1.1 metamorphosis without the butterflies

i woke up one morning this week remembering a dream that involved a swedish thirtyish male somewhere in a kitchen half-naked à la Tyler Durden but without the attitude. needless to say that i woke up laughing and humbled by the thought that this is how old age is sneaking up on me. for my mid-life crisis i married a man eight years younger than i, so this dream, is clearly marking the advent of old age. it came sneaking by having a rather prototype male appear in my dreams in the absence of eros.

when the day starts with such psychological petty crimes and then the phone rings and a past lover is on the other side, life is taking its course. a colleague of mine has these days taken to hinting something or other about my men. oh, i get him loud and clear. i will need to face that one straight one of these days as it becames necessary, if it becomes necessary.

on wednesday i walk into my therapy session and the therapist happily announces that she has found my file again. again, i had to laugh, that internal laugh that is half irony, half satisfaction and two-thirds insight, because that very morning i had thought about this episode of the loss of my therapist's notes on my case a few months back. now, it is not everyday that a therapist and member of the medical profession loses a patient's file, and i remained most unconvinced of its loss, and took the view that it had been misplaced somewhere in the office and its many papers and shelves, and in due time it would surface again. it did, it was among the empty file wrappers.

that morning my thought of that misplaced file was that when i entered the therapist's office for the first time over one year ago, it was because i had more than just issues to resolve, i was in the throws of a depression that was choking my life; i needed help. there is here one person who clearly does not have her shit together - that is me - and goes for help to this other person - the therapist - and that together-person then looses the file containing all those notes about who is related to whom and who did what to whom, where and that whole relatory of recollections that get spewed during the course of therapy. ah! perfection is also not to be found at this address. what a delighful relief!

when a past lover rings early in the morning, i am barely awake, and he has good news for me. for a while back there while i was in the throws of some deep funks of depression a few months ago, i did worry about the state of affairs of his marriage following one long call with him. he is a good friend, our separation was a necessary step for both of us, we remain faithful to each other for there is nothing that can separate good friends. now it was easy to joke about the postulate that perhaps he did not need a maitresse, as is common in france, and a few other places in the world. in fact, having more than one relationship that involves copulation is very common among the human species. it so is that the invention of marriage and the preaching of some alledged morality principles within a few degenerate doctrines has caused this de facto practise to be one that is frowned upon. i know, how in our family the gossip of other people's affairs is often used to preach what should be. needless to say that in this very same family of mine, all sorts of overt and covert relationship behaviour is to be found, however nobody talks about it. that is what they call normal, and that is what i call hypocritical behaviour. but then, that is me, the moral me.

all social criticism aside, it was good to talk for a while with this dear friend of mine. it was especially good to remind him that he too is human, like the rest of us. and like the rest of us, he also does not always have all his shit together, and does not always behave ideally. he is a fantastic friend, and always was, yet he too is not perfect. i too often forget that i do belong to the human species and am vested with all the wonderful incongruities and caprices that so characterize the beasts whom we are.

recently i was visiting a friend and cousin for a week and we ended up discussing a lot of our private issues about lovers, loves, life, fortune and fame. she is the ever wise art historian, and i am the insane writer. while i was visiting her, i was also in the midst of a sweet confrontation with one of my dearest muses who was in town at the same time. at one point she declares that he is not up to my level and that i idealize him. i do idealize him and what pleasure that is! on the other hand, inspite of all my cousin's deep insights into french men's behaviour, this is not a question of levels or worthiness. when is another being worth another? never. we, human, we deserve nothing, have a right to nothing. we are alive, we breathe, we eat, we sleep and sometime in between sometimes we connect with each other. sometimes there is poetry, other times there is ease, and most of the time there is nothing at all. in all cases, i say there is life and relationship.

i return to my lovers. literally, i often do that. i return to them for the lessons learned and return to them for the caresses and the pleasure of their company. sexual copulation is not always involved. lover is a word that makes me wonder. lover is often riddled with meanings belong to some social canonry to which i do not subscribe. but then i already have trouble with the concept of falling in love, and certainly no understanding for that other concept that involves perfection when it comes to the object of one's affections. it was exactly to this point that my therapist and i returned on wednesday. if relationships fail these days, one reason can be sought in the idealization of the relationship itself, and the requirement that it has to be perfect and compliant to several concepts of social canonry, and that is so oblivious to the needs of our soul, spirit and psyche. we need dreams, ideals and angels on occasions. i do well surrounded by a few muses whom i love and respect, and who give me the raw pleasure of sincerity.

