Chapter 10: Parallel Universes
My second date looked like a homeless, disturbed person, I felt like one. It was a match.
Rare were the nights when I had the entire flat to myself. All the other nights, my roommates swarmed about, almost-strangers despite us sharing the most intimate spaces. I had created an online dating profile, and that was like stepping through the door into a crazy new world. A world with its own rules and customs, a world I didn’t particularly like. But I needed to escape from my cramped bedroom somehow.
The first guy I met made me reconsider the strangeness of the online dating world. Our first dates were pleasant, he was attentive and into me, even if maybe a little too much. A few weeks in, his attention - although it was all I had dreamt of - was something I couldn’t stand anymore. I needed to breathe alone, so I ended it with him. I was in for the chase, not for being chased.
The second guy I met I thought was my soulmate. He seemed unconventional, deep in thought most of the time, and his reading glasses circling his green eyes completed the sexy package. For our first date, he came dressed in a purple corduroy jacket that I thought was his grandfather’s as a young boy. He looked like a homeless, disturbed person, I felt like one.
It was a match.
When I understood that his deep-in-thought expression was the result of his depression, I got excited at the prospect of saving him. Helping a depressed man climb out of his hole gave me a purpose. Taking care of him was the perfect excuse not to take care of myself. He often didn’t seem to notice my presence, and I was happy to do the chasing. I didn’t think I deserved to be loved, I had to work for it.
It was a match.
When he would come out, briefly, from his apathetic moods, he would be raging. The green-eyed boy carried his suffering like a war medal on his chest. He demanded to be glorified for having it so hard, mocking me for having an easier life, he thought. I saw something of myself in him. I was also carrying my dead marriage like a trophy made of glass shards, showing it to everyone who would care to look at the cuts it had left on my skin.
It was a match.
But we also had good days. On Sundays, we’d take our bikes and cycle along the beach or if it was rainy, spend the day in a museum debating history and art and ethics.
One such Sunday we took off, cycling along the coast. It was the first warm weekend in February and we were eager to catch some sun. At some point, we stopped to drink some water and while he was pulling out the water bottles from his backpack, I saw the end of a thick grey rope stashed in there. It could have been forgotten in there from another time, but somehow I couldn’t unsee it. How would a rope be useful to a cyclist? How would it help him if he got a flat tire or one of his brake hoses broke? Why would he carry it around everywhere, filling half his backpack?
I asked him what the rope was for, and he answered that it was there in case he felt too miserable one day and might need it. I was used to his dark humor, but a flicker in his right eye made my throat freeze as if I’d just swollen an entire ice cream scoop in one big gulp. We say the biggest truths through jokes. When the truth is too scary to be named, we tell a joke to deflate the tension of the harsh reality. Or maybe he was just messing with me, enjoying seeing me in agony.
Was it a match?
The sweet Sunday turned sour. The flicker in his right eye and his persistent grin gave me shudders. Who was I cycling out of town with? Who was I in bed with? These were another man’s eyes compared to his sad look from the other night back home.
We had been teasing one another on the couch, and in a split second, his face morphed into a statue. His eyes got a red rim underneath them, he was staring into nothing. For a few good minutes, I couldn’t do anything to bring him back. I hugged him. I shook his naked shoulders. I cupped his face forcing him to look me in the eye. Nothing. He snapped back on his own as if he had just entered through the door of our reality and became once again the guy I knew.
There was something about him, that night on the couch, and now on this Sunday afternoon, that made me agitated. I was attracted to him, but sometimes I felt scared while next to him. Maybe my racing heart wasn’t me falling in love, but my body warning me to stay away. But I didn’t trust my body back then. I needed an external object, the sight of that rope in his backpack, to convince me to listen to my body.
The orange sunlight announced the approaching dusk. Catching a ray of the sun straight in the eye, blinding me for a few seconds, I remembered again that time on my 33rd birthday. I had sat on a similar beach, with a similar churning feeling in my stomach and a heavy flutter in my heart, just as now.
I was the only one sitting on the picnic blanket, all my friends standing above me, chattering in small groups. We were in parallel universes. Like two highways that seem to intersect if you look from above, but in reality they run one under the other, forming an X whose lines never touch. In an instant, all the chatter above me seemed to quiet down, and the skies opened to let through a piercing ray of sun - just like now on this other beach, years later. The heavy load on my chest signaled at that moment that I was trying to fit in the wrong universe. I was in the company of the wrong people. My birthday wish became obvious: in a year’s time, I wanted to be surrounded by the right kind of people, by my own tribe.
What would have been a lame birthday became a turning point in my life because I listened to my body. Because I didn’t ignore it by opening another bottle of beer and standing up to join the chatter.
So I had known how to listen to my body for years. But now, on this other beach, watching another sunset, I needed the sight of a rope in my boyfriend’s backpack to convince me to stop and listen. Was I going backward? Maybe lessons come in waves, and sometimes we think we fall back. But what happens is we retake the class and let it change us every time a bit more.
That Sunday was the last time I saw the unconventional, deep-in-thought guy.
It wasn’t a match, after all.
I enjoyed very much the suspense in this Chapter!