On Evil Circus Queens, Fairy Gangsters, and Toxic People-Pleasing
Tuesday, January 16th, 2024:
Omar is a buttface.
God damn it.
Why do they ALL have to suck.
Mommy says she doesnt think hes a buttface, she thinks he actually likes me a lot and is completely freaked out. She says I should believe him when he says he has insecurities and needs space.
DUMB STUPID FUCKING BOYS.
Also, how awkward is it going to be now when he gets here at the end of the month…he came up just for the day on Sunday and he didnt even look at me. What the hell, dude.
Baby Girl cried.
Mistress Me breathed, meditated, held Baby Girls hand and remembered that her life doesnt revolve around men.
It is sad, yes. We had a nice time together. He reminded me that I like men.
But there will be other men.
Will there be Omar, though, Baby Girl wants to know.
Ummmmmm…unclear.
At lunch last week this girl Mia asked me where I live. I told her that I lived in Montreal.
“Oh wow, I was just talking to my friend from Montreal last week!” she exclaimed, and I knew it even before she said the name that that friend was Gale. MY Gale.
It got worse.
“Oh, youre friends with Gale,” she said excitedly. “I know her because shes engaged to my friend Richard.”
Of course, at this table at this restaurant in Panama, I am sitting next to a friend of Richards.
Should I mention that her friend Richard and I currently arent speaking…maybe not.
She asked for a selfie later to send to Gale.
I didnt say no. Just posed with her and Jasmine wondering what Gale would think when she got the message.
By the way, Alba is here! Alba, of the treehouse adventure! She has a boyfriend this year. Outrageous.
January 20th, 2024, Saturday. Pluto is in Aquarius or something. I havent baked a challah in…months. Gah gah!
What a blessing this is. What a mother fucking blessing.
From my penthouse princess turret, I have a panoramic view of the ocean. It pans out in every direction as far as the eye can see.
I imagined this, once upon a time. I realize that now. You see, theres a novel brewing inside of me, and I imagined a girl, healing, by the sea.
But it was me.
First Greece, then Panama.
I saw Omar again today. It was better than last time because I was more prepared.
Baby Girl still had a bit of a temper tantrum on the inside, but Mistress Me calmed us down by putting on a Mommy voice and saying,
“See, kitten. Just watch him. See how nervous he looks. Hes got all these feelings happening and thats why hes not looking at you. This is not your fault.”
Which was pretty much exactly the advice from Mommy that was waiting for me when I finally lowered my drawbridge very quickly today.
Except she also said,
“Now arent you glad you didnt sleep with himÉ”
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
Holy shit its fucking hot. Thats the only teensy problem with paradise. Its very very very very hot. The sun BURNS.
Im hiding from the sun right now, but even with the occasional wind passing by Im literally sweating while sitting still.
incredibly, though, my body feels good. Even after all the acro I did yesterday with the pandilleros.
My Fairy Gangster homies.
I fucking love circus camp.
Guess what quess what guess what imagine many question marks…
Jasmine the Circus Queen says I get to be the NARRATOR FAIRY PRINCESS!!! And she wants me to have all the costume changes, so that every one of my personalities gets a chance to shine!!!
Im going to be a sparkle fairy and a pixie fairy and goth gangster fairy and…so many fairies!!!
January…22nd. It is January 22nd. And a Monday!!
Best Monday ever. High up on the terrace of my happiness palace.
The sun is about to set and the light has taken on a different quality. Its also not scorching.
Weirdly, today was more windy than scorchy. SO windy it seemed like the roof of the palapa was going to blow off.
Isnt palapa a great word. It means the tent where we are all going to perform.
Im supposed to be the narrator but I have not yet been guaranteed a mic.
And I mean, any mic at all!!
I was plugging for cordless and the stage manager was like, “Apparantly the sound guy says there will be no mic at all!”
Ummm…seriously.
I would blame her, but this is Panama so shes probably right.
Somebody else said getting a cordless microphone would cost $150.
It is challenging to gestate a creative expression and write the script for a circus when you are unsure of the basic means of communication.
But that is fine, because I am zen.
I just got out of a trauma workshop. It was…good. I think. For a moment I wasnt too sure. First of all, lines are already blurred because we are all participants, equals, friends. But then we have the circus director, each other, and the therapist who is technically not a therapist and just facilitating our own process but
IS definitely our therapist.
