#35years

I am no artist but I had to draw them...

Chernobyl

26.04.1986 - 26.04.2021

“Did you know you have a compass?” it was the beginning of a joke but after having said that he looked at me for the third time with a weird face. As if I should be put away somewhere. I carried on talking while we were walking. It was the second date we were on, and he was never ever going to understand me anyway. For a little while now this conversation had been one of those moments where I exercise being and expressing who I am in spite of whomever I am talking to. This conversation itself was an attempt at being true to myself even though the one I am talking to might be judgmental.

“Yes, it is like a compass. You just think about what it is that you need to decide, and then you get this feeling. Might take a while, but it will tell you exactly what you need to do.” The muscles in his face had enough of tightening up in way they weren’t used to, so his face relaxed a bit. But he wasn’t looking at me so I could see this way of joking was not well spend on him.

“Look” I said to him putting a hand on his shoulder as if I was trying to get him closer as the conversation clearly set us further apart. “What I meant to say to you was that it took me about 35 years before I realized I could not live like I was living anymore. I was reasoning myself though life and it got me everything, but nothing I wanted.”

“Yeah, but, you have made all your decisions yourself”

“Yes.. Yes, I did” I knew where this was going and there was no way he would ever really understand.

“It is not like there was a different person leading your life before you were 35.”

Well, it was almost as if there was. It seemed as if before that time there had been another person instead of me.  There were years when I didn’t listen to any music. I can’t go through the day now without. I used to spend time decorating the house and loving it. Now it just seems a time-waster. I used to ask friends if I didn’t know what to do, and do whatever it was they told me. Their ideas about it usually made sense to me, more sense than what I could come up with. On hind sight that was just because I was unable to really feel what I wanted to do. I relied on reasoning, because I could not get to my feelings. At that time it felt like the right thing to do. I do not think I could have lived any other way. But that person doesn’t look anything like me anymore. I decided not to say this to him; I wanted the date to be over as soon as possible, but it was still a while over the path through the trees.

The guy walking next to me was quiet now. I thought that maybe the best thing to do was to walk back to the cars in silence. If not I would probably make it worse, besides, I was having some interesting thoughts I could easily ponder over for a while.

He wasn’t as happy as I was with the silence, as he coughed once before looking at me. He seemed to be puzzled with how I felt. Then he just sliced through the blissful silence with a bit of an angry voice.

“There is no need to be angry with me! It is just the truth!” I looked at him surprised. I guessed there was a little unresolved trauma from his marriage there. I was by no means angry with him.

Saying that wouldn’t exactly help so I decided to try again. I got why it would be impossible for him to understand. His wife had left him for somebody else. He had created for her a perfect life. He had a great job and had bought the house that she loved. She didn’t have to work at all; all she did was raising the kids and do a bit of work for a charity. She apparently was now a sort of hippy, if I had to believe him.

Her life had looked a bit like mine before my husband and I split up. My date had caught on that. And he also understood from my story that it was me who initiated the split in the beginning. In the relationship I could not be who I was supposed to be, and felt like I was living somebody else’s life. There was no point in trying to get him to understand me; it was like he had to understand his ex. But there was a point to the conversation for me still. The person I used to be wouldn’t have made her jokes and she would have certainly not kept expressing herself the way she was. She would have probably kept quiet the moment she realized that his opinion was different from hers. She might have even kept the dating going longer because of the fear of turning the other one down.

“Look, I couldn’t get to my feelings until my first kid was born. He taught me a thing or two about myself” I expected a strange look from him again, but he did seem to understand this one.

“I know” he said “They are like little mirrors!”

This time it was my turn to look surprised. I didn’t see him as a dad that was interested in learning from his kids. To me he looked like one of those dads that raised their kids like their parents had done. There was always a weird sense of righteousness to that. Whatever the dad had gone through he had to put his kid’s trough too. Pretend it was ok to think that if he turned out just fine his kid would be able to do the same. He would be putting his kids through some lousy parenting as if it was a favor.  

“Yes, and I had to change how I was raising them. My first-born was too much like me. He did whatever we wanted him to do. I feared he was turning out to be too much like me, only interested in pleasing others and not thinking for himself”

A hesitant “Ok” came from him. This was too farfetched for him. I continued anyway.

“It meant I had to look at what I was doing to keep him under control. It meant I had to try and find out what I felt when I responded to him. You need to do that in order to change.”

I sighed. I had only gone on another date because he talked so smoothly on the app. He made sure I felt like I was on his mind the whole time. It had felt great. Okay, I’ll admit, he looked very good too. I hoped that maybe there would be more sparks between us on this date. But I should have just trusted my instinct after the last date that this wasn’t going to go anywhere. How about that, I was talking how I was able to trust my feelings now, and here was living proof that I still didn’t apparently. I wanted to go home and erase him from my contacts.