Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
“We are lucky”
Tomoyo, my old roommate, occasional savior, and most importantly my friend, took me out for a weekend of sightseeing during the Japan sojourn. First we traveled by bullet train to her hometown of Nagahama where we stayed with her family for a night. Their house is traditional; full of dark wood, tatami mats and doors that slide rather than swing. The heavy humid weather forced house cats Chloe and Cha-Cha to seek constant refuge on kitchen tiles or in the dense garden out back. Tomoyo’s father and sister took turns napping on the floor in the spare room, bodies sprawled over mats, comic books draped over stomachs.
Being there after two hectic months in Tokyo (or 25 hectic years in California) was like slowly sinking into a hot bath. I felt calm, relaxed and sleepy. And even though our to-do list following the hometown visit was jam-packed — 1 night’s stay at a legit bathhouse; cliffs overlooking a violent sea; bike rides around Biwa Lake; hokey tourist attractions — the general feeling of peace stayed with me.
There’s this ride I really like at Disney's California Adventure called Soarin’ Over California (I promise this will relate to my trip in a second). It’s basically a flight simulator, so you start off by sitting in what looks like a giant ski lift. Once you’re strapped in and ready the lights go out, your car is lifted high above the ground, a lovely orchestral score starts playing, a “breeze” picks up, and suddenly you’re facing a giant screen displaying California as it would be seen from an extreme hang glider’s point of view. As you pass over orange groves, mini overhead vents release a citrus scent, and when you reach the mountains it smells like evergreen. It might sound a little cheesy but let me tell you, after walking around a giant park filled with screaming children, it's a delicious break. I like it so much I rode it twice during my last Disneyland trip in November.
Exploring Japan gave me the same serene feeling as Soarin’, except it was real. After dinner at the bathhouse Tomoyo and I walked awkwardly in our nemaki and geta (pajama robes and wooden slippers provided by the hotel) through the sticky heat in search of ice cream. We told silly jokes on the way, tripped over decorative cobblestones like uncoordinated little girls and our laughs echoed down the streets. The next day at Eihei-ji Temple we raced barefoot up hardwood stairs scrubbed everyday by inhabiting monks, poked our heads into prayer rooms and stared wonderingly at ceilings covered in painted birds. The whole temple smelled of fresh peaches.
Finally, as if Japan somehow knew what it would do to me, a musician started playing power ballads on a keyboard when we stopped at the famous Tōjinbō cliffs to watch the sunset.
Seriously, who needs Disneyland when you have Japan?
I’ve been home and back to the usual grind for about the same amount of time that I was gone, but life has yet to let up its explosion of new things. When I started this post earlier today I was afraid that so much had happened since my return I wouldn’t be able to remember the way it felt to be surrounded by Tomoyo’s family, or Japan’s lush and welcoming countryside. As it turns out the problem is trying to find the right words to describe how much I remember. The right words to express how much I loved it. How much I felt like a part of the family. How much gratitude I have. How much I can’t wait to go back.
Recently, after guzzling buckets of wine, my friend Arwen and I started reflecting on our lives (the way you usually do after guzzling buckets of wine) when suddenly she said, “We are lucky. There are people in the world who literally have no real friends, or not even fake friends.”
I've been thinking about this statement a lot, especially now that the year is ending. It’s been a particularly textured one, which is just a fancy way of saying that tons of unexpected things happened in the last twelve months and my emotional responses have been all over the board. I guess that’s actually pretty normal, but I feel good for having navigated through it. After all, I spent the couple of years prior feeling half dead and worn out because of the same bullshit, like my entire life was a broken record. 2009 has been both a knock to the head and a breath of fresh air.
I’m beyond grateful for my amazing friends (Tomoyo is just one example of what I'm workin' with here). They've all taken time out of their schedules to stand by me, to buttress the struggle of relearning how to function properly. I couldn’t possibly want more from them.
To top it off, the end of this year has been filled with sweet things: fingers entwined, shoulder kisses and love songs. I’m hesitant, but the outlook is good. In fact, rather than wanting to start fresh in January like I usually do I’m hoping 2010 will be made from 2009 concentrate. Because yeah, I am lucky, and life is really something.
Forgive me, Angela
Chelsi: I want to marry someone with a swimmer's body and super piggyback abilities.
Angela: Gael told me when we first got together that I'm light as a feather...
: then he lifted me the other day and now he says he has back problems.
---
My favorite part of relationships is when you get to that comfortable place where you can hate on each other about everything and nobody gets mad.
RB @L&U! – Riverside Romance: Paris vs. Tokyo
This was taken during my stint in Tokyo over the summer
Angela shot this around the same time in Paris. As she puts it: "Love love love. Same language, different dressings."
Guess you better go and get your armor
I have this mentor that I may or may not have mentioned at some point on this site. He was one of my teachers in high school and though we related well then, now that I no longer define the end of the world as a fight with my 15 year old boyfriend our thought processes are so in tune that it’s like we were born from the same emo cesspool of baby tears and Converse All Stars.
