Saturday, August 05, 2006

home alone 1 (starring Truth Hurts)

Waking up with somewhat parched lungs, I have again been smoking, even when I didn’t feel like it, I leave P sleeping and slither off to the living room with the new curtains he put up for me yesterday (it was a joint mission), and now my place is almost perfect, save for some pictures that need to be hung up. Not perfect as in Ikea or magazine or middle class dream perfect, but perfect for me, with postcards and kids’ drawings blue-taced to the walls, with only a small broken TV and flickering ancient VCR, with second hand furniture and rugs, and with a lot of tasteless quirky stuff lying around, but just expressive of what I am now, including the “How to be a Hero” printouts glued to the inside of the toilet door where I can read them whenever I pass the time, a whole bunch of books that need to be read that I never read, heaps of clothes, a small balcony filled with untended plants. Yeah why now, what’s wrong withn it. My first home alone.

I wished I shared it with somebody, I wish I had the secure place that shares life with someone else, I wish for a more established relationship, something I can rely on, but right now, what I have is very reliable. I have me, for the first time ever. Maybe I need to have that before having anything else, and maybe having anything else prematurely would only result in failure, like it did back home before I left. I did not have my own space at all then, both literally and metaphorically. It’s different now. I still feel, when I am with P, the I constantly have to fill the silences, but it’s best when the silences are filled by themselves as the anxiety dissapitates, like it was last night when we lay close to each other, having come back from the city center where he has, surprisingly cut it short with his friends. I came prepared for a night that would drag as it sometimes drags (and don’t get me wrong, there is a side of me that enjoys that, and I don’t feel completely disloyal to myself like I did before when I was with the guy I lived with, when I would insist to stay at home and he would go out with his friends and that was another reason for him to pick a fight over, but there is a side of me that looks forward more than anything to these mornings when I am alone writing).

So now, if I have to prioritize my favorite activities, writing would precede sport and maybe even sex. Or all three complement each other. I am not sure where work stands.

If I could just stop time still; I am so happy like this.

We saw a crappy romantic movie, “The Lakehouse”. I knew it would be crap but still went to socialize and also because in the right kind of mood I can enjoy the conventional agreed-upon lies that constitute this type of movie, but this movie broke them, it did nothing to move my heart, except two things: reinforcing the fact that life is now and should be lived now before it’s too late (the guy’s father died, and the only touching scene in the movie is when he looks through an album of his father work and tears come out of his eyes; touching especially because P had found some mention of my father’s achievements, with a beautiful picture of him, and seemed genuinely interested, and because I dared to ask him – dared against myself and not just against his own reaction – if he would join me and my family in Italy in September as they had invited him. And I am thinking why did this crap movie jerk this request out of me, and the answer is not because I want to seal Ps and mine relationship in some kind of commitment so much as the fact that it is my dad’s 60s birthday and I have become acutely aware of how vulnerable life is, and that life is now, happening now, and I want him to meet “us”, the family now, when there is a picture of us to be snapped. B/c also my brother’s marriage is failing, that’s another reason they are coming here to see if they can patch things up and that’s why I couldn’t refuse them even though this is an uncomfortable time. And because everything is so fragile. In life that is. Breaking my arm, a small and insignificant thing, but the way it happened has really proven me that, something that I knew before, but now I think, OK, I am just accepting of it, I am not resisting what life is anymore, I am not resisting the pain and the fear and the loss that are sure to come, so it makes it easier, but of course I can’t so far share these thoughts with P or anyone over dinner.

So maybe this movie was worth something to me after all – I know I will remember it which is funny because there are truly excellent movies and books that fail to register in my memory at all – just for this effect. This effect of having me face and confront yet another fear but maybe one of the greatest fears there is, an underlying fear, of loss, of losing, my parents, my sister in law, my own appearance, the younger, healthier me, my relationship with P that might fade out if he leaves (and more and more it looks like it would be very hard for me to leave, the way I am settling down here, completely transitory, but more and more, since life is in the now and it is the first time I am able to achieve that).

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