Foreign Lands

We lay here and watch a movie, cook, eat ice cream, and my mind drifts towards more urgent matters. I need to go to court, fight the system to stay in this apartment. If it happens, try to hold on to it for a while longer. I think it shows consistency, my life has always been moving around from one place to the next, one relationship to another. All my life I lived like a nomad and loved like a madman. 

Anger has been a key player in the deterioration of these bonds. Other issues, too, played a role. But only anger paralyzed me, took me hostage, raided and looted the lands of decency, the boundaries of good relations; anger plays dirty and says hurtful things. It's not what people say, especially in a moment of anger. It's what they do and what they don't. 

What's meaningful in a relation is to give one another always the benefit of the doubt, peace of mind and space. Only this way can you truly aspire to become part of someone else's life, not their whole, not by a whole lot. In relation to one another, we all live in foreign islands, far away from one another. 

The world we see today emanated out of the past that we forged, stone on top of another stone, brick by brick. There's sorrow and sweat and tears and all distill their acidic properties. Laughter, serenity, quietude, aloofness, you need to learn to love spending time alone if you want to love someone else. We are only alive this moment, never bother with rigid rules, headstrong but flexible, willing to bow down and admit one's mistakes. 

Don't let ego get in the way. You're the man and as such, you're supposed to be the one who fights for something, anything, that you believe. Ambivalence is not a manly stance; neutrality, indifference, when it comes to nurture, do not reflect your core values. There will always be forces testing our resolve, challenging our minds, and women often tap into this dark force as if to see we, as men, can cope with what life often has in store for us. The challenge women represent is the intrinsically the challenge by and large life is full of. It is as if our women wanted to know if we are willing and ready to face the dark, if we have enough light to brighten the obscure passages that await us in the alleys of our destiny, in the turns of fate, in the face of adversity. We must know that women will never inflict nearly as much chaos and pain as life in this world of ours is capable of. We should see our women's nagging and complaints, her lack of empathy at times, her virulent moods and unsteadiness, her bitchiness, as a testing ground for our resolve. We can withstand the feminine blows because we were meant to overcome bigger things. 

But before we do, we must be willing to test our resolve in relatively smaller issues. When we're children, our first day of school, the first love, all these wondrous emotions seem at times too overwhelming, but in retrospect nothing that would have doomed our spirit in those days is able to bring us down nowadays. Perhaps that's the reason why, when it comes to indecisive behavior, self-doubt and timidity, as men we tend to euphemistically belittle one another with adjectives that stem off feminine prerogatives. We call each other "sissies", or tell one another "don't be a pussy", or "little girl", especially as young boys and, in many instances, as men.

We have grown older, we know we can manage, and in the same way, our troubles now are nothing more than challenges that, once conquered, will be part of our circle of influence, and we can adapt and manage, and move on to bigger things.