Exodus

“What have I to fear now that there is nothing more to be done?

Since they can make things no worse for me,

they can no longer alarm me. "- JJ Rousseau

There are so many things people tell you at the onset of a divorce. They tell you it will ‘All be okay’, they tell you that ‘you did the right thing’, they tell you that you should be ‘grateful, you got out in time’ and they tell you to ‘get back out there and move on as soon as you can’. Armed by your own helplessness, you follow each piece of advice as it trickles into your consciousness to frame whatever the latest version of you is bound to become after you are done hibernating in your most recent version of hell.

For the first time, I am realizing, that I am somewhat grateful for people. Even, the silent support of complete strangers that always grated my ego before this happened. It has been a month since I was pushed to pack up all the scattered particles of a life I had tried to build over a year; box it all in cargo and fly home 18 hours after I filed the papers. It now reminds me of that Diane Lane film, where buried under a heap of hyperbole and melodrama, Lane remarks “The surprising thing about divorce is that it doesn’t actually kill you”.

In retrospect, what I feel above all the resentment and disillusionment is embarrassment. A deep, permeating sense of utter ashamed-ness at my own person for having known better and not acted otherwise. Most people enter into marriage armed with a dream but I entered into it in spite of mine. Most women, after having gone through a divorce, realize that their lives are so much better on their own but I knew that beforehand. So what grates me above all, isn’t the fact that I ‘ought to have known better’ but that I always did. An entire childhood plagued by the same problems that I eventually sought out for myself just the same. I am utterly, utterly disappointed in myself. And that hurts most of all, because the one time I actually did follow my heart, my head completely exited the premises and everything was shot to hell.

These days I find myself grasping desperately at the humour in all things. I wade my time through a series of cheap Pakistani films on television and old Austen adaptations. I swear at the television and cry as I scroll through the idle vignettes in my journals and the shoddy, over-posed pictures of my former-lesser half. I am told this is perfectly normal etiquette for a modern-day divorcee. Tears are overrated and always to be forsaken in favour of gumption, which is the order of the day. I think I’ve done well on the latter score, having already put in two weeks of consultancy work and received a good fat paycheck to prove that my mind hasn’t gone completely stale in the year I was forced to shut it down to appease the company I was keeping. Company that happened to believe in alien landings, impending holocausts that one actually needed to stock up for and Illuminati conspiracies that prevented me purchasing toothpaste, lotion and shower gel among a myriad of other things. I am beginning to somewhat appreciate the irony in the fact that I chose to marry a person who believed in the idea of ‘belief’ just as vehemently as I clung to the idea of 'doubt' as life's ultimate exclusion clause. It just goes to show how far opposites can detract.

I knew, a month into my marriage, that I was not meant to survive in it. What kept me stringing on was that quaint notion that marriages are made in compromise and fortitude and that the institution is not to be trifled with. The following months saw me perfecting my spouse-savant; cooking, cleaning, baking, fucking…and whatever else it is wives are derived to do. All the while, limiting my conversation to grocery lists and ‘how was your day, dear?’ Every sense of personality wiped clean after being categorically told how  pesky and pervasive mine was. Brain locked firmly away, conscience in a corner and words held at bay…that was marriage for me. Odd, the manner in which life chooses to choke the poetry out of us.

Now, I find myself on the verge again. Of another exhaustive beginning, going it alone, as I knew I always would. Dhammapada’s disciple a la’ ‘If in your course, you don’t meet your equal, your better, then continue your course, firmly alone. There’s no fellowship with fools’ and yet it doesn’t quite fit this time around because it is not the reality of loneliness that irks me as much as the idea of it. I fear, the bitterness, that such splitting inevitably brings. I fear the brittleness of growing into one of those women who begin by hating men and evolve into hating pretty much everything else. Who spend their days frowning and who have all the means for happiness but lack a taste for it. I fear that fate because I can feel it approaching every day and I have resisted it all my life. I resisted it as the abandoned child, as the charity case, family fuck-up and as the adult wanderer and I am still not ready to assume it. But there is something to be said for the power of heart break - there is an odd poignancy to having personally witnessed a machete taken to a dream one spent a lifetime constructing. It is a temporary colossus that never was, and while for everyone else the fact of it will fade away in time, for me the break will remain. From now on, my life will be classified from this point on and I knew better than to let this be my opus. So yes, I fear, bitterness because I have only ever calculated my life’s achievements to meet one lowest common denominator: Happiness. Eudaimonia is why I always return to Aristotle, even as I bunk-in with Feuerbach and Nietzsche from time to time.

