Hi Dani,

Thanks! Yes, it’s a bit like rope-dancing…
Now, I have the advantage that my LO finally decided to move away, so I‘ll see him very rarely from summer on. Of course it’s also sad but it will help.
At the moment I‘m quite limerence-free, having had a busy week with a lot of socialising with new people and was not thinking about him much.

Husband of best friend, that’s tough! I haven’t read your posts, but it sounds like a very precarious situation. I wish you strength! I‘d go for distraction, workwise and socially, it’s the thing that seems to help me most to get some perspective.

Hi Mila – I just wanted to say that I sympathize. My LO is also a friend, the husband of one of my best friends in fact. I had known them for 18 years before the limerence kicked in. It is difficult to navigate recovery and maintain the friendship at the same time. I am confident that we can do it! Stay strong.

Black Hole

Virginia Konchan

I’m sick of my face. Can I take it off,
mask of pantyhose worn by a thief?
Can I trade up, for museum beauty
or airbrushed celebrity perfection?
Those faces don’t crinkle or age:
they shine bright as headlights of
an SUV careening down the Autobahn
en route to mecca or the Lower Rhine.
My face resounds, reduplicates, divides.
If an equation, it’s the string of symbols
devised by Einstein to describe a theory
of General Relativity: the left-hand side
pictorializes the geometry of spacetime,
the right-hand side, all mass and energy.
Information is not knowledge, he wrote:
knowledge’s only source is experience.
My face is tired of experience, sapped
by being gaslit out of my true feelings:
rage, reverence, adoration, antipathy.
My ancestors, mostly potato farmers
from hardy Eastern European stock,
speak out of my face like prophets
in search of an incarnate messiah,
my face a burning bush or wheel.
You view my administrative face:
its abandonment during the throes
of passion is also a mystery to me.
Sad, slumping face, consternated
face overwrought by cognition,
face upturned with dumb hope:
I trace your origins, relentlessly.
When my ex-husband called me
a black hole, he was, in a sense,
correct: my face a gravity field
so strong even light cannot beam.
Supernova explosion, neutron star,
lead me to a beyond, deep within:
eros of the unthought, undreamed.

“To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Sometimes, a piece of mind could be transformed over night in a tiny yet vital aspect — snowphoneix

The above lines are quotes from the film, “Night Train to Lisbon” , not my own.

We leave something
of ourselves behind
when we leave a place.
We stay there even though
we go away.
And there are things in us
that we can find again
only by going back there.

We travel to ourselves
when we go to a place
where we have covered
a stretch of our life,
no matter how brief
it may have been.

But by traveling to ourselves,
we must confront our own loneliness.
And isn’t it so
that everything we do
is done out of fear
of loneliness?
Isn’t that why we renounce
all the things
we will regret at the end
of our life?

Hi Imho,

I missed a lot of posts but found yours- my wallet is still lost or stolen, but I‘m having such a great time here and saw such amazing things, all in the company of my lovely colleagues .I‘m very happy.
My LO got silent after I showed him some of the stuff he‘s missing here. I don’t miss him and don’t think much about him, I know it‘s just the overload of impressions, but it’s still good to know I can have happy times at work without him.
Tomorrow I’m off to the States!
„ It’s such a nice free feeling that LO is not dominating my thoughts at the moment after so very long.“
I second that!

A Home of My Own

In the East,
“Leaves must fall back to their root”
In the West,
Homer returns Odysseus to his Ithaca
I, a nameless pond-fish
floating among
the steady holding of loyal hands and
the eager calling of native Mothers:
“Come back, back to your homeland…”
decide —one day
I will lay my aged, culture-altered limbs
in the sunny, leafy Woodlawn’s Hillcrest…

To swim into the borderless and colorful seas
one could
tiptoe in Sapphic stanzas
puff Sand’s cigars on dashing horses
waltz on Whitman’s grass
stroll in Proust’s insightful mazes
sharpen eyes in 1984’s mental cages
rage against Shakespearian woes
weep for Dostoyevskian idiots
caress Werther’s infatuation sorrows
hug the giant hearts in Hugo’s realm
stroke Dicksen’s orphans to sweet dreams
chase Socratic evasive quizzes
slip into Nietzschean gay frenzies
giggle at the acidic tongue of Wilde’s wits
recline in Woolf’s room of one’s own
dig into oneself in Jungian couch
scribble in Lessing’s golden notebooks
inhale Austin’s serene feminine pride
refresh in Dickinson’s whispering
stand tall on Brontë’s’ unyielded will
awaken in Vipassana’s silence, and
recharge in Tantric wise embraces…

Here in the valley of the tallest skyscrapers
one could
swing leashes of muggle puppies
tickle colorful toes of mixed babes
hum ancient lullabies of all lands
gaze at dazzling robes circling the globe
savor the seven continents’ species
sip cocktails of the West shaken by the East
curl up in Madam Nin’s laced scarf
spin, spin around the rising of the light…

Here along the curves of Riverside
I could
hear the drumming of my unbending bones
touch the rise and fall of my girly pulses
shred my wild tears to godly faces
exhale my mumbling into compassionate ears
follow that hazy, roaming spirit’s calling
splash gashing ink to the subway’s cackling…

With self painstakingly-polished limestones
I erect my own Ithaca’s roofs.

2/9/2018 — the beginning of LE

Nisor,

Thank you for keeping encouraging me in a turning point on my path… Repetition always helps train the mind!