Nowadays we maintain a pretty tight friendship via e-mail, and when I have a problem or just need to decompress with someone who tolerates my whacked emotions I pull the pen pal card and we have a virtual, life altering conversation. Here’s a bit of the last message he sent:
“I was thinking about ants yesterday. I almost stepped on an ant river crossing a sidewalk. A big one. I would have killed like hundreds at once. They would have scurried around manically for a minute, but would have quickly reestablished their lines and got on with it. They live in an incredibly hostile world. It's the kind of world that would leave most humans curled up in the fetal position. They can't predict when disaster will strike, but it must strike like every day. Hurricane Katrina every day. But, they reestablish their lines and keep going. And, they build amazing things.”
This obvious metaphor was part of his reply to the OH-EM-GEE-WTF-IS-MY-LIFE message I sent towards the end of last month. Basically, since arriving in Japan I’ve been gangbanged by life. That’s right, “gangbanged.” Tokyo has been witness to an influx of various life aspects screwing me in quick succession.
When I first tried to sort out what was going on with my brain it was mid August and my friends from California had just left. It was like 200 degrees and getting up to brush my teeth caused me to sweat so profusely that I considered never brushing my teeth again. Or even moving at all. Honestly, I think I was probably suffering from legit heat stroke and I felt crazy and tired and mean. After being prompted to recheck my attitude I started sifting through photos of my friends’ visit, considered my current sitch, and wondered why I wasn’t as happy as anyone in my position should be. You know, the whole I work online, can go anywhere I want, am spending a ludicrous amount of time in a foreign country rent free thing. Add the fact that I have friends who love me enough to fly halfway around to world just to chill, and I think most would conclude that I should be shitting glitter and rainbows.
Realizing that I wasn’t even close to that really struck me. And when I became aware that my negativity and general dissatisfaction stemmed from sadness rather than what most would pinpoint as anger, I sent a flurry of e-mails to said mentor. Most of them went something like, “DID YOU KNOW, DID YOU KNOW? I’M A SAD PERSON. I’M FULL OF SADNESS. SADDY SAD SAD.”
And do you know what he said? He said, “I know.” It was like a punch to the head:
“I know. You have been for a very long time. I've been waiting for you to recognize this, instead of deflecting your adversity with cynicism, apathy, and anger.”
(Sidenote: I think maybe this is part of what makes a true friend. Someone who sometimes knows you better than you know yourself; someone who will do what they can to help figure out who you are, even if all that means is being around to listen to your crazy thought process; someone who wouldn’t try to force you to understand something before you’re ready for it, or make you someone you’re not.)
I deemed this state “The Sadness” and for 48 hours all I could think about was how I was going to get rid of it. I questioned all of my closest friends, one of whom suggested I was depressed. Admittedly, it would be easy for me to classify my issues as depression, pop a xanax in my nightcap and call it a day, but fuck that. I don’t mean to downplay depression because chemical imbalances are very real and deserve medical assistance when the situation calls for it, but at the same time I think too many people these days confuse depression with plain old consciousness. I have no idea when society added continuous emotional placidity to their definition of happiness, but I think it’s fuckin’ lazy and unrealistic. If I never felt sad or angry or impassioned by anything, life would be stupid.
There is of course, the other extreme, which is just as damaging. Living in a perpetual state of unhappiness is taxing and dangerous, and probably closer to where I’ve been for the last couple of years. Now, in trying to find a balance, there are two pieces of advice from close friends (including mentor dude) that I want to tape to the insides of my eyelids:
- That you care about this at all is a demonstration that you're not embittered; you're critical, and being critical at a moderate level is extremely useful and productive
- I've tried to identify my sad times and mine them and ride them a bit. I find much of the richest parts of my soul are rooted in sadness. I don't want to prevent getting sad anymore because now I recognize its value in my life. However, I don't want to stay there either
They've helped me to established that my poor soul isn't in the shitter and that crapping rainbows and glitter every day isn't necessarily the level of happiness I want to live in. These are the things I contemplate while being gangbanged by The Sadness squad, and though they are extremely comforting and helpful words, they certainly don’t lighten the load. The gangs of bangers keep coming and in fact they’re here as I type this, banging away (I can’t even imagine what kind of mental images this is causing you, but they’re probably fantastic). Their forms have changed; they’ve morphed from mental states to friendships to career decisions to affairs of both the financial and love variety, but they all serve the same purpose of fucking me mentally until I reach the point I did yesterday, which is where I’m so exhausted from tossing my life around in my head that all I can manage to do before I fall into a 17 hour nap is drink sake and watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
[originally this space was full of crazy talk about love, but I took it out because it invited way too much no goodity.]
My final conclusion in this big ranty rant is that I think I’m on my way to a better place than the one I’m in now. It’s like the ants story: after a hurricane of—get ready—GANGBANGERS! I’m quickly trying to realign my insides. At the same time though, I've realized I want to keep things kinda wacky. Remember, that 24/7 emotional placidity thing is just lame. I’m sure whatever I build will be even more amazing if it’s saturated in my own brand of crazy. So I hope you understand me when I say that even though I want it sorted, I hope to never feel like my life is totally “fixed.” In examining my issues and letting others offer their own advice things don’t become better, but they do become clearer. And in being able to see what the fuck is going on I think I’m closer to knowing both what I want and what I don’t want, and how I'm going to get there. Most importantly (and I hope made very evident through drawn out discussions like this one), my drive to move forward is alive and totally drooling. I guess that’s a good start.
