My marriage of 13 years ended in January. I still love my ex-husband because it would be impossible not to love someone who was so close to me, for so long. I don’t think I still love him the way a wife loves a husband, but I love him deeply, like family and someone closer, more intimate than family. He has remained himself throughout his hardships, a part of him astoundingly clean, uncynical, and he deserves to breath easy, relax into the years of his life, be happy. I want him to be happy. I still feel the need to share things with him (funny things, interesting things he would enjoy), and I miss being touched by him. I miss waking up next to his warmth, feeling the belly of our cat wrapped around my feet. So, there’s that.
There’s also the usual taking stock of my life and wondering how much of an empty space there will be once I’m gone, and how many people will really miss me.
I have long and cherished and deep and caring friendships, but I wish I had more friends. I wish I had travelled more. I still wish sometimes for a life with more unpredictability. I miss the violent beauty of more intense years, when I was for example a rural teacher in Mexico, in the mountains, and the world would sneak up on me and take my breath away with a moment of light and clouds, and an oak. The same simple beauty sneaks up on me now, in the city, but my routines are more dependable. I find beauty, or let beauty find me, and I am moved by it, but there is something about navigating unfamiliar places that makes us more aware of everything, the endings of our nerves are more open and our heart pounds faster, more frequently. Sometimes I really miss that, and feel the urge to do something else, somewhere new, but I don’t know any more if that’s a creative or a destructive impulse.
I rent a tiny studio apartment that should fit someone a few sizes younger than me, I don’t own a car, I don’t even have a driver’s license. I don’t have a brilliant career. I have no children. But I’m not unhappy. I have lived a life with enough meat in its bones. I don’t regret it. I feel awake. My soul is alive. My soul, in general, breaths easy when I’m alone, reading, painting, navigating my own brain. My soul takes long breaths when I take long walks with good music pounding through my headphones, so I get to see the world with a soundtrack and check how the songs and the fleeting images of the city and its streets, alleyways and parks seem attuned with each other, or dissonant.
Except my soul by itself is not enough. I re-read recently “The Grapes of Wrath” and I’ve been thinking about Casey, the preacher who is no longer a preacher, when he says he couldn’t find his own soul or any revelation while alone in nature. He didn’t receive his revelation in the desert, he received his revelation in jail, amongst his fellow human beings. The soul he needed to find wasn’t locked inside him but connected like a stream to a river with all the other suffering souls of the world. I care about that river of souls as an abstract force that drives us to fight for collective meaning and redemption. But I care even more about the way we bridge the gap between our individual soul and other unique, irreplaceable souls. There’s danger in that space. To let yourself be known by someone new. To try to really know somebody. To care, not just for the faceless destiny of all humans, but for a specific face, a constellation of freckles and tiny scars, a voice that gets deeper or softer when it is touched by longing, or happiness.
It came up on the news that there was an explosion in a highway, and 2 people were killed. Suddenly, I don’t know why, I imagined one of those people was someone in my life I don’t really know yet and would like to know better, not someone already close, but someone at a safe distance from me, who could be closer. I imagined the possibility of those connections suddenly shut down and squandered. I got nervous and only relaxed as I took inventory of the people that stand like unexplored promises at a medium or distant range from my life and confirmed they were okay, their public personas replying to messages in chats, posting stuff on social media. It was a relief to know the space between us was still there, unknown, full of possibility. I wonder though if, even without death, even while we are all alive, we’ll go ahead and waste that space, anyway. Curating our social media posts, building invincible public versions of ourselves, reacting to each other in emojis, being cool. We walk down each other’s streets and stay at the threshold of our houses, talking about our jobs and activities and vacation plans, making clever comments, and we don’t go inside the house, we stay on the side of ourselves that’s fine and uncomplicated, we don’t reveal the messy rooms, the mistakes, and the sadness, we don’t cry in front of each other. A lot of our relations live on that threshold, without crossing it. We have close friends already, to cry with, and to the rest we offer a deferential choreography of steps, dancing around our doorways, never going inside. The truth is, maybe in most cases there’s no bridge and the polite dance is all we’ll ever have. Connections are infrequent, magic gifts. To leave any gift like that unopened seems like an immeasurable waste. The hardest adjustment to Canadian culture is how much people respect each other, and each other’s thresholds, keeping polite distances. Maybe it’s because even in Mexico I always acted like a polite Canadian, making sure I wasn’t going where I wasn’t invited, and I wasn’t staying longer than expected, and I wasn’t getting too close too soon and I wasn’t making anyone uncomfortable. I needed my fellow Mexicans to put their arms around me in an impulse, shorten my name with familiarity (call me Ji, or Jime, instead of Jimena), and hold my hand into their houses. I can’t be like I was any more, in this country. Maybe it’s my turn to be the Mexican, among the Canadians, even though that seems foreign to my own character, and difficult.
I write texts like this one to catalogue my fears and find a route to move across them. Sometimes it works. It takes time, but eventually I’ve changed my life when it needed changing. That’s how I ended in the mountains of Michoacan and that’s how I ended living in a new country, that’s how I fell in love, and that’s how later I found the strength to walk away from my marriage. I used to dream about Africa. I used to think I needed to explore the world. But that isn’t so scary, any longer. What is scary is to cross the distance I carry with me and around me, to jump out from the inertia of the expected social choreographies into unknown, fragile ground. That ground doesn’t exist until you step into the space between you and another person, the results can’t be planned or predicted, the new ground can turn out solid and rich enough to plant a garden, or even a multitude of trees, or the ground can disappear under your shoes and let you fall on your face. You can’t step into that territory without being vulnerable.
And yet, every person is a whole universe. There’s so much to explore. I want to be an astronaut.
