“Perhaps it is necessary for me to try these places, perhaps it is my destiny to know the world. It only excites the outside of me. The inside it leaves more isolated and stoic than ever. That’s how it is. It’s all a form of running away from oneself and the greater problems.”
- D.H. Lawrence
my arrival in panama was punctuated by an itchy rash decorating my torso... just in time for christmas.
the red bumps were not rebuffing panama, but rather crying out epidermal injustice at my inability to claim one piece of earth as my own. my physical being was defiantly screaming,
“For the love of god, woman! Pick a place and hang up your goddamn coat.”
the truth is the more time i spend abroad, the more i seem to belong nowhere. i return to the states and find myself vexed by the onslaught of material abundance. i feel simply like i am drowning in artificially flavored cherry jello and i want to be stripped down to the marrow of life. i want to be liberated from it all.
and controversially, i find myself equally enamored by the simple comfort of knowing that i am, let’s be honest, where in the end, i belong.
a few days prior, patrick sat across from me at the mews tavern imbibing one of the winter lagers he eagerly anticipates all year. i had returned home for a whirlwind week to take the GREs and visit graduate schools and we were enjoying one of our shared pleasures in life: food. we both like our coffee to taste like dirt and our beer to taste like, well, beer, and not apple juice from a sippie cup.
patrick and i are similar in other ways, too.
he grew up in the same ramshackle beach town i did: sort of like a down and out version of cape cod that, as comfortable with its lot in life as a la-z-boy recliner, would never venture putting on airs. its character rests on its modesty; the crumbling stone walls, rows of stoic corn, unpretentious trailers and sedately weathered beach cottages occupied by a cast of curmudgeonly characters. it all emotes that characteristically new england unfetteredness.
i remember the first time i really noticed patrick.
i was 13ish sitting on the late bus looking out the window and he walked by. my seat mate, liz, jostled me in the rib with her angular, bone china elbow and motioned to the brown haired boy idling by our window in a navy, crew neck sweater and vans skate shoes.
cute, huh?
yup. definitely cute.
patrick had this manner of walking that still persists where he always seems to be leaning ever so slightly forward, his fists lightly clenched. he looks as though he is ready to throw an arching punch or itching to run for the hills. 14 years later, he still manages to have this affable boyish look to him. he is inordinately polite referring to my parents as Mr. and Mrs. Dolan making the whole experience of dating him feel kinda retro, but not in an outdated way. just in an old fashioned boy meets girl sorta way.
there are certain kids, you know the ones, that look as awkward behind a desk as a moose looks in roller skates and we both seemed to fit into that category. we frittered away most of our high school years dreaming about waves and awaiting summer months. he says i used to “sorta wave” to him in the hall, which i imagine resembled something like an involuntary spasm of my right hand as i painfully made efforts at being normal, or social.... or whatever.
somehow pat and i “found” each other some 6 years later at the mist, our local dive bar of choice. i was feeling godly after cooking dinner for friends and having a few mama sodas under my belt, and the liquid courage propelled me. we spent that night talking mostly about hands, a seemingly odd topic of conversation, but fitting given my jesus complex (i got a thing for carpenters) and his work as a painter/chef/and yes, appropriately enough, a carpenter.
we have spent the last 4 years holding together a relationship that some days seems as strong as duct tape and others as tenuous as a single strand of hair. we are bound together by common history and this sort of shared life vision. this is what nourishes us. we are both enamored by our beloved provenance and marvel at the serendipity of finding a partner that seems to emulate the most salient characteristics of our hometown.
and yet... and yet. it often seems that i am deserting this place that i so adore and the beloved man that resides there. shortly after me and patrick started dating, i received my peace corps invitation. we spent 27 months scraping by as other volunteers’ long distance relationships fell to the wayside. our relationship’s fortitude often seemed to be less a source of pride and a testament to love and, at times in conversations, an embarrassingly juvenile fixation. pat’s friends assured him that i was cheating on him (“Man, you have no idea what, or who she is doing down there!”), while my friends assured me that i was crazy (“This is not a relationship, Kelly. It is a bullshit encroachment on your right to be a young and emancipated woman.”). when acquaintances seemed impressed at our ability to “stick it out”, i shrugged assuring them it was less a testament to our undying love and more an indication of my rapidly deteriorating sanity.
i came home...and then i moved to vermont... and then patrick moved to indonesia... and then he moved home... and then i moved to panama... and in a month, i move home... and in 3 months, patrick moves back to indo.
anyone noticing a pattern here?
there is a hell of a lot of leaving going on and that is not what you are supposed to do when you love someone, right? you are suppose to make these very adult things called “sacrifices”. the truth is that i had always imagined my 20s to be this period of my life when i would explore and put myself first. my best friend, marilyn, and i would have conversations about this laying on faded beach towels while we were still firmly planted in our place of origin yearning for the day when we would be “liberated”. we imagined our young adult lives filled with adventure and foreign countries; we were convinced that it was our destiny to travel and belong to the world and that no one, or rather, no man, should impinge on our peripatetic destiny. and so it was decided: my 20s would be about being selfish and wanderlust and, in truth, they have been both to my benefit and my detriment.