Personal Finance: Lifestyle Inflation
Recently a friend linked me to an article by Amy Chan, the adorable author of www.amyfabulous.com. The piece is titled “My Very Own Choose Your Own Adventure” and the point she pushes is that there is no "correct" way to do things. She compares the facets of life to the adventure books in which you pick a path and you go with it, all the while aware of the opportunities for different avenues you’re passing up. The article shifts quickly to applying this method of thought to love *cue your doom .wav of choice*.
Chan (or Fabulous) preps the reader by telling the story of how she once had a mutual connection with someone who was unavailable, but dude chose to stay with the person he was already committed to. To answer the inevitable question, How can you love someone and still connect with someone else? she writes:
Well, I think you can fully love and respect your partner, but still naturally connect with others…But there comes a point when you realize that temptations and different connections will always exist, but at some point you have to make a choice – and with faith, stay true to that decision.
What is important is that no matter which path you walk or which destination you land – you know that at the end of day, you walked each step true to your principles and values.
I enjoyed the article. I think it’s a very practical and logical way to look at love and life in general; although, I’m not so sure it leaves room for mistakes. You see, I read those choose your own adventure books when I was a kid, but the funny thing about it is I never stuck with one path. If I turned right instead of left at the roaring river and my boxcar ended up in a ditch, my body broken and bruised, I didn’t close the book and flick on the television. I flipped a few pages back, turned left and ended up in a magical field full of flowers, ponies and million dollar bills.
Real time: It’s not that I have commitment issues, or lack faith in my decisions. In fact, when I commit I do it with such fierce passion that everything else, every other possibility, melts away. This means I’m careful about what I commit to, and if I start walking in one direction and am not completely satisfied with what I see or feel in the distance, I turn around. I think at the end of the day that's what it’s about: dog-earing crucial moments in life and making sure that where you go from those points feels true to you. Because if it feels true and right, I think you will love wherever you end up wholeheartedly, and the possibilities of where you could have gone instead will fade away, and connections you make in the future will be deeply appreciated yet nowhere near as bright. Call me naive if you want, but I honestly think that if you genuinely believe in what you commit to, every other possibility will pale in comparison to the achievements you make based on that commitment.
A friend and I--coincidentally the same friend who linked me to Chan’s article—had a severe falling out several years ago. And when I say “severe” I mean batshit crazy horrible FUBAR insane. It resonated with me, of course, and throughout what I like to call The Lost Years I often found myself returning to the last time we saw each other and wondering what I could have done differently. For a long time it remained one of the very few points in my life that, if they were illustrated on a time line of Chelsi, would be represented by a question mark. And maybe a sad face or two.
And this is the real kicker (ESPECIALLY when it comes to matters of the heart) because while you have total control over your adventure in an adventure book, there are things in real life that require more than just your will to change. Often times other people are involved, and their values and priorities will likely be different from your own. In regards to the love that never was, Chan herself writes: “…it is interesting to consider, what could have been if he had made a different choice. We would probably be the main characters together in our Choose Your Own Adventure book.”
My FUBAR friend and I became friends again last week, and I'll admit that in this particular case I lucked out. I'll be forever grateful that things worked out the way they did, but the circumstances were such that had he not made the choice to go back and help me lift my boxcar out of the ditch, I’d have no choice but to close the book and begin another. This idea of acceptance and moving forward with faith when there are no other options, is for me, the point Chan's article hits the hardest, though she doesn't say it outright.
We have to accept the things we cannot change because if we don’t we’ll pine over them forever. And at the same time, we have to have faith in our right to dive back into the things we can change, especially if we’re still haunted by possibilities of what could have been. Doing so improves the quality of life, and anything that serves that purpose, in my book, is being true to my principals and values.
If you read this and feel like I’m talking directly to you, it’s probably because I am
Homo sentimentalist cannot be defined as a man with feelings (for we all have feelings), but as a man who has raised feelings to a category of value. As soon as feelings are seen as a value, everyone wants to feel; and because we all like to pride ourselves on our values, we have a tendency to show off our feelings.
- Milan Kundera, Immortality
In my mind, when all is said and done and we are stripped of all our earthly possessions and jobs and schools and futures, when all we have is the way we think, feel and react in the present moment, when we are nothing but insignificant specks in the universe and our slates are clear of all sin, of all... I am still just as grateful to have you as a friend as I am when all of that garb is included. I don't judge you because of what you've done or what I know/think you will do. You don't have my respect because of what you've accomplished and/or what you're aiming for.
You are my friend because you just are. I respect you because of what you are without the world and I don't judge you for your actions because I know who you are without them. It'll never be something you have to worry about or question. It's solid like a rock. It's automatic.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to feel this way.