I'll keep my marble

Turns out, I'm blessed

Photo by Christine Tan on Unsplash

I’ve started several posts and shelved them, or to be accurate just sort of drifted away from them, and then when I went back, couldn’t really makes heads or tails of them. This one, by hook or by crook, I will publish. No matter if I’m satisfied with it. Because the point is to write, to break through the freeze that’s settling over me again.

You won’t be surprised to learn I’ve been racked with anxiety, and it’s been very difficult. I’m still getting over a two-week cold, which seems to have moved from my chest where it had stubbornly lodged into my ears (!), causing muffled hearing. I have an appointment to see an ENT doctor on April 10. It’s occurred to me I should go sooner, but when I called the doc’s office yesterday, it was just too hard to understand in Spanish what I had to do and where I had to go to make that happen. I gave up. I’ll wait for April 10, and in the meantime hope the stuffiness in both ears subsides.

I’m willing to write you now when I was loathe to do so before because, well, something changed. As I said, I’ve been frozen with fear. The kind of fear that fills your mouth with sawdust and strips your breath for what feels like minutes. The kind of anxiety that makes it impossible to see, take in, or experience much of anything.

I’ve been hiding too. And yet, in some weird way, it feels good. It feels “healthy,” affirming, like something I maybe need. Like it’s maybe healing. But then again, maybe not. It could be simple depression and its related inertia that’s making me stay in, stew chickpeas, and watch (incredible) films on Mubi nightly.

Yes, my dear friend B. gave me her Mubi log-on information, and I’m down the rabbit hole. I’ve seen some incredible flicks, including the brave, searing, difficult “Jaggi,” by Anmol Sidhu (2022) out of Rajasthan. Devastating, important, beautifully acted, and, well, unforgettable. You might wish you could forget it, however. But, no. That’s not true. It’s immeasurably sad, but the protagonist and his purity in the face of relentless cruelty will change you.

So many good flicks though, so many raw, cool films exploring taboo topics with courage and sensitivity. I’m thinking now of “Appropriate Behavior,” by Desiree Akhava (2014), a film about a young Iranian-American woman from Brooklyn grappling with her bisexual identity paired with her traditional Persian family values. The result is a humorous and daring portrayal of a confused young woman just trying to figure it out — who she is, who we are, what life is, how to live — you know, the whole enchilada.

So, yes. Film. Good film, but still — an escape. An escape from the frantic environment inside myself, and from connections with people. I had lunch with new friends last weekend. It was good; I’m glad I went. But, I had this weird sensation of floating above the table at times, observing. I couldn’t seem to fully engage.

Afterwards, I followed two of our friends to their apartment to pick up a couple of plants they had offered me. I felt honored and gratefully accepted the coffee offered, but within a few minutes, I felt… trapped, stifled, like I couldn’t breathe very well. I wanted to fling open all the windows. I wanted to collapse on the floor. I didn’t want to hold myself up anymore. I didn’t want to pretend. I didn’t want to play the role of new person getting to know new people anymore. I just wanted a friend I could collapse with, or against.

I missed Bubby, my friend who died a few years ago. Whenever I feel bereft and maximally confused, it’s him I want to call. He had a simple, natural way of dispensing wisdom, and I never doubted his love and regard. I felt utterly safe with him. He could navigate the world. The world seemed easy for him.

But of course, this was just my perception, and a faulty one at that. In reality, he messed his life up pretty bad at the end, marrying a much younger woman who turned out to be cruel, vicious, and abusive. When he’d extricated himself from that mess, he took to drinking. The hard stuff. Mid-day. All day. He came down with liver cancer and died a terrible death, alone, isolated, abandoned, four hours down the coast from Istanbul, waiting for his son and granddaughter who never arrived.

His life before that rocky ending was pretty sparkly, full of sailing, travel, champagne, elegance, lovely friends. He had a rarefied sense of taste, design, and style. He taught me all about the best music and art. And he made me crab dinners on the regular. And, oh so many other delights. Just being in his aura soothed me, every time. Time slowed down. “Hey, cutie,” he’d say when I’d arrive. Aging was hard for him. He resisted it, he feared it. And he was terrified of exactly what came to pass: dying alone and in pain. (Morphine isn’t allowed in Turkey. Don’t die in Turkey.)

When I visited him in Istanbul toward the end, he said, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be cancer.” He was embarrassed by it. He wanted to fall from a sailboat, or taken by a heart attack at sea. Something romantic like that. Cancer was beneath him. And it’s true. It was.

