Chapter 5: Poems
I was eager to fabricate love through made-up romances and poems, to match the intensity of my imagination.
Chapter 5: Poems
The weeks after returning from Prague I continued floating into the dark nothingness of my new life. I didn’t know how to live without a man to lean on, mentally more than physically. Because I defaulted to being partnered up, the weeks without a partner seemed like wasted time. So I started looking for the next boyfriend earlier than I had initially wanted. A relationship felt like breathing, while being single felt like holding my breath. And one cannot hold their breath for too long without dying.
Working was an acceptable surrogate until I found him. I threw myself into my job with passion and abandon, until I could throw myself with abandon into his arms. That someone, that He with capital H I was waiting to come and save me from myself.
It was a rainy morning that day. I was hopping my way towards the office building, avoiding pools of water filling the sidewalk, while balancing my transparent umbrella in my left hand. I loved watching the rain fall over me from underneath that transparent umbrella, protected from the drops but seeing them almost splashing into my eyes. I still kept Mother Nature close, in any form she came, warm breeze or downpour.
Getting ready to manage the simultaneous tasks of avoiding rain puddles, opening the door of the office building without soaking my laptop bag and closing the umbrella at the precise moment when I’d be under the roof, I hadn’t seen him standing there holding the door for me. When I looked up he was smiling his crooked smile, waiting for me to get a hold of all the things I carried and step into dry land.
‘Oh, thank you’, I said, grinning probably a little bit too wide.
‘Good morning’, he replied, stating the obvious. The morning was indeed very good upon unexpectedly seeing him.
‘Are you going to close that umbrella?’ he asked, amused, watching it forgotten in my hand, wide open.
What umbrella?! I couldn’t see any umbrellas around. I couldn’t hear the rain falling heavily on the glass roof of the entrance. I could only see smiles and sunshine.
‘Oh, yeah, sorry!’ I breathed to come back to reality and get a hold of myself.
The colleague, whose name I didn’t know yet, worked at a different company on the floor below mine. We had crossed paths several times at the corner café where we’d go for our mid-morning break. My own colleagues spotted the exchange of looks between us and had been teasing me ever since. I brushed off the whole thing, but I secretly enjoyed it. My mornings became more interesting, the coffee became sweeter.
Breaking eye contact with me, he turned towards the receptionist and started talking with her for a brief moment. Surprised at the sudden break of the spell, I poked my chin forward and I rushed towards the stairs behind the white door next to the elevator. We had made a deal with a couple of my teammates that for two weeks we’d only take the stairs to and from our third-floor office, in an effort to make up for sitting at a desk for eight hours. I didn’t hear the usual mini slam the door made behind me every time it closed on its own. Someone else had slipped in as well. Turning on the stairs, I saw him looking up at me. I knew his eyes better than his name. He caught up with me, making me feel hyper aware of my legs and their movement climbing the stairs in front of him.
My mind was quick to start a fantasy of him grabbing my wrist, spinning me around and holding me as I was about to fall, unbalanced, into his arms. How he’d look me in the eyes for a few seconds too long, how our lips would come closer, with space just for one feather between them, but how he wouldn’t kiss me. How he’d say something cheesy and release me. But he was much more polite in reality than in my daydream. He showed his crooked smile again and asked me if I worked on the third floor.
Awakened by the pragmatic question, I nodded in confirmation. He said he was at the agency right underneath, on the second floor. I knew that, of course, but I couldn’t say. He opened his mouth to say something more, briefly smiled to himself, and then stopped his thought. I bit my lower lip in disappointment, and left him in front of his office door. Maybe he wanted to propose to grab a coffee or lunch. Maybe he wanted to say something about my looks. I thought up all sorts of things he could have said, way beyond that simple exchange in the hallway. But who needed reality when my imagination was so fulfilling?
I stepped into the office with a twinkle of light in my eyes and a wide smile. My colleagues all agreed that newly-divorced life seemed to suit me well. Nobody knew about my alone time in parks after work, nobody knew about my evenings writing love poems. During the day, I was sharp and confident, sustained by the occasional encounter with crooked-smile guy from downstairs. I needed a pillar to lean against, after my marriage and my oldest friendship were on rocky ground. The pillar could have been anything, and that one, even based on a fantasy, would do just fine.
The following week, I couldn’t wait to tell a friend all about the new guy, over lunch. We picked a table in the sun, and ordered our fixed menu options. Besides being in the sun, which my friend knew always boosted my mood, she noticed I had an extra spark in my eyes.
‘I’m glad to see you’re doing better’, she said, as she hadn’t seen me for a few weeks, since before my trip to Prague. ‘Traveling suits you well, and we knew that, didn’t we?!’
‘Well, it’s not thanks to the trip to Prague. Buff, I’ll tell you about that in a minute.’ I shook off the sad thought as I was eager to tell her about the office guy. I didn’t want to remember yet the monster that had eaten at the friendship between my almost-sister and I, back in Prague.
‘But then thanks to what?!’ she said, the right corner of her mouth raised in anticipation.
And then I started telling her all sorts of details about the second floor office guy, how he looked, how we were about to start something, how, practically, he would pull me out of my loneliness.
‘So you’re hoping this guy will do all these things to make you feel better. To make you forget you’re still going through a divorce.’
