Wormholes

I heard the couple upstairs tonight having some kind of fight, and the woman just sobbing. There would be a bit of yelling, and then loud sobbing, then quiet, then more sobbing. This couple doesn't usually make a lot of noise -- sometimes music, sometimes a treadmill or something, sometimes stuff dropped in the bathtub. Once or twice, sex noises. But mostly, they're quiet -- and in the anonymous intimacy of urban living, I actually have no clue who they are or what they look like. (Only that I must not have drilled through their floor the time I thought I had when Barbara was hanging my antique windows -- well, for obvious reasons).

Tonight, overhearing them made me really sad. Just, echoes. All that lumpen weight of sadness. Sometimes, even 3 years after A and I split up, I find myself perplexed that my life isn't what I expected it to be for so long. I mean, I like my life a lot -- I'm someone very different than I would have been still in that partnered-shape -- and my work is engrossing and fulfilling, my friendships so rich, life with F always like emotional yoga, pranayama and stretching and rest. But sometimes it really does feel like I fell into a wormhole and landed in a completely different dimension, where I'm living in fully in another time, but it's folded over a life that I'm still living in parallel. Picard on the dying planet, where he had a family and learned to play the flute.

I think living so long with the assumptions of "forever" imprinted on me in ways I still can't quite penetrate. I have such a simultaneous pull to fuse as tightly as possible with F and to know that that pull is futile -- it doesn't fit either of our stories.

What's emerging in my writing for my dissertation (sadly thin progress today, this stormy lazy day) is that how people create generative interactions has to mirror their stories of self and relationship. I'm still charting this out... but it's hard to keep my own life out of the analysis. And there's something on the tip of my tongue about consistency, and how in newness, there's much less consistency. I keep thinking about the difference between my "alpha couple" -- who've been together 15 years and made a very smooth enterprise of interweaving themselves -- and a couple of my younger couples. The stories with the alpha couple are... not polished, but even the inconsistencies are practiced and familiar.

I think that's one of the hard things this new relationship thing... not knowing where our stories of self, where our stories of relationship really fit together -- especially if our language is different. Finding the ways to hinge them, know that my words for this and his words for that actually can fold together, aren't the paradoxes that they've sometimes felt. Right now, it's good -- it's better than it's ever been -- and some of that is about leaving space for the different words, different stories, to nestle together, layer on top and dock. Sometimes I feel like there is such a very astonishing amount to learn just in the living of the day to day.