But also our friend.
Or acquaintance.
So…yeah. Boundaries get real blurred in the circus.
And of course Jasmine went first, and a thousand unicorns died and were reborn as she expressed herself.
So Baby Girl just sat in the corner and drew. When it was her turn to share she said,
“Id like to but I dont know how.”
“Well, is there something you want. A glass of water.”
This is a dumb therapy game, I thought. I have a water bottle! How is asking for a glass of water going to help me heal…
“No,” I said.
“I noticed you were drawing,” she said. “Would you like to share your art.”
For a moment, I considered it, but it was just some dumb pastel lines and some stickers cuz Im really not a great drawer.
“Anything else” she asked. “Anything at all that you want.”
I thought about it and realized, there was definitely one thing.
“I want my fairy godmother, but shes not here!” I said, and I hid behind my meditating sloth.
This utterance was percieved to have done a good job and everyone was proud of me for processing my trauma.
I remained unconvinced.
But then the doors closed and she said, “Its just you and me right now. Can I support you in any way. Is there anything that needs to get out.”
Damn straight there was! That questionnaire covered dumb things, or maybe it was relevant, but where was Gavin. I hadnt even mentioned him.
“You deserve to take up space,” she told me.
Oh.
Gah gah.
So I did, I took up space, and she held it for me. And I felt safe and okay with the slightly blurred boundaries because I trusted the process. The experience. The ocean. My own power.
Cariela is gone. Shes off to Imetepe, where I went a couple years ago. I hope her trip is less haunted than mine was.
The terrace is all mine, now, which is kind of okay for a couple days, I think.
Its been a lot less busy anyway, since…
Oh my god. A ladybug just landed on my arm. A Panamanian ladybug! Its beautiful, black with one red dot on each side. Ive never seen anything like it.
Mommy and I were recently wondering if all the ladybugs got deadified, cuz we only see those fake ones tehse days, the uglier ones that smell.
But this is definitely a ladybug!! I think so, anyway. If he bites me ill be mad.
The sun is really about to set now. I can finally look it straight in the eyeballs.
According to my dad, thats allowed, and I trust him cuz he knows suns.
Still though, its a scary thing to look at the sun.
The sun is powerful.
Especially here, where it beats down unceasingly, neverendingly, forevererly. .
Sunday, February 4th, 2024, Montreal
Ummm.
What.
Just.
Happened?
Hooray, I have my question mark back!!! And the apostrophe! You can tell I’m back home now with a real computer. And italics, which I’m going to use in a teensy bit of editing privilege.
I am furious with Jasmine. It’s a new feeling, fury. Mommy says it’s important to channel it into righteous anger.
I have a lot of it, right now. I want to sit down and write her the letter that I’m definitely going to write but I’m too angry. I need to calm down.
But she HURT Baby Girl. She hurt her bad, and Baby Girl HELPED her! All fricking month! At the fucking “vacation” we PAID to go on! To RELAX our nervous system!
Well, last week was not fucking relaxing, let me tell you.
And I will tell her that. And she will pay.
Actually, she probably won’t. I’m sure I’ll never get my money back, or the hours of unpaid labor I gave her, and she probably won’t learn her lesson either.
I’ve considered a public review but it would look like I was trolling her, especially since we’re all friends.
The truth is, people should be warned. What she is doing is reckless and unsafe, and somebody is going to get hurt, more hurt than Anton’s injury after I told her that those particular classes needed to be safer.
Do you know what she said to me when I went to her for help because I was in a state of trauma shock? (As a result of her fucking retreat activities?)
She told me that she needed to “think about the group right now.” That if I wanted to have a safe space I could stay in my room.
Ummmmmmmmmmmm
OH NO YOU DIDN’T.
You will hear from Super Boss Bitch and Mommy and you will FEEL their wrath.
The good news is that since I basically spent my entire vacation dealing with bug infestations, stabbings, man orbit, heartbreak and despotic circus retreat leaders, I now feel quite capable of going back to work tomorrow.
Eeeek I’m going back to work tomorrow.
With Gavin, I finally understood a boundary had been broken when…when did I, actually?
I guess it was a similar thing, actually. I was very very hurt and…
Actually who knows? I don’t.
But with Jasmine, I know.
The moment that I found myself leading the instructor meeting, I knew.
I was not an instructor!
I SHOULD NOT have been at that meeting! LET ALONE LEADING IT!
