birthmarks / trademarks

on the seeming (im)possibility of getting over (any/every)thing

a metaphor on the workings of a break-up, one year later, in four acts

“days like this i don’t know what to do with myself, all day, all night.”

-fionna apple

the abandoned building

the day started so still that it took me a while to realize it had started. i woke up from the mattress that was on the floor; the termites had finished eating my bed frame a couple of weeks earlier. i made my way to the bathroom through buckets meant to collect all the water that was leaking through the roof. i was cold but there was no hot water, so i decided to skip taking a shower. i looked around and i had it. five hours later everything i owned was in the car, and i abandoned the house.

i expected the house to fall apart as i drove away, but i didn’t. doesn’t matter, i said to myself, because it’s just a matter of weeks, maybe a month, for the whole thing to collapse. there is so little left of it that when it does crumble it will barely make a sound.

i had tried my best to save the house. i had exterminators in to remove the pests. i had a guy fix the roof. i even had heating at some point. yet it seemed that the moment the handy man left the house, the termites returned, or something broke again, or something that was not broken decided to. i had to quit, remove myself from the disaster, and i did so quickly, without looking back.

imagine my surprise when i learned, almost a year later, that not only the house is still there, but that the termites left, that the roof was fixed for good, and that now it is inhabited by people that wear my old sweaters and drink coffee in the cups that i was too lazy to take with me. why couldn’t it work for me? why was i forced to leave, while others were welcomed?

somehow, he was everything i am not.

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the funeral

when things go sour in a relationship, death starts coming over to your house on a regular basis. first it starts as cold drafts that make you freeze in early fall. then the presence is longer, like a feeling that there is someone looking at you while you masturbate in the shower because you have not had sex in a year. before you know it, death is having coffee with you, running errands, welcoming you home after work. one night i woke up past midnight and i saw it sitting in the rocking chair we had in the living room. “don’t be scared” death said “i am not coming for you or him or anyone really. i came for whatever it is that holds you together.” “why didn’t you come before?” i asked “in these instances, i only come by invitation, and i only take what is handed to me. someone invited me. someone needs to give me what i came looking for and then i will go.”

breaking up is the act of someone dying. you die, or he dies, or the link between the two (if considered a live entity) perishes. closure is the romantic fallacy of mutual agreement on mutual agreement: for the sake of argument, you are going to say that you understand why i broke up with you, and i am going to say i understand that i hurt you. truth is, he did not understand why i broke up with him. he was too busy being emotional and hid himself in what i felt were generic, impersonal feelings. “i am sad, i am sad, i am sad, i am sad”, like he was being punished by having to say the same thing one thousand times and then he could be forgiven. truth is, i did not understand how i hurt you, partly because you were not doing a good job explaining, but also partly because i did not care. i was too busy taking care of myself and being excited about a life in which i did not have you to drag me down. “i don’t care, i don’t care, i don’t care, i don’t care”, like the total asshole i was to you to make you angry and leave me alone.

yet, closure can be the funeral of what was, the burial of all the unanswered questions, the feelings that will not be recognized as legitimate, the anger, the sadness, the bad memories and in my case, even the good ones. i have all the arrangements ready-casket, flowers, crying old ladies, priest, food for the luncheon afterwards. i am missing the body though, and although i could have a closed casket and just imagine he and all the other shit is in there, i want an open casket. i want people to see you with a thick layer of makeup on your face, rotting as people stand in the line to say “he looks like he is sleeping”.

now i know what people that have to assume that a family member is dead go through. it makes sense to assume so, but i will never let go completely because i will never get the body, and i need the body to rot underground to know that death came and took it.

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the death of archeology, the immortality of anthropology

as an undergraduate i took a combined course in archeology and anthropology. the focus of the lectures was the deconstruction of societies by the detailed study of the objects it produced, and also, hypothesize about elements that were not part of a society by a lack of objects. the responsibility of the (archeo/anthropo)logist is not only to discover and classify, but also to construct theories based, ironically, on deconstruction practices. break something apart to see how it works-otherwise we are just filling museums with stones and shit that we don’t care about.

