R.M.

~ Essays. Poems. Written Meditations.

R.M.

Tag Archives: heartbreak

Friday

18 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by racheltejas in art, divorce, Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Motherhood, Seasons

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

break-ups, children in summer, divorce, heartbreak, loss, love, metaphor, motherhood, relationships

Friday

A little while ago the man to whom I devoted almost the entirety of my adult life phoned me. He was taking a leisurely hike with an old friend he had met and bedded during his student days. I suspect she was in town partly because of his newly single status, but I know little of the ways of others.

We don’t get along. I fell in love with a man; I also fell in love with an idea, a hope, an illusion, a mirror, an escape route… the very word “falling” – well, how can one expect precision from a trip and a stumble? So. I fell in love with a man. He fell in lust with a body, and held out high hopes the body with this troubled but alluring brain might be changeable enough to become a wife. This was his love. I cannot be angry: it was a lie to himself as much as it was to me.

To return to the phone call. It was a one sided conversation, as so many are: he spoke, I listened. The unique element of this call however was that the husband’s words were not directed toward me. They were about me, and spoken to this woman, who was happily echoing his cruel dissection of my character.

In the vernacular we wretchedly name such a communication a “hip-dial.” I prefer to think of it more mysteriously than that, as if Freud and a pissed off Aphrodite had a bottle of wine, and came up with a plan. I know another woman, who used to be my closest friend, who discovered her fiance was gay through exactly such a phone call. She married him anyway, but that is another, probably more interesting, story.

The day Husband called was hot. My two older children were playing with the happy mindless Joy that only the combination of heat and water can evoke. I sat in the shade, staring at the sun creating diamonds in the water, perfect crystal drops flowing off my daughter’s even more perfect limbs. She is named for Apollo and the dolphin and royalty: in the water she becomes all three and it is a sacred gift to see her in such power and innocence. I am all ether; she is all water. Her sister is the sun. Her father… would it be a crime to wish his name Acteon?

I digress. Listening to the disembodied voice, watching the exquisite scene, feeling the cool shade on the hot, hot day… my mind, like an over-taxed bone, fractured from the contradiction. I was fascinated. Who is not fascinated by his or her own self? I was mortified, humiliated, and because I thrive on humiliation, of course eager to hear more, hear everything. He could not be cruel enough: the cruelty is proof of my suspicion, held since birth, that I don’t belong to Love. We’re on the outs, I think we broke up during a past life.

His voice was a contained fury. Words like “claustrophobic,” “shrill,” “horrible” drifted by, just as my gorgeous neighbor, the one who looks exactly like Anita Ekberg, wandered over to give me a hug, invite me to a barbeque. I looked at her astonishing beauty, with her equally beautiful little girl and husband, as I watched my marriage, the remaining ideas I had of it, catch fire like an old piece of newspaper, drift up in flames, light and buoyant, and disappear beyond a fence I could not see. “I at least have a job,” I heard the voice say, as my black haired son dove into the water, searching for a sunken penny.

I did not go to Anita’s barbeque. Eventually I hung up the phone. It was the most reluctant end to a call I think I’ve ever known: finally, the ring of Gyges everyone wishes for and then regrets. I did not regret my ring. Instead, the brief revelations were a relief, an affirmation.

I have lived in this body a good many years now. My hands are veined bone, wrists like a starved hawk. All talon, no prey. My mind has filled and emptied itself like the tide – we are just water and mineral after all, and for all our attachment to the corporeal there isn’t much to it, is there?

Perhaps this is why we are so moved by watching children in water. Joy, Light, the purest love of Now one can witness. Rivulets like run-off from a secret mountain glimmer on wet skin, newly awakened muscle. Laughter drifts through the air, a kite in a dream. These are the moments of an embodied numinous vision. Then it fades, like a once loved voice on the other end of an old telephone line, moving further, further, further away. And then gone.

 

 

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Never and Always

19 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by racheltejas in art, Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood, Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

abandonment, anger, cocaine, divorce, Eloise, essay on divorce, essay on love, family life, heartbreak, homes, Kendrick Lamar, loss, love, Mary McCarthy, motherhood, Nina Simone, North Carolina, Top Hat, travel, yoga

Never and Always
“I wish I knew how it would feel to be free. I wish I could break all the chains holding me. I wish I could say all the things I should say…. I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart…”
– –  
the great and only, beloved by all Ms. Simone, God rest her angry and righteous soul.

It is dull, and tawdry, hardly worth writing about, and has been written about so much and for so long and in so many languages one begins to believe no one thinks about anything else. Fucking. Attachment. Love. Marriage. Family. Intimacy.

Mary McCarthy, before proceeding to write her tremendous and moving book on Venice, first wrote that all that had to be observed about Venice had already been written. One could make the same claim, and more honestly, about marriage, and sex and intimacy and divorce. My god, someone somewhere come up with a better conceit, a better way to live, to write, to grieve.

I think of the perfection of Kay Thompson’s prose as she has her Eloise describe her glamorous, odd, lonely life.

“Here is what I’m good at:
roller-skating
feeding Skipperdee
ballet”

“Here is what I love:
skibbling down the hall
banging a stick
watching the grand ballroom being
set up for a dance.
Room service with Nanny.

