I’ve never written very much about what it’s been like for me to be single, have I. I told you, years ago now, that I’d broke up, and that I was very sad for a long time. I told you when I started feeling a little better and even about a horrid date I went on. I’ve spent a lot of time talking and thinking and emailing about it but I have been trying, these last couple of years, not to talk about it too much here.

“It.” Right, it. It entails everything regarding my romantic life: all the mistakes I made in that one relationship; the intense grief I felt for so long that I thought would possibly kill me; the remorse; the anger; the loneliness; the shame; the hate I’ve felt for my body and the belief that I am ugly; the wondering if I was always going to be alone; the distrust I felt towards men in general; the constantly being the third or fifth or seventh wheel; the solid inability to imagine myself in any sort of relationship that involves taking ones’ pants off; the fear that if I ever did get into some sort of pants-free relationship that I would just fuck it up perfectly, immediately, without even trying. The intense jealousy; the feeling invisible and asexual; the conviction that I could either be awesome or have a partner but not both. Most of all though, “it” has been the thought, everyday unrelenting, that there is no love in the world for me, and that I should not dare to hope for such a thing.

Well, love. From family and friends, sure. Absolutely, definitely. In fact I’d say that these past couple of years in Seattle have brought me not only deeper relationships with my existing friends but have also brought me new friendships I never thought could exist, that I never even thought about as outside chances. I would often find myself amazed that I was surrounded by so many good people and that there was so much to talk about and so much fun to be had. Even here in Wellington, where I’ve been for just over a month, I find myself making connections with people easily and fearlessly, trusting my instincts about who to hang out with and who to trust. I’m getting ready to move soon but I have to say that one of the best things about the crazy Maple Lodge have been the immediately satisfying friendships with people there. Maybe it’s just the intensity of traveling, where all emotions and experience seem heightened because you’re out of context, but I truly feel as though I stumbled amongst really good people that I’d never meet otherwise but whom have proved to be just the sort that I need to be around at this juncture in this strange new life. So it’s not that I don’t believe in love or that I don’t love people or that I don’t feel love from my friends and family. That, I think I’m pretty good at, frankly. That’s probably the best thing I do in my life. It’s that other kind of love that I have basically stopped even wanting for myself, shrinking my heart a little in the process.

And then. Then there was a surprise. One of these good people I met became someone I couldn’t stop thinking about. “Don’t want this,” I wrote in my paper journal. “It’s all going to end in tears.” I invited him to the museum one day before I had a job, sort of on a whim, and he told me his name on the street as we walked down Kent Terrace. We talked and talked and talked, every day, and I found myself looking around for him wherever I went in town, hoping to run into him to talk some more. All of us would be screaming and laughing and telling lies downstairs in the lounge and I would sprout extra eyes all over my body to be able to look at him more; I grew antennae to be able to better sense where he was in the room at all times. Before I started working I’d hope that he’d stay up after everyone else had gone to bed too, so we could sit with cups of tea by the fireplace and just get into it. I kept telling myself that I just enjoyed his company.

I learned that he was hilarious and intelligent, thoughtful and considered and really sarcastic. I learned that he likes art and music and movies and books and that he dresses better than I do, not that that’s hard. I learned he thinks that “Don’t Stop ‘Till You Get Enough” is the world’s best pop song and that he calls his man-purse an “action satchel.” I learned that he was traveling in order to expand his heart and open his world, that he was trying to find something he couldn’t get at home with its work and pub and work some more, that he was refusing to live in quiet desperation. I learned he was paying attention to what I was saying and that he wanted to know more about me, too. I learned he was gorgeous inside and out, deeply kind and compassionate, and perhaps the most generous person I have ever known. I also learned that he had been presented, rather suddenly, with an opportunity to go to Southeast Asia at the end of September for four months. I put a blanket over his head and kissed him anyway.

He…I’ll call him G Funk here because that’s what he’s under in my phone’s contact list…bought his tickets for Malaysia after we’d been together two days, the day we moved into a double room (which we’ve decorated with a disco ball and posters of Barbie, Eminem, and the solar system) at the Lodge. I encouraged him in this, as I hoped I’d be strong enough to be able to do, as I hope he or any of my friends would encourage me if I had that chance. We’ve had eleven days together and will have fifteen more before he leaves. I’m going to take a couple of days off work and drive with him up to Kerikeri to drop his car off at a subtropical garden and then down to Auckland to see him off at the airport. He’ll be back in New Zealand in February. To say I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster over the past week or so would be doing the rollercoaster community a disservice because I am pretty sure the laws of physics preclude the highs and lows I’ve been feeling lately.

I have been trying to write a paragraph about him for about fifteen minutes, trying to tell you what this man is like, what he means in my world; I feel like I’d need to use all the languages I speak to describe him because English just doesn’t have enough words. I’m trying to tell you what a pure shock it’s been to me to all of a sudden not be single…he called me his girlfriend within twenty-four hours…and to think so incessantly about another human being all day. I want to describe in detail his goodness, his sweetness, and how I have to turn my face away from him sometimes because it’s so intense, it’s been so fast and crazy and this is just not how I do things. I want to tell you that that entry about the mountain that I wrote last year, the thing I thought was the most romantic thing that had ever happened or ever would happen to me or anyone else in the history of the world, doesn’t even compare, is not even on the same scale as the way I felt when we were taking pictures of each other doing somersaults and cartwheels at the beach, or kissing under the clouds, or when he put his arm around me the other night at the Southern Cross as we listened to a crazy funk band. I want to tell you how scared I am that I will repeat all the awful mistakes I have made in the past, and how last night when we talked about his leaving I felt myself fold into myself a little, how I sat there in the car, lay there in bed, telling myself: “Don’t want this. It’s all going to end in tears.” I want to admit that I am so afraid of ruining this, that there seem to be so many ways to ruin it that I am sure to stumble upon one of them.

He told me the other day that he was a better person for having known me, that he feels lucky. Little does he know that it’s really me that’s the lucky one. I was alone for so long and I didn’t even realize how dessicated parts of my heart had become over the years, even as I was getting stronger and feeling more and more free. Now I think my heart is breaking, a little, but it’s because it’s full to overflowing and I’m not strong enough to keep it all inside.

Posted on September 12th, 2006 by Chiara
Filed under: Everything