Friday, August 24, 2012

Gratitude

Because like everything, what I'm grateful for changes, so here is my current list:

I'm grateful for Tai Moses, my friend of 38 years who, though the 3000 miles between us never gets shorter, I feel closer to than ever. I'm grateful that my daughter, although she is typical in the teenage ways she challenges and aggravates me, is also kind and loyal, self possessed, confident, and radiant. I'm grateful that although my father has been gone for 16 years, he left me with a love I feel whenever I think of him, and I think of him every day still. I'm grateful, though I didn't stay married to the man I married, that he and I have a respect for one another that cannot be broken. I'm grateful that my mother, who is now 84, still walks, and works, and sings, and every so often has a second shot of vodka that makes her ridiculously and beautifully childlike. I'm grateful to have brothers, and work that I love, and for knowing I'll return to London and to Rome, and enjoy them both so much more next time around. I'm grateful to live in a beautiful home with a shiny bathroom floor and hot water when I want it-grateful for the man who's name is tattooed on my ankle, who, although we never made a life together, gave me a taste of what real love could be. I'm grateful I stopped giving myself to men who weren't there on New Year's Eve, or on my birthday, or who never made me feel like I was the only one. I am grateful to have found a man who's already thinking of how we'll spend New Year's Eve together, who shows me I am the only one, and who, if I dare to look forward, I can see on my next birthday, holding my hand on a plane to Bora Bora, that place I've been dreaming of for so long.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Loveworks

Most of us don’t just get to have the love we want because we want it. We get to have the love we want because we first spend a period of our lives squandering our love on those who can’t receive it, or don’t appreciate it, or don’t deserve it, or who abuse it. And then we spend more time searching our souls for answers, asking ourselves in what areas we could have been better. We meditate, we pray, we wonder, we cry, we blame and we take responsibility. Then after years and years of being on what only seems like a hamster wheel, we realize that love feels good, not bad. We realize that love is completely attainable, that it’s not the thing always out of reach. We understand that a person who makes you cry, or doesn’t respond to your touch, or isn’t with you on your birthday, or who doesn’t want you to meet their friends, or who doesn’t treat you like the gift that you are, is the wrong person to spend your precious existence with. At some point, the time in which you reside in wrong relationships gets shorter and shorter, until you come to a place where you can smell the wrong one coming from a mile away. And then, when you discover you’ve been looking into a trick mirror your whole life, seeing things not as they are, but as you believed them to be-when you finally put forward the love in you that calls for, requires, and gently demands it be reflected back just as it’s being given…

…love walks into your life as effortlessly as if you never had to do any of that work at all.

Monday, August 20, 2012

0 to 60

You ride in your car with your friends, you're seventeen. The music blares, the road is unknown, and the next song coming will be better than the one playing now. So much wonder, so much hope; vacillating between loneliness and euphoria, always on the verge of tears or something big, and then you blink your eyes and you're fifty.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Love whispers

I have written so much on this blog over the last six years; mostly I've written about love. And I can see now that my preoccupation with love, sex and romance came from my hunger, and that hunger came from being starved. Not because I was denied by others, but because I denied myself.

Perhaps it was simply a matter of timing; perhaps I was just not ready for more. Clearly I was ready to hold myself back. I was ready, not for someone to arrive, but for someone to leave and for something to break. What I craved was the thrill of uncertainty, of being kept in the dark, kept on my toes, guessing, even mistreated. I was ready to continue my rein as the queen of Broken Hearts.

Last winter, a man resurfaced into my life after twenty-seven years. He had been enamored with me for a brief moment in time, and when we were young we kissed one night on the church steps, then he left a dozen red roses outside my door.

Twenty-seven years later, the old flame, that for me had barely been a spark back then, was ignited. And if I'm honest, I saw red flags the night of our reunion that would have made a wiser woman run.

After we dined together in New York in spring, I went to him in summer. I went because I liked him well enough, because he wanted to see me again, because after he returned home he called me "My Love," and paraphrased Shakespeare in an email, and because he said his Sunday would have been sweeter had I been there to share it. I went to him because he couldn't schedule coming back here, and because he wanted to take me to the seaside. I went, not because I knew he was The One, but because I knew if I didn't go, I would always wonder if he was.

I went to him because I ignored the voice that kept telling me, Don't go.

I don't need to relive the moment I saw him again in summer, how, after all those miles I traveled and all that money I spent, there was hardly a smile on his face when I arrived. I don't care to remember, but I do remember, how he didn't offer to help with my bags, ran five steps ahead me, and flinched when my arm brushed against his in the car. I don't need to describe how I felt when he made it clear, that although there would be plenty of wine this time around, there would be no more roses and no more romance, because regardless of how remarkable a woman I was, he was as closed to me as a New York City liquor store on Sunday.

I didn't expect to fall in love when I was there, but what I expected even less was to be treated like, and even told I was a stranger to him. When I woke up on the fourth and last day of what was to be a week-long visit, I knew I could not spend another moment in his company. I also knew he would be the last man on my list of wrong men.

Then, almost immediately following what I would call that "Awakening," I met someone. At first I couldn't recognize him. He wasn't married, or half my age, or unemployed, or emotionally damaged, or neglectful, or toxic, or unsure how he felt about me. At first I fought him, gave him a little kick, then I tried to bite, but he wouldn't go. Then, like a wild filly after her first hours trapped inside a pen, I slowly began to surrender. Me, the neglected and mistrustful mare and he, the steadfast, determined, and gentle Whisperer.


After a lifetime of being fascinated, confused, thrilled and tormented by love, love is no longer my story. Love is no longer my theme or what I do best, or something I crave, or the thing that eludes me. Love is mine, and whether this particular love lasts a lifetime or for one more day, it's as it should be:  kind, passionate, and present.
  
When I comb the pages of this blog, the pages of the last six years of my life, I can now see a trail, a path. I now have a detailed map of my journey to love, and all the roads and roadblocks it took to get here.

How Deep is Your Love was the song playing on the radio when I had my very first kiss at fourteen, and all the kisses since then have shown me just how deep, and just how shallow love can be.

Love is no longer what I look for or long for; it's what I give and it's what I get. Love is not a Shakespeare quote recited by a man with a Do Not Disturb sign on his heart, it's waking up beside a man who's heart is wide open. Love is not given in promises, it's the promise of being seen, and when we no longer accept swimming on the surface, love is not shallow, love is the deep water we find. 


Friday, August 10, 2012

Note to men

The secret to having a woman who isn't needy is simple. Give yourself to her. She requires a lot less than you imagine or fear.

Thursday, August 09, 2012

The way things aren't

While the train conductor informs passengers which cars to exit from, I keep thinking he's saying, "Please look for a unicorn member of the crew." He's actually saying a uniformed member of the crew...obviously.

Thought in real time

He's not a  prick, and he's not a pansy. He's a man.

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Just not white

Annie: Mom? Could we do something fancy and white-peopleish, like take a vacation in New Hampshire?

Saturday, August 04, 2012

Thought in real time

We have so many dreams in one lifetime, and the most important thing is not to dwell on the ones that never came true, but to rejoice in all the ones that did.

Thursday, August 02, 2012

Reason #456,997 why I love New York

Because when my kid is out and about with her day-camp, she gets to randomly run into and meet people like Spike Lee.

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

In my dreams

Last night I dreamed of tidal waves and kisses.