Toxic people-pleasing, that’s what it was. I wanted to impress her, I wanted to be her friend, and she just kept taking, kept taking, and I kept giving, kept giving….
And I can’t blame her for that part, although if she were a decent human being she would not take advantage of somebody she knows to have difficulty saying no.
But no, I did consent to it, and that will be my lesson.
HOWEVER.
When I went to her for help? Saying I had been too exposed to her trauma and I needed a safe space to heal from my own?
That’s when she evicted the other woman in the penthouse and moved in with me.
FUCK HER.
She was scared of me, toward the end. I guess she thought somehow we were both going to pretend it hadn’t ever happened? That when I had gone to her in crisis, after two and a half weeks of helping her through every crisis imaginable…after catching her headache, her panic and her sleep deprivation…she would respond by telling me that I could leave.
!!!!
She informed me that I didn’t need to be in the circus.
“I’m getting this weird energy from you,” she said. “I need to feel love from my narrator.”
?!?!
I need to feel love from my director! I replied.
Neither of which is true. Nobody has to love anybody. This is a circus, not a marriage.
“I have to do what’s good for the group,” she said, “And I want to move into the penthouse to take a hot shower.”
?????????
THAT is for the good of the group? While your five native Panamanian instructors, the only brown instructors, happen to be the only ones in a stuffy bunked tin room with no air conditioning?
“I have to save my energy for the group,” she said.
Save your energy for the group?! I TOLD YOU TO DO THAT, bitch! (I didn’t write that one down).
I told that to you while massaging you because you were stressed. While holding you because you were traumatized and triggered. While spending hours and hours in messy meetings trying to untangle the vision in your brain and give words to your story. I TOLD you to trust yourself and to focus your energy on healing for the group.
I didn’t say, abuse people when you feel threatened.
Oh, she is going to hear from me, big time.
I learned some very valuable lessons this month. For example:
- Stop trying to impress people. The right people will be impressed.
- Be careful who you try to be friends with. Pay attention to the people with charisma. Notice whether or not it is deserving.
- WATCH OUT FOR ENERGY VAMPIRES
- Be WAY more careful of your boundaries in your personal life, even (especially??) when you are on vacation.
- Channel fear into righteous anger
- Remember how fucking strong I am.
Saturday, February 10th, 2024, Shabbos:
My first real Shabbos in more than two months.
Never again will I miss Shabbos.
Okay, never say never, but I will be WAY more picky.
This morning I woke up and cleaned out my bong.
Then I smoked, then I swept and mopt (hehe “mopt”) mopped the floors, and now I am here.
During the vacation, I Mistressed Me’d with Omar. He asked me to! And I couldn’t say no, which maybe I should have.
We had a little Fairy Princess Business session right then and there, and honestly at first that’s what I thought had got him to put up his walls — all my advice, mostly solicited but maybe some not, about finances and shit that was none of my business.
It felt like my business though, because we were eating and sleeping together and all of our things cost money and he didn’t have any money but didn’t seem to notice. Plus, he opened up to me so I did the same.
Anyway, I have come home with a shit ton of paperwork for somebody who has just finished a vacation, and it’s sitting in a pile waiting for me to have the patience and motivation to sort it.
I know without looking that there are 4 Omar pages there, the results of our lunchtime session by the lake near Granada.
I wonder if I should just throw them out? Initially we agreed to meet again in a follow-up session, but now he’s no longer speaking to me, and it’s not my responsibility to store his paperwork, is it?
It feels wrong to get rid of the pages, though. What if he needs them?
He does need them. They are the pages that lead to the actualization of his dreams.
No wonder he stopped speaking with me.
Outrageous. I think it was only last year that I actually finally threw out a whole file folder of Sekhar’s papers, and that’s only after he told me that would be fine.
Hunger. HUNGRY! Must eat. Bye!
Saturday, February 17th, 2024: Shabbos
Damn, it’s like I have to break through soooooo many layers just to find myself. Here. Now.
I want to write the next great American novel. I want to launch an influencer army against the patriarchy, starting in Central America and shooting like the Mocking Jay around the world. I want to publish a thousand pieces of self-help content and skim off of capitalism while I do it.
I want to take from the rich and give to the poor, rich and poor being a spectrum, good and evil contributing to my assessment.
…And I want it all NOW.
