I am bone tired. I've been working and traveling nonstop for months now. Since September, I've worked in Spain, Britain, Tanzania, the U.S., Gabon, Senegal...and I saw the next few months stretching out in an endless series of challening and rewarding projects in far-off places. Part of me thrills with the idea. But part of me is so tired. I need the respite. The pause. I need to let my body and mind and soul regroup.
I am fully here. I've spent the morning listening to Matchbox Twenty's new album and cleaning my house. It feels so domestic. I am not a particularly grounded person - always throwing myself headlong into projects and work. When I do these normal things: cooking and cleaning my kitchen and wiping down furniture, I feel like I'm play-acting some role that is not me. Is never me.
I like the loud songs. I don't like the sweet love tunes talking about all the tender moments and the years spent together. Something inside me shrivels up. This is the difficult part about being at home and spending time alone: I am confronted with the past with Hans and Sjors - it reaches its tendrils through the months of good work and interesting people and strong accomplishments. I have worked to form good memories to stack on top those awful black and lonely months and such exquisite pain. But I can't escape. The steely threads reach to me, hold me down, whisper: "yes. But don't you see what you've lost?"
I suppose the thing I miss the most about Hans is the ability to curl up into his tender nature and release all of my anger and my fight because I knew he wouldn't hurt me. I liked the sense that I was lucky enough to see and appreciate his sweetness, an exclusive gift because the rest of the world was not privy. But this memory is embittered by the knowledge that I betrayed his generous trust in me, violated that space. Worse: the concern that I felt all the time that I was with him that this betrayal was inevitable - that my nature was harsher than his and more prone to wandering and that I was less able to completely yield myself.
I completely gave myself to Sjors, though. So it was not a matter of my ability to surrender. But he was the match to my soul and there is not a moment that passes without the pang of loss in it. I have cut off all contact with him - except in the inner sanctum of my mind which still perpetually reaches to him, talks with him, longs for him. With all the betrayals and the anger I feel, these things have not been sufficient to sever that sense of rightness and connection. I suppose that he severed it long ago and does not suffer as I suffer. But if I consider that my sensations always had their match in his mirrored experience (as all matches must), then I consider that he must suffer, too.
It isn't as though I haven't tried to date - to spend time enjoying myself and learning and appreciating men after Sjors. There have even been some beautiful moments. But they only serve to make me feel more isolated. I could form an attachment, bring someone in and spend the next decade with him. Maybe I will chose to do that, but I will not be able to delude myself that I have not lost the other soul who was match to mine. He is still out there, and I am the kite which has lost its grounding, battered around and unable to connect again to the purpose for which I was made.
We are alone, aren't we? We may form communities and hobbies, we may travel and work, we may have children and lovers. But do we ever stop being alone? I consider marriages between people who are not the other's match. How much more alone must they each feel, lying beside the stranger in the same bed?
These are my thoughts - the sensations I try to escape and then stop and examine and make sense of with the hope that I can find some peace. But there is no peace. I will create the illusion of satisfaction and accomplishment - I will seek for connection - I will work to change things and to improve my mind and the quality of my soul. But I will not, I think, find peace.
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