Rude Awakening

I woke up yesterday morning to the sound of my clock radio playing Ludacris at 5:40, groggy as usual but feeling unusually euphoric for a Monday morning. As my dream came slowly back to me, my euphoria transformed into sadness and disillusionment: I dreamed that, several weeks into the round-the-world trip that my ex-boyfriend, La Moustache, left me to undertake, he called to tell me it was a huge mistake and begged me to take him back. And I was thrilled.

Usually when couples break up after several happy years together they miss each other. They have other emotions too, of course – anger, bitterness, relief – but there is some level of missing someone who you once loved and who was an important part of your life. Not so in my breakup, at least from my point of view. I was too furious with Moustache to miss him, and in any case, our last weeks together – while he prepared his Land Cruiser for the drive around the world and I moped around and frequently demanded “How could you?” of him – were so miserable that it was a relief to finally be out of each others' presence. If he ever felt a moment of nostalgia for me he did not give me any indication of it, and I can honestly say that the scenario that occurred in my dream never once crossed my conscious mind before. I did hope for some level of atonement for his abandonment of me at what was already the lowest point in my life, but I never hoped that he would give up on his mission and return to the life we shared.

Recently my neighbor, the Cat Lady, and I were discussing the Brazilian, and she presented a hypothesis: “Maybe some of your disappointment about the Brazilian is actually misplaced sadness about the end of your relationship with La Moustache,” she suggested. I nodded politely, but inside I poo-pooed her idea: I had done my mourning, and it was over and done with.

My dream called all of that into question. My disappointment when I woke up that it hadn't been real made me experience the loss all over again, even as I was furious with my subconscious self for wanting him to come back. I even burst into tears in my car on the way home from work. And I wondered: What would I have done if it really had happened? Even if I hadn't taken him back, would I have been tempted to?

Really, of course, what I most wanted when we broke up was for him to be the person I thought he was: the funny, caring man who I used to cuddle with on the couch as we watched movies, who adored our pet lovebird and who I was always excited to see when he came home from work in the evenings. And the hard part is that that IS who he is, at least in part. He didn't spend our three years together playing a role. But he is also the other part, the part I didn't see until things started to go badly between us: the person who selfishly told me he still loved me and wanted to be with me and hoped I would wait for him to travel around the world. The person who tried to convince me that it's normal for a couple to spend some time apart before getting married and starting a family. The person who thoughtlessly wrote in an article that was published all over the world that he had to choose between using his savings to buy a house with me or to travel the world, and he chose the latter. People are complicated, and are rarely the simplistic villains or heroes we sometimes paint them as.

Still, I like to think that I wouldn't have taken him back if my dream had actually come to pass. I probably would have been tempted to. But even if he does have some redeeming qualities, he is certainly NOT a quality life partner. Far from it.

Ring My Bell

I had a few moments (okay, hours) of obsessive self-doubt this week, during which I became convinced that I would never hear from my Brazilian beau again. This despite the fact that he told me that he wants to help me trim Green Bean's wings next time he needs clipping, go for a picnic when it gets a little warmer, do some experiments to determine why my car keeps growing a pond in the backseat, and has sent me several text messages since I last saw him. AND I'm not even sure if I like like him yet, and we've only gone out three times. To help me through this obsessive moment, I turned to several girlfriends, who assured me that everything will be fine one way or the other, and I need to lighten up; which of course I knew already, but still it helps to hear it from a friend.

One of my dating gurus, Li'l JC, had an additional piece of advice. She objected to my preferred mode of communication, the text message, and told me (or rather her handsome new boyfriend told me, through her) to “nut up and call him.”

To say that I am allergic to phone calls is to put it mildly. I frequently daydream of throwing my cell phone into a body of water, possibly the pond in my car since it's so conveniently nearby, especially when it is ringing. It is not unusual for me to notice with a sinking feeling in my stomach that I have sixteen voicemail messages that have piled up, or more. I would rather send an e-mail than make a phone call, rather receive a text message than listen to a voicemail. Besides, it can be stressful for people whose first language is not English to talk on the phone in English, as I well know from many experiences on the other side of the fence. (My new squeeze's English is astonishingly good, maybe even better than mine; still, his accent makes mundane statements like “I have to go to the bathroom. Be right back,” sound impossibly romantic.)