I have bills to pay, though, and a day job to maintain, so I’m back at my grownupping with gusto because after facing the Evil Circus Queen of Panama, the regular shit just ain’t so scary anymore.
I just started (and finished, thank you binge-watching) the Netflix reality TV series…what’s it called again? Ah yes. Surviving Paradise.
SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD.
In a nutshell, everybody experiences classism and power dynamics. The game is rigged to stir shit up but the players do most of that by themselves.
The nice people get fucked over every step of the way.
At the end, though, there’s a twist.
Who gets to judge the final winner?
All the people that the finalists eliminated will pick the one who gets to win.
HAHA BACKSTABBERS, LEARN YOUR LESSON!!
So guess what?
The good girl wins! The empath, the one who only ever sacrificed for others, whose closest girlfriend still wouldn’t do the same for her. She now triumphs!
HOORAY!
…but the story isn’t over yet. There’s ANOTHER twist.
The winner has a choice. Keep the $200K and add another $50K into her pocket.
OR. Pick one of the losers to share and walk away with $100K.
So what does she do?
She shares her money with somebody who doesn’t deserve it as much as she does; the girlfriend, who never EVER would have done the same thing if it had been reversed.
Because empaths NEVER FUCKING LEARN!!!
I’ve done a very good job compartmentalizing the rage I feel after Panama. It’s still there, of course, seething beneath the surface. And I will let it out, when I am ready. Like a volcanic eruption, maybe.
But I’m not ready yet.
So whenever I begin engaging in one-way conversations in my head with Jasmine, I try to remember to send her to the moon and to soothe my ruffled feelings.
Her time will come.
But in the meantime, I’ve learned my lesson. I have. I SWEAR I HAVE!!!
I will not pour thousands of dollars into anybody’s project but my own unless they have PROVEN themselves to be worthy of that money.
Nor will I pour more of my time and energy into the undeserving.
Gah gah.
I know why Omar stopped talking to me, by the way.
In all the hullabaloo about Jasmine I barely had time to grieve. Like actually literally I was in the middle of grieving him when Jasmine threw her panic and terror ball at me and I oh-so-dextrously retrieved it from her.
That morning was a…Friday, I think. Yes, a Friday. I had finally had a chance to sleep in my own bed and I woke up to the remembering of having learned what scared Omar away. This was accompanied by the heavy realization that he probably wasn’t going to speak to me again.
I meditated over the ocean that morning and tried to collect the hurt little pieces of my 9-day-romance-broken heart. Told myself I wasn’t dumb for being vulnerable with a person. That at least now I had remembered that boys aren’t all bad, and that the next one will just have to be somebody who isn’t Omar.
Then I headed off to see if I could catch Jasmine before breakfast; for weeks I had been trying to confirm what my narration would be looking like. I still had literally no script to work with, just pages and pages of scattered notes. We had only 4 days until dress rehearsal. I needed to touch base with her.
She was up in the shala.
“Lorelai!” she exclaimed, and I felt that feeling of warmth that comes by being greeted by somebody as charismatic as her.
She pulled me into her room.
“I haven’t slept in four days,” she moaned. My heart broke for her. She was in a complete panic, and how were the rehearsals going to get run?
“Sweetie,” I said, because I still thought she was a sweetie and that we were on the same team, “You KNOW it’s going to be fine! You’ve done it before! It’s time to start believing in what you are capable of. This is what delegation is for! Abs is in charge of the rehearsals so you don’t have to worry about them! Save your energy for what really matters, and think of us, your team.” Abs was short for Abigail, our stage manager. It was her job to supervise the rigging team and make sure that the belays were properly switched during the show, from silks to lyra to pole back to silks and then lyra again…
This being an important job, because if not done properly,
People could fall. On their heads, and spines, and necks.
And severely hurt themselves.
Or die.
Because circus is no joke.
“Trust Abigail,” I told Jasmine, “She is a GODDESS at rehearsal organization. You chose her as your partner for a reason. She’s got this! You don’t have to worry about it.”
This was tier 3 advisor-level shit, came the muffled thought from the back of my head. I had proposed being an Advisor to the Circus Queen as Tier 3, but I was doing it now, for free, because…Jasmine. Jasmine walked into the room and you lit up and you just wanted to do your very best for her. So here we were, doing our very best, proposals be damned!
But being an advisor took a lot of energy. I knew this, because I had been exhausted after our free session last fall. After that, I had cautioned myself to give carefully, because…damn my head hurt.
