Unrequited like

Two Gentiles and a Jew walk into a bar: the Gentiles leave, the Jew stays, and our blogger is still, somehow, broken hearted.

I have to get out of here.

Far away from familial expectation, from the same people and the room I feel has been staring back at me for the past 31 year of my life.
In a few days I will be 32. Ask me how I thought my life would've turned out by now.
I don't know how I got back here.

I'm sitting in my childhood bedroom on a winter night in the middle of Wellington and I'm suddenly freezing cold.

I remember the first time it happened. A Brazilian man, older, with heated leather seats. We used to go out all the time in that car. He introduced me to a grown-up world that seemed so sophisticated to my Antipodean 23-year-old  frame of experience. He taught me samba, introduced me to Caetano Veloso, Fernanda Porto, Batucada, Capoeira, Almodovar films. It was the first time. I'd read so much into every vague glance, the merest of touches, that when the word came - "no" - it landed with almost unbearable, collateral impact. Now when I look back, he seems so small.

He wasn't the first actually- no, now I remember - the boy in the black leather, the motorcycle. He went home to marry his sweetheart.

Then there were all the men my naive self tried to introduce to God, covertly and overtly. I can laugh looking back at the bewildered German I handed the new bible to, the Patagonian who bolted from church feet first when our pastor mentioned the word "hell".

Now when I look back, when I see in my mind all the unanswered prayers circulating, like unborn children swimming upstream towards heaven, I can laugh. The disappointments, clambering to get a foothold on a rung on the ladder again after the blow of losing opera. I did - what else - get up again. I even managed to fool myself how little it had all meant. I kept up that self-deception for a long, long time.

The fact is, it does matter. I don't have the faith I had as a child. I've seen destroyed friends, beat up from years of many forms of denial, self-medication. Tactics to delay or defer reality. Addictions. I've witnessed them try and bridge the void in their life, the chasm of resounding silence, once to have been filled by he children they will never have now. All, left empty, time and again.


A boy. A boychik. Jewish, good-hearted, talented, nice. A little angry - that's disappointments of life.  Lots to talk about with this one. Easy. I probably loved him. I'm sure he loved, and wanted to marry, me. But he needed too much. He wanted Jewish children, raised in a Jewish household. This I can't give to him. God help me, I still put my hand to the gospels, despite it all. I need Jesus more than I need worldly love. Despite myself, somehow, I carry on. The reason why, I still couldn't tell you.

"I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time-waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God - it changes me."

I start to think maybe I'm wrong about who I've turned down, or maybe I'm wrong about where God is, am I just trying to convince myself - who am I kidding, and what if I missed something? And it doesn't matter if it's the wrong man, and I know it's the wrong man, with their ever-expectant looks; he's attracted to me, he loves God - I should force myself to just feel something, damnit. And the thought then becomes so depressing, I will feel the need to grab hold of one of the mad, strange, or bad men who wanted to share my company, anything to turn away that awful feeling, that gnawing loneliness.

If I stop, and look back, I might cry. So I keep pushing through. I move and push with inexorable momentum until the noise is drowned out.


A phonecall, tonight. Confirmation. And then - silence.

Think of this as an early birthday post.  See you in another 32 years.



We are the dreamers of the dreams... RIP Gene Wilder, master of the comedic pause.