Sameness Is The Same…

…Fighting is the game
Nameless is the lady who has gone insane…

It was sophomore year of college and I had fallen in love. And, like most monumental relationships, everything about our love was magnified because of our youth, because of our shared predicament as strangers in a strange land, and because we were full of passionate optimism for causes larger than ourselves.

Ambition drove us to different parts of the world soon after we committed to our relationship. A month after, he spent time in Costa Rica working at an orphanage in a remote village. I spent the next six months in a theater conservatory-style program in London. When I returned from London, we spent three beautiful weeks in Hungary, afterwhich I continued school in Maine, while he spent the half the year studying Arabic in Jordan, and the other half continuing research in Middle Eastern Studies in London. We spent one year living together, and then it was off to upstate New York for me for graduate school. He pursued a fellowship at Oxford. We both committed to yet another two years of calling cards, six-hour time differences, and transatlantic flights on a student budget. “We can do this,” we told each other over the phone, when it seemed like sending care packages, troubleshooting Skype, and going to bed alone were going to be the status quo for the rest of our lives.

The mechanics of how our love fell apart don’t really matter, but the relationship did collapse spectacularly after four years as the transgressions we hoped were just accidental turned out to be conscious choices in making mistakes. In the years we had shared, however remotely over continents, we had built up a platonic idea of what it was like to be “us”. Over the course of distance and time, compounded by divergent ambitions, these hopes and dreams of an eventual shared future and forever became unsustainable.

Unless you’ve been in a long-term, long-distance relationship, I don’t think you can really appreciate the energy and effort needed to keep on believing that somehow all you’re doing is worth it. While we both agreed independence and doing what we needed to do to be happy was the healthy thing to do for us, we didn’t anticipate the resentment he would feel when I was too busy to call, or the immense guilt I would feel when I was having a good time without him. We didn’t anticipate my depression being an issue, and how I became either needy or aloof because of it. The pressure to be perfect and pick up where we left off the last time we met grew too great, and made our brief in-between-semester interactions artificial. “You and me versus the world” became a sardonic joke instead of that youthful ideal that we aspired to when we first met.

When I think about if I’d ever be in a long-distance relationship again, I hesitate to say yes because I know too well that feeling of being a celibate single which I would be happy with if I was at a point in my life where that was something I wanted. I can’t describe to you how much it hurt to miss someone who just wasn’t there when things were bad, how much more it hurt when the world was unbearably beautiful and you couldn’t share that feeling in an email or a phonecall. Am I more mature now that I could handle a long-distance relationship with no particular end goal or end time in sight? Does this have anything to do with maturity? I’m no advocate of being one half of an interdependent couple, but I don’t believe that there’s much value in being in a relationship if at the end of the day I’m not able to fall asleep in my partner’s arms, on the couch, because they’re 3000 miles away. Does saying that mean I am being too dependent on someone else for my own contentment in a relationship? Am I overcommitted (by needing the condition of proximity be fulfilled) and undercommitted (by rejecting because of zip code differences) to a relationship all at the same time?

When my college boyfriend and I finally parted ways at Gatwick airport, both of us in tears because at the time we didn’t have the clarity of mind to understand what went wrong beyond the most immediate situational causes, it was without a doubt painful and emotionally draining. Hindsight is always 20/20, and I know now that removing myself from that situation made me realize I didn’t have to be the sailor’s wife gazing out at sea for a ship’s return to port, turned to stone, waiting for a nebulous something to change course.

City and sea
Light versus tree
Mapping out the stars inside your brain
Completely different
But the same sort of sound
More easily found
This is what I wanted from the start
The day is light the night is dark

Save Up All The Days…

… A routine malaise
Just like yesterday
I told you I would stay…

My life is currently being lightly jostled by thoughts and suggestions of things that will change it. It’s sort of like being a little leaf, riding the ripples of a pond, and trying to figure out which direction to float in, or if to decide at all or instead do nothing. The changes that are adrift could be called negligible or monumental, depending on their interpretation and depending on the ultimate decisions that are made, but nevertheless, a shifting and a shuffling is palpable in my breath.

And it is all about the timing. These whispers of a morphing future have caused me to ask questions perhaps a little before their time, and I find myself being nudged and prodded, gently forced to confront some challenging, but not necessarily difficult, issues. At the same time, I wonder if my sense that I’m being coaxed to face up to some issues in my life in an untimely fashion is just an indication of how I’ve been holding off on answering questions whose time is due. I know I shouldn’t let those unspoken questions fester.

I’m ready for a change, but change doesn’t necessarily mean a moving forward, or “progress” – just something different. I’m ready for a reconfiguration, whereby some aspects of my life that I’m very happy and content with remain as they are, and others are adjusted to make for a happier future. I am ready to change things and, simultaneously, let things happen – like reorganizing the inner workings of a slowed down, tired machine to make it run more smoothly.

I’m optimistic. I think good things are about to happen, and I’m beginning to plan for their execution.

Would you always
Maybe sometimes
Make it easy
Take your time

Sweet Disposition…

… Never too soon
Oh reckless abandon
Like no one’s watching you…

M. and I took a break in early July, off to New Mexico where we got to spend some time outdoors in New Mexico’s ecotonic ecology, and gorge ourselves on tamales, carne asada and sopaipillas. I never knew really, before going to California for the first time last year, how good real Mexican food could be, and what a disservice restaurants in New York do to burritos. (Burrito Loco, I’m looking at you.)

My absolute favorite spot on our trip was a town called Chimayó – a quiet spot in between Taos and Santa Fe most famous for its Santuario. At our bed and breakfast, I got to watch hummingbirds buzz frantically at the birdfeeders while I ate my pancakes, and we made friends with Griffin, the cat. There were also horses and a rooster that we didn’t get to see, but we could hear from our room that opened up into the garden. The world’s best tamales (no offense to anyone’s grandmother) are to be found in Chimayó, at Leona’s, right next to the Santuario. I can’t describe heaven. You have to go there. Or order tamales FedExed to you.

Returning from New Mexico back to New York City left me somewhat on a low as I struggle to deal with being reminded of what life could be – free, outdoors, seeing beautiful things and being inspired – and what I feel constricts the full extent of my possible happiness in parts of my life right now. That sense of inhibition has slowly sucked me into a throbbing despair, misplaced frustration, and misdirected anger that I hope is only temporary. The red rocks and open skies of New Mexico are a reminder of how much I don’t want to live coldly like a cog in a machine. I desire so much for a life that is of inspiring daily experiences.

I’m definitely feeling restless, and looking for some kind of a change. What that change must be, I’m not sure. I’m passing milestone after milestone on a long highway, but still unsure of where I’m going. People seem to have their lives figured out, and I don’t necessarily want to execute a ten year plan, but I’d like the option to at least deliberate over my choices so I could evaluate acceptance or rejection. In grad school, MAK and I used to play the “what do you think we’ll be doing a year from now?” game. Right now, it knocks the breath out of me to think I’ll be doing the same thing.

And while our bloods still young
It’s so young
It runs
And we won’t stop til it’s over
Won’t stop to surrender.