enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary
"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh
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ugh. castration, hockey hair, and the past dug up
So C. and I just finished watching Little Childr3n, and I must confess that I am thoroughly creeped out. My apartment looks entirely different to me, as it always does when my mood changes.
I really, really did not need to see that scene in the car. That date.
Shudder.
But the funny thing is that after shutting down the dvd player I returned the tv to tv mode and...there was my boyfriend from my mid-twenties staring right back at me!
There is a show on tv up here that I'm sure the more cerebral among you have never seen and that--hopefully--is not viewable elsewhere. It's a harmless thing, really, however-- a makeover show on which the thoroughly out-of-date participants are initially judged rather harshly by a jury of people supposedly brought in off the street.
And since my ex-boyfriend is an IBM engineer of the white-picket-fence variety, I'm quite sure that he does not work for this show and was, indeed, pulled off the street in Toronto to participate.
He always had a sense of fun, though fun of the very-limited-and-thoroughly- unspontaneous variety.
He is a lovely guy, really. He treated me well. There was nothing wrong with him, per se. He had a lovely family, he had 6.435 close friends, he had GICs coming out the wazoo.
We traveled to Asia together, on my first overseas trip. We ended up in Melbourne, Australia, where I took a job. Do you know what he did?
Exactly what he did back at home in Toronto. He joined a squash club. He went to movies. He made pasta for supper. He went to bed at 9 p.m.,a and tucked his bedroom slippers under the side of the bed. He always folded all of his clothes, and, more shockingly, he always organized and graded them by colour!
Me, messy SSSSy, dating a neat freak! Imagine that! (When I travel my room looks like a clothing hurricane debris field.)
During the days when not working I would tour the city, wander St. Kilda, travel the back streets. At night I would hang out with a jazz musician called Carlos from Portugal. He'd make paella at 10 p.m. and we'd sit around the table drinking red wine and chatting in a large group. A little later on we'd head out to some backdoor club to hear him jam.
There was a French restauranteur thrown into the mix, too. He was trying to set up a restaurant in Melbourne and when he tasted the competition he would ask me to come along. I tutored him in English.
I've always been too loyal, too straight-laced and too naive to conceive of cheating on Andrew.
I wanted to be free of Andrew at times, to be sure. But I would never have hurt him. It was almost two years later that I finally separated myself from him, left him in Toronto, and moved to Ottawa and then Vancouver. These things were all probably the best decisions of my life.
Hmm...I like remembering this stuff. It reminds me that I've always followed my own inner compass, my own moral guide. I adventured without straying, if you know what I mean.
The French restauranteur was marginally problematic. Andrew and I had such an understanding that Andrew was never jealous of the attention that the other man paid to me. The Frenchman bought me silk scarves, a crocodile belt, expensive dinners. The gifts made me very uncomfortable. I don't know what I did with them. Gave them away, maybe. They didn't suit me. I was twenty-four, twenty-five. I was very naive.
Said that already. I liked to wear ladylike sundresses to the knee that fluttered when I walked. And I always wore 1920s-style flapper shoes with curvy little heels and a mary-jane-esque strap around the ankle. Black. My hair was below my shoulders and wavy.
God I was stupid.
Have I ever mentioned that after my contract ended at that company in Melbourne on a lark I took a job in a seafood canning factory? A friend from Scotland was on a backpacking trip and since her background was in food science someone at a temp agency had called her up to see if she wished to do "quality control" at a canning factory in a suburb of Melbourne called Footscray. And could she rustle up a few friends?
I worked side by side with Chechnyan immigrants for three, five weeks. I hardly remember. It seemed like forever. I punched a clock. And all day long, each day, I ran my fingers around cans of fish to check for faults in the seals.
That was one of the best teachers of my life. I learned just a little bit of gratitude in those weeks of five a.m. bus rides into the factory district, practised occupying my mind whilst my fingers were otherwise busy. :):)
Everyone needs a little bit of Footscray, meditation to the muggy odour of fish guts on a humid afternoon. Forget Bondi, shrimp on a bar-b: Footscray should be in the brochures.
Um. I'm babbling. That trip to Autralia was very interesting. And very little of it was about Andrew.
In case you haven't figured it out, there were two Andrews in my life in my 20s. They were both good men. But I only loved one of them.
I only fantasized about one of them, really.
And it wasn't the one who looked perfect in tennis whites and who was saving for retirement whilst in university. Oh no. It was quite another young man. And as wrote a much better writer than I: "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds/Or bends with the remover to remove/ Oh no! it is an ever-fixed mark..." :)
I'm such a corn dog!
OK. I should really go to bed. Perhaps tomorrow I'll tell you more about IBM Andrew.
But you could probably guess the rest, anyhow. I know nothing of his life of the past seven years but I can bet you that I could tell you what he does on a daily basis down to the quarter hour, what he still eats for breakfast, what he named his children if he has any and what colour of car he drives. And that he's perfectly contented, as he should be. I wish him well.
We kept in touch for a number of years, had dinner occasionally when we were in the same town, shared a small laugh. And then one day he didn't reply to one of my emails. And it was OK. It was time. I was happy to see that part of my past drift away to where it belonged.
Oh good lord and he was spotted--by me
I suppose it's better than the time when my mother spotted an old high school boyfriend of mine on the news as he and his father had been arrested for major art fraud...Yes, yes! That did indeed illuminate the deficiencies in my loser boyfriend radar!
|11:44 p.m. - 2007-08-20
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Come al solito - 2011-04-16 unfettered spending - 2011-04-15 How does it go? - 2011-04-14 Whirlwind. - 2011-04-13 bleak that flips over to daffodil - 2011-04-08 |