The strange terror that filled me at the thought of picking up my phone and calling the boy who 48 hours before I was comfortably recounting my life story to hearkened back to an earlier moment of receiving romantic advice, nearly 20 years ago. I was eleven years old and in the fifth grade, and my dream had come true: my crush of the past six years had asked me, through a friend, to be his girlfriend (it was the old-school form of a text message). I had been in love with him since I first spotted him in soccer practice at age five, and had remained in the thrall of his black eyes, full lips and bad-boy reputation ever since. I raced home, eager to share the thrilling news with my sister. I could hardly believe this was really happening to me, and I thought that my whole life, from that point forward, was sure to be changed forever.

My sister was exuberant when I told her, but then gave me the advice: “If you want to have an open, communicative relationship, you have to call him and tell him you accept in person,” she counseled. I have no idea where my sister got this misplaced, weirdly precocious wisdom from; it would have been great advice if only I had been a college student instead of an elementary schooler. However, she was my big sister, and even though I would have preferred to jump into the ocean in mid-February than call him to accept his offer, I knew I had to follow it. After all, didn't I want an open, communicative relationship, fifth grade-style?

So I called and did the deed, and it was one of the most awkward conversations of my life. “Umm, hi, T? This is Heathen. So, I heard you wanted to go out with me? Well, yeah, that would be fine. Okay, bye.” It wasn't exactly an auspicious beginning for a healthy, communicative relationship. I can't recall exactly how long the relationship lasted, if it was two weeks or three, but I do recall that we did not speak for the duration of it, except once when it was my day to collect hot lunch tickets; when T got to the front of the line we mumbled “hi” to each other while studiously avoiding each others' gazes. After a few days of this torture, T's friend called me to break things off. No, he didn't even have the decency to call me himself to break up.

Well, sorry Li'l JC, but I have decided to disregard your advice. You can blame my sister. It's possible that my new love interest will become the most recent victim of the Disappearing Man Syndrome, but in the meantime, I'm working on diversifying my assets so I won't mind as much.

Relationship Debris

Anyone who has spent longer than, say, 20 minutes with me knows that I am a huge fan of the Modern Love column in the New York Times. Actually, to be more precise, I have a love-hate relationship with it. Sometimes it makes me tear up a little or laugh out loud, other times it fills me with frustration and I have to e-mail it to a bunch of friends accompanied by snarky comments. The most recent memorable article was about a man whose grandfather joined Facebook, then, to his chagrin, became friends with his ex-girlfriend. It was hilarious. (And yes, of course, I've written several drafts of Modern Love columns about my recent breakup to submit to the Times. I still feel like I need to let some time pass before I'm ready to submit anything though – it is, after all, a very public forum.)

Last week's column, about how one woman handled a breakup, was a huge miss as far as I was concerned. First of all, it wasn't actually written by the woman whose relationship ended; it was by her friend, and second-hand stories are inherently lame. Second of all, it was about how her friend dealt with the breakup by having a performance artist dressed in a bear costume named the Death Bear visit her house and remove all paraphernalia related to her ex-boyfriend and bring it to his “den;” this is just weird and annoying. It took place in Park Slope, and when the New York Times writes articles like this, as it often does, it reinforces a lot of people's stereotypes about Park Slope, which as a former Sloper I find offensive. And, finally, it was hard for me to relate because this kind of cleansing ritual is utterly antithetical to my philosophy. (I support people who it does work for, though – it just doesn't happen to be a modality that works for me.)

My friend and dating guru, Li'l JC, is such a person. She received a lovely tangerine-hued KitchenAid mixer as a gift from an ex-boyfriend, and told me that she seriously considered giving it away when they broke up. I, on the other hand, received a crimson KitchenAid mixer from my ex-boyfriend, La Moustache, and the thought of giving away my $300 mixer never once crossed my mind. I also wear every single day, even in the shower, a necklace designed by my friend Yummy Mummy and purchased for me by Moustache, as well as a watch he bought me (not in the shower though). I frequently wear the fuzzy brown hat he had my milliner make for me, as well as the antique pearl earrings he gave me (except that I left them at a friend's house in December – accidentally on purpose, perhaps?). Even my vacuum cleaner and coffee grinder were former possessions of Moustache's that I received in the divorce settlement. As if that weren't enough, I have two paintings on my bedroom wall by my ex-ex-boyfriend, l'Artista. And, for Christ's sakes, La Moustache and I had a pet bird together! What am I supposed to do, give my little bird away to a crazy man dressed in a bear costume?? Over my dead body. Even if I did get rid of every single object connected to my exes, there are a thousand little habits that would remain: when I did my laundry recently, I was reminded that I learned my underwear-folding technique from La Moustache's mom.

