994 DAYS LEFT : Love Astray Awry Alight Alive and Askew

I want to say once and for all because pride always prevented me from saying it - Silvana cheated on me and chose leaving over staying with me.  There.  I created this entire bullshit scheme and story, a dramatic refusal to accept facts involving death and christ-like resurrection, all to avoid dealing with the shame that the first woman I chose to really think I fell in love with and spent time with was a whore who couldn't stop herself from sleeping with other people.  

Was she really a whore, did you love a whore?  No of course not, that is bitterness and broken heart.

How many disappointments with love?  

Lori Hoff - High school beauty who I let myself get infatuated with - yes, I wrote love letters to her in French maybe yes, and I stuffed them in her locker.  Mr Anonymous.  And eventually it all came out and of course she didn't love me or wouldn't want to.  It was like some stupid John Hughes movie before they were ever written.  Boy falls in love with the impossible girl and she doesn't even know he exists.  The good thing you would say about Lori Hoff is that she was never cruel about it.  She had a good heart despite her beauty.  

Helen Monopoli - she never broke my heart on purpose - I just let myself love someone who lived too far away.  She never said no, never did anything wrong and remember how you used to lie there in pain every night listening to the record of the ocean waves on the beach and think about her coffee and cigarette tongue first thing on my last morning at Papoose Pond in Maine?  Grinding in the sand, wanting to make love to fuck whatever so bad that I could never let it go in my head?  That first girl who smoked and drank coffee in my life.

Silvana  (Paris, Silvana Paris, is there no irony in that where you find yourself in Paris but not with Silvana rather a different Argentine?) - well I saw...but why did I fall in love?  Her accent?  Sure.  Her teaching me words in Spanish yes of course, the mystery.  The idea of water ballet and shaved pussy and you thinking that all Argentines were like her and me thinking that because she was catholic or from a catholic country she would never have sex with me and yes, making love to her or with her was always the greatest moment of my life by crikey.  She had that way about her where all her passion was compressed into that one moment each time of making love.  It is no wonder I fell into her honey pot and could not pull my way back out.  

that is all too simplistic.  She opened up a new world to me. She was mystery as well, exotic, the Argentine which, for a man who had spent his childhood dreaming of distant places and different cultures, always focused on Europe but here, out of nowhere, just after Malvinas, came this Argentine, at the time of Guillermo Vilas and his fullback thighs....Argentina had not yet been diluted then back in the very early 80s, fuck, nothing had been diluted yet - ok, yes, you could argue rightly that Argentina had already been tainted by the fantasy of Peron and by the reality of military juntas and the Disappeared and the atrocities commited against their own people, probably by puppets of a horrific United States of America hell bent on controlling the world.  But it was a feeling, post-Malvinas and once I met Silana, everything and anything Argentine, I fell in love with.  

She was my shot at the title, right?  Remember that photo you took of her when she was modeling furs?  What of it?  She was a model, she was beautiful.  She was fully bodied and passionate.  She was a woman by 18.  A real woman and when you met her again thirty years later she was even more and more deeply a woman, a mother then, a philosopher, an intellect, a fucking power.  A force.  An explosion, when you think of her, of beauty and naivité despite a sharp harsh rounded reality, an ugly reality.  

I was a blip in her fucking life until I wasn't again.  Someone forgotten in the long slope downward. I was not in her universe yet I kept her in mine as an ideal, a dead ideal, a past that I could never return to but more than anything, an ideal, a perfume of love, a symbol, a logic.  She was in every gesture for decades until slowly ever so slowly she was just a mention, a blip, never forgotten but a distant star you could no longer see with the naked eye and by then I was healed and by then I was able to come to Paris to start over, to find the new ideal, the new woman of my dreams and that is where I found Kattia.