But Jasmine was in crisis. Crazy, head-on crisis.
And this is my vacation! I have more energy to give on my vacation, and who better to give it to than the incredible fairy queen bringing our entire circus together?
On my wall is a quote that I have kept with me for…oh I’m not sure how long, but maybe over two decades.
It reads:
Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
Google credits that to Will Durant.
Woe to me, man. Fucking woe. To. Me.
“If only it were that easy,” said Jasmine, her hand on her heart. “I don’t trust Abs. I think she has a lot of anger in her. I feel it in her chest when I walk by. Plus, she left our workshop after I shared my trauma.”
She left because the workshop was running late and she had to pick her kid up from school.
Ding ding. DING DING. This was paranoia and projection.
The alarm bells really started ringing in my head right then, but they took about 48 hours to really get loud enough for me to listen, because I loved Jasmine. I believed in her.
And her story. I believed in her story.
The tragedy.
She was born into so much tragedy.
I had heard her story all month long, over and over again. Hell, the circus show itself was based on her story, that night on MDMA, her memory.
The things that had happened to her. To her mother, to her sister…
FYI I’m not betraying any confidences here; these were stories she told everyone, over and over, the abuse, the domestic violence, the sexual assaults…until my own challenges became a distant hum in the background, decreasing in importance.
Such tragedy, befalling such a brilliant artist.
We can do magic together, I thought as I fairy princessed my way around the resort hotel that had become our unicorn castle, a circus retreat in Panama and we were going to take down the patriarchy.
We can make magic, I thought as I fluttered about trying to make things less overwhelming for Jasmine.
I told Olivier about it when I saw him last week.
“Ben, en fait je me sens très très bien du corps,” I told him proudly. I’m actually feeling really good in my body.
…I may have broken my brain, I added sheepishly. But the rest of my body is doing great!
“J’ai appris mes leçons, par contre,” I said. I’ve learned my lessons: Never get close to anyone, ever.
“Oh, but it sounds like you were trying to be nice to somebody,” he said. “And…that’s not bad, just maybe next time…”
“Choose more wisely?” I asked, and we laughed.
“Maybe, yes!” he agreed.
He told me again about his past relationships before Tamami. He said the last breakup happened during the pandemic.
“For me, it hasn’t been friendships that were bad. Always romantic partners. That’s where I had this endless pattern where I would find somebody who needed help, and I would give and give and give and they would take and take and take. So after the last time, I did a lot of soul searching. And I sat down, and I meditated, and I free-wrote, and the pattern became really clear to me, and so too came the realization of, never again. This will never happen again.
“For me it became suddenly obvious what was going on. Because I asked myself, what was I getting out of this? I was feeling needed. It came from this insecurity I was trying to fill, this feeling that I would never be enough. But I never was enough with any of them; I was just always trying to make somebody else feel good enough who didn’t think well enough of themselves.”
Co-dependent insecurities. A self-perpetuating cycle. A black hole of energy.
Toxic people-pleasing.
The need to feel needed.
I can relate to that, for damn sure. It happened with Gavin, it happened back in the day with Jess. And it happened last month with a vengeance with Jasmine.
I think I’m still not ready to unpack the rest of that crazy week. Oh I will, don’t you worry. You’ll be hearing about it for sure.
But just, not yet.
I promised you Omar details though, didn’t I?
By now, all the Jasmine stuff has completely overtaken any Omar triggers, so I’m mostly just a little bit wistful of that moment we had together.
He’s a cutie.
Which is really what got him, in the end. Because he’s just a cute, silly clown.
“Gah gah, gagita, precisosa, gagiña,” he called me. Gagita. The diminutive form, because that’s what Spanish does. From “gah gah.” Get it? GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH!
“Papayaso,” I said back. Papa Payaso. Papa Clown.
He never really had a childhood, Omar. He has worked since he was 5 years old, and he’s basically always been the only man his mom can count on, from the time he was a boy.
She lives in a shack. With 16 other people, and he’s responsible for all of them. Nor does he exactly have that money to be responsible for all of them. He could live a decent life if he only looked out for himself, but the thought hasn’t even occurred to him.
Which is what I found so endearing while we were traveling together, and I stand by it.
But.
He does need to look out for himself, at least a little.
But he may never do that, and I may not be around to know if he does.