I find myself raking my nails over my face in rage over my stupidity for having been that woman, one who thought herself born to forgive a man his mistakes. I wish I had smashed plates and sworn to my heart’s content but it was not prudent. Maintaining decorum during divorce meant that I silently pack my life, leave without a cent (as is becoming quite a trend with me) and not so much as squeak a solitary defense because I still couldn’t conceive of  ‘stooping to that level’. I couldn’t sift through emails and swear to my heart’s content because I just never chose to learn how to (not for dearth of material and/or inspiration, mind you).   It is quite perverse, this moral mathematics of the mind; an analogous equation that demands propriety of me, even at the most inopportune moments. How I wish, that I had inherited a truck load of venom from a gene pool soaked in salt.

For now, I have several logical anchors set in place. I am rabidly searching for work in a different city so I can deconstruct and reconstruct... alone, this time. I am making and keeping friends because I realize how much I missed them, and not just the mere idea of them. I am surviving to the staccato heart beat of reminiscing over old songs, planning new paintings and dreaming of another life that I can actually work for in this second act. I am relinquishing old appendages, wherever I find them creeping up. I am shedding weight and bleeding toxins of mind, body and mannerism. I am finally writing; constructing metaphors for missing moments spanning a year of both silence and supple salience.

So here's me clearing out barnacles of the mind

and hoping to finally spackle some flesh on the bones of my dreams.

A Precautionary Tale

In a banal setting
At an inconvenient time,

Would beauty transcend?

Or would it struggle still

Trapped in an open wound

Festering in an unrealized dream

Would it rebuke, rebuff or remember

That silly, stately girl

A fateful glitch in perpetual resistance of perfection;

A lonely wretch never to melt under an honest kiss;

A sad sage never to shimmer under the glow of a real compliment

That silly, sodden girl
carrying her bundle of incongruities
Dancing with her platoon of personal ghosts
Trapped by her quest for the one
 
A man deep enough
A man shallow enough;
A man hard enough
A man soft enough;
A man high enough
A man low enough;
A man dark enough
A man light enough;
A man, man enough
A man, woman enough

That silly, forever sorry girl

Trading in her pumpkin carriage

For a putrid cage,
 a stable quadrant in a dizzy world

 

Could Beauty ever forgive such a betrayal?
See her settle for a man who wants her
Only so she can beat herself bloody
in the memory of the one she wanted
 

A Happily Ever After Autopsy

"A lady's imagination is very rapid, it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment" - Jane Austen.

I suppose it goes without saying that no self-respecting feminist of this or any age wishes to live down to a Jane Austen summation of the 'fair sex' and yet I must admit to having done so. In a big way.

The word marriage has always terrified me, more than the institution itself, it is all the fringes of the fairytale attached with the concept that always disturbed me. There is a certain elusive 'un-attainability' to matrimony that is never really achieved even after all the papers have been signed, the 'I do's' uttered and the proverbial aprin donned. Couples are never really complete, no matter how much they affect the illusion of being so. There is always something to reach for, until there isn't and that is perhaps an even more terrifying prospect. For me, personally, the word always carried with it the myth, the mirage, the miracle...all followed by the manifestation of the mind-numbingly and soul-crushingly mundane.

There is much more to it, I am discovering. Having gotten hitched at what most would call 'break-neck speed', in many ways I am still reeling from the ride. Often, my partner and I spend hours marvelling over how we only met last December, got engaged three weeks later, married in February and now I am here. Here, in a new country; among new people; seated on new furniture; eating from new dishes; typing on a new computer and wondering if I am still the old me. That's one thing about marriage that I have observed, if you happen to be the woman leaving home and everything you know for the 'fairytale' then you are surrounded by the 'new'. So much so that one longs for the familiarity of all the frustrations that made one take the leap in the first place. I grant you the paradox.

