and I discussed the better English-language films and actors, during one of the many good times at Centro.

It was a fitting bookend to my Italian aventura, my sojourn in Oz, my dream.

Which left me susceptible to a blast from the not-so-distant past. I check into my social network infrequently these days, to deal with invitations and requests and to share my published articles…but this week I saw him in the news feed. A brand new picture: Sonny lounging barefoot in a patch of clover, propped on his elbows, heels kicking up like a kid. My heart was wrapped up in clover/the night that I looked at you. He’s growing his hair out, the way I always liked it best, and I think now that I lied when I called Rick the most gorgeous man on the planet. I wonder who’s kissing him now…

And I remember keenly some of the urgency I felt about leaving this town. Two weeks ago, one of my worst-case scenarios occurred without incident — I ran into my old studio boss, she of the batshit-insane emails — but she carefully avoided me, and I felt freer for that careful avoidance. Sonny, however, in his mere two-dimensional glory, has me running for Trebbe Johnson’s book again, seeking conceptual aspirin for these sudden chest pangs.

**

My lovely, groovy, gypsy-skirted friend Diana wrote this week on her blog about “god-love,” about hanging out with her free-lovin’ Dances of Univeral Peace/Course In Miracles hippie peers who make out on couches at parties like unchaperoned adolescents, and for only the four hundredth time I feel left out of the divine acid trip — without, in all honesty, feeling that bad about it. I’m definitely not a raging atheist like Bill Maher or Christopher Hitchens — I believe the best things in life are a mystery — but I also appear to be made out of spiritual Teflon. Considering how thoroughly my childhood insecurities were exploited in order to force-feed me the so-called Bread of Life, it’s a wonder I’m open at all to what those two gentlemen consider utter balderdash. I’m not going to argue with Trebbe or anyone else about my desires and cravings being misdirected longings toward The Divine…but based on my own experience (or lack thereof) they may as well be telling me that they’re misdirected longings toward The Heavenly Unicorn. I cannot tell a lie: God has never slipped me the tongue. Not with my knowledge, anyway.

Although Sonny is something of a “little-g” god. (I doubt there are two 21-year-olds alive who could in tandem outshine this luminous 42-year-old.) But this is why I have always adored Dostoevsky: his characters are passionate, lusty, complex people possessing tremendous depth of thought and feeling who struggle with a burning doubt in anything “divine.” He fully grasps the intoxicating allure of beauty (see Dmitri Karamazov’s unforgettable monologue) and the transcendental elements of desire. He shows extraordinary (one might even say Christlike) compassion for human vulnerability and our misguided, shame-driven actions. When he presents God as Love, you can almost believe. But you also get the feeling the author never fully settled the question for himself.

**

This week I’ve gone back to listening to Nick Cave, who (I would point out to my music-loving German friend, were he here) makes my darling Damien look about as sunny as The Partridge Family. Well versed in Biblical lore, Mr. Cave is a die-hard old-school goth romantic forever lamenting the loss of some dark-haired temptress with long fingernails. He knows fruitless yearning and restless seeking like the back of one of his bony hands. Little wonder Wim Wenders chose Cave’s dark, dissonant “Carny” and “From Her to Eternity” to bring together angel and trapeze artist in his marvelously subversive landmark film “Wings of Desire.” Bruno Ganz’s soulful angel gives up direct spiritual communion with God for fleshly communion with a human being! Talk about your wacky reversals! The two piano-driven songs to which I keep returning are “Nobody’s Baby Now” –

There are some things love won’t allow
Yeah I held her hand but I don’t hold it now
I don’t know why and I don’t know how
But she’s nobody’s baby now

and “Do You Love Me” –

I found God and all his devils inside her…
So completely filled with light she was…
All things move toward their end
I knew before I met her that I would lose her

What a line. I knew before I met her that I would lose her. That’s pretty much where I’m coming from these days. It sure wasn’t wrong about my good buddy Rick. Then again, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not wrong about anybody, is it? Maybe that’s the lesson to be gained from my various beautiful and disappearing teachers. The Buddha had it right, after all: impermanence is the only permanence. As Damien wrote, Life taught me to die.

But I’ve rambled on quite enough already. Here, without further ado, is my post-Centro diary from Rome.

Part 6.1 ROMA (ROME)

I begin this final chapter in the Piazza Della Madonna De Monti, on Via Dei Serpenti, just off of Via Cavour. There is a little fountain here, and up the street is some of the most killer gelato in Rome (Gelatone). Rome isn’t as big as you’d expect…you can get everywhere you’d want to go on foot, if you don’t mind a good walk. The blocks are shorter, usually, than in most American cities, so distances on a map look greater than they really are.

