“We have to pull this one here out”, my dentist says smiling behind her surgical mask. “It’s not an emergency now, but it can create problems later on. So when you feel ready, let me know.”
I remember how the last wisdom tooth extraction went, about ten years ago or so. This elderly surgeon trying unsuccessfully to numb my pain as the infection in the tooth was preventing the anesthesia from doing its thing. Pulling and stopping to hug me and wipe the tears off my face, all this time telling me about a Turkish writer she liked and Leonard Cohen and concerts and what not.
“I’m sorry I’m crying”, I tell her all sweaty and red, “it’s just that it hurts so bad and I can’t help myself…”
“It’s ok, it won’t take much longer”, she says pushing her big boobs against my chest and neck and wrapping her right arm around my shoulders, pulling me close to her so that my tears land on her white robe.
So now, as I’m leaning back in the chair, noticing how the muscles in my arms and thighs are refusing to let go and keep building up tension, I’m telling myself I’m saying goodbye to the past to start a new chapter. The amazing one.
I’ve been saying goodbye to my wisdom tooth for about three weeks already and kept pouring in it rage, sadness, fear, anxiety and everything I’ve felt no longer serves me. I’ve been touching, liking, sucking, hitting it softly and repeatedly with the tip of my tongue to give it its last moments of pleasure before letting it go.
“Do you want to keep it?” my dentist asks holding it tightly in the shiny silver tongs. The extraction only took about five minutes and was painless and effortless. “I can clean it and give it to you, like I do with children…” she adds, her eyes smiling again above the light green surgical mask.
“No, thank you, I want to let go of it. I just want to see it and say goodbye. Can I have it?” I reply.
“Yes, of course”, she says and cleans it first so that I don’t freak out from the blood and gum pieces attached to it. When she finally places it in my hand, I feel so much compassion for the poor tooth. It looks bad. It’s got a big hole on one side and the big filling looks bad, too. But the most impressive is the root. So fragile, pink and still a little bit bloody, small pieces of flesh still holding on to it. This was stuck in my bone, I think as the tips of my fingers are touching it trying to soothe the pain it’s gone through. This is its first time outside my body. The first time out into the air. It’s like a birth, somehow.
“Thank you, dear tooth, thank you for serving me.” I say and my numb jaw is playing tricks on me as I’m trying to smile, my eyelid heavy and my lips a little bit confused. I tuck it in the white tissue and let it sleep.
“I’m feeling strange… Dreamy and out of this world. And I feel like I’m missing something…” I tell a friend the next day over breakfast at the school.
“Well, you know, teeth are the deposits of memories…” he says.
“I’m saying goodbye to the past. I put so many things in it…”
“It’s gonna take a few days to get used to the new situation. I felt the same when I had mine taken out. A feeling of absence. Physically I was ok, but emotionally it was strange. Another example of how nothing is randomly put in our bodies and everything has its place and purpose”, another friend who is a doctor tells me later on, so I no longer worry. I decide to be patient as attachments are dissolving and a new chapter begins.
When we’re holding our lover I think many of us want to be able to erase his/ her past entirely. We avoid asking too many questions about the past and don’t enjoy getting too much information about relationship history or sexual experience. But who would our lovers be without a past? Who do you think made him/ her who he/ she is today? It all started with the parents in this lifetime, sure. But it continued with lovers.
So if you’re having great sex, please remember to send your gratitude to all his/ her previous lovers for providing good training. They’ve done so much work so that you can now have a wonderful time and only have to make small adjustments instead of starting from scratch. The same work has been done on you. So be kind and cultivate gratitude. The past is over and done with. So that we can now fully enjoy the present.
The silver water is sending shiny sparks all around, glazing the trees and the grass and the morning runners. We’re silent. No words. I am stretching my tentacles, feeling the air between us, to check whether it’s vertical or horizontal and what temperature it has. My calves are sending signals and I ignore them. I’m bathing in the silence. Finally. No agitation. My solar plexus is quiet at last. Sometimes it whispers. Careful there, it says. Careful with this force you’re handling. The more I’m sweating, the happier I am. Has this city ever been so beautiful before?
