Post Kiss Attempt

What happened that night?

I am in the train now, thinking back. The train is making this very deep sound somewhere beneath us. It will pass. "This too shall pass," is the phrase tattooed in Hebrew on the left inner wrist of the girl staying at my place. It is based on a story with King Solomon who learned humility from this phrase. The sound shall pass. And so shall all the annoyances or hurts we encounter. We just need to have faith that this is so.

Nothing happened as I had imagined. There was no rain. There was no waiting beneath that awning of my apartment building. In fact, it was a nice, cool early summer night. 1:15 in the morning, or night, and we were dropped off by the organizer of the practica since he lives just a few blocks away. He's settled enough in this neighborhood to have a car here. I was tired, but still I wanted to chat with her. I offered tea and she accepted.

The story isn't so interesting. What I learned from it isn't that much more interesting either. It's about my struggle with not getting what I want, how to behave as a response, and dealing with the even more important point of friendship. Smaller realizations were that I can't be that Don Juan I imagined I could be. I just don't know her enough, and as such I don't have enough confidence that a Don Juan would with a stranger. We aren't such strangers; we're quite comfortable with each other, except when we see each other. There isn't usually a hug. But beyond that, for two strangers who had met only a couple of weeks ago, we are pretty close, we click pretty quickly. That might just be because of our flexible personalities.

I didn't know what to say. How to behave. I just told her whatever she told me last Monday didn't matter. What does that mean? She was more puzzled than I was. I wanted to say that when you like someone, it isn't conditioned on whether the other person likes you back. However, hopefully, if the other person doesn't, you soon will stop liking them. I couldn't figure out what I liked about her. But I was more preoccupied with the reiteration of the lack of reciprocation. She simply said that she couldn't control her feelings. It's true, even if that's an overused reason, it's that simple. At the given moment, no one can really control his feelings. We don't consciously choose whom to like romantically or not. There could be psychological reasons, but at the given moment, we don't control whom and when.

I tried not to be upset, but I couldn't help it. There was no reason to be upset. There was no surprise. But the ego is powerful, especially at 2 in the morning. And the next day I wanted to talk to her now that I was a little more awake, but she skirted the subject. In the safety of text messages, she told me that she was avoiding talking to me about it because it wasn't easy to do so, though she understood well how I wanted to talk about it. I understood well too that it was unnecessary to talk about "it", because there isn't anything to talk about. I understood that a rejected person's need to talk about the rejection is a way to find closure, find healing, immediately.

That too shall pass. My anxiety grew and I called one of my friends. She told me to stop hurting myself by jumping from one person to the next, to give myself some time to heal. And I felt better. I just needed to hear my own wisdom from someone else's mouth. There are only a few days left before she leaves and I might not see her again (though very untrue since the tango world is so close-knit). I could be grumpy and needy around her to make her pay me more attention to compensate for the hurt, or I can enjoy the time together with her as much as possible. Life is about enjoying the moment, and one of the worst things you can do is stop living for a moment because you've closed yourself inside a big dark box of your own self-pity and resentment.

So last night we met up at another milonga. I wasn't going go. I needed to recuperate from the lack of sleep that is contributing to my incessant coughing. It was also my childish way of convincing myself, and her, that she was the cause for my lack of sleep and that she was no longer worth it.

I took a long nap and woke up past 11PM, and the next thing I knew I was on the 7 train, meeting the city at midnight. When I saw her I wondered what I liked about her. I think she's very sexy and beautiful, but there was something else. Her mannerism, her artistic mind, the tranquility in her voice, in her gestures. That's another thing about life: learning some new personality, new way of behaving, moving, talking. If I just stop looking inward for pity and look outward with observing eyes, that would be better than meditation. Although she'd been dancing for only one year, her dances are very sexy.

So those are the reasons for which I like about her.

I am thinking about sculpting. It's a metaphor loosely borrowed from a line from that movie with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. I saw it in college. My metaphor is that each time we meet someone, we learned something new about ourselves through them by taking our experience with them to chip at the crass stone that is us. Without any experience in life, we are just a stone like all else. But it is the chisel of experience that shapes us, but each strike can be painful, and there is always the danger of breaking us into pieces. So that's how I see this and other experiences I have with a woman. It's painful, but the experience shapes me, and in this case helps me understand more what I like, what I find attractive. Discovering what attracts me is itself a step closer to understanding myself.

And even with the pain, it shall always pass. I will be sad to see her go. But that sadness will pass and leave behind indelible memories. This girl has gone through a lot of heartaches. Not like mine, her being an attractive woman. But still, a great deal of disappointments. But in the end, she is still open, optimistic, happy, glowing. She's still young, but that doesn't mean her experiences have aged her. I can learn from that. Learn from the Hebrew words on her wrist.