Vulnerability hangover. The Bathroom Portraits. Berlin. Summer of 2016
“I wanted us just to spend some time together, get to know each other,” he said.
“Well, you’re certainly getting to know a lot about me,” I replied, weeping.
When I was twenty-eight years old, I traveled the world with a carry-on, looking for an anchor.
I didn’t see much of it, the world.
I went up and down the East Coast a couple of times, once driving, once by bus, and then journeyed by train across Spain, France, Germany, and Holland. I relished my experiences, but burned out hard after about six months. I pushed through until month nine, because I had commitments. I worked all along the way, teaching workshops and giving bodywork sessions.
Peopled pressed keys into my hands, fed me, guided me. I was the recipient of extraordinary kindness. I traveled alone, with openness, humility, resourcefulness, and gratitude. I followed the arrows of serendipity and synchronicity. I took them to mean that I was in the right place, doing the right thing, and that was a balm for my anxiety. I became more malleable. I expected the unexpected. I missed trains without cursing!
I believed I would know my anchor when I saw it. Could be a man, a job, a city, a community … or something I hadn’t considered before. It would joyfully ground me. It would be the undeniable call.
Here, it would say. Just here. This is the spot. Put down your gathered-up roots. Go on, then.
I tried my hand at a blog while I was on the road. It was titled “looking for love in all of the places.” Some of you read it. Everywhere I went I wound up talking with people late into the night about love, and sex, and relationships. It was the forerunner to horizontal.
I had a daily writing practice at the time. The only requirement I had for it was that I wrote every day. Raw, unedited, and with joyful disregard to consistent form. Sometimes it came out like a journal entry, at others a poem, occasionally I wrote dialogue as a scene from a play, and when I was uninspired, I wrote stream of consciousness.
And, you know, there were some days that I didn’t write at all. But unlike most of my other undertakings, in which I momentarily failed and then chalked it up to JUST NOT BEING THAT DISCIPLINED ABOUT ANYTHING, I GUESS. Welp! Fucked that up! Ruined that one! …
If I missed a day of my daily writing practice, I just picked up and wrote again the next day.
In bird by bird, one of the only books on writing that’s worth reading, Anne Lamott says about meditation, “Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.” In the puppy training of my writing regimen, I finally managed not to whack myself on the nose.
I just brought myself back to the newspaper.
* “If you write about me,” he asked afterwards, “please without my name.”
I wrote about him. The passages were graphic and they mentioned his name several times, almost as a litany, so when I shared, back then, I shared a heavily abridged version. It’s the first time I vividly recall hamstringing my artistic expression to protect someone else’s relationship. It felt inauthentic and insufficient.
I value my own work only when I am deeply honest or deeply innovative, and I have more facility with being deeply honest.
In deep summer 2011, I arrived in a tiny European city. I was there to visit a friend who was performing the lead in an opera. I’d never seen an opera. I’d never seen an opera singer, aside from my friend (a robust fellow), and Luciano Pavarotti. I thought all opera singers resembled my friend or Pavarotti.
Not so.
The night I arrived, my friend said that the whole cast was housed in the same apartment building and that a colleague of his would be coming down to meet us, and we’d all go have a drink together.
“Great,” I replied absentmindedly, expecting a Pavarotti.
Five minutes later, in walked this young, blond, fair, fit, blue-eyed … Adonis. If I had had something in my hands, I would have dropped it. I felt my heart in my shoes.
A few hours later, after some heavy flirting, I found out that he had a girlfriend of five years back home. And I have to tell you, dear reader, it did not deter me. I had little compunction. I was enchanted. It felt magical — and inevitable. It was going to happen. There was no way it was not going to happen.
I invited myself up to his room. We spent the ensuing two nights together in a delirium. He put underwear on to sleep, because he said that some nights back home he would wake up and be in the act of fucking his girlfriend. He said with chemistry like ours, we’d probably instantly make babies.
The third night he said he couldn’t do it again. I was leaving the next day, and she was arriving, and that’s where he drew the line. He wouldn’t let me come up to his room. My host was out on a date, so Theo and I lay on his bed, fully clothed, over the covers, and cried. Both of us. The next day we had a coffee and he walked me to the train.
I wrote.
I’ve just boarded the train and said my second goodbye to Theo, less tender and less painful than the first (this morning at 1am crying in his arms in a dark bedroom). How can such a brief affair feel so emotional, so passionate and wrenching? And then again, the most passionate, emotional, and wrenching parts of our lives all seem to happen rather quickly, like the body of an earthquake whose presence is felt long after it has made itself known. How unbelievable moments are — in one a man’s lips are between your legs, and in the next they are singing an opera… one moment you are in his embrace and the next — on a train perhaps never to see him again. My throat aches deliciously, and it is a reminder of what I have felt, which no one’s reason or morality can take from me. This is the consequence of seizing the day, and not a very bad one, I don’t think. If you accept that pleasure contains within it its old enemy, then you, then I, must embrace the enemy to live whole. The sadness that I feel now is worth it. I don’t want to be evened-out, dispassionate, non-attached. I will never be a true yogi, because not only do my attempts at distancing myself from my emotions fail, but also I lack the requisite desire to detach myself from worldly pleasure and its sufferings. I remain enmeshed, and I can relish the wracking sob of the morning as well as the cry of orgasm, Theo, Theo, Theo! that preceded it. Everything will end – an affair, a life, an orgasm, and so the fact of its ending cannot be a reason not to proceed, not to take it between my teeth as any dog with any bone will tell you. The pain I feel now is a reminder that I have lived and that I am still living. If I am present with my aching longing I cannot reject it.