The journey was fairly uneventful, although I was glad to have given myself an extra hour in Milan because I had to navigate the subway system in order to get to Stazione Centrale. Here’s proof of how freaking hot it is in Italy: I didn’t have to go to the W.C. once during the four-and-a-half hour train ride. (In general, my usual problem is not a problem, even though I’m drinking litres and litres of aqua naturale, because here you sweat copiously and all the time.)

After a little bit of searching in the neighborhood of the Teatro Dell’ Opera — it took me some time to figure out that the street names are chiseled on the buildings — I found the YWCA tucked away almost invisibly on a side street. This particular area, near the Termini station, reminds me a lot of Boston, but I guess that’s not incomprehensible given than Boston was built by former Europeans. The crazy thing I noticed about Rome right away is that in these busy metropolitan areas, you may see some big chunk of ancient brick sitting in the middle of everything, an unnamed, unknown arch or wall. In the piazza Largo di Torre Argentina, there was a sort of interrupted dig in the middle of it, with a row of crumbling columns. I read somewhere that the third line of their subway system has been stymied by the ongoing accidental excavation of yet more undiscovered ruins. What a place to live — it’s a perennial treasure hunt.

The YWCA is an undiscovered treasure all its own. Girlfriends, take note! It’s a clean, quiet, pleasant environment specifically for women, although a man can stay if he’s with a woman. It feels safe, there’s no tourist stampede or rowdy college students, and the staff is friendly. My first night there, I had the 4-bed room to myself. Which is exactly what I needed — someplace safe, quiet, and cloister-like, to decompress and lick my wounds. Of course, quiet is a relative term when the streets are full of wilding Italian football fans. World Cup fever is in full swing here, and when Italy beat the Ukraine on Friday night, Rome turned into Boston after a Patriots Super Bowl win, with honking and hooting and hollering continuing long into the wee hours.

I followed my Let’s Go book’s advice and found the Hostaria da Bruno, near Termini, for a late (though not for Rome) dinner. The place was lousy with Americans, and for this reason I rather defiantly spoke only Italian with the waiter. I ordered a half litre of red wine, an insalata, and a plate of gnocci.

I never did manage to find a decent salad in Rome. I had a gorgeous salad in Pettenasco, with crispy dark greens like arugula, and a wad of the freshest mozarella you can imagine. And the pasta in Orta was everything you’d expect from Italy. But this salad was iceberg, and the gnocci was nondescript and a little too salty. I was disappointed.

Then the waiter suggested the special dessert, made (from what I understood — he was speaking only Italian to me) fresh that day. I agreed to give it a try.

It was the redemption of the entire meal. Santa Maria, was it good. A sweet, creamy vanilla custard, topped with a compote of small savory-tart berries I didn’t even recognize. They made me pucker. With a cappuccino, it was perfect. Somehow, a little wobbly with all that wine, I made it back to the YWCA and to bed.

The next morning I set out for the most distant sights, intending to get all my most tiring walking done on the first day. After a meager Italian breakfast of a croissant and a cappuccino at a nearby snack bar (Rome is full of these), I headed for the Villa Borghese, which, from what I could tell from my book, was a place I definitely wanted to see. The Galleria Borghese sounded wonderful, less of a tourist madhouse than some of the other museums, and it contained masterpieces by Caravaggio, Titian, and Raphael. From there I planned to head across the Tiber river to Vatican City.

I started at the basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, close by the YWCA. An impressive twin-domed structure, the interior of which dates back to the 5th century, it crowns the Piazza Dell’Esquilino where I had my cappuccino. It was built as a shrine to the Virgin Mary on the site where an apparition supposedly appeared, and the presiding Cardinal is none other than the scandal-plagued former Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Law. (I went inside it the following day during a mass, but the part that was open to the public wasn’t all that amazing, unfortunately.) Directly across the main street Via Cavour began Via de Pretis, and I started up this street, soon cutting due north to walk through virtually deserted cobblestone streets in the government district (which reminded me of Beacon Hill and Cambridge back home). It was relaxing to be off the beaten path. Before I knew it I had reached the huge, green public park that is the Villa Borghese, and was at the manor-like Galleria.

A traveling Raphael exhibit had packed the place, and I found out that tickets were sold out through July 5th. Resigned, I decided to explore the park, which was a shady oasis in the oppressive Roman heat. Scipione Borghese had commissioned this immense garden upon becoming Cardinal in the early 17th century, and the Galleria was built as his villa suburbana.

