You can never go home

 I went to graduate school in Medford, MA, when I was 22 years old. I came from such a sheltered world - and I'd never lived away from family and friends. Then, suddenly, I was 4,000 miles away from everyone I knew. 

I lived in a graduate house just off campus - a little 7-by-11 foot room. It was strange and isolating and lonely. But I was excited to be on my very first adventure: living in a very different city, prepared to study physics and to train to be a fully-fledged physicist. I was very nervous and excited. 

The first person I met on campus was a man named Roger Tobin. I remember him as tall and lean - in his forties. He had a strange rat-like way of holding his hands together, wrists limp.  He'd volunteered to be my graduate advisor. However, I soon learned that this was hardly a benevolent act. 

In his office that first day, he said to me - "I don't think you belong here."

He then went on to explain how he had objected to my being admitted to the program. 

I was shocked, of course, but the literary part of my brain who read the classics thought, Ah, perhaps this is a challenge. Perhaps I am meant to demonstrate my resolve and dedication. Perhaps this is meant to push me.

As it turned out, there was nothing altruistic in this. Instead, he did his best to make my life a living hell. I understand now that the persistent humiliation he subjected me to - the exams I was forced to take (which my colleagues were not) - was actually bullying. But I had zero internal defenses against such treatment. I was naive and credulous and hopeful and I couldn't imagine a world where someone would be cruel for the sake of cruelty. Instead, I metabolized and internalized the treatment - believing that I was somehow deserving of it. That I was inadequate and stupid and foolish for wanting to understand and study physics. 

Now, in my forties, I can better understand the particular egregiousness of his actions. Whenever I meet kids in their twenties, of course I can spot the weaknesses and tenderness. It's completely obvious, even with the ones who try to pretend to be tough and world-wise. But I would never dream of using this against them. It inspires compassion in me, a desire to nurture. But Tobin's inclination was to torture. 

I became increasingly desperate and miserable, but I refused to surrender. 

Then, a few months in to my studies, the truth of my family spilled out in the most terrible way. The suicide attempts were the worst - and the dawning understanding of everything they had suffered. 

I understand now how the grief overwhelmed me. It was a shifting - an understanding that the family I knew and loved was not the same family that had always existed. The cruel and terrible dynamics and the broken boundaries, the violated trust, and the impossible suffering of the children I loved was more than I could bear. I felt it with me all the time. And there was the terror of a successful suicide attempt. It was the constant threat. 

I remember feeling like this reality was always before my face - a relentless hideous truth that I could never escape. There was no relief. Those years were the most anguished time of my life. 

By the time I returned to Utah, everything was different. My family was never "whole" again.  Even the home I returned to was not the same home. My parents sold the house where I was raised. I never went back. 

I've started to understand how this sense of exile has defined me. It's everywhere in my writings:  this peculiar pain of never being able to return home. 

It is an ancient pain, of course. The first agony described in the bible: the exile from Eden. An angel with a flaming sword guarding the gate. Home so close, but so inaccessible. 

And now Arnoud identifies a new idea. What was it when I met Sjors? What was that first undeniable feeling? Recognition. For some reason I will never understand, he was home for me. I've never felt so whole as I did in his arms, or when he stretched across me, shoulders to toes, and looked into me with that bright blue gaze and said, "there! The maximum amount of contact for our bodies." 

And so it was that the pain of losing him - of the hidden truth being different than it seemed, of returning to the Netherlands, but never being able to see him, to touch him, to be near to him, is resonant with that old familiar ache. I am here, but I can never go home. 

Dreams

 I have dreams about you. I don't know what that means, or if it means anything. Sometimes I still believe that it means you are reaching out to me in your heart. Other times, I feel that it's my mind trying to put together the pieces of something that can never be reconciled.  

Last night, I dreamed that I was participating in some large-scale international military training program - and that I'd signed up because you were an instructor there. It was in some isolated and badly-supported mountainous region, and there were hundreds of assignments to figure out. Some physical, some weapons-related. None played to my strengths, and I slogged along as best I could. Sometimes, I would catch a glimpse of you - and sometimes I thought you recognized me. But it was not with warmth. I never encounter the loving version of you in my dreams. Only the judging, angry man I met in Amsterdam Centraal that last time - or when I came to your door and tried to talk. I wanted to find you, to take you aside on our own, to say, "I love you. I've never stopped loving you." But I was too ashamed. Too afraid. And I never did. 

Of course, this real-life training course in the Netherlands has been one of the most brutal. To be here, so close to you, to come because I loved you still. To be here because I believed you could find me. The entire decade I've lived here, I've been only a short distance from you - maybe an hours' drive. And you've never come. After my first attempts years ago, I stopped trying to come to you. 

Proximity has been torture. 

What I wanted from you was softness,  a sense that you still loved me. I couldn't find it. As I've never found it here. 

I don't know where you are now. 

The work itself has been hell. I was long ago shut-out from the work that mattered so much to me, the work in which I excelled. I tried to find meaning in other things - and never did. Instead, the work I found was far below my capability and I struggled against sadism, bad systems, egos, bullies, trying to survive. I couldn't seem to retain my sense of self inside such systems, and I could only suffer and hold on, battling depression and dread and fear. I tried to have children, too, when I stopped hoping you would come. But I never could. I will not try to describe this past decade. It's too painful. Too much. I've hated everything about my life. Hated everything about me. 

The saving grace was the tender love of Floriaan. And his family. And a trauma therapist who could help me try to understand the fucking wreck of my life. 

Do I resent you your career? No. I look inside and feel no resentment for that. Simply gratitude that you were able to promote and build something from that exceptional mind. I never wanted you to suffer. I never gave your name. 

But I wish that I'd been able to have the same chance. 

There are different rules for men and women. And they needed to pillory me. I was never repentant. That was my sin. And I never stopped loving you. Another sin. 

When I returned to Naples last week, I came in such profound contact with the person I had been there - and this has made me grieve for who I was, and what I've lost. I didn't look at it for so long, couldn't look behind me because it paralyzed me to see and acknowledge. 

Why do I write this to you? Why do I still now, after all these years, so badly need you to see me? To comfort me? Why do I return to the source of my poison as if you have the power to undo the past fifteen years -  as if your love might heal this wound?

Because I believe, somehow, that it still can.