You can't get rid of the past; every important person in your life shapes you in some way, and for me it's better to keep my memories and the possessions that go with them and use them to reflect and learn. I don't believe in karma, or that wearing a sweater given to me by an ex could condemn me to a life of celibacy. I can understand the urge to get rid of everything connected to someone who has hurt and betrayed you, and I have sometimes taken breaks from things that remind me of people I don't want to think about, putting them in storage until I am ready to see them again and remember that period with less pain.

One particularly difficult decision I had to make when I moved out of the apartment I shared with Moustache was whether to bring my own mattress with me, or Moustache's. I thought about it a lot, and finally chose Moustache's. It was better quality, and after three years of sleeping on it, I was used to it. Of course, it had a lot of memories attached to it, but when I got to my new apartment, I flipped it over. Now it's like brand new. I sleep very well in it each night, and only occasionally have nightmares about La Moustache.

Kissing Frogs

In her infinite maternal wisdom, my mom has counseled me and my sister that “In order to find a prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs.” Even though this is contradicted by my mom's own experience – she got married at the ripe old age of 22-going-on-23, and I seriously doubt that she had the time to kiss many frogs before then – I am beginning to see her point. I met and began dating La Moustache six months (to the day, weirdly) after my breakup with l'Artista. When we met, I had been dating a man named Mr. White Pants for four months. Even though I knew that there were plenty of other men out there besides Mr. White Pants and La Moustache, it was hard not to feel like I had two choices before me, and one was very clearly superior to the other.

Mr. White Pants was a Southern gentleman, hailing from a tobacco city in North Carolina, the youngest of six or seven siblings. He was twelve years my senior, and I met him through his college roommate, who had been trying fruitlessly for some time to court me. In retrospect, it wasn't very nice of him to flirt with his friend's crush, but at the time I can't say I minded.

Mr. Pants worked for a bank and made a lot of money. He had gone to graduate school at Columbia, spoke fluent Russian, and lived for several years in Uzbekistan. He was on the board of a small theater company and invited me to the opera. Sometimes I thought that if he were a character on Sex and the City the ladies would think he was a really good catch. In the end, though, I'm not one of the Sex and the City ladies, and after a while I started to realize that despite his intelligence he was lacking in one very important area -- personality. Every time he talked to me about his work I was either bored stiff or horrified, like when he told me about financing open-top mines. He enjoyed tango dancing, but it seemed more like a hobby he had picked up to make himself seem interesting than a genuine passion.

And then there was the matter of the pants. He always dressed up for our dates, and frequently wore his favorite white pants. When I got to know him better, I found out that every time he wore the white pants he had to wear tighty whities to match them, because otherwise people could see his undergarments through the pants. I'm not saying I don't sometimes have to think about wearing underwear that you can't see through my clothes, but a man who matches his underpants and trousers was a turnoff, to say the least. In addition, one day my Wise Woman mentioned to me that when she was walking down the streets of Manhattan one day she passed a man who she wondered might be Mr. White Pants. When she described him to me, he sounded utterly ridiculous.

Just as I was starting to feel ready to move on, along came La Moustache. He was handsome, had an interesting job, he told me great stories about his recent trip to the West Bank to cover the war between Israel and Lebanon, he was funny, we were reading the same book when we met (Heat by Bill Buford, a great book), he loved the New Yorker like me, and I instantly felt more comfortable with him than I ever had with Mr. White Pants. But I wonder if, had I been dating other men, I would have thought more critically about him and kept my options open longer, rather than allowing myself to be convinced to jump headlong into a relationship as I did. Perhaps through the veneer of charm I would have discovered his underlying froggy qualities; or perhaps not, since (to give myself some credit) he was very good at hiding them.