I love the Villa Borghese. I would spend a good deal of my free time here if I lived in Rome. There are garden sanctuaries within it that were retooled in the 19th century, such as the Corinthian-columned Temple of Aesculapius, which sits amid flowering bushes on a still, idyllic little pond. Old Italian men sit on the park benches, and there is a zoo at the far end near the modern art museum (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna). I walked beyond the Villa for a few blocks, past the museum and off my map, to the end of one of the Metro lines and a statue of Winston Churchill. Here I sat down to rest my weary feet, swig from my bottle of mineral water, and munch on the apple Elke had given me for the road.

From there I made my way across the park to the Piazza del Popolo, the people’s square, with its mirror-image domed churches Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto. I hunted on side streets for a good lunch place before deciding on an elegant but affordable pizzeria with sidewalk tables. The pizza was tasty, but not nearly as tasty as the pizza I had had in Novara, with its wafer-thin crust.

Piazza del Popolo was only a short distance from a bridge over the river, and after crossing I cut south to Piazza Cavour, a place I was determined to see as a self-respecting Morrissey fan. His latest album had been written here, in Rome, featuring his signature sound samples (every time I heard a Roman emergency siren, I expected to hear him launch into “The Youngest Was the Most Loved”) and he mentions this piazza in “You Have Killed Me.”

A brief tangent (indulge me): I feel an even greater kinship with my former comrade-in-despondency these days, because his Roman experience ostensibly involved the breaking of his legendary, lifelong (romantic) losing streak. The new songs recount, in more detail than his coyness usually allows, a reluctant joining of the ranks of the content and fulfilled. Horrors! Someone has killed our morose old Mozzer! “At last I am born,” he croons at the album’s conclusion. I didn’t break my own perennial losing streak in Italy — I revisited it — but I did have something like this happen before I left, which defied all of my negative (and usually accurate) expectations. As for my own Italian journey, Moz’s first track “I Will See You in Far-off Places” has become something of a theme song, apparently written to some long-lost, beloved wiseass:

It’s so easy for us to sit together
But it’s so hard for our hearts to combine…
And I will see you in far-off places…
I believe I will see you somewhere safe
looking to the camera
messing around
and pulling faces…

I found the piazza, bordered by the pretty white Chiesa Valdese (church) and the massive Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice). There were very few people around. “Piazza Cavour,” I serenaded the Palazzo, “what’s my life for?”

Then I was ready to move on to Vatican City.

I followed Via Crescenzio to the Piazza dei Resorgimento,  where you first see the thick brick walls of the City. On the island in the center by the Metro tracks were clumps of overheated tourists and several African men selling duffel bags and luggage. They must have been doing so illegally, because when a police car drove into their midst they scattered and ran. I stopped to rest and to write in the shade outside of a gelateria before starting around the high brown wall in search of an entrance. I should have just looked in my book, because I wound up going in the wrong direction and hiking around the entire perimeter. My feet were hurting by the time I found the ingress by the Piazza San Pietro. I couldn’t help but think: what the hell is the Pope so afraid of that he has to live within this bloody fortress?

The Piazza was full of pigeons and tourists. St. Peter’s basilica was very large and imposing in the background, but I was too tired to do anything but take a few pictures and sit down. After that, without consulting my map, I headed down Via Della Conciliazione, again in the wrong direction, until I reached the Piazza Pia in front of the truly ancient Castel Sant’ Angelo, built by Hadrian in the first or second century. I was by the river again. Stopping, I wondered if I should just head back downtown. It was nearly six o’clock.

Accidentally, I made eye contact with a short, balding fortysomething man crossing the street, and he asked me for the time. Suddenly he was asking me a barrage of questions. (Here’s a tip for the womenfolk: never make casual eye contact with a strange Italian man unless you mean it.) I answered most of the queries good-naturedly (where was I from? what did I do?) until this man, named Giuseppe, asked me “Do you have a boyfriend who loves you?”

Not only did that make me wince (ouch), it made his intentions crystal clear. With a somewhat forced laugh I said “I think this conversation is over now,” and turned toward the Vittorio Emmanuele bridge. “Wait! Wait! Signora!” I could hear him calling behind me. Bye bye, Giuseppe. Thanks for letting me know it was time to leave.