Hello, it’s me, Eloise.
We’ll have two beers,
a steak and ice cream
and two raisins for Skipperdee
and charge it please, thank you very much.”
skipperdd

A sardonic, simple list. Good for an eccentric little girl, the poignant ghost of a great hotel during a louche moment in New York’s history. Good for heartbreak, too.

Here’s what I want to do:
Travel to India. By myself. Practice Ashtanga yoga for 6 months,
meditate and perform austere kriyas,
and fast for weeks under the guidance of a great sadhu.
Make my body a moving wraith
everything carved away
but skeleton and muscle
and some sort of renewed faith.

Here’s what else I want to do:
make my way
from Paris
to Barcelona
to Tangier
to Asilah
taking cocaine and reading
through the night.

I’ll buy a small riad
with an exquisite courtyard
gardens
a boy to keep it
cook for me

and charge it please, thank you very much.

Here’s what I must do:
take care of my three confused children
love them
despite feeling emptied of love,
or even tolerance
for myself.
Ensure that their lives are beautiful
organized
every potential reached
so that when the time comes
if they wish
they might travel
to India
or sit for orals,
brilliantly executed
at Oxford.

Here’s what else I must do:
give up
my vision
of teaching,
of extended travel
and study
my vision
of living in the country
close to an ocean
Artemis
who has adopted
three
perfect
children
bows and rivers wending
through soft green hills
firelight
moonlight
steady silence and quick fast feet

There is a house in North Carolina, not far from the Virginia border. It was built in 1905 to perfection: wide pale pine floors, windows that reach from floor to the edge of the 13 foot ceilings. A butler’s pantry of oak and two staircases winding up to bedrooms that stretch out like something out of the Secret Garden or a the rooms of a sad, complicated heroine in a late James novel.

The house sits on four perfect green acres. It is land that is eternally dampened by sea air drifting in from the Atlantic. There are gardens and a formal koi pond next to a gazebo, and trails that lead to a small forest. The forest backs a farm of many hundreds of acres: this land will stay land.

It is my mansion on a hill. White and clean and beautifully lived in, meticulously loved. It’s for sale for not even a song – barely a whisper. It’s a house for writing, for children riding bikes down the long halls, for early asana practice and evenings on the wraparound porch with an absurdly expensive bottle of Willamette Pinot Noir. It’s a house to leave and be happy, deeply happy, to arrive home to; it’s a house to carry one through the last stages.

When I saw the house I yearned for it, I couldn’t imagine not moving there, children and animals in tow. What would I do with all that ridiculous amount of space? Leave it empty, primarily, I thought, to be filled, barely, with spare and modern and slowly acquired objects of the purest beauty and originality. More space than object: that’s what I saw when I saw the white house on the Southern-green land.

Are these the common things common women like me strive for during a divorce? I’ve no idea anymore the difference between fantasy and what might be some sort of real objective.

Well. I had no idea until yesterday.

Clarity. My lifelong enemy. I am much happier living in the shadows of the numinous world, an existence that can’t really be named or pinned by practical concerns. I remember vividly the first time I realized this about myself: I was nine years old, and Top Hat was playing on the big screen, in honor of some anniversary or other. While watching the gorgeous “sleep” scene, in which Ginger Rogers, dressed in a robe of silk-satin with princess seams, is serenaded to sleep by Astaire’s sand-softened dance, I remember thinking, “Oh! So this is what life is like.”

It wasn’t until my husband and lover of 17 years moved out a few months ago that it dawned on me that I had been wrong.

And just how wrong, I am still discovering. There is no music that touches this chaos, no asana that will force the grief into some sort of malleable or recognizable shape, no company to keep or wine fine enough to address or dress down this pain. I miss smoking. And coke. I miss looking at trees for their beauty and not just another external object I’m seeking to ground me in this reality, this life. This…fucked up…solitary…chaotic…life. I miss my husband.

Today, after some prodding – he is not, after all, a sadist – he said the words I needed to hear. “I don’t love you.” Yes. Yes. Just like 17 years ago I thrilled from neck to groin when I heard the opposite. “I love you. I love you.” The latter makes you high; the former makes you numb, sister drugs.

Farewell to my mansion on the hill. Farewell to teaching, to the dream of making my living and living my life through spiritual practice. Farewell to the Great trips: summers in France with my children, a year in India during their middle school years, a journey to Bali to study with the original Western acolytes of Ashtanga yoga.

Farewell to my beauty, the sweet remnants of my youth, to sex and fucking and making love. Farewell to my beautiful inner world of refined ideals and wonder and the undying, aching belief in Platonic perfection. Farewell to love. Farewell to this man, my husband.

What is to come? The common caricature made real, I suppose: a once attractive, spoiled white woman, middle-aged, qualified for not much, returning to school and joining the workforce, lucky if she can, consumed with the well being of her children, budgets, not getting fat, worrying about university at night, scheduling vet appointments in the morning before rushing off to work.

Will there be music? Will there be practice? Will there be ballet, and walks, and (some) travel? Will there be life? Who will live in my white house with the wide windows?

So, yes, there is not much, not anything really, that hasn’t been said, felt, more aptly numbly not-felt, about love’s loss.

Anger, of course. Anger, like a little girl left by her best friends on the sidewalk. The anger resonates, always, with the lyrics of Kendrick Lamar.

He said it. He said it all, when he said,
“You ain’t try.”
1935-top-hat-ginger-rogers-1

 

 

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