Mă opresc la vitrina cu măsline și gândul îmi fuge pe nesimțite, lăsându-mă goală și nemișcată lângă coșul de cumpărături parcat cuminte lângă picioare.
– Ce vă uitați așa? mă-ntreabă zâmbind ușor încurcată o doamnă mai în vârstă din dreapta mea, mânuind cu dibăcie lingura cu coadă lungă pe care o tot umple cu măsline din toate recipientele și le golește apoi în caserola de plastic din mâna stângă.
– Aștept, îi răspund și-mi dau seama că zâmbetul meu o face să se fâstâcească. Zâmbetul și privirea pătrunzându-i până-n străfundurile ființei prin ochii albaștri, înconjurați de pliuri de piele uscată, în care machiajul de acum câteva zile s-a scurs ca o acuarelă.
– Mă scuzați, nu mai durează mult. Haideți că m-am pus aici și am ocupat tot locul… îmi răspunde și lingura prinde viteză în mâna ei noduroasă.
– Nu-i bai, nicio grabă, stați liniștită.
– De care vreți să vă luați? mă-ntreabă întinzându-mi lingura.
– Pastă iau.
– A, e foarte bună. Eu o amestec cu avocado, să nu fie așa sărată.
– Ce idee bună, îi răspund, nu m-aș fi gândit.
– Ia spuneți-mi, care sunt cele mai bune măsline? o a treia doamnă ni se alătură privindu-ne cu prietenie.
Cădem de acord că cele mai bune sunt cele maro și apoi gașca se sparge și fiecare își vede de cumpărăturile ei. Pășesc printre rafturile înalte, iar impul se dilată și se-ntinde, lungindu-se ca brațele unei caracatițe îmbrățișându-mă strâns și dându-mi apoi drumul ca să mă găsească din nou și tot așa, ca un iubit care mă simte noaptea lângă el și-mi amintește că sunt a lui. Și zâmbetul nu mă părăsește. Iar căldura din palme se dăruiește și mandarinelor și pâinii și ingredientelor pentru prăjitura de Crăciun.
Locking the metal gate behind me, I pull my big hood over my head, hiding from the cold and the light and the world. It’s a very cold morning in Bucharest and an important day for me. As I’m walking to work, chanting a mantra and looking for an Instagram photo opportunity, there’s this thought process going on in parallel. An analysis about my own role in my own life. Where am I heading?
Having left behind a few homes, some hotels, travel companions or mere stops on the road, I can feel the time for another change is approaching. When a place can no longer hold you, it spits you out. It’s like a birth. Painful, too, yes. You have outgrown the place. And, as we know, everything is temporary. So that’s no tragedy. It’s actually exciting. (I’m glad my house in Harmony Street can still contain me, though it rarely sees me anymore.)
“Are you happy there?” my 84 year old friend asks me about the place I seem to have outgrown.
“No…” I answer in all honesty.
“Well, then you have to leave. It’s as simple as that.” he replies and I feel that life is as simple as that, indeed.
“You’ve outgrown your old clothes, it’s time to move on”, Brendan Perry’s deep voice sounds in my head as my big hood comes off and my curls can breathe again the crisp morning air before walking through another gate – a magical one this time, that makes me invisible for mean people, who cannot see or hear me and therefore do not answer when I say good morning and cannot look me in the eye. It’s a magical power I possess.
I’m giggling behind my fluffy scarf and the hot tears in the corner of my eyes are painting soft grey traces in the shallow creases of my wrinkles, like playful fish tails swimming in the salty water.
“Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?” Nick Cave’s voice sings to me as I’m breathing the cold air around the lake in Herăstrău Park, this time with a running companion. It’s past 10 pm and we are running.
“Give me something I’m afraid to lose” Bruce Springsteen continues, sending sharp knives through my stomach. (Yeah, I often speak to myself in songs.)
While my body is happier and happier from the effort, I gradually start feeling this inner pull that’s creating a sort of distance as if to prevent a tragedy from occurring when you are at your most vulnerable time. Looking for flaws, for pretexts, for borders, conflicts and gaps. I try to ignore it and then to fight it and it still reaches out and scratches like sharp cat’s claws grabbing hold of your thigh as the hysterical animal is climbing your leg as if it were a tree. What do I do with this? I try to sweat it out of my system. I try to befriend it. I try to love it. I try to kill it. I try to work with it. I try to live with it.