In the interest of learning from my past mistakes, I have been working on meeting frogs. Here are some of my stats so far:

Frogs I've gone on dates with: 4
Frogs I've gone on second dates with: 2
Frogs kissed: 2 ½ (one was an awkward edge-of-the-mouth kiss that I was attempting to dodge)
Frogs kissed because my sister forced me to: 1
Second dates I've gone on because I had a bit too much to drink on the first date and got beer goggles: 1 (mental note: one drink maximum per date)
Very nice frogs I've gone out with: 3
Frogs who really liked me: 2
Frogs I found attractive: 0

Another piece of advice I received recently from my mother after I complained about the lack of attractiveness of my dates: “In the end, it's not really that important.” Again, this is contradicted by her own experience – my dad is very handsome, and even after nearly forty years of marriage Mom will occasionally pause when she sees him across the room and say, “He's really quite good-looking, don't you think?” This is one piece of advice I am ignoring: I want a hot boyfriend, and I think I deserve one.

Clearly, I have a ways to go. My sister went on dates with 26 men before she met her prince, the Sensitive Bostonian. And this time, I am determined not to be tricked by any frogs disguised as princes.

Feminism, Revisited

When I was in the 7th grade, I was a raging feminist. At the time, I had a sweet, somewhat troubled young boyfriend, the Modern Jewish Boy. I adored him, and spent hours on the phone with him voicing my opinions about relations between the sexes (a subject that, at age 13, I felt I understood quite well). This was shortly after the Anita Hill allegations about Clarence Thomas, and I remember venting to him how shocking it was that a man who treated women as Thomas had could be allowed on the Supreme Court. It was also the year that Bill Clinton was elected President, and I became a devoted fan of Hillary. I wished fervently that she could one day, perhaps in 1996, be elected President, and I wrote her a letter to tell her so. On Halloween, I dressed up as Hillary and went trick-or-treating with the MJB and my friend Ms. B, who was dressed as Bill.

Three years later, now age 16, I reunited with the Modern Jewish Boy. During one of our early phone calls, his mom interrupted us to pass along a question through him: was I still a feminist? “No,” I replied, “I'm over that stage.” I cringed inwardly as I recalled those long-ago conversations. “Feminism is not a stage,” his mom told him to tell me in reply.

Despite her advice, I continued to not worry much about sexism or women's rights. I didn't consider myself to be either a feminist or a non-feminist; I believed in women's equality, of course, but I didn't see sexism as a big problem in this country. When my sister became a women's studies major and stopped shaving her legs in college, I scoffed at her and dismissed her views as extremist. I worked as an intern for a while at an African American historical house museum, lived in a largely black neighborhood in Brooklyn, taught a lot of black kids who lived in homeless shelters and whose futures looked pretty bleak, and all of these experiences made me think that racism was a much bigger problem in this day and age than sexism. When my friend Miami Nice announced that she'd be voting for Hillary Clinton in the New York State primary, I tried to dissuade her by telling her that it was more important for our country to have a black president than a woman.

All of this changed for me when I realized with a sickening shock that I spent the past three years living with a man who not only didn't respect me, but didn't respect my gender. In part my ignorance can be attributed to his skill at hiding it, but I have to admit that there were signs; he made disparaging comments about women he knew, mostly about their physical appearance. It's not that I let him get away with it entirely. I called him out on it, and told him it's not okay to talk that way about women (or anyone, but he never commented on men's bodies). But I also glossed it over in my mind, chalking it up to his Europeanness. It sounds so naive now, but it never occurred to me that he actually might think women were lesser than men. There have been times in the past few months when I have used the word “misogynist” to describe Moustache, but this doesn't accurately describe him. He doesn't hate women, he just doesn't accord them the same respect as men. As my awareness has heightened, I've begun to realize that this subtle, insidious sexism is more widespread than I thought.

And perhaps I've even been guilty of it myself. When La Moustache announced that he'd be heading off on his grand tour, my immediate reaction was two-fold. I worried that our relationship was ending and felt heart-broken that he wanted to go on a trip without me. But a series of questions also leaped into my mind: “If Moustache leaves, who will change the oil in my car? Who will wash my laundry? Who will do my taxes? Who will pay for my car insurance?” And I have to admit that this was a big reason why I didn't want him to leave: I didn't want to face the prospect of doing all these tasks myself, and I wasn't sure I could do them (or at least do them as well as he could). I am grateful for this forced reminder that I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself.