At the festival it was my third time seeing him since he had stopped talking to me, and it was no different this time around from the other two. He appeared for a moment, happily said hello to everyone in my vicinity, and disappeared without a word to me.
A pretty good tactic, I realized later when I had to transform myself into a moon witch and slide like the night past Jasmine and her toxic poison potions.
I felt a little silly having come to the festival at all; three weeks prior we’d been like little love-birds here in Granada, and now, I was back and all I felt was sadness. He wouldn’t even make eye contact, and I could have stayed at the retreat. This was supposed to be my day off…
But I had come to see our group. Anton, Rigo, Irina. Their little team had drawn artists from around the globe and I wanted to support them. After all, that was the purported mission of this entire circus troupe; to support the Panamanian artists!
Except for giving them air conditioning.
Strange that Jasmine hadn’t even included the festival on the schedule, I thought on the bus, but immediately gave her the benefit of the doubt; after all, Emma was going to be here, and she had apparently been very manipulative of Jasmine.
Or so I had been told. By Jasmine.
Thinking about the festival was probably too painful for Jasmine.
Still though. She had paid for the transport, but she could have actually told people to come! Instead, only five out of forty of us actually showed up to show our support at the biggest art festival in Central America. Arranged by the same circus artists who were given the shittiest housing conditions at the retreat and never complained about it.
Zoe and I wandered over to the murals and I poured my heart out to her, such as it was. I did trust her, although I didn’t trust the narcissists she ran with. (This concern was confirmed later that day when it became very clear that Zoe had immediately gossiped all of my drama away.)
I didn’t care, I just made sure to not share anything more directly with the narcissists themselves.
I thought to myself as I headed straight into Jasmine’s arms.
ERG!
But I didn’t give Zoe’s particular narcissist the satisfaction in the cab the next day. I didn’t tell them what Omar and I had talked about.
Because we did talk. Much much later, after I had given up on it ever happening, after I had smoked a joint with Rigo, shared a hug with Emma and thought, I really don’t know about her being a manipulator, but how could Jasmine be wrong?
After the performances. Oh, the performances. Teenage boys making hilarious fools of themselves on stage, girls too, juggling, acrobatics, a very long theater piece that nobody could understand because voice modulation classes haven’t come to Panama yet…
I could teach, I whispered to Rigo. I could come down and do a workshop with the kids. Because they’re GREAT at body langage! They must have learned it from you…
And they had. Their clown mentors had taught them well. It was like Panamanian vaudeville, this show.
And it was performed completely free of charge for the neighborhood, with beer served discreetly in plastic cups and artists paying to show the world their art.
Anton was exhausted, which he must be, because the fire show out in the plaza? And the acrobatics??
And his damned leg. Still fucked up from the lack of safety instruction at the contortion class. Gah gah.
But there he was smiling at his protogés, filming them. More than smiling. Beaming. Like they were his own kids.
“You bored?” he asked me. I could have been bored, for sure, not knowing what was happening in the play since you couldn’t actually hear any of the lines. But I wasn’t.
“This is history, right here,” I told him. “You’re making history, a revolution with art. You guys are incredible. What about you?! You bored?”
“No,” he said. “Just tired. VERY VERY tired.”
At the very end came the grand finale, and there was Omar, running onto the stage and then…
Oh damn. Of course he was basing the bottom of a very tall tower. There he was in a line with all the other guys I had met back when I was his 9-day girlfriend, and he had to reach around and up as the men between them got lifted. His shoulder didn’t buckle but it definitely trembled and I swear I saw terror in his eyes. No wonder he needs to go to the gym every day. Acrobatting is no joke.
And then it was over, and he was fine, you could see the relief in their eyes because the scary stunts were over. And there he was, he happened to be walking toward Anton, could I help it if I was standing next to him?
I looked him dead in the eye and I said, “Good job,” and I meant it.
And he said, “I’m sorry, gah guita.”
And I said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I never meant to hurt you.”
So this was it, we were going to have the conversation, right here, right now. I felt bad, actually. This should be his moment, the adrenaline after a show, the congratulations.
“You should be drinking this in,” I said.
“No, it’s okay. I’ve wanted to talk to you. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Okay, but you did though. Not for having feelings, but just…You know what hurt me? When you pretended I didn’t exist. I don’t need to be all love songs and kisses on the lips, but you’re the one who kept talking about friendship. And that’s not what friends do.”