“You gotta have patience with me”, I tell him as I’m running through the graveyard of my past relationships, trying desperately to find the exit. No matter where it’s taking me.
I walk around the room waiting for a message to pop up on the screen of my phone. I’ve got so many things to do and try to fool myself I actually care about them more than about anything else and I’m really terribly busy and I completely forget about what I’m actually looking forward to. As if I were trying to forget about a pizza delivery that’s running a bit late when I’m starving and there’s absolutely nothing in my fridge and I haven’t eaten for ages.
And then, when the message does pop up, I try not to grab my phone right away and keep busy at least a few minutes before opening it, reading it and writing a reply a few seconds later. Time seems to be stretching, tightly caught between my fingertips and my heart, like a piece of chewing gum I’m playing with. I’m always careful not to break it. Excitement does eat up calories. Anxiety is always hungry, too. And, a week later, what do you know? The scale is 2 kilos friendlier.
I must confess I wasn’t actually looking forward to watching the documentary about Nick Cave’s latest album. I hadn’t even listened to the album, to be perfectly honest. I knew it was much about the pain of losing his fifteen year old son last year. I knew he’d fallen off a cliff in Brighton. Didn’t know it was LSD. In November, right after I’d been in Brighton after my birthday.
Got on the train from London and I’m feeling so excited taking in the damp landscape as the train is cutting through fields and small towns in a more quiet and rural England. I can’t wait to get to the sea. A Romanian couple are talking loudly a few seats away and I’m feeling so self-sufficient in my quiet bubble, reading, writing and taking pictures.
In Brighton a friend is waiting for me. I met him in Bucharest in a pub one night a few years ago. We had a friend in common and later found out we were born in the same area – the Jiu Valley, Hunedoara, each from his small mining town. I met him once there, on a winter holiday. We went up on some hills together and licked a sweet, clear liquid off some naked tree branches.
He meets me at the Brighton station and then takes me on a walk along narrow streets lined with pubs and shops and I get my green leather bound diary from an antique book shop and my Rumi poetry book from this big fancy book shop. I can still remember the moment I found it and my fingertips touching it for the first time. Such great desire for this book. A lover seeking a lover. A few months later my friend writes telling me he’s found a nice, old, copy of Rumi’s and wants me to have it. I tell him I’ll wait for it till we meet again, so he can give it to me in person.
We make confessions and have a pleasant time as he’s taking me to the sea. Even before I step on the pebble beach and feel her smell, like a woman’s smell when she hasn’t showered for a day, my eyes are flooded and I look away for fear I might look stupid. But the sight of the sea does that to me every time. I suppose I should live next to her for a while to find my cure. Or just let her make me cry like this every time. As if I were meeting an old lover I could never fall out of love with.
“I have a surprise for you”, he tells me and walks me to what I recognize to be the Royal Pavilion, where a friend of his from the gay community lets us in before the huge crowd queuing at the entrance. You know, everybody knows everybody in the gay community. (Or rather everybody has known everybody. At least once.) Therefore, it’s like a big family, people help each other. So we have this wonderful, quiet and private tour and I am impressed and grateful. Her majesty feels she’s getting what she deserves.
“Do you know Nick Cave lives here?” I ask my friend, but I can’t remember his answer a year later. I’m thinking about Nick Cave as we’re having lunch in this Thai restaurant and then a beer in a queer pub and can’t help admiring the view. I wonder if I could actually recognize him if I saw him in the street. I’m thinking probably not.
Having left my friend in Brighton, after one more pint in a pub on the corner opposite the station, I am smiling alone in my blue seat on the last train back to London. “I love you”, I text my gay friend, but the text won’t go through and I’m left looking at the reflection of the luminous phone screen in the black wagon window. My body would like to lie down in the arms of someone loving and just let go. Still, I must be alert and awake and make my way back to my kindergarten friend’s house in London.