...
i sat in professor white’s office last week in a cardigan, tweed pants, and pointy shoes, some sort of business casual assemblage my mother bought me as an early christmas present. she nodded at me in approval the night before when i tried it on sort of acceding that her daughter looked adequately encumbered and, therefore, she must be wearing what could be deemed interview appropriate garb. i tried to resist the primal urge to rip off those horrid, itchy tights as i sat across from professor white, an exceedingly nice and intelligent man. he asked me about my interests in sociology, my experiences abroad, and what other schools i planned on applying to. well... huh. i stammered off a list of programs that were conspicuously situated in the northeast and not all within the framework of sociology. he looked perplexed. here is where i made the massive mistake. i said i was hoping to stay a bit closer to home for “personal reasons” (i.e. read: patrick). as soon as the words spilled over my lips, i felt like someone took a big red stamp and cauterized “REJECTED” on my forehead. i am suppose to be a Ph.D. candidate willing to run every sacrifice including the demise of my personal life in order to achieve academic preeminence. i stumbled through the rest of the interview knowing that i had committed a grave error and for once, actually regretted not lying.
here is the thing, though. i am 27, hold that, 28 years old and i do want that relationship and i want to figure it out. and it is high time i start showing my partner that i am, oh yes, that i am committed and not a flakey, capricious twit regardless of all the supporting evidence attesting to my twittiness. i love this man... i feel fairly certain of this.
...
a few weeks ago i was sitting in my site mate lydia’s house on thanksgiving. lydia is 64 and someone i could listen to talk to for hours. we will be in the middle of conversation and all of the sudden she will come out with some outlandish life tidbit about growing up in indonesia, the bed and breakfast she owns in cozumel, or her ex-lover that lived in a nudist colony in arizona, and state it as nonchalantly as if she were commenting on inclement weather.
i appreciate lydia’s melba toast version of love. it isn’t that decadent aunt jemima-fied, whipped creamed belgian waffle kinda love my twenty-something cohorts idealize and i like that, or at the least, respect it. after a couple shared glasses of boxed red wine and a thanksgiving dinner of vegetarian chili and apple pie, the conversation turned to patrick. lydia apologized for offering her opinion in advance if i found it unsavory, but i implored her...
please, i could use some sage wisdom.
well, honestly, from everything you said, i don’t think you’re going to do much better.
uh-huh. i nodded hesitantly.
here is the thing. i can see that you live in your head like i live in my head and people who are like us, well, we tend to drive ourselves a little nuts at times, because there’s this endless stream of thoughts about meaningless junk crowding our minds.
uh-huh.
well, you see, i used to have this guru and he would talk about enlightenment in terms of everyone having a specific number within a range, 0 being an inanimate object and 1,000 being the most evolved enlightened spiritual leaders of our time like jesus and the buddha. the thing is, when someone reaches that level of spiritual evolvement they no longer dwell in thought; they dwell and understand the pure essence of being and what truly matters. they radiate from the heart.
hmm.
well, so there are other great teachers of our time: einstein and jung and all of these great intellectual leaders and, although they are highly evolved, they only linger somewhere around 500 on this scale. why? because they live in their heads and feel that the mind is the chief arbitrator in life.
right.
so what i am saying is that patrick is buddha and you are carl jung.
¿...comó?
well, patrick is able to discern what is truly important in life. he values his personal relationships, beauty, and love. he sees that you are fixated on the mind, being that you are at a lower point on the path to enlightenment, but he sort of tolerates your intellectual twaddlings, because, well, clearly he loves you.
haahaha. i laughed. i laughed until i cried. it was partially due to the wine, partially due to the mental strain of continuously ruminating over the state of my love life, and partially due to the fact that she sort of nailed it. not that i am anywhere even slightly illuminated by the intellectual prowess of jung, or that patrick (sorry, patty...), despite being a carpenter, is akin to jesus christ, but you get the idea.
we recently shared a conversation that seemed to resonate cindy’s appraisal of our relationship after i read an article in the new york times on happiness. the article suggested that those who tend to be engaged in their current activity, not letting their thoughts run like mercury on a tiled floor, are more likely to live happier, more fulfilling lives. so i asked patrick...
when you are doing carpentry, what do you tend to think about?
mostly i think about what i am doing... sometimes other things, but for the most part i am just concentrated on the work. why?
...huh. that’s incredible.
my mind tends to resemble more of nicholas cage in that movie, adaptation, where he is trying to decide what muffin to eat before working on his screenplay. you know the part:
“To begin... to begin... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin.”
so such is patrick and such am i. two seemingly dissimilar and yet fundamentally corresponding people drawn together by both our divergences and our commonalities. as much as my skin cried out tyranny at being forced to move from the frigid clime of rhode island in december to the stifling tropical humidity of panama, my lover is doing the same. he is somewhere inside screaming at me, as i am inside of me somewhere screaming at myself:
“For the love of god, woman! Pick a place and hang up your goddamn coat.”
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| The other men in my life: At the training center with some of my favorite students. |
