I have a clairvoyant uncle in Mexico City. Last year he helped me unravel a romantic misadventure by gazing at the lines on my palm. “He’s married, he has a drinking problem” he said. I was in denial, but after spending $30 on a background check, I was leaving his wife voicemails updating her on her husband’s dalliance.
While looking at my palm he said “the next one, there won’t be a lot of attraction in the beginning but over time it will evolve into the real thing, mohabbat.” Mohabbat means love. These words echoed in my head so many times over the past year. There have been a couple nexts after that reading, but none of them turned into mohabbat. I keep those words close to my chest though, that there is a possibility this could happen, that I could make it happen.
I remember watching a Matthew Hussey interview and he said the worst part about a break up is that you lose all the dreams you had with that person. I didn’t realize how true this was until today. Every break up I have ever had led me to a therapists office, to the self help section of bookstores. I was always working on myself, trying to make myself enough for love. During the pandemic, I doubled down on personal growth and perfected my life as much as possible. When I started dating again I had arrived at a point where I deeply believed I was worthy of love, and then I found out he was married.
I’m hungry for love, but not in a way that reeks of desperation, of neediness. I worked through those emotions in therapy! I’m hungry for love because it’s like going to Japan and having really good sushi. It’s a meal I want to experience, I want to taste what it’s like to be deeply connected to someone. I want to hang out in a tent out West and then run around in the desert with him while on peyote.
Back to what Matthew Hussey said. Having hope for love, for a connection with someone, is doing the bold act of wearing rose colored glasses in life. It’s such a naive thing to do though in a world filled with so many shady and self interested characters. I realized today that half the reason I struggled so much with letting go and getting over romantic connections is because I had a dream that I wanted realized, and every rejection and bad experience made me feel like the thing I craved so much was unrealistic and I was undeserving of it.
There’s something to be said for tenacity though. Anytime you have a dream or a vision, it doesn’t just magically appear. Even after you’ve done the work, you can still fail and have to go back to the drawing board. My uncle, when he looked at my palm said “you’re the type of person who will do 100% of the work and only get 25% of the results. Some people get lucky and they get what they put in. You won’t for a while.” I’ve accepted my fate. At this point in my life I have a handful of small, but good, successes. For the most part, I’m still working into a seemingly endless night, waiting for the dawn to break.
The title of this entry is a quote from Alejandro Jodorowksy
a soft death 