As I’m walking on my own to the cinema in Bucharest tonight, I pass by this loud tipsy couple speaking English. She’s way younger than him and Romanian, while he seems to be an American. Both are tall and lean and their movements seem a little bit disorganized and careless, zigzagging across the sidewalk and dodging various obstacles.
“Yeah, you know, because nobody’s perfect. Not even me”, she says and speeds up a few steps in front of him.
“Really? You’re not perfect?” he asks sounding genuinely surprised.
And I smile and walk on, checking out the Christmas lights on their first night. I was supposed to meet someone tonight and it got postponed. A long awaited encounter. So my stomach is still not very tense and I still don’t feel like I have anything to lose. It’s just a projection at this point. I’m a silent passenger walking among these people, under these lights, along these streets, in this cold. Nobody’s partner. Perhaps somebody’s dream. Still not met. I am anonymous. I can very well disappear. Only I feel so balanced and confident. There’s nothing that can shake me right now, as I am walking to the cinema.
“Most of us don’t wanna change, really. I mean why should we? What we do want is sort of modifications of the original model. We keep being ourselves, just hopefully better versions of ourselves. But what happens when an event occurs that is so catastrophic that we just change? We change from the known person to the unknown person. So that when you look at yourself in the mirror you recognize the person that you were, but the person inside the skin is a different person.” Kick Cave begins in his serious voice, perhaps a bit coarser and fainter than I used to know it. He’s sitting at the piano and the camera is moving around him and the strong contrast, black and white image infused with high pitched violin sounds quickly hypnotizes me and I lose track of who I was when I came to this place.
“Ah, Brighton! I was there. Right there. Brighton peer. Last year in November, after my birthday.” I lean and whisper in my friend’s ear and she looks surprised when she turns smiling to me.
And that sensation of being torn and shred to pieces comes back. Or the memory of it, rather. You know, when you feel you’ve freed yourself to the point of becoming nothing more than a piece of rag being blown by the wind and drifting aimlessly, unable to grab hold of anything stable.
“Somebody’s gotta sing the pain.” Nick says and I finally get it. Somebody’s gotta be here to represent the pain, the darkness, the hardship. Someone’s gotta validate these experiences and honor this part of life so that the darker side can have a voice and therefore can make room for us to perceive the lighter side, too and make the difference between the two. In a world of duality, light cannot exist without darkness. Nor can pleasure without pain. Or happiness without unhappiness. So we need these special representatives that offer creative media for the dark side to come to the surface and feel justice is being done. The same way we need representatives for the bright side. And ways to express both. I just think the darker positions sometimes are harder to fill in. At the same time, I also feel there’s a great danger it might actually be quite on the contrary.
“I shall never love again.” my friend in Istanbul confesses to me after his girlfriend left him. Again.
“Yes, you will, habibi. This is what you told me the day I first met you. And that was when I knew I would love you. You will love again. And it will be wonderful.” I tell him without any shadow of a doubt. “Do you wanna know how I know that? It’s because I have been there. Broken to pieces. Trembling and suffocating, crying and shouting with pain and crawling like a worm. And I will never stop loving. No matter what happens to me. My heart will always stay open. Always. Because it’s wonderful.”
“We decided we would be happy as a form of protest. We decided to be happy and our happiness would be an act of revenge, of defiance. And we would be kind. To ourselves and to the other people.” Nick Cave explains towards the end of his documentary.
And I remember that so did I. So why am I so afraid then? I need to keep reminding myself of the simple things, things I’ve been certain about and that fear makes me forget. My stomach seems to insist on coming down with gastritis. Simply because it finds it so romantic. I am not afraid of travelling alone to remote and hostile places. What if I run? I’m so good at running! I can just disappear. Before things get out of hand. Before I lose myself, before I become too vulnerable. Having nothing leaves nothing to lose. And all the possible freedom. I don’t actually need anyone, do I? No one to complete me. I am whole. Shams confirmed. Yet, I remember my decision. And I’ve decided to be happy. And to be kind. To the others and to myself. Not as a form of protest. But as a way of living. Inshallah.
My long pearl, aquamarine and sapphire earrings are dancing along my bare neckline, highlighting my red lipstick – a murder scene under merciless stage lights. The piles of soft snow in front surround four human standing statues stooping and then rising again slowly, their barely perceptible moves forcing us to squint and speak in low voices.