I no longer think that a “true yogi” need distance themselves from the world, by the way. Quite the opposite.
Over the next five years, he wrote to me approximately every other month to tell me how beautiful I was in the photographs I posted. I spent the next five years thinking in the back of my mind, in all the world, this is the man who really loves me. This is the man who would choose me if he had the chance. This is the man I wept for when I watched Before Sunset and 5 to 7.
Three years ago, he wrote, “Even though we only know each other from that moment, let me tell you that I love you.” He said that he often thought of being with me. He told me that he still dreamed about me. Not fantasized, although that too. Dreamed. Dreamed about me. Five years later.
I think I can be forgiven for my expectations.
Who is it that I want to be forgiven by?
Two years ago, we spent a night together in a hotel in Germany. It was the only night that we could be in the same city and available to each other. It was the first time I’d see his face since he put me on the train. And I expected magic.
He warned me that he was tired.
“How’d it go?” a friend asked me afterwards.
“I ruined it,” I said.
“Did you ruin it good?”
“Yeah,” I replied, smiling ruefully. “I ruined it real good.”
He didn’t have a girlfriend anymore. She ended their ten-year relationship the year before. I was in Berlin to see another lover of mine. We knew these things when we made our plan to see each other. The clarity felt good, and clean. My anticipation was a soaring thing.
I thought we’d fall into each other’s arms. Instead he was … stilted. I longed for all that affection he expressed over the five years we hadn’t seen each other. By the time we put our bags in the hotel room and walked down the block to a biergarten, I was on the border of tears.
Like a masochist, I asked Theo to tell me the story of his relationship. When I had asked him to tell me the story before, he said that it was a tale for in-person with a glass of wine. He told me the story then. At a wooden table. Over a sausage. With a beer in his hand. Metaphorical wine. It took most of the night, and it stung, but I was glad to hear it. I finally felt that I knew him a little.
He made jokes. They weren’t funny. We didn’t touch each other at all. Back at the hotel I started to sob. Perplexed, he held me for a minute or so and then pushed me away by the shoulders so he could look at my face.
“I just don’t understand why you’re so upset,” he said.
With embarrassment, choking on my hopes for us, I finally managed to tell him that I expected magic. That I thought he would be the man who loved me.
“But love you in what way?” he asked.
I didn’t answer that, but. The epic way? The reciprocal way? The still-dreams-about-me-way? The willing-to-move-to-the-United-
My lover in Berlin was a person who seemed never to get disappointed. I think now that he was a Stoic. This was his philosophy: if you don’t get the part, or the girl, if something isn’t offered to you, or you don’t win the thing, it actually wasn’t possible in the first place. You could argue that it was possible, that you were in the running for that part, in fact you were invited to final callbacks, so you definitely had a chance, etc., but, he posits, if you didn’t get it, then it wasn’t actually on offer for you. It could not have been otherwise.
If I’m in a self-blaming mood, I’d say that I choked the joy out of my time with Theo with my bare expectations. It’s not the first time I’ve built castles in the air and been the one to cry when the evaporated — as you well know. But after a few years of reflection, I cannot see how it could have happened any other way, me being primed in the way I was primed, me being who I was and him being who he was then.
Maybe “ruining it” isn’t ruining it at all. If I could have behaved differently, I would have. If he could have behaved differently, he would have.
It was our alchemy at that moment in time, fueled by memories of our magical and clandestine experience, and years of anticipatory foreplay. It was our alchemy, and it couldn’t be helped. It had to play out that way — because it did.
I can drive myself to distraction, if I want to. I can blame him and play out the what-ifs. If he’d had the skill to hold space for me, acting as the ocean rock, allowing me to crest the wave of my emotions, I would have smoothed out the other side into his arms, vulnerable and grateful, mascara off and tender-underbelly up, with shipwrecked relief. We could have made love then, even knowing that we didn’t know if it would ever happen again. I can do that, certainly — I can blame myself and play out the what-ifs. If I’d taken a step back from my emotional response, had a cry in the bathroom, just enjoyed whatever there was to enjoy to the full extent that I could enjoy it, then … Then what, really? Then I would rekindle the fire of my pining? Then I’d uproot my own life and try to forge a new one in Europe?
I dearly wanted to meet him again, without the spectre of his girlfriend, to see what we could have together, what might grow between us … and I did. Now I have my answer.
Nothing.
Another friend asked, “And if it had been what you hoped, what then? Are you still looking for an anchor?”
No. No, I’m not.
I have one now.
It’s my community.
Maybe ruining it isn’t ruining it at all. Maybe it was ruin-worthy. Maybe it had to be destroyed, to make way. Maybe it wouldn’t budge, so it had to burn. Maybe the ashes are enriching the soil. Maybe it’s a phoenix next rising, almost too bright for bare eyes.
Big Love,
Lila
* His name has been changed.