But, where was I? Okay. I have a lunch in an hour, with a man I met briefly on an expat Facebook group. I think he’s married. This is a networking lunch. If I like and trust him, I might go out on a limb and ask him if he knows any eligible bachelors as well. I’ve decided I want to seriously date and find my mate. I don’t want to do this alone anymore.

I have to shower and get dressed, so time is limited, and if I don’t publish this immediately, it will also go into the “Drafts” bin.

What I’m trying to say is that after days and days, and weeks and weeks, where I’ve been wandering around in a fog of fear, absolutely dismayed by myself, my mind, my choices, my fears, today is different, and here’s why.

I went to kickboxing! My son made me promise to go at least three weeks ago. I did promise. I even committed to specific days, and I didn’t go. I disappointed myself, and my son. True, I had this vicious cold, the third cold since arriving in Madrid on December 1, but still.

Anyway, I went today. I nearly missed it. I had my phone off, forgot to check my schedule the night before. Somehow, I remembered at 9:26 a.m. that I had registered for my first fitboxing class for 9:30, around the corner. I threw on my clothes and dashed out. I was late; the class had begun, but the young man was very kind and solicitous. He set me up while barking instructions at the other students. He wrapped my hands in yellow tape and fitted my boxing gloves over them. I’m smiling and even laughing now as I write this. Lol. Yes, this old lady went to fitboxing. I was definitely the oldest person in the room, quite possibly by a couple of decades. But, who cares?

I was terrible of course, but that wasn’t the point. I did the warm up, hit the bag a few times, “jab, cross, hook, uppercut.” The bag hardly moved, and I couldn’t get the sequences down very well, but of course it didn’t matter. I broke a sweat, did some lunges, some crunches, some stretches. And I sprang for the membership in the spirit of “trusting that things will work out,” as my yoga teacher said.

It felt good. It felt good to get out, to exercise, try something new, engage with a youth, break a sweat, and then to sit in the park on the corner for the first time, beneath a small forest of trees decked out in a coat of tender, new, apple-green leaves.

I looked around. I noted the parapets on a nearby building and wondered if I’d ever seen them before. A dog stopped near me, inclining his body my direction. I chuckled. I recognized that move, as my dog who died last year used to do the same: sidle up to folks in hopes of a pat. I obliged, and her owner stopped, and we connected. She said, in Spanish, her dog was six years old. She’d rescued her from a street in Cuba. She was near death. “She had about a week to live,” said the woman. We commisserated on dogs we’d each lost, her former dog three years ago, and of course, my Daisy.

Then, I walked home, made a coffee, made a toast with thick-cut marmalade and three massive, shining strawberries arrayed in their tight, red, speckled coats. I bought them the other day at the incredible market up the street, Mercado Villahermosa, where I also buy heads of escarole the size of medicine balls and deep burgundy, taut bell peppers, practically quivering with vitality.

Now, I’m listening to Diana Krall, finishing my fast-cooling coffee, and getting ready to get ready for my lunch date around the corner at El Mano, an elegant local taberna.

The fear has lifted some. And, I have good news to report. I do have a client: one client, and it’s so much fun to work again. Who’d ever thunk I’d say that? Not me, that’s for sure.

I have a lot of work to do. My therapist seems to have abandoned me. I tried to date and got stood up by one guy and catfished by another, but that’s okay. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.

This whole life is a series of trying, isn’t it? And would I return my marble for another? No, I would not. That means I have a blessed life. Or so I learned this week from Warren Buffet, who apparently said, “Assume that every person currently alive, all eight billion souls on Earth, is a marble placed in a massive jar. If given the opportunity, would you put your marble in with the others, shake the jar, take another marble at random, and live that life instead? If the answer is no, then you know you have a blessed life.”

My son turned 28 yesterday, and I couldn’t be prouder of him. I sent my (“no-contact”) daughter a second letter this week, care of my son, and I’m happy about that and feel good about it, and it doesn’t even matter if she gets it, opens it, or whatever. Expressing myself to her, even if it’s just through the ether, through the universe, through God, feels important and right.

Okay, it’s time to go. Thank you for reading, for listening, for your good will, for your attention to this matter (sorry, couldn’t resist). I promise to keep fighting the good fight. The alternative isn’t an option. Just know, life is hard. It’s supposed to be. And it’s still a blessing.