Last night I sat with a friend discussing a broken heart, and amazingly it wasn't mine. One of my oldest friends from middle school just got her heart royally broken, by a 22 year-old pipsqueak (granted my luck with the aged elders has been no better.) It was strange to be playing Counselor Troi rather than, say, Hecuba--which is more usually my milieu. There she was, obsessing aloud about what she should say to him next to get the explanation for why he was such a dick that would make it all ok. And I had to tell her what none of her other friends had: there's nothing you can or should do. You will not get any satisfaction from anything he says, it will suck until it stops and meanwhile the worst thing you can do is try to make him do *anything*. I was the first person who didn't leap to her defense, berate him for being blind and idiotic and not deserving of her, and tell her she could have any man she wants.
Well, the truth is often we can't have the ones we want and that's why we want them. The neurology of romantic love is entirely tied up with the system of primal drives in our caudate nucleus: or "the lizard brain." We get addicted to love and it's no mere 80's hit, it's pure dopamine and norepinephrine and the crash is NASTY. It was kind of wonderful to suddenly play the part of compassionate but brutally honest friend, but humbling to hear the same words coming from my mouth that come from all good friends: "just give it time." More on the neurochemistry of romantic love soon, I'm geeking on it mightily.
Rehearsals for A Dream Play are starting to pick up some steam. I'm trying to silence the doubts, suspend my OWN disbelief, and "trust the process".
I love my job at the juice bar/cafe in Balham and I double love how much Bikram Yoga I'm doing in the studio right across the street from said job. I've found a californian oasis to call my own.
Last week I went to see a play for the first time in weeks and was surprised to hear a very, very familiar voice emerge from the shadows about 20 minutes in. One of my two London Theatre ex lovers, haunting me in Ghost Stories! It was a hilarious and wonderful surprise (as was much of the show--see it if you can!) and we're meeting up next week to catch up on the last year. It's so fun seeing how people change, or how they seem to have changed but actually they just put on a few pounds. Either way, the passing of time is gratifying and somehow quietly glorious.
Spring is springing and the weather was GORGEOUS for a week and the island transformed overnight into a place not entirely populated by xenophobic dough people. Smiling dough people is such a step in the right direction.
On February 9 a doctor looked at my MRI and CT scans and told me my right hip was just shy of arthritic and it was likely I would need a full hip replacement before I'm thirty. That night I came home and my bedroom was on fire because I had left a candle burning all day which I don't even remember lighting. My family is grieving a loss and it aches to have been far away and not to have said goodbye to my Aunt Nancy who succumbed to stage 4 pancreatic cancer a few weeks ago. We all miss her and I wish I had spent more time with her. Feelings of fragility and loss in the face of so many futures now impossible, perhaps always impossible.
My mother is NOT getting evicted, and my childhood home is not getting auctioned off by bank of america-- for now. My mother now has about a year or so to find ways of earning enough income to keep her in our family home. Prayers, digit crossing and general love in her direction always always always appreciated.
And as for me, other than some depression after the medical news and the housefire and Nancy and everything else, I'm feeling so much hope, creative juice and general optimism about the gradual making of a life here. It is strange to be so deliriously single and to be fasting from ALL of my compulsive habits--even taking a long and needed break from Art of Living. I have no overwhelming passion for anything right now, and while I don't really expect that to last-- knowing me-- I am so grateful for the emotional respite now. Life feels calm, manageable, basic and kind. The hemisphere is warming, the days are lengthening, and secret joys are beginning to whisper themselves to me again.
Everything feels fertile, generous, restful and full of possibilities. I love springtime.
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