It was a long walk back to the YWCA, down Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, past the aforementioned ruins in the Largo di Torre Argentina, through the Piazza Venezia with its huge white marble monument to king Vittorio Emmanuele II. Here I helped a lost Australian tourist locate his whereabouts on a map. From Venezia, I took less touristed side streets over to Via Cavour, and from there it was a straight shot back to Santa Maria Maggiore and the YWCA.

After cooling down and looking through the food listings in Let’s Go, I decided (rather insanely, after all that walking) to venture southeast of Termini into the San Lorenzo neighborhood for dinner. There was a vegetarian restaurant there called Arancia Blu, Orange Blue, which opened at eight-thirty (Romans eat late). It was probably at least two kilometers away, but I started off anyway, walking the length of the Termini station to Via Bibiana. It was definitely the skids along that route, complete with abandoned buildings and drunks, and I wondered about the walk back after dark. Once I turned onto Via Tiburtina, I found myself in a vital, if run-down, area that reminded me of parts of Somerville, Brookline, or Cambridge (Massachusetts). This was San Lorenzo, south of the city university, and it had that youthful, vibrant, multicultural vibe found in urban student neighborhoods. There were a lot of kebab shops and ethnic restaurants, and I loved it immediately.

I passed by Arancia Blu at least once without seeing it, a concrete building covered with graffiti. It was only eight-fifteen, but the pretty green-eyed waitress told me I could sit down anyway. I opted for the attractive raised wooden patio. A squarely built gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair (who, unbeknownst to me, was the chef) came to ask me if I wanted red or white wine. Apparently they give you a free glass at the outset — how cool is that? — so I asked for white. The man returned with the wine and a small plate on which were the two most delectable samples of focaccia I’ve ever tasted.

I liked this place.

I ordered a pasta dish with saffron and asparagus from another waitress, who reminded me of a slimmer, more unassuming version of Ingrid Bergman with a longer nose. (The pasta came very al dente, and was bright yellow.) While I was waiting for my food, a young woman, looking vaguely retro-punk with black-rimmed eyes and a black Blondie T-shirt, sat down at the next table and spoke American English with the waitress. She looked like my kind of people, so I struck up a conversation. Her name was Julie, and she was a student at the state university in Atlanta. This was her last day in Italy. She had come back to San Lorenzo because it was one of her favorite parts of Rome. We chatted all through dinner, through my decadent dessert of chocolate cake (so dense it was like fudge) with bitter orange sauce, and she told me where to go in Florence for good food. Specifically, Osteria Pepo, next to the very popular ZaZa’s. I wrote this down.

We walked back to the hostel neighborhood together afterward, and I felt completely safe.

The next morning after breakfast I sent out my travel diary from the YWCA computer. I had to retype the whole damn thing, because there was no way to hook up my laptop to the Internet (this was true at Internet points around town as well). Then I made an online reservation at the Ostello Archi Rossi in Florence for the nights of the third and fourth. The Web site confirmed availability for both nights in a 6-bed dorm.

It was eleven-thirty when I finally set out for the Ancient City. It was much closer by, fortunately; I was really feeling the effects of yesterday’s trek. Walking through the Domus Aurea park, where Nero’s house had been, I arrived at the Colosseum.

I had gotten quickly accustomed to Rome’s Renaissance grandeur, but this was something else entirely. There’s old, and then there’s old. The remnants of this colossal structure truly belonged to another, dead age. I didn’t pay to go inside; having only two days for all of Rome, I had determined that I wouldn’t spend much time standing in line. From outside you can get glimpses, through some of the arches, at the stadium inside, and that was enough for me.

I had a forgettable lasagna and another iceberg salad at Luzzi on Via di San Giovanni in Laterano, the street across the Piazza del Colosseo from the Colosseum, before entering the ruins. I took Via Sacra, the oldest street in Rome (a stone-paved pedestrian walkway), past what was left of the famous Roman baths (walls) and the Temple of Venus (ten columns), to the well-preserved Arch of Titus, A.D. 81, which depicts the sack of Jerusalem. Here there was a splitting-off of streets: Sacra, Nova, and Clivus Palatinus, with stairs on the Sacra side leading down into the sunken area of the Forum. Clivus Palatinus led to the Palatine Hill, but I didn’t feel like shelling out for the view when the rest of the Ancient City was mine to see scot-free. I descended into the valley and wandered amid modified temples like the columned Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, which had been (like so many buildings in Italy) remodeled by later architects and turned into a church. Other temples like that of Vesta, up on the hill, were nothing but a crumbling wall, and the adjacent House of the Vestal Virgins could have been any number of things. I read in my book that the Vestal Virgins were among the most respected people in Rome, with the power to pardon prisoners – but that if one of them was found to have partaken of the pleasures of the flesh, she was buried alive with a loaf of bread and a candle.