DO I think it was mere coincidence? Of course not.  I remember deciding one Saturday morning in a park in Bristol, reading a Croatian female writer that I was done worrying about British women, that they could never appreciate me because they didn't care about literature or languages your specialities and that you would find a woman without kids in her 40s who still looked young like me and I would find love again and it would be in Paris;  That is why I didn't go back to Utrecht.  I knew that I was looking for another brunette again.  A real brunette with dark eyes.  

And there I meet Kattia, randomly, outside le Baron Rouge.  A place recommended by Viktor Car, who I met through a writer's online café.  Without being with Shari, I would probably never have been signed up to the café I think but certainly most certaintly without having been in the café I would never have met Viktor and without having met Viktor I would never have been in Baron Rouge and sure, the night I chose to be in Baron Rouge was my own, just like the night Kattia chose to be there with Cristina was her own...she hardly ever goes there, what prompted it?  What had her there?  And what were the odds that you would go out there and smoke your cigarette right then at the same time that Cristina was smoking and Kattia had joined her and that I too would be out there and ok, something conspired to bring us all together there and you could call that maybe fate but from there it was all the two of us working our way into each other.  

If life about trying to recapture the illusion of love, that moment which seemed once like perfection?  No it is not about that but it is interesting to think about how relationships rot or rust or lose their way and if only that couple could remember what they thought back then before it had become blackened and tainted, they could find that innocence or lust or something that no longer exists between them.

But is it always then too late the moment the couple try to recapture what was already lost or had been buried by living?  By arguments, by bitterness?  Is there a complete circle possible or is it always a finite line like time?  How many times does a relationship come full circle?  

Maybe the history of relationships of everyone, told from both sides would be interesting.  

Ask everyone you know of a history of relationships and to see if a pattern was ever established and by relationships apparently I am talking about love relationships.  

Silvana and I used to Rub noses like esquimos - this was our language.  Do I remember our first kiss? Sure I do of course I do. She had a broken leg and was on crutches, how awkward but nothing awkward.  I loved her with all my heart and this was back in the day when my heart had not been blackened.  This was when my heart was whole.   She did not blacken it for me.  You mother did that maybe.  The family and the distance and the absence of love.  Show love for sister who never leaves or left their side.  You never knew love, unconditional or otherwise.  

But Silvana, some of the most beautiful moments of your life.  Up until something else?  No, they still rank up there.  Even though most of them are the distant past but even the strange magic of being in Spain, of lying there on the floor of someone else's empty flat drinking wine and talking and listening to the rain storm thirty years or so later.  The savages in us both.  The love, the love.  I never loved anyone like I loved her.  Even thirty years later.  So why didn't I stay with her?  Why did I not follow her?  Because by then she was burdened with children and she would have thrown it all away for love but I did not want to risk it.  I didn't trust her of course and frankly, I was not wrong to not trust her.  Her love was not trustworthy, maybe she was a witch.  

God, I was in love with her.  What does it mean to say it like that?  Nostalgia?  Be grateful for crissakes.  I had a chance to be with her again in Spain and in Argentina what, 30 years later maybe more and maybe I didn't take it out of fear but maybe I saved myself more heartache as well because although she is more passionate or was more passionate than Kattia, Kattia always has had something different, something I could have faith in.  Kattia, I felt anyway, would never cheat on me. She loved me.  Loves me.  Loved me, hard to say.  Kattia used to joke about being a witch too.  Argentine witches, the pair of them.  One good, one bad, one white magic one black magic.  

From Wales Online about a witch casting love spells:

She added: “About six months ago, there were loads of people wanting love spells. But my grandfather told me if you use witchcraft and make somebody fall in love with you, it’s a curse you place on yourself.”

“He’s right, because you don’t know whether they really love you, or it’s just because of the spell.”

