Rid Me of this Torment

I slept about 1.5 hours. A tango song is in my head. "Quítame de este tormento..." are the words (the song's name is "Fueron Tres Años", or "Those were three years"). The words means "Rid me of this torment". I am not tormented. Not really. But I am thinking about this verse of this dramatic song (typical of tango) as the sun slowly rose.

We saw the big fireball rising over the Grand Central Parkway. We were both sleepy. I slept, as I said, 1.5 hours; she slept none. She said by the time she was ready to go to sleep, she realized she would have to wake up 18 minutes later.

My heart felt sunken. Like a ship looking for treasure it is itself sinking into the depths along with other ships of treasure. It has been seeking treasure when in the end, along with its own undiscovered, unrealized treasure, it sinks to the bottom, too.

After getting out of bed with 1.5 hours of sleep, I found her climbing out of my kitchen window out to the fire escape. No one has ever done that, not even me. She sat out there, alone. I left her alone, her last moment with New York City on this trip.

I didn't dance with her. I avoided her while not making it obvious. I did it out of spite. I wanted her to know.... But no, because I didn't make it obvious, she shouldn't know. I wanted her to miss me. I wanted her to remember that I was one of her top favorite dancers, even though she had never commented directly how much she enjoyed dancing with me. I wanted her to miss me. I wanted her to miss me and in doing so feel sorry that things didn't work out, to feel regretful to have rejected me. She would prefer a boring lame musician over me; and she preferred an unattractive tango teacher who ended up hurting her, than me. From her I learned that I, yes, I, have to get over the reality that a woman will like a man who is unfit for her, and more importantly, in so many ways not as a good fit as I am. Logic cannot prevail when you like someone because you never really have control over whom you like.

So I didn't dance with her out of spite. But I wanted her to miss me. I didn't talk to her much after the milonga. I paid a lot of attention to her friend. And why not? Her friend was flirting with me. It's such a great feeling to have someone flirt with you when you find her attractive. So I look at this woman, this petite musician whose voice managed to grip my heart ten days ago. I look at her and I realize I am fortunate not to have gotten anything out from her because, if I had gone any further, my heart would be now in ruins. It is still in little pieces after the disaster with the last woman, and it doesn't need to be smoking in powder now.

But the farewell was difficult.

There was no drama. I got up 1.5 hours later to take her to the airport, through Grand Central Parkway, where the fiery ball rose imperceptibly before us. There wasn't much talking. My heart was just a bit squeezed. And those Spanish words of that tango song were ringing in my head.

My art friend was frank with me yesterday after getting know this girl a bit more. She said very tersely that I was making myself a third of what I am worth while making her three times what she's worth. She, and my other friend, couldn't understand what I saw in this woman. But she warned that I was doing the same thing again: picking woman whom everyone else liked.

So that was part of the spite from the milonga: there were too many women at the milonga but still she managed to get a lot of dances, everyone liked her for her charm, her body, her smiles, her bedroom eyes.

I complain that it takes too long for a woman to realize what a gem I am. But do I take the same amount of time to discover the hidden gems around me that other men don't realize at first sight?

I complain that this woman prefers these imbecilic men over the amazing me, but if my art friend is right, then I seem to be preferring women who are not as beautiful as I am.

None of this, now, matters. I realize miss this girl. We hugged before departure. Longest embrace yet because, besides when we are dancing, we don't really hug each other. Now we hugged. She didn't want me to stay with her in the airport. Would I really have wanted that? I wanted drama. I wanted to be part of the movie where the ending is a sweet, long goodbye. I do that a lot with movie endings. I remember with that Polish woman I imagined going to JFK to say goodbye to her one last time and dance with her just before the security check because that was the connection we had deepest. So silly, now that I think about it. I don't know why I have such silly fantasies.

This time I imagined just reconnecting with her after being so spiteful in reactions to her rejection. But it didn't happen. What did happen was that I drove her to the airport. I hugged her. There was no cheesy words about the future. I didn't even ask her to let me know when she arrived. No mentioning of talking more.

Because there is no point. That's what I am learning in a bitter way now about real life. In real life, especially in the real life of tango, you meet a person, you may or not may fall in love with her, but you in any case go through a deep and meaningful experience with them. But it takes certain maturity to accept the end of that experience and move on. No more sentimentality after. Most relationships we make in life are transient, and lasting part about them is the memory and experience left in our psyche.

She and I organized a dinner party last night. She played the guitar and sang her songs at the end. Before the milonga where I avoided her. She sang one last song that she had told me about earlier. It was a song about the only long term relationship she had had. And it was one she didn't want to have dragged out so long. But it affected her immensely. She thought she could eventually love a man with time, but in the end, time simply made the breakup infinitely more painful, and the man apparently is ruined by the experience while still in love with her. The song was her way of telling him through the echos of time that he had to move on, and not hope that he could make her happy, "to set her free." I felt she was singing that to me.

When she captured my heart she was also singing, about two weeks ago, singing this tango song with her amazing voice. I felt she was singing to me. Now this last time she's singing on this trip, I also felt she was singing to me, but in a way that meant closure. Don't fall in love with me, don't give your heart to me. That's the lesson I am supposed to learn, not just with regards to her, but with everyone else in the past and in the future who isn't ready for my love, my heart. And whatever experience I have built with this or that person, I can't keep lingering around hoping that the experience will eventually become the fairytale version I want.

She took her baggage alone and went inside the terminal alone, without turning around. And that was the end of that. That's the painful part. To learn this new lesson is the painful part. To learn to say goodbye without any more thoughts of what had happened between that goodbye and the hello before that. Life is too beautiful and too short to have to linger around the old bus stop of memory.

So I got in my car, and drove away from the sunrise back to my house, where there's a girl that makes me feel happy just because she flirts with me.