I looked at her as if she had splashed her glass of sparkling water all over my forehead. I insisted that I actually liked him, that I thought we could make a good pair, that it all made sense. I was galloping over the natural steps of getting to know someone in my quest to do anything but sit with my divorce pain.
After my separation, I gave myself six months of buffer time. Even though they felt like six years, I was naïve to think it was enough to heal from the heartbreak of dismantling a marriage. It turned out I couldn’t even wait out those self-imposed six months. I couldn’t help but look for my next boyfriend. My divorce paperwork had barely started, but I needed a new man like I needed fresh air to breathe. He would not only be a patch on my open injury, but he would also save me from myself. Because I didn’t know what to do with myself outside the confines of a partnership. I was a wounded bird in need of a warm wing that would cover me up and keep me alive.
My friend of course noticed all of that, and was trying to make me see it as well. She was asking questions to find out if I even knew the guy long enough to make up my mind if I liked him. She wanted to know what I liked in him. Not what he could do for me, but was he someone I wanted. I looked at her resenting the rain she was pouring over my parade. Wasn’t she happy for me? Wasn’t she tired of seeing me suffer for the whole three months since my separation?
So I tried another way. I told her about a thought I had had recently.
‘You know what I realized the other day? I never loved a man until this day.’ I’d said that last part leaving an extra pause after each word.
She looked at me with half a smile and her thin eyebrows raised in disbelief.
‘I thought of all the guys I’ve been in relationships with and I realized I didn’t love any of them’, I continued.
There had been four guys. Four guys with whom I had spent a number of years at different stages of my youth. And at that moment in time, I brushed off my entire romantic past, digging myself into a loveless hole. I had found more or less reasonable explanations about why I hadn’t loved any of them. Love had departed not just my mind and body, but my entire neighborhood. I couldn’t recognize it anymore if it hit me in the head with a pole. I didn’t have any of it left inside me, not even for myself.
I was so convinced of this realization that I was putting a lot of effort into explaining it to my friend who kept her thin eyebrows lifted throughout my entire speech.
‘This is your grief talking’, she told me in response, going full psychoanalyst on me. ‘Don’t believe your thoughts these days. You need more time’.
‘Well’, I continued, ignoring her and widening my eyes in excitement, ‘this realization actually gives me hope. It means now I have the chance to properly love the next man.’
Now I could finally love someone, I thought. It could have been anyone, really. As long as it gave me something to focus on. Something to stop me from floating aimlessly into the nothingness of post-separation reality.
‘Listen, right now you’re like a victim of a fire who just jumped out of the window of the burning building. You need time to understand where you landed, and how many limbs you broke.’
It was my turn to raise my own eyebrows.
‘Wow, I thought I was the poet in our friendship, not you.’
‘Well, poet or not, I think it would do you a world of good if you spent four-five years by yourself, to really get to know yourself. I mean, you haven’t been single since you were, what, 18?!’
I looked at her across the table as if she was mad. Irritation and disappointment were fighting for a top spot inside me. But the sensation of vertigo won.
She had no clue what it meant for me to be alone, having no man in my life. Wouldn’t she know I would simply disintegrate and die if I’d spend five years alone? It seemed not just outrageous, but downright scary. Tell a fish it needs to spend five years out of water.
I had experienced vertigo ever since I was in my early twenties. Only the prospect of separating from a partner gave me that empty pit in my stomach, like when you’re on the board of a precipice looking down. That involuntary survival instinct to not go there, at any cost. My head started to spin only when thinking of taking a step forward. I felt a similar nausea when my friend told me that it would help me to spend four-five years alone.
If you filmed us from a drone, zooming out high above us, you’d see an agitated me gesturing to her outrageous proposal and you’d see a calm and firm friend of mine, standing still, not budging an inch towards accepting my fantasy. An anxious, agitated woman searching for air next to a steady as a rock one, breathing effortlessly.
That night I went home and did what had become a habit in the past weeks. I stayed up late writing poems. Despite what my friend told me, I was convinced I hadn’t really loved anyone until then. But I was eager to fabricate love through made-up romances and poems, to match the intensity of my imagination.
In my room, I laid on my left side on top of the bed cover, one arm holding my head, and a large notebook in front of me where I’d scribble my fantasies. I kept changing positions when the tingle in my supporting arm prevented me from concentrating on the task. An online dictionary of rhymes was open on my phone. I would start by writing down some thoughts from the day that was ending, some dreams or longings. Then I would break the sentences apart into short phrases, like separating pieces of playdough by color. Checking the rhyme dictionary, I’d swap a word for another to make the lines sound better. Then I’d read them out loud to count the syllables and hear the rhythm. I was molding words into poems.
That was my nightly meditation that kept me in the moment for an hour or so. The mind makes no difference between imagination and reality, so in a way I was living the stages of a new relationship. It was also a good excuse to keep myself away from the moments of gloom when remembering the separation, which often came crashing towards me.
Laboring over those verses every night before bed was my way of making some art. My way of creating something beautiful in a dark world. The poems were not for curious eyes. They were the remarkable part of an otherwise ordinary day stretching around me. I would write about an imagined romance, about the lust in my belly and, sometimes, about a home. A future home I dreamt of. As I wrote those poems by hand, in that foreign bed I rented, I felt a tiny thread of connection starting to form between me and the strange house I slept in.
Read next: Chapter 6 - Wilting roses