Does it mean that I'd been in love?  What does it mean in the context of anyone and anything else?  What is the meaning of Shari?  Shari was the ferryman to get you across the Atlantic back to Europe where you belonged.  I never loved her, never could love her.  I tried in the beginning.  She seemed loveable but she wasn't really.  She was distant and so fucking self-obsessed.  So fucking self-obsessed.  She was fun to hang out with but let's face it, yes, she was good to look at as well but always too skinny and unsure.  Like a colt learning how to walk.  You grew to love her in a different way in the same way you grew to love Marni and both of them had bad character flaws?  Really?  And I have none is that what I am trying to imply?  No.  Just that some people have flaws that are more obvious than others.  For example, what is Kattia's flaw to the casual observer?  She has none.  What about to me right now?  I live with her, what are Kattia's flaws other than having a hard time holding a job all of the sudden or maybe for always and you didn't know because she always quit before she got sacked, I dunno.  

Kattia has no obvious flaws.  Let's be honest.  You are looking for them.  She has flaws that I learn of intimately - she is quick to anger (passion) she is weaker at times than she lets on but this is not a flaw.  Her goodness FAR outweighs anything else - her happiness, her optimism, her sometimes reductive simplicity, consumerism.  This is the extent of it.  Her love, by god, her love is all-encompassing to one degree but to another it is not.  She wants to keep her distance but to keep me close. She wants to be worshipped but wants to have to surrender her nothing herself.  This is not a flaw that one would see from the outside.  

My flaws are obvious the minute I open my fucking mouth.

But mostly when I think about what her flaws are I think about why I love her.  Her interest in beauty, in the beautiful things of life, the reaffirmations.  She is so singularly different from you who is negative and bile.  But you were not negative and bile when you first met her, were you?  No.  You were filled with adoration like a child because all of Paris was new to you, all of your love for her was new to you, the passion, the sex the fucking the eating the drinking of champagne of quality everything was an explosive passion and where did it begin to diminish?  Because she created distance?  No, when she started finding flaws in you - when you started to see the contradiction between the flaws that she was pointing out in your (ie seeking out the negative) versus her usual treatment of life, seeking out the beauty and the hope and love?)

Why didn't I get the same treatment, the benefit of doubt that humanity got?  Because I was close to her?  Do I now have to conceal my true self or alter my true self?  I don't want to do either because it is a compromise and I am stubborn but the truth is, I would do anything maybe to have those moments back.  And yet they are not lost she is right there sleeping in the back room.  She fucked my head up with bad sex or her inability to stay focused - you might say in a pessimistic moment that her inability to reach an orgasm is an inability to stay focused and that inability to stay focused is what caused her to lose her last job so what now work and orgasms?

I was meant to be talking about love gone astray and starting with bitterness about Silvana and moved to the end of the pantheon with Kattia. 

Silvana, unlike any other, was that quicksilver through the fingers.  Every time.  My relationship with her always had the clock ticking, right?  Remember that, adding to the urgency?  The one year and one year only?  The clock ticking and remember how I thought about her already gone at one point in that restaurant or café where we were and she got up to go to the bathroom and I looked at her empty chair and thought to myself one day this will be real, the emptiness.  It haunted me before it even happened and not a self-fulfilling prophesy but a reality which perhaps lent an urgency and when you were in Spain with her, in Bilbao, twice, it was magic as well, limited time, compressing all that love into that one moment.  Same as showing up in Rosario suddenly, on the other side of the fucking world and spending what, a day and a night of magic curious magic with her?  

She was the greatest love of my life and yet I did not choose her when I could have.  I chose Kattia because there was something about Kattia that seemed more human, less savage, less dangerous.  I thought at the time it was simply because I loved her more but maybe it was instinctual as well.  Not just self preservation but that there were other lessons to be learned from Kattia which I have not yet learned but am still learning and with Silvana it would have simply been relearing a bad lesson which was that her life was a bordel of complications and she could never ever truly be trusted.  Not because she confessed that she'd had ten abortions or that her father shot himself in the head while he was lying in bed with her and her mother.  You see?  I knew there was something in there very dangerous another world of black magic and that was her allure, that black magic.

