about jewels

today while minding my own business, that is, wrestling with a self imposed deadline in a attempt to preempt total panic later when the real deadline falls, the phone rings. i pick it up and on the other side is one of my dearest friends, colleagues, lovers. you name it, he is it to me or has been at some time. because he spent five weeks in a de-stressing therapy clinic and i have myself been up in the air quite a bit, it has been a total of eight weeks since we have seen each other, or so he tells me. for my part i have not really been keeping books.

a couple of weeks ago i buzzed him on email and got an answer with contents that roughly translated that he was not yet ready to talk to me. i mailed back that he should take his time, after all, that is all that is really his, his time. not having an expectation or anticipation as to how much time he needed for himself, i also put the whole to rest. i love him dearly, intensely, even passionately but i also have the same attitude towards my work. when he rang today, i was both surprised and pleased.

he told me about his experience at the clinic and that is a story that is not mine to tell. i shared with him the events of my last eight weeks. it was on sharing those events with him that i became aware of how very much has happened in this life of mine during the past eight weeks. that feeling that i had four weeks ago after returning from a week over-there-somewhere attending to matters close to my heart, is not a feeling, it is an attitude, a way of being and living. it is relatively new, change has taken place in this life of mine. that bit about me not recognizing my life since is real.

roughly one week ago i met with a dear soul who this summer populated my carnal distractions and when the animal who i am decided that also good affairs must one day come to an end, he decided that i am a cold blooded bitch. in our most recent meeting i could barely recognize the man, and i wondered who that person there talking to me was, he seemed so foreign. i cared so very little for his troubles and tribulations. i wondered why on earth i had even bothered to call him up when i passed his office. yet, i remember well one moment earlier this past spring when this man touched me, and i ingested a wonderful drug. i knew that it was a drug, it is a drug that i have taken before, it was the abysm of falling in love. we do fall in love with our own neurosis, and so it is also with me. the love affair with the own neurosis, is however therapeutic, if not narcissistic. what a delightful choice the psyche gives you, you fall in love and then you may choose therapy or narcissism. the choice is yours, it always is. on occasions i forget this so very basic bifurcation in every day life.

it was in my week away one month ago that i faced that choice once more. i went for therapy, and i felt like a total fool. imagine me having this man whom i very much like, and whom i admire, right there sitting next to me. imagine me sensing his presence, imagine me feeling insecurity. mine or his, it really did not matter. then i feel him pulling back and away, i turn around and tell him exactly what all of his tossing, doing and bending activates in me. then imagine the two of us alone in the privacy of his kitchen a few weeks later. imagine him calling me yesterday with a wonderful stratagem just to talk but having not much to say. it takes so little to make me happy. our call lasted less than ten minutes, and i was delighted, even satisfied. satisfaction sounds perverse now; perverse is the very idea that the seducer is now being seduced. yet our egos are so very delicate and brittle. shattered egos make for very deep neurosis. being the fool whom i am, once more i wrote to him again... and again i felt like a divine fool. i like being a fool at this point. i have given up all pretense of wisdom, enlightenment, or for that matter common sense. i am as i am so be it.

at the end of our phone conversation today my friend and i were bubbling. while we were not looking for it, we have found a deep friendship. he told me about his therapy, his falling in love, his needs, his life's errands. i shared with him my struggles, my falling in love, my fascination with the muses, my passion for life. we concurred on the matter of sharing a bed with each other.

it is not every day

it really is not. it is not everyday that the phone rings and it is one of my friends around the corner that erroneously rang me; god only knows after what. it was morning and i was still in bed half asleep after a very late turning in last night at three this morning.

he rings, this friend of mine, and he is apologetic about his blunder, i sounded sleepy. i thanked him for the keys to his apartment that i had picked up last night before going to see a flick at a good old movie theatre in town with a retired and somewhat lonely colleague. i thanked him, the one on the phone this morning, and remarked the fact that the keys were pink after all. yesterday he had asked me what colour i wanted the keys, red or blue? i said pink. in fact they are more like fuchsia or magenta, however this bit of naming colours is not exactly my strength, and metal coloured keys is a very local thing that keeps some of the folks sorted in terms of what key goes into which hole. so, barely awake, and with a set of keys to his apartment in a ridiculous colour, i shared with him my excitement, and told him that i had had an orgasm right there and then when i got his keys last night. we laughed, we often laugh.

this one friend of mine, like another one at the same address, are both jurists and as close as i get to having two brothers around the corner from me. we hold each other's hands through thick and thin, to say nothing of a few fun and animated social occasions or bits and pieces of our lives. we have helped each other move apartments on more than one occasion, we have stood ready with moral support and prepared meals through exams and dissertations, and when we need a good shoulder to cry, we know where to go. we also have no difficulty what so ever in making bad jokes while half-awake.

it is not every day that i am home. but how am i?

i am thinking a lot more than i had expected that i would about my dear - not better half, not worse half, not half at all - with whom i spent last weekend. he is an angel, he is a muse, and he gets to me every now and then. in the last two decades i have fallen in love with him several times. i neither believe in this thing of falling in love, nor do i like it whenever it happens to me in spite of my own lack of belief and my insistence that each time that i do, it is with the world and with life that i fall in love, not with someone in particular. in between my falling in love with him, and with the world, my fancy trails other chimeras and fantasies, yet we return faithfully to the eternity of our dreams and the lightness that our shared times indulges us with. sometimes it is this lightness and ease that i suspect has had me so confused, if not apprehensive and confronted. but is it an indulgence?

life goes on, or so it pretends. i have been feeling very light and i need to return to my silence, and my monastic life. therapy has been good, really good. it is not every day, like today, that i make waffles and end up not managing to get one single one out of the waffle iron in one piece. all three waffles disintegrated in small pieces all over the iron... i forgot some ingredient and i do not recall which one. i make buckwheat waffles from my own recipe that i have forgotten to write down. this is my life, a recipe that i have forgotten to write down. sometimes it works, sometimes, it doesn't.