The Love Stories We Cannot Tell

A question to ask at your relationship’s hardest hour.

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*This is an expanded version of an earlier story. Republished by Human Parts.

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They say you meet your karma in India.

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It’s 2017. The year is shutting down for good. I’m back in New York for the holidays watching Anthony Bourdain eat food in Myanmar on the teli, when all things Asia start to consume me. I watch no further.

Thailand and Vietnam are romancing my brain on the daily, a visa for Myanmar has already been served. I want to dive into the food culture and explore the eastern way of life. Yet there’s something more to the energy moving through my bones besides my eternal burn for food and travel. I can’t put my finger on it so I get myself a plane ticket.

Thailand is my first stop.

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A vibrant, bustling city in the north, culturally rich even if a tad too digital nomad-y, I’m in Chiang Mai with a friend who has joined the first leg of my trip. We’re cruising down streets being dusted by monks, desolate alleys with monkeys running wild, in cute cafes with mountains hovering near, eating killer food surrounded by humans with smiles as bright as the sun near shops with temples in the rear. The urge to drop everything and live there indefinitely arises fast. Chiang Mai is a massive breath of fresh air. We both have other bridges to cross first though.

Days before she makes her way back to New York City, Jade says bluntly, “You’re going to meet someone.” I get a case of goosebumps. It feels like a premonition.

I take it a step further.

Being a believer in the power of intention, I’ve manifested much of what I’ve wished for in life — my Berlin flat in an impossible market, empty taxis during overcrowded hours, money galore on airport floors, a faux-fur coat to hold me through eternity just by visualizing and writing about that which I desire. So I take out my journal and start to scribble.

The scribbling becomes a script describing the encounter. I meet a man. He’s emotionally available and drives me physically wild. We spend several months adventuring through Asia — inseparable, intoxicated, undeniably in lov…

“Wait!!!”, I hear the part of me who thoroughly enjoys her alone time anxiously admonish. “Do you really want to do that?!”

The little one is making contact.

She who held a dysfunctional family on her growing girl back, finding freedom in solitude and life in her inner world, a gift no doubt yet, when there for too long, a bridge to an infinite sadness. Wanting this unhealthy kind of independence no more, I know I must get firm with her. Out loud I proclaim, “I give up being on my own!”

I want to fall in love again.

Throughout my twenties and thirties there were many men, however none with whom I fell head over heels. I was starting to feel frustrated and wondered if it would ever happen again. Was I doing something wrong? I wanted the teenage kind of love I experienced with my first boyfriend full of abandon but wiser and deeper.

I write more and my unconscious begins to take over.