La Moustache has many admirers, including friends who know both of us. Some of these people have posted updates from his blog on Facebook, and added their own words of encouragement and support: “Good luck, Moustache! We hope 2010 will be full of adventure and joy for you. You have so many people back home who love you and are thinking of you!' (Please note that La Moustache is not on Facebook, so he has no way to actually read these words.) Upon reflection, I believe that some of these people are clueless, and don't realize how he treated me; perhaps I even gave them the impression that I was fine with his trip as I attempted to walk the fine line between conveying that I am not okay with his actions and being a bitter ex-girlfriend. However, other people know how he treated me, and either don't have a problem with it or think that he was a jerk, but that's not a reason to stop being friends with him. After all, he's famous now, and maybe if they're nice to him he might invite them to join him for part of his epic journey!

I've been nostalgic for Brooklyn lately, and there are a few musicians who remind me of my former home who have been getting frequent play on my ipod, such as Jay Z, “Best I Ever Had” by Drake, and Beyonce. Among these, I'm embarrassed to say, is Chris Brown. As I bought his album I thought to myself, “He's an asshole and I wish I weren't giving him my money, but listening to his music doesn't mean I approve of men who beat up their girlfriends.” In retrospect, I realize that by buying his music and listening to it I am tacitly supporting his behavior in the same way that people who read Moustache's blog and pass it on are supporting his behavior. I can't un-buy it, but I can and will throw it vehemently into my little iTunes trashcan and listen to some Rihanna instead. Us women gotta stick together.

Ghosts of Relationships Past

Last week I traveled home, along with everybody else in this country, to spend Thanksgiving Weekend with my family. I was a little on the skinny side when I arrived, due to a post-breakup decrease in appetite, but found that, when I weighed myself every morning on the bathroom scale, I weighed a pound more each day than I had the previous day. By the end of the weekend, I was more or less back to my normal weight. Green Bean traveled with me and was happy to get lots of attention and to have free reign of the house, and was also appreciative that he's been forgiven for preferring La Moustache to me in the past. There were a couple of semi-close calls, but I managed to keep him safe from my parents' obese cat, Kiki, thanks largely to Kiki's unmaneuverability and slow reflexes.

While I was home, I had a brief visit with my oldest friend, Ms. B, who moved back home from New York a year and a half ago, built a house, had a baby, and transformed herself with astonishing rapidity into an adult. When we had a moment to ourselves, she told me something surprising: “If I were you, I would call up L'Artista. It's probably not the right thing to do, but I would if I were in your shoes.”

Up to that point, I had not allowed this thought to cross my mind. L'Artista was my first serious boyfriend. I met him when I was 18 and had just arrived in Florence, Italy for a semester of painting lessons, where he was my 28-year-old painting teacher. He was charming, handsome, hopelessly in love with me (as I was with him), the most amazing cook I've ever met, and a disaster when it came to committed relationships. Still, he was scrupulously honest about this last aspect of his personality, which puts him several notches above La Moustache in my book. He took me for rides on his Vespa, painted numerous paintings of me, and cooked fabulous meals for me and my friends. We embarked on a meandering, romantic relationship while I went to college, then moved to New York and began my life. It should have ended there, when I grew up a bit and began to want a real partner, but L'Artista got carried away by his own romanticism and began musing about moving to New York and starting a life together. I chose not to heed his earlier warnings, and we talked about this possibility for over a year, without making any discernible headway. My patience finally began to wear thin, and the situation culminated one day on a bus in England; during a discussion about our future together, L'Artista got up, ran to the bathroom, and was sick to his stomach. This was too much for me, and I ended it. As soon as I did so, he told me he was ready to move to New York and get serious about me. HA.