“I know,” he said. “I…I know it is my problem. It’s happened before, and I know I need to look at myself and figure it out because otherwise maybe I’m just gonna die alone, but…”
We continued in hushed conversation, Emma quickly interrupting to hug us goodbye, nobody else daring to…
Apparently in all the after-show hubub I missed the final joint with Rigo and two of the other girls, which I found annoying. They were gone by the time we finished.
But I guess this was more important.
It took me fifteen minutes to realize that he actually knew what the trigger was. I thought it was something nebulous, a random weird red flag that had caused him to reflexively retreat that thoroughly. Honestly, I assumed it was my financial advice, solicited or otherwise.
But it wasn’t.
In Spanish, the word for mother-in-law is “suegra.” People use it casually quite a bit, and it’s not uncommon for boyfriends and girlfriends to refer to each others’ parents as suegro.
I did it one time super early on with Etienne, actually. Six months in, right before I was going to meet Olivier for the first time. I can’t wait to meet my beau-frère, I giggled to him, and he just rolled his eyes at me.
Beau-frère: Brother-in-law.
I guess commitment issues all manifest in different ways…
Back at the retreat after Omar dropped me off, I kept worrying about him.
I tried actively to spiral off the man orbit and recenter, though. I knew already that if we continued I was going to have to learn how to not make everything about him. That he had his own lessons to learn and I couldn’t control when and how he learned them.
But I can help a LITTLE bit, I reasoned.
He told me over the phone one evening that the thing with Mariela was still on going. That his sister-in-law had gotten all riled up with his sister. They had headed “off.”
Where’s “off”? I asked.
There. Over there. Where Mariela lives. To “golpearla” for what had happened to the man who got stabbed. Golpear: To beat up.
Because obviously it’s Mariela’s fault that her husband stabbed him.
This world…
“So I’m stressed,” he said. “I have to take care of my mom, who’s really upset, and all the kids…and I talked about it with my brother. We’re gonna get a loan. To renovate the kitchen.”
A loan to renovate the kitchen.
I don’t even want to ask how interest rates work on a 0-collatoral loan for thousands of dollars you don’t have in Panama.
Or who the sharks are that will come after you if you can’t pay the bills.
And a property with a custom-built house would literally cost less than thirty thousand dollars. I could actually afford to…
No Lorelai. Stop. His problems are not yours to solve.
“What about your dream of saving for a car?” I asked. I thought it was a money sieve, but at least it could possibly help him to earn some money too, money that could help fund the other things…anything was better than that loan.
“That was just a dream,” he said, so firmly that my heart melted for him. “The banks would never give me credit for a car.”
But they will for a kitchen? I backed off, though. This was his life and his choices. I would let go.
“My mom asked about you,” he continued.
“Awww, she did??” I said, my ears perking up. I had apparently made a very good impression. I have a habit of doing that, but it had all been genuine. I really did love his family.
And apparently they loved me back!
“Yes, she was sad she didn’t get to say goodbye.”
“But she did!” I argued. We had made a special trip to go see her before heading off on our trip. I had hugged all of them goodbye.
“Yes, but, apparently she thought you were coming back. She said she thought she would have the chance for a proper goodbye.”
A proper goodbye!
“Gah gah gah, that’s so sweet,” I exclaimed. “My mother-in-law is asking about me!!”
Oooooooh.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh.
“That’s why all your walls went up?? Because I said suegra?!” I asked in disbelief. “But…”
Maybe I had misunderstood. Really? That was why?
“I know you were just joking,” he said. “I know now and I did then too, I just…I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
“But…you could have told me you were scared,” argued Baby Girl. “That’s what I did when we were playing around and you were too much of a perro! I got scared of your scary boy-dog-payaso antics, and I told you, and you listened and it was so nice. I could have done that for you, too.”
He listened and nodded and said he was sorry, but I don’t actually think he was listening. I think I was already written out of his narrative. He had raised the drawbridges of his happiness palace, and I was on the other side. He just wanted to make sure he apologized, and then he would be on his way.
In the end, we said that we were friends and everything was fine, but I don’t think that’s actually true because we haven’t talked since.
Gah gah.
Well…at least now I knew.
And so it was that I made my way home to the hotel that night, and then to the retreat the next morning, and then straight into Queen Jasmine’s toxic dungeon of a mother-fucking brain.
Love,
Lorelai