lately all objects talk of you, remind me of you, take me back to a specific instance. when i moved i avoided taking anything that was yours, or that could remind me of you, but there were certain items that i had to take, or that somehow avoided my memory scrutiny. items like my bike, which i use to go places, remind me of how you taught me how to ride a bike with a ten-dollar relic from a thrift sale in an alley in logan square. or that sweater i gave away the other day because it had a stain, just to remember later that it came from a birthday party where you spilled your wine over me. or the coffee table book on natural curiosities that i like so much, which you gave me our first christmas. all of these are anticipated memories, vortexes that i can easily avoid or indulge in safely.

recently i am making connections that i did not anticipate, and as joan didion said, i start vortexing before i know i am. a shirt reminds me of a pair of pants, which reminded me of another pair of pants that i gave to you because they were too big, which reminded me of a new year’s eve that you wore them, which reminded me of that night and that whole holiday season. writing my thesis reminded me of the dedication i have designed for it, and how i told you about it riding the lawrence bus, and how you didn’t really care. cooking soy meat reminds me of that supermarket i used to buy it in albany park, which reminds me of our last apartment together, and all the fights we used to have in it, and how it was the last place i saw you, talking to someone on your cell phone after shaving the beard you had sported for months.

stranger occurrences have taken place, as rachel moving into an apartment across the street from where you used to live before we moved in together. the few times i have picked her up at her place i park the car where i used to park it, and i surprise myself navigating this rather obtuse section of logan square like the palm of my hand. i once had a date in rogers park, thinking it was a neighborhood i had never been to. my date suggested a vegetarian restaurant that i was excited about, as i didn’t know it. when we got there, i recognized it from one time we went there for breakfast, back in the day when we used to do stuff like this because we still liked each other. i even remembered what i ordered that one time. i went to the french restaurant that we went to on our first date and had the waitress tell me that “my boyfriend” had just been there with a friend the night before, yet that was only the second time i had been there. recently, i walked to the bank under a scorching sun to deposit money into your bank account because you could not pay your electric bill, feeling really sad and angry at the same time. later that day i mysteriously found the shoes i wore to our first date in the trunk of my car.

i hate that every corner of chicago seems to have your tag on the walls, like some gang member trying to mark his territory. it makes me very sad that you had to be the person i lived those things with, rather than sergio, who is so much better for me. even things that were sergio’s reminded me of you, because they reminded me that it was something we wanted to do and never did, or something i needed from you but you refused to.

and then it happened.

i was walking to my car and i saw a girl carrying the same travel coffee mug that sergio uses. i thought of how he smiles at me with his eyes closed when we wake up in the morning, how he makes me coffee before i go to work, how he calls me babe in front of everyone, how long and straight his eyelashes are. you were not a part of that, at all.

i have stopped cataloguing items in your honor because i have deconstructed you, me in you, us to the point where it is all screws and bolts. some of that stuff will go to the museum, as it does point to a structure, a function, a memory. yet, most of it is shit that is going to the dumpster. i have to open space for new objects in the museum’s display.

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santosha

in yoga we keep talking about santosha, a niyama that describes the virtues of contentment. to reach contentment one has to embrace every aspect of life-the good, the bad, the plain ugly. we usually work on this by embracing discomfort in certain static poses, mostly hip openers that work in svadhisthana, or the sexual chakra. instructors usually warn students that these poses are emotional, that you might feel like crying, but that you just need to let go and embrace anything that you might be feeling.

a week ago i really felt like crying in frog pose. i usually do, but this time felt that weird sensation one feels in the back of your throat when tears are coming, so i excused myself and went to the bathroom. i cried for the first time since everything had happened, and let me tell you, it felt really good. all this time i have been embracing mentally, intellectually, but there was an emotional connection that was missing. i could go on and on about how i felt hurt, or sad. rather, i can be hurt and sad and not think about it as a hypothetical state, but live in it, embrace it, stop resisting it. this idea left me sad and hurt for a few days, but surprisingly, that was all i needed to move on. and today is the first day that i feel like it is all in the past, that it doesn’t matter anymore.

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i abandoned the building. it is still there and people live in it with my old sweaters and coffee mugs. but now i live in a better building, wear nicer sweaters and drink coffee from bigger, cooler mugs. who gives a shit.

i buried a casket with a doll that resembled you. when we carried it to the graveyard it was heavy, and the old ladies cried as i paid them to do. people came later with gross casseroles that i did not eat and threw away two days later. it felt very real, the way it was supposed to.

as an archeologist i have traded subjects of study. this required me to leave my position in one museum and open another one.

i can stay in pigeon pose for half an hour if i need to. my hips will thank me when i am older.