Chasing God

(I am not Christian, but that is the language I know how to speak)


* * *

Every time I come here:

This is it. This is the time I have gone too far. He will not be here this time.

The cobbled streets are grey with damp and edged with snow that melts at my step. The Minnewater is before me, open boats laden with tourists even today, their umbrellas blooming over the gunwales, bottoms shifting on the hard bench seats as they dutifully point their cameras left and right, five houses in a row with five styles of roofline, history in a digital frame. I cross the bridge, the heavy wooden doors open, the whitewashed buildings of the Beguinage low before me.

There is a carpet of daffodils, where I expect last year’s green commons. They stop me in my tracks and steal my breath. They are a sign to me in all my arrogance, a sign that no matter how shitty a person I am, no matter how much of my holy talents I squander on the maintenance of Big Lies, God still gives with both hands, God still loves endlessly, boundlessly, God forgives the unforgivable and loves me despite my profound absence of loveableness.

Inside, the church is warm – signs entreat donations for “HEATING” in four languages. There is the chanting of vespers, and I know as I enter behind the German girls sharing an ipod that this is not atmospheric recording to aid in the parting of tourists and their money. The chant is slightly flat, in partial tune from daily use and not from anything so useless as practice – how can living this chant be practice? – it is round, perfectly incomplete, the edges soothed by acoustics, the nuns’ honking their noses through each others’ singing (older in full habits, those merely fifty- or sixty-something in fleece pullovers) coughing through the readings, they are not performing, they are not living a Big Lie, they are not lost and afraid all the time, depending on the hands that yank away. They are here. They reach for God as I do, but I am tentative, stepping to the edge of the crosswalk knowing in my head that cars stop here, but still unconfident enough to hover at the pavement, the drivers waving their hands in frustration – are you crossing? Are you stopping? These women, I am sure, stride into the road, the Bruges drivers accelerating to a stop just as they do in London, in Amsterdam, in Paris. These women stand at the edge of the table and fall backward into the arms of God.

I light a candle. I always light a candle. A nun reads in Flemish. The chapel is filled with the warmth of candles and expensive heat and the smell of wax. I do not have the right to pray, but I hope I can be good.

Officially, Intermittent

I did *try* to write every day. And mostly, I did actually write at least something. And then was felled at the knees by lack of internet, lack of privacy, and much mental time occupied by being The Boss.

So yeah. This is now an intermittent blog. I can't keep letting you down, Gentle Readers, by saying I'm going to do something and then not doing it. So when I do, I'll make it as good as I can. And I'll also not kill myself by saying, oh, don't post that until it's perfect, because that way inaction lies.

Where am I now? In a secret location (let's note that it's a major honeymoon destination), shacked up with the Ex. I know. Dumb, dumb Mandy. So far there's only been minor shortness of breath. And really, who knows? The part of me that says, hmmmm, you're* kind of self-involved and a little bit boring and really, the sex had been going downhill, is strongly considering making this a last hurrah. The part of me that thinks, hey, never know when you'll be hit by a bus, would rather not end without closure. I'm working on having Part A strangle Part B but then the thought of choking just turns me on.

Where will I be Thursday? Possibly in a Midwestern City with Big City Lover. We're texting it out.

Where will I be the first weekend in June? With Fucked-Up Guy, plotting and planning to give my team-members and his fiancee the slip so we can shag intensely and silently in shared lodging.

Where will I be all year? Why, on the road, of course. That big beautiful pond full of fish, maybe one of whom will touch the thing in me that needs it beyond my control...

* * *

Quote of the week: "I never learned in health class that wiping front to back thing, and that's why I got a gall bladder infection that almost killed me..."

Words to live by.

* * *

*note intentionally ambiguous pronoun

Day Six: Small Comforts

Free-associating. Late.

And Power Girl is out dancing at a dive bar (In the car: "Now, what do you do, Third Friend, if someone asks to buy you a drink?" "I giggle and say nothing!" "No, you ask for something nice and give it to me if you don't want it!"), Hairline Boy is asleep in the next room and I am bumping slowly, slowly down dial-up road. That is to say, when I want to video-chat in my schoolgirl skirt with yet another musician, it has to be done in the parking lot of the coffee shop down the road - but that's tomorrow's post.

The first night I spent here, I slept alone. And then the next night Hairline Boy and I talked into the night, both of us a little wounded right now, and I asked him to share his bed given up to me. He said, "All I can do is sleep." I said, "I know."

He is faithful, as faithful to his distant girlfriend as he is to the choices and ideas that have kept him at a lower level of success than makes him happy. He is constant as penury, honest as paper plates, truthful as sloppy guitar playing. He is kind, universally so, even when kindness lays his heart on the table for the cleaver, ends his relationship, breaks up the band. He is exactly the sort of man who believes the woman he left his partner for when she says, "No, we can't openly see each other right away, and I have to see this other guy as a cover..."