May I take a moment here to vent? Jesus H. Christ, I am so over this ancient, culturally pervasive madonna/whore business. We’re still feeling the effects of centuries of this perverse dualism, this sexual sickness. You can be esteemed, like a Vestal Virgin, or dispensed with, like a worthless piece of shit. (Sound familiar??!!!) I want to be a Sacred Prostitute, goddammit. These ladies, Heterae, tended the goddess temples in Greece, and healing powers were attributed to their sexuality. A war-scarred man limping home after the trauma of battle might go to the temple to be “healed” by one of these respected priestesses. (Yeah baby, I’ll heal you up real nice!) Deena Metzger wrote a famous feminist play inspired by this practice, “The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them.” At the root of it, it’s about engagement, about giving something back to a man that has been sorely lacking: not merely pleasure, but the Feminine itself. Literally, it’s about “plugging a man back in” — to connection, to community, to the ethic of care.

I kicked around in the ruins for a little bit longer, and then exited up to Via dei Fori Imperiali, crossing the street to have a look at the bits and pieces of the Forum of Augustus. I recognized where I was immediately; down the way was the gleaming Vittorio Emmanuele II monument, and here was the beginning of Via Cavour. I took Via Cavour to Via dei Serpenti, where I found the heavenly gelato at Gelatone, and sat in the piazza to begin this massive missive.

I checked my email at an Internet point on the way back, and discovered that Ostello Archi Rossi had confirmed me for only the 4th, so once at the YWCA I used their pay phone to call Florence. The young man on the other end of the line told me that if the email confirmed only the 4th, then they only had availability on the 4th. “That would have been nice to know before I made the reservation,” I said. He repeated himself about availability. “All right,” I said, realizing I was getting nowhere, “whatever. Can I cancel my reservation?”

That made him change his tune. He actually checked availability, and said that they had a space, but that he couldn’t take my reservation over the phone. I was to email them and authorize them to charge my credit card for the night of the 3rd. I paid the YWCA the 2 Euro to use their Internet (their minimum charge, for an hour) and followed his instructions. Then I went back to my room to freshen up before heading down to San Lorenzo. I wanted to have my last dinner in Rome there.

I took a different route and thought I had gotten lost, in a very down-and-out looking area by an ancient ruined bridge, but I do usually have a bloodhound’s sense of direction (despite yesterday’s Vatican fiasco) and eventually found myself on Arancia Blu’s street, Via dei Latini. I explored the neighborhood for a while, looking for an open restaurant, but in this part of town it seems everyone opens late. After eight o’clock I gave up, already ravenous, and went to see my friends at Arancia Blu.

The green-eyed waitress, Silvana, was there, and let me sit outside again and eat bread. We talked for a few minutes, and I mentioned that I had been working up at Lake Orta. She was from the lakes region herself, but had never heard of Centro. The Bergmanesque waitress, Daniela, who had waved at me when I passed on the street, brought me a glass of sparkling wine to go with my bread. When the kitchen opened I ordered the potato and mint ravioli, which was certainly an interesting combination, if not ecstasy-inducing. For dessert they recommended the parfait of eggnog, which had a marsala-caramel glaze that gave a wonderful bitter tang to the creamy sweetness underneath. Daniela brought me a (gratis!) glass of marsala to go with it, and I sat back, content, chatting with the cute college-aged couple from California at the next table. Life was good.

When I left, reluctant to part for good from this new home away from home, Daniela motioned to me, and made her way around the tables to kiss me, Italian-style, on both cheeks. This pleased me to no end. What a terrific place this was, and what marvelous people, like a slightly upscale, Roman version of my local organic community cafe at home — only with free wine.

Walking out into the night, I heard drumming. I followed the infectious tribal beat to the piazza near the clock tower where I had snapped a picture earlier. (I have no name for the place; it’s off my map, and nowhere on the Internet.) A crowd stood there watching a group of student activists in blue and orange costumes dance in front of a banner decrying the Mexican government for human rights violations. It was election week in Mexico, but I wasn’t sure what these kids were advocating in terms of Italian participation. All the fliers had already been handed out, not that I could have read them anyway. Still, it was fun to watch their choreographed dance and catch the contagion of their youthful energy, that spirit of resistance.

They moved on down the street, and I turned back toward Termini. The marsala and the good people of San Lorenzo had calmed my nerves enough that the walk back, along those dark and deserted streets, gave me no pause.

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.