Since then, L'Artista has maintained his romanticism, and continues to call me “amore” in sporadic e-mails that I rarely reply to, and muses about what it would be like if we were to see each other again. The thought is terrifying and, I have to admit, enticing. I e-mailed him in September to wish him a happy 40th (!) birthday, and told him about some of the difficulties of my life lately (though no mention was made of La Moustache, since I had a feeling he would get ideas if he knew I am single). He e-mailed me back several times, and finally wrote a note saying that my silence was beginning to worry him; he asked me to let him know if everything was okay. Angry and embittered against all men, I wrote back a cryptic e-mail saying that I was fine, I just didn't need selfish people in my life at that moment, or maybe ever. I composed the e-mail rapidly, without thinking, and wrote it in French because it seemed like too much trouble to find the words in Italian (even though I often chat online with old friends in Italy with no language problems). I quickly hit “send” before I had a chance to reconsider.

The response was fast; a hurt L'Artista shot off four e-mails asking what he had done wrong, and if it is a crime for him to tell me that I am important to him. I suspect that he's forgotten all about his role in encouraging me to hope for more from our relationship. I didn't reply to any of these missives.

There is a fine balance when it comes to memories of past relationships. Too good a memory makes it impossible to move on, and too poor a memory leads one to keep making the same mistakes over and over again, like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If given the chance, I feel sure that L'Artista would do it all over again with me, right down to vomiting in the bus restroom; absent that opportunity, I imagine he is making similar mistakes with other people (I flatter myself that I am still his first choice). Four years after the last time I saw L'Artista, I like to think that I am a wiser, better person because of that relationship. And despite his 40 years, I have a feeling I'm a lot wiser than L'Artista. For that, I am thankful.

Drawing of me at age 19 by L'Artista

Indiana Jones

La Moustache is a journalist. He works for a well-known wire service. So, I probably shouldn't have been surprised when I saw the headline, “How one man is preparing to drive around the world.”

Moustache's article got picked up by USA Today, Yahoo! News, ABC News, and local newspapers across the country. People from coast to coast are reading about how “It is scary to leave your girlfriend, your career, your apartment and people you know to have a year of waking up in unfamiliar places.” They are looking at pictures La Moustache took of himself checking the engine of the Monster and folding out his rooftop tent. And they are thinking that this guy is awesome.

In his blog and in the article, La Moustache frequently mentions that some people think he's crazy for leaving his job and undertaking this trip. As far as I can tell, he is referring to one person: me. Everyone else thinks he is courageous and adventuresome. Comments on his blog and article include the following:

Fantastic!!!! I envy you. What an adventure. I've been to many of the places you mentioned, but not the way you are doing it. I admire you for it and hope you have a fabulous time!!


Salut Indiana Jones, Bonne chance pour ton tour du monde, c’est génial!


Godspeed, my man!! May your adventure be a great one, and may the 'hairy' parts be things to laugh and/or brag about. There will be a lot of us following your adventure, and rooting for you all the way....


Good luck to you! I look forward to reading more about your adventure throughout the year. My husband is being deployed overseas for the entire year of 2010 and this will give me something to look forward to reading about as the long year drags on! I wish I had the guts to do something like this:)

Grrrrrr.

It's My Party

I am standing in my kitchen, looking down through the second-story window to the driveway, where my Parisian boyfriend and a friend of his are wrestling with a gigantic cardboard box in an attempt to remove its contents. It's about the same length and height as a refrigerator box, but not as deep, and inside it is an equally gigantic tent. They are standing next to a Toyota Land Cruiser, the top of which the tent will eventually be screwed onto. The tent is to be my boyfriend's home for the next year, and he, the tent and the Land Cruiser will leave our driveway in a month and a half and drive around the world (except for places that are not navigable by car, like oceans, where he will ship his new life partner and fly to meet it).

Six months ago, La Moustache and I were spending our weekends visiting open houses. He had gone to the bank and gotten pre-approval for a loan for us to buy a brownstone together. My hopes and dreams for our future included such projects as traveling to Brazil, planting carrots in the garden behind our future brownstone, and dressing up as a Hasidic Jewish couple for Halloween (we live just south of the Hasidic section of Brooklyn, and I became inspired one day while watching a Hasidic couple cross the street). It did not include a record breakingly-early midlife crisis, or the portable shower and toilet that are now sitting in my hallway. Nor did it include La Moustache's' spending the money that was intended to be a downpayment on a house on a trip around the world.