He doesn't want anything from me. We flirt - a very little. His eyes sparkle when he looks at me. And each night we hold each other a little less tightly, grading down from drowning outside our depth to now, merely close. I still wake each time I roll over, surprised to find him there. His hands behave, his mouth stays shut, his heart is uncovered, but not in that way.

And that is why I advise when I know it will not be taken, that is why my expertise in his field is unwasted even if unreceived, that is why I pay him with two checks to be certain he will pay himself. Custom for me is payment in kind, base currency, the attitude of prayer, and that custom is unwelcome here.

I ask him, "Do you not have kitchen things due to circumstance or because you don't want them?" I think I will get him some knives, or nice glasses.

He says, "Like what?"

I say, "Like plates."

No, he does not want kitchen things. I can't give him what he wants. My usual band-aids are all wrong, don't cover a burn unless you have to. His wounds are drying out. I use my hands to wipe his face in the night, thumbs gently taking the tears from his eye sockets, asking if I can kiss his cheek with closed lips.

I can't fix it. I can't fix anything. So I change in the bathroom and come to bed in t-shirt and leggings, lie in his arms and wish him more like me, me more like him.

(Laughing)

So I have another pseudo-deep whiny-whiny post already written, and it will eventually see the light of day.

But not yet.

I am lounging in the syrup of once again being with someone where I replay what happened in my head in the car, the next day, as I fall asleep, it distracts me from eating, I pause with food on my fork and get temporarily lost in the warm glow of memory all the more precious for being fleeting, tenuous, likely to be recaptured eventually from mutual desire, but unlikely from circumstance.

Notes were taken, porn will be written - but I beg your indulgence for a few hours, while this swirl of sensations and skin-tingling memory settles into transcription. You'll excuse me if I am disinclined to reach that point...

More Precious Than Flattery

Sometimes I don’t write because I’m busy. Because I’m lazy. Because I have nothing to say. Sometimes I don’t write because I am afraid of what I will say, or what I must say, and what I must think and know and feel to be able to say.

I call ex-Lover. Against all counsel, against my own will, I can’t maintain the wall any longer. I am calling to say we can’t be friends, he has texted me that he blames me for a prank someone pulled on Cute Girl, how can we possibly be friends if it’s me versus her in his head? He says it’s easier to hate me, that believing I did something awful is one way to do it. This takes down a fence rail barring my way out, he’s not my champion any more. I wouldn’t prank her via computer, I don’t know enough to make it clean and cruel and untraceable. A weapon you don’t know how to use belongs to your enemy.

My weapon is words. I can shape the world, history, memory with words.

Ex-Lover says through the phone that our relationship was staggering from disaster to catastrophe. I don’t say what I wanted was you, what I wanted to give you was me, even negative attention is attention.

He says we were already breaking up for more than a year. I don’t say every time I made a scene, every time I hurt you, every time I walked away it was in fear that I would never be able to walk away, too deep, no turning back.

He says, as I head into the produce section to get a smoothie, the only thing I can keep down, “I had hoped this would bring you closer with your husband.”

I say, “It did. It’s not enough. It will never be enough. I knew that when I married him.”

He does not say that he, too, hates not being enough. That when I slept with someone else, it was nails through his palms as well as fodder for his fantasy. He says, he was crushed by what I wrote about Folk Rocker, about wanting, about needing to be wanted.

I say, that feeling? When I wrote you I was with someone else? This is like that, except there is no happy ending where I come home to you and you beat bruises into my ass, my thighs, my pussy, fuck me until you own me again. This is every day a new chapter of pain and there is no end in sight. You have taught me to welcome pain from you, to beg for it, to wish for more, to love your hand, the belt, the chain. Now I have no choice but to seek it out, to wait for more. I do not say, nothing like putting your finger in the ass of a crying woman, remember? And the weeks you kept yourself from fucking me because you had hurt me so badly, instead pulling on the belt around my neck while I came, you coming later in your hand, smearing the semen across my breasts in the strange and creaky-floored hotel? I say, at the very least, you could have waited, you and she could have kept things quiet for a week or two instead of rubbing your new relationship in my face.

When you have been with a lover for some time, the only way to surprise your lover is to hurt them.

He is shocked by my response to the breakup, he doesn’t get why this is so hard for me. I say, “I love(d) you,” with the 'd' so soft neither of us can hear it.

I say, “Remember the staircase at the farmhouse?”

I don’t say the place we played house in the fields for nearly a week, the place you first learned how much you loved to fuck me while I lay still, the place where we cooked together and then I leaned over the top of the stairs, looked down at you looking up, your face against the blond wood everything there was in the world to me and I told you in someone else’s words how much I loved you though we did not (then) allow ourselves to say I love you, told you deny thy father and refuse thy name or if thou wilt not be but sworn to me—

He says yes, he remembers.