I panic when I can’t find my phone and go back to the cloak room to search for it desperately in the pockets of my coat. “Thank you!” I tell the lady holding my coat, but I’m actually talking to God again, wiping the shiny sweat drops off my forehead. Communication or the illusion of it is reestablished. My white phone, matching the snow on the stage is back, clutched by my graceful hand.
“Hey, wait a minute. Sit here and talk to me. Say something. I am your woman.” this drunk middle aged blonde shouts to this confused man dragging his feet through the white snow.
To put it very shortly, they have an affair in his hotel. They’re both married. “Very married”, she says. His wife calls several times. Eventually he is told there’s no need for him to return home anymore. He’s got two kids, too. “Do you love me?” the middle aged blonde asks. “Yes”, he answers hesitantly. “Very much?” she insists. “Yes”, he retorts. “You have to go home, you’ll be very unhappy here.”
All this time, this other couple, a younger and somehow ‘cleaner’, more authentic one, lacking the hesitations and attachments of the other one, are showing us what’s really going on, their real interactions. And I’m thinking we need that. A double showing people what’s really going on inside while we’re struggling for words or gestures. Too few of us ever take the time to look beyond hesitations, preconceptions, fears and pretexts.
I straighten up and my white pearls are softly bumping against my skin, my collarbones pushing from under the black blouse like dolphins pushing their backs from below the surface of the blue water. The sapphires and aquamarines lend my neck that watery feeling and if the tip of a tongue were tasting my skin right now I’m sure it’d pick up a faint salty trace.
Their love making is a swim through the piles of snow, a flight, a plunge into a white ocean, a conversation among muscles and bones and sweat. And in the morning it becomes nothing but a memory. For him. She completely forgets about it. So the next day their interaction puts on a clumsy gown over jerky moves.
Today I stumble upon this info about the way angler fish mate. In the depth of the ocean, so vast and dark, when a male picks up the pheromones of a female, he follows them as she’s flashing “her bioluminescent lure”. When he finds her, he bites a hole into her belly and he latches on and gradually their bodies fuse and their blood vessels join together, so the male starts taking all his nutrients from the female’s body. Therefore, the male does not swim on his own anymore, nor does he feed on his own or even see with his own eyes. And the organs that he no longer needs atrophy to the point that he becomes nothing more than a lump hanging from the body of the female, being fed by her body and providing sperm for her to spawn. They become one.
For us, people, that is gross and scary. We do not want that. So why do we still lament that we do not have that? We do not really want such fusion. And yet we look for someone to complete us, help us become whole. We look for someone to give up entirely who they are so that together we can become someone new. Someone to give us a good reason to finally commit suicide. Leave behind everything we used to be. Don’t we? So that we can start fresh. A totally new life.
We never find that because we do not really want that. None of us do. What we really should be looking for is to start a new life, if that is what our hearts say, regardless of our partnership status. And if someone does come along, I’m sure neither of us wants one to bite a whole into the other’s body and crawl inside, lose organs and identity and just provide something that’s missing. But rather to swim side by side. For as long as we share a common direction, similar rhythm and are good company for each other during the journey.
And so, by the end of the play, when the audience, struck by the freezing winter cold, are hesitant in showering the performers with their painful applause, my red lips promise to stop running and stop hunting illusions. Or confirmations, for that matter. They finally know their worth.
PS Reflections written on a tango playlist background and caused by attending “Winter” last night, written by Jon Fosse – a dance show on at the Nottara theater in Bucharest, directed by Mihai Maniutiu and choreographed by Andreea Gavriliu.
I put on my running clothes over a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt and give myself a pep talk to stir up my faded enthusiasm before shooting out into the cold evening. I am so angry, frustrated and puffed up that I can’t postpone this any longer without running the increasing risk of killing someone. I’ve never felt so much aggressiveness built up inside. And I need to sweat out the demons. Fifteen minutes later, I am back at the house. Frozen fingers and an icicle stuck in my throat. I’m determined to find a gym. It’s more a matter of mental than of physical health. And it’s urgent.