at this point i recall another french man in my life, another past lover, one whose tracks i have lost, one with whom i conceived a child. one man who was pure poetry. our child left us both before his farewell, and in the deepest core of my being there is this taste of life lived to the fullest that has stayed with me. he is one of the rare people that have departed to not be heard of again. i have no idea of where he is living now, or if he is living. does it matter? no. he enriched my life with his presence. what more could i possibly want? i have my peace of mind.

perhaps this is not old age at all. it can be that one night i dream of an unknown swedish adonis by the kitchen sink, and then the next night it is somebody whom i know, and it is something totally different.

perfection: the way it was

i have a thing or two for dark dank rooms and men with firm glutæi muscles. other than that my tastes are perfectly normal, however i am not quite totally sure that the devil wears prada. you, the devil, and i are on a first name basis. it has always been that way, we are best friends and companions since time irreproachable.

- life goes on and i do not quite know how it got to be this way -

if you - or anybody with the ability of speech - would have asked me some 35 years ago where i would see myself 35 years from then, i would have been the one with not much of a clue. i can only suspect that in putting myself back then to being barely 14, all that i could think of then was that i wanted to study medicine. medicine. there you have it. i had been exposed to the books that medical students drag home during the breaks, and i liked what i saw and read. i also heard all the gory tales about anatomy labs and what abuses cadavers and students get to endure, and i was not impressed. i also liked architecture, but that seemed very remote as i had no access to the world of architects in those days. agronomy was a dream, a very romantic dream that nobody around me ever listened to or gave any encouragement.

then it all changed. why am i writing this now, and why are there tears flooding my eyes?

it was an accident. i was doing the dishes and a glass slipped off my hands. reflex, slow reflex. when i went to catch the glass that slipped off my hand a sharp edge cut through my left wrist and i could not move my left little finger. needless to say that it was a bloody mess. i was alone and called my father across the street at work. in hospital they stitched the tendon back together and then the wound. i really do not remember either the pain, nor the stitches the blood. i remember however how some physician spent a whole lot of time stitching it back. i most likely do not remember the pain in hospital because there was a local anesthetic applied. the wound healed well, and soon i could move my little finger again. however in the freezing cold of a northern american city i could always feel the internal stitches until years later they finally dissolved. it was nothing, a little cut, a mended tendon and a few shredded plans about medicine. instead of flying back across the atlantic to europe, i remained in north america. i had registered at school, i had left my room ready for my return and i was looking forward to seeing my school friends in the fall. it was not to be.

my parents had other plans, plans that i will never understand, and plans that i do not need to either understand or analyze. these plans affected my life and that is as naked a fact as i have ever witnessed. somebody does something and it has consequences or not, the fact lies in the the doing, not in the consequences? no, the consequences are also a fact, a consequential fact activated by another than the primary actor. should i get theoretical now on causality theory? no, not now. causality theory is nothing that i call fiction, it is circumstantial abstraction.

but do not let me lead you astray, i just looked up sachverhalt in order to find the word in english that i wanted right now to express something that comes close to circumstantial. this looking up from german to english is nothing that i could have ever predicted 35 years ago as one of my actions. then i wrote portuguese, did not know one word of german, and my english and i had a tenuous relationship. then germany was a far away country that i never planned to visit, much less live in, and i would be willing to bet that i had never heard of switzerland other than in geography classes or referred to as la suisse. that one day i would be sitting at a dinner table in lisboa surrounded by distinguished members of the legal profession and caught myself speaking as one with swiss roots and national esteem. but it was not i who was defining my identity as such, it was the distinguished round that clearly assigned me this role. my swiss roots are the ones that i have grown by studying and working in this country, they do not stem from blood lines or other historical or biological facts. if i speak of national esteem, and not of pride, it is because there is something that i call swissness, and others may call swiss culture, or suisse raison d'être that has somehow become a part of me. nationalism in any shade is something that i can not and do not want to accept.

i am right here, not enlightened, not famous, not glorious, not anything in particular. i am here finding my place and looking into identity and knowledge. i am here facing the bloody fact that is some foreign concept about perfection and satisfying my perceptions of what the expectations of others might be. i am here reminding myself that nothing outside can cause any trouble.

it was upon my return from the ivy league circuitry that fourteen years ago i came here in search of myself and then wondered off north and east to return with one word alone, sincerity. extreme sincerity.