It’s been a full three months since all hell broke loose, and I am now sitting on a Sunday afternoon in a dim house, alone but for the animals. The kids have gone to a party. Outside, the trees blow fitfully in sheets of gusty wind and the sky is a slab of grey and white. The wind whistles and howls, doors slam and the dogs sleep. Earlier, I watched the rugby (the World Cup semi-final in Yokohama; South Africa vs. Wales; SA victorious), zoning out on the ebullience of the happy, silly fans; the brute focus and mesmerizing physical will of the massive players. It was not an elegant match, but it was a close one. The girls played brightly animated games on tiny screens in the kitchen while I whooped and cheered and sprang up ridiculously from the couch for 80+ minutes. I would’ve much preferred to watch it with other people, the way we did years ago -- all those cozy afternoons of charged camaraderie, friends carrying on and commentating, fetching endless beers from the kitchen. One of the many things I took for granted, I guess. Being alone is delicious until it become compulsory. I am searching for a way to unravel from my former life, my old internalized identity, all so maddeningly – permanently, it seems— tied to one person and the shared post of our history. My thoughts are now always of him, while his thoughts are now always of another. In truth, my thoughts have always, ever, been of him. But self-protective reticence wrote a dumb, proveable future for itself. Good old-fashioned heartbreak is alive and well and it’s rough as shit; no one's heart has yet fully adapted to this precociously cynical and self-subsumed age of ours. It's true, I'm told - and it's the same as it always was, for everyone - that time is the only antidote to the pain of it. Time will loosen its grip and one day I will look back upon these brutally sad and distracted days with a head becalmed and heart made wiser by the indifferent ticking of a clock. They say I may even be grateful that it happened. I should be glad at least that I am able to sit down and face this, write this, post this; it's better than the past twelve weeks of verbally incoherent emotionalism. Not that this post is especially coherent... but it's a start. This is progress, already. Katy, a favorite yoga teacher, said the other night, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” Those words made me infinitely strong in the bizarre contortion I’d found myself in on Wednesday evening, nearly drowned in facial sweat and doing a kind of sit-up crunch with legs and arms held in the air and twined around themselves. But how do you not suffer? Peter O’Toole says the trick is not minding that it hurts. Or maybe it’s the screenwriter that said that. Or maybe even Lawrence himself. Not holding on seems to be the key - not minding it, not identifying with the pain. You're meant to feel it, observe it, and let it go. Let it go, let it go. Let it all go. The platitudes can be true but they’re terrible. It’s all so much easier said than done.
