A long and lean woman stood naked in the doorway. The faint light from the kitchen outlined her silhouette casting the rest of her in shadow – almost spectral in the 3am night just before she came back to bed. Later, this same woman, someone I once dated, was with me as I submitted fake papers for a job interview or mortgage or something official. She was with me the night before when we bought the fake papers at a vendor’s table at an arts fair in a theater lush with the reds and gold and black of a magic show. What neither of us had anticipated was that the gentleman examining the papers, the gentleman who could have been a French inspector from a black and white film or a train conductor dressed in his coat and hat and stopwatch on a chain, had also been at the theater and had seen the very same papers we presented. He recognized the faded ink stamp in the top right corner. He knew these were fakes. This all took place in a bright and yellow room with lots of natural light where a different ex-girlfriend and her friends were patiently waiting for me to finish up this business – she was doing me a favor, we had already imposed for a few hours, and they were giddy to get on with their day. I’d say these were fever dreams, but I haven’t had a fever.
It’s mid-afternoon on a gray Sunday. An occasional bluster of wind clutches to hold on to what’s left in Winter’s pocket. I’ve split my morning between reading, writing, and laundry. The writing hasn’t been very good. A few scraps and lines here and there. I attempted a poem about my morning ambitions: clean out the basement, throw away the ripped coat, plan a trip to the beach, take a job in a far away city, flirt with a woman whose profile reads, “if it doesn’t bring you income, inspiration, or orgasms, it doesn’t belong in your life,” put away some books, wash the sheets because I’ve been sick, find a fountain by a foreign cafe and toss in a coin rubbed shiny with hope. The joke, at the end of the sketch/poem is that I’m going to be singularly focused on several things at once, but first I’ll take a nap and it’ll be the best nap I’ve ever had – after which I’ll start in earnest.
Among the things I’ve contemplated this morning is what Shakespeare might have meant when he wrote “all the world’s a stage.” I was thinking about how everything is, on some level, performance – and we spend much of our lives looking for an appreciative audience. How does that change when we’re the intended audience – when what we do is mostly for the self? We go about our lives, telling stories from our past, performing at our job or the bar or on a date. With everyone, a different role, a different slice of who we are.
Amidst the reading and writing, I paused to consider an incident. I was thinking about the internal struggles so many people (myself included) carry around with them and into their relationships. I was thinking about the lost opportunities in getting to know people on those deeper levels. My ex wife and I seldom talked about our pasts – we, like everyone, had our various traumas. Unfortunately, we never really connected over them. I had a friend who would occasionally talk about how awful her second marriage was and how abruptly it ended – yet she avoided talking about how that impacted her current approaches to dating. I could see how she kept people at a distance and how she avoided deeper conversations with her partners. Lost opportunities. Sometimes because we’re afraid of the answers and sometimes because we ask the wrong questions.
The incident I was reflecting on was from early in one of my relationships. I can remember the setting – we were at her place, it was a weekend, and she had asked if she could go and call her nieces and nephews (from her marriage). I remember her walking up the stairs to make the call. I think I sat and read on the sofa with the dog. It was important to her to not lose touch – at least with that part of the family. I’m not sure I had strong feelings about it one way or the other.
Thinking back, I appreciated her asking, but I wonder what type of guilt, if any, she might have felt in that moment. What I mean here is that regardless of how I felt about it – and she was trying to make sure I was ok with it – a more productive conversation would have been about how she felt about it. When relationships end, we lose a piece of ourselves but also our sense of how we fit into the lives of others. In the beginning of relationships we’re often guarded, protective, and/or embarrassed of our pasts – and it’s taboo to go there with a new partner. It seems that sometimes, when we ask permission to do something, we’re actually looking to give ourselves permission to do something: grieve, remember, or connect with that part of the self. And permission is both the right and wrong word choice because it sets up a yes/no dynamic when what we really mean to talk about is comfort level. I can remember later in that relationship when I was double checking that she was ok with moving out of the city and in with me. My question was probably as much about her comfort level as it was about my guilt in taking her out of her element. More accurate language, deeper questions, in most of these cases would be “are you sure you’re ok with this, because I feel a little bad about it.”
As I search to find the thread in this post, the tiny idea that ties it all together, I’m reminded of a Vonnegut quote: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Everything, on some level, feels like performance. The holding on, the things we carry, winter not giving way to spring, entrances and exits, dreams involving exes, cleaning out the basement, the stories we tell, and the ones we keep tucked away… and how all of us have, somewhere hidden, a stack of forged papers and an inspector who might be on to us.