everything. is everything
i’ll start with this.
today, out of the blue, there was a thunderstorm.
we took an early flight to london, then a four hour drive to mersea, the island town where he’s from. i like that he’s an island boy. we stayed with his mother and her husband. they were a really cute couple, very comfortable life companions. i met his younger brother ian, and had a nice english roast dinner that was pretty fantastic. i was a little shy but families tend to like me so it was okay and i was comfortable. i was ridiculously excited inside when his mom brought out photo albums while we were cleaning up. my god, he was a beautiful child.
we retired to the den where we watched bbc and talked of politics and extreme sports. seriously. his mother insisted i try some ginger ale with my whiskey, but it was warm so…you can imagine. i offered some to david and he feigned enthusiasm and said, mmmmm…that’s lovely. later that night, he asked me if i really enjoyed ginger ale with whiskey and i said, no, his mother had been so excited about it that i wanted to be polite. he said he was glad i told him because it saved me from 30 years of him putting ginger ale in my whiskey.
we left the next day after a huge breakfast of bread, ham, cheeses, and meat pies, the experience probably giving me a lifelong love for milk tea. we headed to the home of one of his best childhood friends and his wife in the town of colchester.
the place felt deep in the country, and we pulled up next to a chicken pen. i kind of really enjoyed that. ben greeted us and noticed we were tan. and you’re really tan!, was the first thing he said me, which i thought funny and bizarre because he said it in a way that sounded like he knew me and was surprised i’d gotten so tan since the last time he saw me. he was the artistic type, the guy who belonged on a beach, whose strength radiates out in a resoundingly masculine way. i could tell he was also a gemini. his wife, kaz, was bright and airy like a butterfly caught in a windstorm, gently infusing her environment with electricity. their house was from the 16th century, held together with rich, fossilizing beams and new discoveries of hung knick knacks scattered around every room. it was like some magical treehouse antique store, where discovered objects allow you to travel to your past. b
ut then at night, they told us the room where we’d be sleeping used to be where they stored the bodies from the bubonic plague. i was kind of amused by that turn of events.
we went out where we introduced everyone to sake bombs. i efficiently got a room full of strangers drunk. and then i watched them and i tried to understand them.
ben is a vegetarian but he eats seafood. david thought kaz was a vegetarian but she had mentioned to me that she eats meat. i’m not sure what all this means. ian is somewhat hardheaded, but he’s soft at heart. i would be surprised if he wasn’t a good person. he brought up his exgirlfriend and everyone kind of groaned. he still holds a candle for her, and it made me really hope she’s a good person so she will be kind to him.
there was more beer at the restaurant, and then on to a drum & bass club that was overrun by teenagers. my favorite was the fat one in glasses with the bouncing tits. he looked like that kid in stand by me, but i was kind of proud of him, for getting on that dance floor and having the courage to follow his friends and try to grind a girl.
then something happened at the club, something small but resounding. i can’t figure out the energy of this town, so i didn’t get involved. there was something else there, the overlap of another reality, and then i saw something that i probably shouldn’t have seen. but i didn’t want to get involved so i detached myself from it. i couldn’t believe when david became sad later. i was determined to hide my hurt, even though a person always knows when there’s a room inside someone else into which they may never enter, often for their own good.
i was kind of relieved to go the next day. not because i didn’t have an amazing time and enjoy the company, but because i didn’t want to think about things anymore.
we drove the hour and a half to london without really speaking. i think i was probably the creator of that, since i was deep in debate with myself and wanted to sort out my head alone.
the next few days were more stable. i met his newlywed older brother and his wife and headed to their adorable home for a bbq. again, efficiently got a room full of strangers blitzed with sake bombs. they were amazing people, very funny and easy-going. i learned that when you toast someone, you look them directly in the eye and do not waver.
everything was going well, when i enountered david’s saturn-conjunct-moon (there are only two people i’ve met who have this and generously, they’ve both taught me a lot about this). i confronted it visualizing the mood-slaying of the princess of swords, the image of myself i decided to go into this trip with. (these were the symbols that helped me visualize what energies were at play, not like i treat my life like dungeons and dragons or some shit). what this means is basically, some men are so afraid of or conflicted by their emotional vulnerability, that they can be very emotionally reactive to defend it. often this comes from a hard, demanding male authoritative figure in childhood who caused a person to repress his emotions, so that the handling of emotions is inconsistent and can often come in an outburst of strong emotional sometimes inappropriate reactions. sometimes if the mother had the dominant role in the household, it would signify the mother as the source. regardless, emotions can be repressed until something triggers a past trauma that causes the person to roar like someone snuck up on their behind with a hot cattle prod.
in this case, i think he was feeling sad about me leaving and about potentially having to miss my birthday because of work, but he got sulky andwhen i tried to open up the subject and he didn’t want to talk about it, i just ended up purposely ignored it. which caused a quiet, restrained argument in our favorite place, the subway. i told him to relax, that i promise we’ll talk but we should do it where we’re free to talk. i laughed and told him everything was okay and he looked relieved because i wouldn’t lie. back at the hotel, i explained to him, just because i’m not highly emotive, doesn’t mean i don’t care. you can’t try to provoke me to check if i get emotional as proof that i care, because it’s just going to make me mad. i told him that it would be easy for me to get emotional and we could go head to head, but the reason i try to stay calm and stay focused that we’re on the same team, is so i don’t get mad and say or do anything that can’t be taken back.
i told him that if he relaxes, we can work things out, but he can’t get emotionally reactive to the point where he’s completely wrapped up in being upset, because his being upset doesn’t change the fact that i’m upset. you can’t bully a person out of being upset, i told him. but we can talk about it and figure out what happened together so that we can get back on the same page.
i think he was embarrassed and i really didn’t want him to be because everything was okay. i know sometimes with emotions, we just freak out.
i ask him, remember at the beginning of the trip, i told you we were going to have a big argument two days before i leave? yes, he says. it’s true. i wasn’t really serious when i said it, just a throwaway comment, but somewhere i had a feeling that two days before would be when the sadness over the separation would hit. and here we were, two days before i was to leave, having the necessary conflict to achieve more understanding.
i think a woman can help heal some aspects of this type of trauma by allowing a man to back his emotions down safely, once he realizes that he feels exposed, so that when he calms down he can hopefully understand what happened happened in a safe, protected place and that no one has judged him. i really think if men had a safe place to feel more comfortable expressing their vulnerability, insecurities and their perceived weaknesses, they would feel so much better about themselves, giving them more inner integrity to become much better leaders.
the rest of the trip was good, even when we said goodbye. but then i could already feel my memory loss creep in once we were separated in the airport, and it only deepened once i was nestled inside the safe confines of my home base. what is anything in this life, but part cold, stone reality and part projected illusion? if you focus hard enough, can you interchange the two?
when i’m alone, the question i really face myself with is…am i 100% willing to commit to a belief that magic exists?