Jolted

How little we know ourselves.

A friend called me from Kent. We chatted about mutual interests for a while and then she asked about the relationship ending and my return to South Africa.

I talked to her about feeling very distressed in some ways, humiliated, uncertain how to go on. Saying that when I can afford it I shall get some therapy.

She was warm and sympathetic, a little quizzy but meaning well. It was a bad connection, our voices kept breaking up. I was relieved to be able to put the phone down.

The shock hit me harder than I had thought it would. Shock of disclosure in part. I haven’t spoken to anyone as yet who knew us as a couple.

He had written to her and that made me feel small and humiliated and suspicious. I trust J, she is gentle and wise and tactful. But it hurt, all the same.

He told her he felt that he had been very clumsy and that everything he said made matters worse. That made me flinch inside. A hackneyed hetero scenario. The simple baffled man not understanding the complicated hurt woman. Is there really no more enlightened and subtle way for men and women to relate?

And I feel a fool because I went in with eyes wide open. He is no better and no worse than most men of his age and generation. It makes me shrink inside to think of the misunderstandings and inevitability of the whole thing.

Smarting amour propre, I tell myself. Vanity piqued. Hurt pride.

But there is a horrible exposure and indecency and lie involved in the whole thing that makes me feel sick to my stomach. What we do when we think we are in love, what we do in unintentional cruelty and to justify ourselves. What happens when we don’t care enough. What happens when we don’t tell the truth.

Walked up to the library feeling almost queasy with shock. Feel the damn feelings, I kept telling myself. Feelings won’t kill you. Chose books as if sleepwalking. On the counters at the front there were vases of late winter proteas, dark red and spiked with silver. The mountain beauties of the Cape coastal ranges, proteas.

Protean shape-shifters, mutable and endlessly varied. How I fear rigidity and stuckness, the death of the spirit that leads to reification, a frozen posture, defensive and deluded.

Came back and there was Hamish the computer salesman wanting to talk with me about laptops. I don’t know what will work best at this point and I couldn’t think clearly. A poor kind of exchange.

The sun has come out, hot and making the snow on the mountaintops gleam brighter than ever. Why do mountains always look so much higher if there is snow on them? There are two spindly almond trees in flower further down the street. Yellow oxslips on the sports field.

Let me get over this and heal properly. Failed love has robbed me of a sense of self and I need to retrieve and glue together the pieces that got broken and fell somewhere out of sight.

The first day of spring, the beginning of September, my Libra birthday month. Breathing in deeply, sending oxygen and caring energies all the way down to the tired and aching heart chakras.

It will get easier, one of these days.