So if the wizard of OZ is of any use it is to distinguish yes, the good witch from the bad witch, the one who causes you heart ache and the one that heals your heart and this of course is the basis, without you ever having known it, to find that bookend Argentine love, that safer love, that one that wouldn't hurt you and to be fair, Kattia hasn't hurt me, not intentionally.  She has hurt me with petty things like words but she did not betray me. And did you never wonder how you betrayed her instead?  Yes I did.  I wondered all the time and decided long ago that we were far too far along to ever go back now.  Lies can become the truth over time, everyone knows that.  They distill, diminish in importance, become their own illusion.  

***

Citizen KANE:

Jedediah Leland : You don't care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love 'em so much that they ought to love you back. Only you want love on your own terms. Something to be played your way, according to your rules.

Kane: “Toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows.”

***

I  went all this way and never talked about Alexandra Sangmeister, another of them.  A shame because while my relationship with her was rather brief it was pretty intense, right?  She insisted on having an AIDS test before sex and I refused for a long time because I didn't care, I could have sex with other girlfriends, I wasn't or hadn't comitted to Alexandra.  

Try and remember why not.  

She never reached out to me until I was living in DC not just in the suburbs for one.  But ok, once I was there in DC then she became available.  I just remember that first night meeting her at a party and then going back to her flat and sleeping with her fully clothed I think and with her television stuffed with teddy bears.  

We went out drinking like buddies I think.  How did we get more intense?  I cannot remember.  I remember dating Deirdre at the time, USA Today jounralist writing about Generation X and Douglas Coupland and going to parties where she interviewed people for her long-ongoing article.  Anyway, Alexandra I dunno....I just remember that one day I got tested and was clean and she had the whole flat lit in candles, the entire flat and it was magical, christ, how could that have ever fallen to the wayside?

But we became exclusive before that.  I can't remember if it was her idea or mine.  I was quite happy with my entourage of women.  I had the world by the balls as far as I was concerned.  Earning well, working full time, long hair, Doc Martens, mind, reading literature, writing poetry, singing and playing in bands, doing it all on the very low scale...

I remember during that period of time seeing a movie about Dorothy Parker about suicide or about talking about suicde, not enough, never enough...Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle and I remember feeling so depressed about it and maybe even telling Alexandra and maybe something around then, it is all blurry, a poetry reading she came to maybe yes...all of it....

Every little detail was a blur.  Her nervous laughter, her working for caterers.  You thinking you were in love with her.  Making love making love.  Getting high in her rooftop house overlooking the Washington Zoo and you, stoned alone in her flat, with her cat, looking at a bird together and the cat turning to you and talking to you in cat, that you remember, something about the bird in the tree, I want it so bad, something.

And your time with her was limited as well because she was fucking off eventually to Panama to the jungle or something and so you decided for some reason that you would fuck off as well only this time to Prague.

So Alexandra, in a way, was linked to Prague which was another element of your life which had nothing to do with the Argentines.  

The two of you went to Europe together - the idea was that you would see a bit of it together before she went off to Panama.  This was in the days way before the internet, the days when people were far away they could only hope to write letters to one another, no fucking social media existed and in a way you could say those were the good old days when you had to wait for something or actually learn something before you had all the facts, fake or real, at your fingertips, yes the good old days. (just like you said to Kattia yesterday the good old days being when the supermarket gave out plastic bags or paper bags fuck, even had people bagging your groceries FOR you, do you remember that?  Fuck.  Anyway I am straying.

So yes, I remember we went to Amsterdam first.  I had my bass with me.  (I'd bought a bass and learned how to play a bass oh yes, because of another great failed love which I won't go into here because the deeper I get the deeper I get but yes, Kathleen Jaron jesus...) I remember Alexandra and I were on pins and needles about getting our passports or maybe it was just me because there was a government shut down over the winter and finally got them in time some how and ended up with two of her old friends, a couple in a group house in Amsterdam and we stayed there and had fun as far as I can remember only sex somehow became an issue and I blew up and left her there high and dry in Amsterdam and took a fucking bus right to Prague because I was like fuck it, no sense bothering we are all going to be separated eventually.