I say, “That’s how I felt all the time.”

Reaching Towards Relief

I've been wending my way through a book, Tomcat In Love by Tim O'Brien, recommended by Brit Boy. The epigraph is the last sentence of this poem, which I had read before in a class, but hadn't really noted. Now I'm noting. I hope you'll enjoy it - I think it's now one of my top five.

(The other four would be Aristotle by Billy Collins, "You want a social life, with friends" by Kenneth Koch, TS Eliot's Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, and The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes, because my mother used to read it to me.)


One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-- Elizabeth Bishop

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Broken-Up

…It’s true what they say – eat less and exercise! I’ve only been on the Break-Up Diet for four days and the pounds are melting away! Follow the simple, three-step plan of food that tastes like cardboard, long city walks alone through the streets you once shared, and just plain ol’ not remembering to eat, and you, too, can lose five pounds in four days. He-llooooo, cheekbones!

…Why not take this time to reconnect with other loved ones? Four years is finally enough distance to phone Writer, the long-term boy prior to this one, and give best wishes to him and his lovely post-me wife! And when I’m in need of human contact at Oh-God-Thirty in the morning so that I won’t dial Lover’s number that one more time that mentally dons rappelling gear atop the Cliffs of Insanity, it reminds me that Secret Scientist is just finishing his Starbucks run and ready for my call. Thanks, friends!

…How about taking up a new hobby in your now-copious free time? Drive to a distant city and explore documentary photography at 3AM in the Meatpacking District! Jog moonlit paths in Central Park! And hey, did anyone say “post more often to your damn blog, you lazy bitch?”

…Learn more about grammar by replaying all your recent conversations in your head and analyzing the exact degree of offended, bitter, jealous or lonely you should be! By listening carefully to old voice mails, timing phone calls for when you’re sure he’s out with that adorable ‘other woman’, and reading old love letters stained with his semen, you can derive hours of misery from just a few pages of material!

…If you’re having trouble staying with the plan, try enlisting a buddy to be your coach! Ask them to make you a CD of “bestrongstaybrokenup songs”, or call them every time you feel the urge to dial your ex's number. Whenever my phone rings, Power Girl takes it firmly away from me and tells me not to answer or she’ll rip my fingers off – she’s such a tease! Eventually, she’s going to find me texting in the closet, but for now, Gentle Readers, that’s our little secret…

(he still wants to be friends)

Today I Am...

1) Crushing hard on a Kiwi who plays the ukelele.

2) Bitter that I'm not better at my job.

3) In another time zone.

4) Out of love.

5) Totally thwarted in #1.

6) Wearing a totally ridiculous outfit...

7) ...that I am paid to wear.

8) (Not like that)

9) Alternately loving and hating my hair.

10) On the edge of tears.

11) Behind on a big project.

12) Transported by said Kiwi playing "Sweet Child Of Mine" on said ukelele

13) (Including the guitar riff)

14) to another girl.

15) (Context is important)

16) Contemplating starting a Facebook.

17) Definitely out of love

18) and calling on Beautiful Girl

19) to help me stick to #17.

20) Because if he puts his hand on the back of my neck, it's all over.

21) Craving Thai salad rolls

22) which will be made for me by a tiny Laotian woman

23) whom I think understands how much I love them.

Tiny Stars

Man Who Loves Stars is yet another musician (he does not play the guitar). When I see him in the restaurant, his face lights up, he stands to greet me, he has lost weight. When he hugs me, the solidness of his body is a wall of comfort, much like Fucked-Up Guy, only not, well, fucked-up. This is not a date, another friend is here, Man Who Loves Stars has had the foresight to warn me there will not be private time tonight, and the class to buy my dinner anyway. It’s a pub, London food, which is to say curry. I ask the waiter to surprise me, not fish. The food comes, there is some kind of meat and some sort of gravy and I think vegetables or at least something else that is not meat, but I am not tasting food, only nearness and our knees rubbing under the table. I want to make this man happy, I want to see the light in his face when he sees my naked body and yet it is a calm, certain want, an expectation of what will happen at an unrushed, un-urgent time to come.

There are two stolen moments when our friend is at the bar. First, he says:

“Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about your life right now?”

I am washed with a wave of awe, that this boy, this man, has the interest and caring to ask this. I can’t think of anything better, and short enough to fit in the time span, so I tell him my price has gone up. He is genuinely delighted on my behalf.

The second time, we lean into each other, our knees joined by my hand, and he reaches his soft, strong hand for mine. I babble something about my marriage going well, but mostly what I want to say is, do you have any idea, any idea at all, how safe you make me feel? How comfortable I am with you? Instead, I scoot my chair around and he rubs my back through the next topic of conversation, his hands sliding into my hair, along my neck. He will never grasp the roots and pull. And that is one hundred kinds of okay with me.