This is the second entry. I don't have internet at the new place because New York moves at the speed of incompetence. At least with Time Warner cable internet.
So I won't be writing often. I want to go to sleep after more packing. I knew that I would always underestimate how much there is to pack!
Tonight the plan, as the previous blog said, was to go back to NYC and dance, either at my favorite Sunday night milonga or this one where I get to be in a movie. Such is New York. But in the end, as I mentioned, I decided to stay in and "finish" packing (which didn't come true). I went to have dinner with that friend, the only real male friend I have made and nearly lost. We had a great chat. And I was trying to be brave. I mentioned that girl, his first true love and his first great disappointment, the one that I dated a year after she broke his heart. I could see awkwardness on his face when I mentioned her, even though, as he said, with a smile, that it's been four years. Has it been four years? Time flies.
My intention wasn't to provoke him unnecessarily. I wanted there to be no boundaries. True friends have no boundaries, doesn't understand conditions, rejects rules. I crossed boundaries that are now old, meaningless. We talked about tango, about philosophy, like when we were having our weekly lunch meetings a few years ago, just before he found out I was interested in his ex-girlfriend.
One thing I tried to explain to him was this spectrum of friendship, with one end being more like acquaintances, people who would hang out with you and have fun, but on the other end, I tried to explain, was where those handful of friends who make a difference in your life. They aren't like family in the sense that they sync with you, intellectually, emotionally, even, compatible with you even if there are differences. And like family, they won't leave you. No matter what. That's how I feel about my best friend in London. How I feel about my two friends here. We can miss each other through time and distance, but their existence makes my life better. Simple as that.
And one thing he tried to explain to me that got me thinking was this idea of emptiness. I learned the hard way that you can't expect anyone to fill that void in you, that emptiness you started carrying since childhood, most likely starting with some fault of your parents. I learned that when you lean on someone to do that you would quickly lose that person. So I thought, well, I guess I will have to find a way to fill it myself. But then he suggested that you don't even try that. Just live, and let the emptiness fill itself. What an idea! Not sure how much I agree yet.
So we exchanged these thoughts. I realized I would miss him too.
There was one more border to cross. It was old too. I paused from eating my sandwich and apologized to him for being so immature a few years ago when I dated his ex, and for being so immature to delay this apology. He smiled and told me that he had long forgiven me, and that his apology was not to have the maturity to understand my natural desires to be with someone. We smiled. We crossed that bridge, that border. There was nothing left in the past.
The past haunts you. But not always in a way that you obviously want to erase. In cleaning my room for preparation for that subletter, the most prominent items are from or related to the woman of my most recent drama. I found the flag she had made me for my last birthday. I thought it was funny that it is white on one side, as if it were a surrender, or at least, asking for a talk. On the other side was lots of blue lines, reminding me of the Greek flag, flag of a piece of her own past that was a thorn in our relationship. I wasn't sure what to do with it. The most obvious thing to do is throw it away, or better, burn it, since I am so dramatic. But I decided to keep it, not for hopes of the future, of which there is none left, but a sweet memory of the past, to remember that despite the callousness and selfishness of her behaviors, there was also a lot of love. For this reason I kept the two notes she had left me over the span of this tumultuous year: one left before she disappeared to the other side of the Atlantic for a few months, and one on Valentine's Day when she left me sweets.
The guy friend sent me an email very late, after we went to my last Yale practica, after I was done packing. He repeated what a dancer told him tonight, that when I danced with her when she had just started, she was "whisked away" and fell in love with tango. It was sweet of him to tell me this on a weekend that reminded me how lonely I was except with my demons. He then went on to remind me that I was a good person.
To keep that flag, those two notes, and whatever else I find, and to keep all the other memories of other women who have failed to give me what I wanted, memories in the form of dried up roses, of a heart of stone on which "Hope" was carved, to keep all these isn't being sentimental, isn't living in the past, but rather, is to dilute, bit by bit, the ugly memories with the nectar of the good ones. Whatever have been the reasons for these women's failure to see who I was, they gave me in their own ways happiness that I don't wish cynicism to spoil.
In the end, as I said in the last entry, and as I can even more surely say now after meeting with this guy friend, that friendship in the end is what counts, beyond the drama, beyond the sadness and the hopelessness, friendship and family are the only things that can pierce all that cloak of darkness. I am feeling more ready to go back to New York, even without my fantasies fulfilled, with good memories and strengthened hope.
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