Who knows how but when I got to Prague I somehow managed to phone Alexandra in Holland I think and she was on her way to Paris for crissakes but after she would take a bus to Prague and you would reunite, jesus, how melodramatic.  I remember being in that communist hotel in Prague and being so fucking relieved because yes for what the 13h to 6h drive to Prague in bus (17 hours straight) was hell had been hell and separation was killing me and when I got to Prague knowing absolutely nothing other than Cedok and I found a hotel and called Amsterdam and there she was thank god thank god I was so fucking happy as if Silvana had never fucking existed, thank god - and I got to talk to her and we were all so sorry that it'd gone haywire and she was going to Paris but she would come thereafter right to Prague.  

And she did and I met her like a puppy at that same bus depot.  Snuck her into my post communist hotel which I have no idea how I was paying for it but yes, I must have had some money saved up who knows from working for Nickelsporn, I have no idea how but I did...anyway...maybe i even lived with Alexandra in her treetop flat near the zoo in DC before it was time to go that is also quite possible.

Anyway, Prague was a dream a lovely dream and what happened?  I found the youth hostel, dropped off my bass and we (Alexandra and I) bought plastic rings (which eventually you threw away a year or so later into a river because she no longer wanted to be with you) and made ourselves some sort of love ceremony in front of the Astronomical clock in Prague...what else do I remember about being in Prague with Alexandra?  Nothing.  Nothing?  Did we go to the opera once, maybe.  I took her to my now favourite cave pub where I had found the jester and found the guy who got me microdot and yes, everything was crazy from basically the first night on oh yes, I remember Joe's restaurant, having met some guy in DC who had lived in Prague and who had worked there and that was going to be my salvation I was going to work in that restaurant but it never came to be....anyway, I don't remember where we went, what we saw...jesus, just the clock and the rings...fuck, the vapors all erased from the time that I lived there later alone.

Later we went to Italy.  What do I remember?  Assissi oh yes, Saint Francis of course, throwing himself naked into snow banks to ward off sexual desire because yes, the big joke was how was such a sex crazed person like myself going to stay celibate and faithful during the long separation when she was in Panama and I was in Prague...yes we stayed in Assissi and we got drunk one night ordered three bottles of wine with dinner, could probably still smoke at the table yes of course and then she threw up on someone's Mercedes in the street later on...and I remember the hotel we stayed in (jesus, now I just remembered another love story, Claudia Scala, you see how I have been blessed?)

Anyway, we were in Italy and in Assisis and I remember she fell ill for some reason and had a great fever and I thought she was going to die...I remember that in that same hotel there was a bar downstairs and maybe we drank in there from time to time and there was a cop in there who hung out in there in full uniform and I remember being scared of him for some reason like I could be arrested...I remember that we ran out of money or something, or she ran out of money and we had to wait there for days and days because money had to be wired to her in order for her to be able to pay for tickets to get the train out....

I don't know where we were supposed to go.  I know we ended in Rome but we were somewhere else I don't know where, a beautiful countryside village maybe in Tuscany where the only hostel available separated the females from males and we couldn't be together which was a tragedy but then we conspired to wake up early together, go for a long walk before anyone was up, find a secluded place and there we made love like never before in the nature.  I remember too that she was on top and that had been unusual but the sunlight of dawn breaking through her fucking me rather than the other way around so what?  Fucking at Dawn outdoors.  If you put it like that, Tantric Love at Dawn (no not trantric because we had to hurry out of fear of being caught and it was not even the first time we had done that weirdly - as it turns out, the more I think about Alexandra the more mysterious and wonderful she seemed...)

What I remember most is it ending in Rome, her getting on the train to to to the airport and you chasing after it and her shouting I love you I love you I love you out the window as the train pulled away.

No sense thinking about six months later reuniting after all those pangs and pains and not getting along at all and the plan originally had been that you both move to SF where her twin brother lived and then you couldn't get along, too many changes all at once and you ended up going to NYC instead and staying with Marni until you got sorted....