Last week I had a very romantic dream about D. It wasn’t a nostalgic dream about when we were together in Italy or about Samoa. It wasn’t a future dream about being together again in New Zealand. In the dream I was in Miami and he was in Darfur and we were talking on the phone and it was the best thing ever and when I woke up I was really sad and even tried to fall asleep again so I could talk to him some more. I haven’t heard his voice since the end of July when he first got to Khartoum, and so when he told me in chat the other day that he is leaving Darfur in two weeks and taking a new job in Afghanistan the first thing I said was “Will we be able to TALK?”

It’s not a situation I ever thought I’d be in, I tell you what. By the time I met D. in May I had come to a pretty glorious time in my life in terms of being single, and anyone who has come to it honestly and for real will recognize it when I say: I was finally okay with it. I was finally okay, after four years of single-ness, after celibacy and crushes and pseudo-dating and makeouts in bars and confusion and disappointment and heartbreak and flirtatiousness and double entendres and inappropriate texting, after straining most of my friends’ resolves with my constant over-analysis about how I’m Just Not A Man’s Woman and I Think I Am Sort Of Difficult and I Can’t Really Ever See Myself With Anyone and What’s Wrong With Meeeeeeee and so on and so forth. In Wellington–I think, in part, because I was hanging out with a younger and less married crowd than in Seattle–I started noticing how much I enjoyed being single, how I specifically liked not being part of a couple, how I was honing flirtation to a fine edge, how I loved my time alone and my time with my friends and how I never, never apologized for doing what I wanted with whom I wanted. I loved the sense that my time was my own and that I didn’t have to answer to anyone if I wanted to spend my evening singing into my hairbrush in front of the mirror or curled up on the suede couches watching awful TV and eating pasta with my flatmate or wearing my tube top and my rhinocerous necklace and staying out until five in the morning.

So I noticed all that, and thought about what a good time I was having, and how many people in the world I had found to be friends with, and about how even though I got my heart good and broke a time or so, I did end up recovering very nicely. And then I started to think that maybe there was no One for me, that maybe he really wasn’t going to show up the way he’s supposed to show up, that maybe the prize for having changed my life and moved to another continent was not going to be a long term relationship with Mr. Perfect. That maybe I would stay single…dare I say it?…forever.

And I started thinking about that more and more–like for real, what will happen if I never partner? What will I do financially, what will my relationships with my family and friends be like, what will I do about sex and intimacy, what will I do about emotional needs? I won’t say I spreadsheeted it out but I also won’t say that the tenor of my conversation with my friends, when we talked about this sort of thing, didn’t start to change. By the time I left Wellington for the second-to-last time I was actually pretty happy about some of the decisions I’d made and some of the thinking I’d thought. I don’t know how it happened but some switch flipped and I was actively excited about remaining single indefinitely–like I had all these plans. Like I was just going to be so awesome that I could hardly contain myself, that I was hopeful and thrilled and centered and calm all at the same time, because I had finally, finally, at the tender age of thirty-three, figured something really important out for myself, that I’d been trying to get a handle on for four hard years and had never quite got.

None of that changed when I met D, not the least because I didn’t think that I was going to ever see him again after Samoa. I did remember giggling to myself and sort of amending my manifesto, as it were, to allow for making out with fabulous boys that you’ve just met, but I didn’t expect meeting him to seriously change anything about me. It had been a long time since I was a girlfriend and if you’ve been reading here a long time you’ll recall that I didn’t much like myself the last time I was one, and I didn’t particularly see much need to get back into that.

Even though he was stunning. Even though we got on so easily and immediately. Even though he listened as much as he talked and seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. Even though we had so much in common. Even though we were clearly crazy about each other pretty much from the moment we met, I didn’t think that was reason enough to embark on anything so insane as a long-distance English-as-a-second-language visa-dependent relationship with someone I had known for fourteen days.

But maybe it was because I had done so much thinking about all that sort of stuff quite recently before I met him, and maybe because I knew my default life plan was a very good and fun and awesome one that I could go back to whenever I felt like it, I was able to finally say something like “Well, you know this will probably never work and it’s ridiculous and insane and we’re stupid to try it, but I think I’ll always regret at least not giving it a go because you are pretty great and I feel pretty great with you, so sure, let’s be boyfriend and girlfriend!” (But to be honest with you, having been burnt a couple of times before, I was still not really expecting to hear from him after we said goodbye on the Samoan beach, and I remember thinking that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care, because we’d had a gorgeous two weeks together and that that was a good thing in itself. So you can imagine how I felt, after a day or so out of touch, to get that first email.)

When I was in Seattle and he was in Italy, before I went there in July, we talked on the phone every day, and I found that that was not a terrible way to have a new relationship. After Paruzzaro we both thought that we’d be able to continue that, although I did sort of wonder what the internet situation would be in, you know, the Sudan. It turns out that the internet situation in the Sudan, you may not be surprised to hear, is a bit dodgy, and so we have been reduced to Skype chat, almost every day if we’re lucky, once or twice a week if we’re not, for the last ten weeks. That’s how I’m a girlfriend now.

It depends on the rainy season, it depends on the satellite. It depends on the compound’s generator (”babur” in Arabic, I have had reason to learn) and when they need to turn it off at night. It depends on if we can navigate the time difference and whether he’s up for writing at high speed in his second language. Usually our chats don’t end in endearments and plans to chat same time same place tomorrow; they end with him getting cut off, almost always after he’s just told me something like “One of our other offices to the north was robbed by bandits” or “There was an army attack this week on one of the camps,” leaving me to knit my brows and look real hard at the screen, willing him to be there on the other side of it, willing him to be safe.

He’s been safe so far (”It’s only the Sahara coming between us, stella,” he writes) and I have every reason to believe that he will continue to be when he gets to Kabul. I have every reason to believe that I’ll get residency in New Zealand, that he’ll get a job and be able to join me there, that we’ll be able to have all the quotidian luxuries that people in relationships have: not having to count the days left, not having to remember everything we wanted to tell each other in person before we go back to long weeks of clicking on the keyboard, not having to have every single moment be The! Best! Ever! because there will be more moments, there will be more days, there will be more time together.

“I’m not feeling very romantic lately,” I told him last week, before he got the job offer for Kabul. “It’s hard to have the same feelings as I did in Samoa, or even in Paruzzaro when I can’t even talk to you.”

“I have the same feelings, stella,” he typed back. “It is strange, here I am very into my job, and Darfur, and Kabul, and so on. But I always have us in my mind, in a corner, always present.”

I’m not doing anything so exciting as leaving Darfur for Kabul, but I still think about him all the time: when I walk on the beach in the evenings or when I count the iguanas on the way to the grocery store, when I talk with my mom and spend time with my old friends and their kids. I think about hearing his voice in a couple of weeks when he gets back to Khartoum and I wonder what I’ll say and what he’ll respond, which language we’ll speak. Is that romance? None of this is part of the plans I made, it’s not anything I expected to ever be doing, but here I am, here we are in our separate worlds on separate continents, living in the corners of each others’ minds.

Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Chiara
Filed under: Everything