I saw a picture posted by someone on Facebook that says something like, every human relationship is difficult, it's a question of which is worth keeping.
Every morning I emerge from the subway and hear a newspaper seller shouting something incomprehensible behind me as I rushed to the train track. That is familiarity. It is part of my routine. The memory of traveling from Washington Heights through Harlem in order to get to the Metro-North station still remains a little bitter. It was becoming a routine and now that routine has ended.
What is worth keeping? Part of the problem with pack rats like me is the irrational desire to keep everything.
Part of the problem with irrational behavior is that it's hard to know when it is irrational and when it is not.
The Swiss pianist organized a very nice little concert. For me, at least, very avant-garde (if that word isn't too cliché now) classical music. I was very touched. In any case, she shared with me a poem that she had written a while back, inspired by a piece by a composer I had never heard of until I met the Russian pianist, who has a piece by him as part of her repertoire. Scriabin. Reading the background of the poem and the poem itself, I realized I didn't know a lot about the Russian pianist that I would have liked to know. I never asked her about the pieces she played, what they meant to her, their relationship to her as a musician, the historical and present relationship. And while too busy writing her poems, I never asked about her poetic side. During the breakup talk (the one after I stormed out of her apartment), she told me she has actually a lot of emotions but that she devises ways to protect her lover from those emotions. I never tapped into that. I was too busy figuring out when the next time it was to see her, how often we were seeing each other, and what it all meant to me.
I don't need to be so harsh with myself. I found out a lot about her Jewish background, her ideas about being a Jew and carrying the legacy of persecution and survival. But that connection markedly faded a few weeks after we started dating. In the final two weeks I can't remember what our connection was. We cooked and ate together. We talked about tango. Surely there was more, but nothing as memorable as the connections we made earlier.
Time and patience. And what to do with the space that time and patience yield. I am not entirely sure what I was rushing to do. Perhaps I wanted her to get me to some ideal place in life, like being married, having children, or simply be in a relationship carved in stone by my imagination. I was rushing to something whose form and shape I didn't really know; there was just the insatiable need to attain that goal. And in the growing rush, that space I needed was shrinking. And without that space, the connection between us devalued or disappeared. What do I do with this space? It is for me, of course. To see what I can do for myself. What I can do to enjoy the road to whatever posts of goals there are in life. And from this space, I listen and not demand. I would listen to her relationship with Scriabin's music. With other music, and then, perhaps, I can finally begin to understand her interpretation of the music on the keyboard.
But what am I saying. None of this is likely to happen. What is important is that I learn to take that space. Next time I feel the connection between me and a girlfriend is fading, it's a good time to look inward and see if the reason is my own disconnection. It's a good sign that I am again at my old pattern, giving away myself too fast and too much, hoping someone else will take me to where I think I've always wanted to be instead of savoring every cobblestone that I lay on the path toward that end.
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