The cherry on top of my predicament is that at the same time that La Moustache made this decision, I lost my job. I'm an elementary school teacher, so usually at this time of year I am so busy laminating labels, planning lessons, and organizing book bins that a boyfriend could leave me and I'd hardly notice. Not so this year. My job fell through at the very last minute, as I was in the process of putting the final touches on my classroom, leaving me with an abundance of time to sit on my couch and contemplate how I ended up living with a mentally unbalanced person for three years and never realized it.

Since then, my mood has been swinging around wildly like a ship's lantern in a storm, reminiscent of my adolescence. At times, my fury knows no limits, like when I ripped up postcards I sent to Moustache and threw them on his bed, or the day I intended to give him a kiss but without fully realizing what I was doing sunk my teeth into his cheek (hard enough to leave a mark, but I didn't break the skin). While he was outside working on his preparations one day, I snuck out of the house, hoping he would return to find me gone and be left wondering if I would ever come back; instead, I returned two hours later to find him still outside, hard at work. Other times, I cry pathetically, hoping against hope that he will comfort me and tell me it has all been a bad nightmare. There are moments when I am overwhelmed by desire to spend as much time with him as possible, and sit in the driveway keeping him company while he saws wood to make drawers for the Cruiser (which I've nicknamed the Monster). I spent an entire afternoon this way recently, pretending to read aloud the FAQ section of a Lonely Planet guide to circumnavigating the globe. Here is a sampling of what I “read”: 


Q: Is it safe to take a trip around the world?

A: No. If you decide to do this trip, be forewarned that you will almost certainly perish. If you are not done in by Dengue-fever-spreading mosquitoes in Africa, run into a deadly scorpion in South America, or get a fatal STD from a prostitute in Eastern Europe, you will surely commit suicide before the end of the year out of loneliness and desperation.

Q: Will it help or hurt my career to take this trip?

A: It will damage your career irreparably. Everyone will realize that you are insane, and no one will be willing to employ you again, ever.

Q: What kind of food can I expect to eat during my travels?

A: Be prepared to be extremely flexible in your diet. At times, particularly in remote parts of Asia, the only foods available to you will be insects such as moths and spiders. It is considered rude to squash them before consuming them, so you will have to eat them alive. It is also possible that you will need to traverse areas of South America where you will be forced to eat dog feces to survive.

Q: Is it better to undertake the trip alone, or with other people?

A: This is a tough question, and you will need to make a decision about what works best for you. On the one hand, traveling with friends over long periods of time and in close quarters can be extremely stressful. Sometimes people get into physical altercations with their traveling companions, and friendships rarely last beyond the final destination, if they last that far. (One young woman recounted to us that she was kicked out of the car in the middle of the Sahara Desert by her former best friend, and had to drink her own urine to survive 10 days before she was discovered by a group of Berber herdsmen.) On the other hand, as mentioned above, if you travel by yourself you are at an extremely high risk to commit suicide. Furthermore, guerillas and bandits often target lone travelers; people traveling this way have been known to be beheaded in remote locations, and their decapitated bodies were not found until over a decade later.

Q: What sorts of preparations do I need to do prior to my departure?

A: Take out an excellent life insurance policy. Other than that, there is really nothing you can do to prepare for such a dangerous, foolhardy trip.

Rather than trying to fight this resurfacing of a teenage mentality, I have decided to go with it. In fact, my new mantra is: I can do whatever I want to. Fate has dealt me a harsh hand, and given the circumstances, I have no obligations to anyone but myself. If I feel like eating chocolate for breakfast, sleeping on the couch with all the lights in the house on, or reaching into my pocket, pulling out my car keys and pretending to shoot La Moustache with them, I can. (Like biting, fake shooting is surprisingly satisfying. It gave me new insight into why my six-year-old students engaged incessantly in such battles.)

Is La Moustache crazy? Did I live for three years with someone who is profoundly self-centered, and not realize it? Has he always been this full of himself, or is this a side effect of his selfishness? Is it possible that I was correct in my feeling that he was a kind, loving boyfriend during our years together, and is now acting out of depression-induced desperation? These are the questions that run constantly through my mind, keeping me up at night and making me exhausted even when I've spent the entire day immobile on the couch. I'm trying to let go of them and accept that I can't know the answers now, and may never fully be able to answer them. In the meantime, I'm off to take my second bath of the day, accompanied by a big bowl of ice cream and only occasionally interrupted by the roar of La Moustache's saw intruding through the window.