Moving beyond the fairy tale beginning of meeting someone in a foreign country; on a bus; during a journalism conference; spending a week together; being proposed to and finding oneself unable to refuse despite all former logic that compelled a somewhat 'default' state of singledom, there is now the rather taxing and unexpectedly rewarding exercise of cohabitation. For those who know me, this state is as far from my natural habitat as possible. It is alien for me to share ...anything, really, with the occasional exception of DVDs, shoes or clothes. Sharing a life, a bed, a bathroom, a closet, a kitchen, a TV, a thought and a feeling is by no means a natural inclination and yet somehow, the days pass and one achieves new 'natural' states. It often makes me wonder if I am still the same person, if my mind is still my own or if I have inadvertently swapped it for a stepford bride caricature who bakes and cooks and cleans and folds underwear. Underwear that don't even belong to her, mind you! The sheer grounding of gender roles in marriage often grates my nerves and the 'singular' in me blanches at some of the things I now find myself 'volunteering' to do. It itches and it irks, all until I see my partner mopping the floors at my side, cooking at my side, folding laundry at my side and waking up in the middle of the night to make me Chinese food because I mumble something about having a craving during my sleep. Suddenly, then its okay to be less ...singular.

And yet, I am singular. I always have been. It is ingrained in how I think and how I view the world. I have always prided myself for 'not' fitting in; not buying the brand everyone needs to feel worthy of ...whatever it is brands bring; for not needing to be popular or indeed, even liked. I have relished the freedom that comes with dispensing of that very base need for approval. I used to view marriage as that damned Occam's razor matrimonial option that only ever oscillated between either being somebody or being with somebody but sometimes the simplest answers aren't really the best ones. Especially when concerning relationships. One can do both, although, granted it isn't easy to embrace differences and suddenly accept that everything one does now requires a sounding board. That one can no longer navigate each whim to its illogical conclusion and that every decision, every tabletop purchase, every grocery item and every life decision now needs validation from someone other than 'just me'. There is that ugly word 'compromise' that keeps cropping up and it leaves a distinctly un-feminist taste in ones mouth every time it does. Which is ridiculous, considering the taste of compromise is mostly just bitter and not everything bitter has to be linked with feminism, at least not as a rule.

Then again it IS un-feminist too. I always took great care to separate the rhetoric about choice with some basic rules that feminism did initially aspire to achieve before it forayed into its present dark alley of dada-ist and gaga-ist absurdities. Yes, feminism is about choice but one needs to be honest about the fact that it is also about making certain types of choices, whether or not we like to admit it. Putting a burgeoning career on hold for love is by no means a 'feminist' choice and I would refrain from calling it one. Neither is putting off a PhD for several years because one wants to start a family first. These are choices and women must be free to make them, but no, they are not feminist choices. It would be childish of me to try and take the course many women do of trying to defend their choices by labelling them as feminist just to feel better about themselves. It is counterproductive and it confuses the discourse, and frankly, feminism is a confused enough discourse to begin with! I suppose what it boils down to is accepting ones choices for what they are and still taking pride in the face that one made them.

When I found the man I knew I wanted to marry I decided to forego, perhaps, the biggest career opportunity that had ever come my way...a stint at the New York Times as part of the Daniel Pearl Fellowship. The latter required that I return to Pakistan and work there for a year and that would have meant risking my relationship. It was not a feminist choice and yet it was a woman's choice, made by a commitaphobe who always said that she would only ever get married if she found someone who made her want to get married. She did and it came down to finally taking that chance which has been every bit worth it. The decision, however, has made me reconsider many of my 'rules' about what I used to want for myself. While I still agree that marriage is an inherently patriarchal institution, I also recognise now that most of marriage is what you make it. So I am choosing to work out of that set up from within...it sounds convoluted - I know. And yet, all it takes is a partner willing to work with you.

Lately I have discovered that much of marriage involves the 'appearance of being happy'. So much rests on having the right furniture, the right bathroom rug and the right crockery. Because heaven help us if we serve dinner to strangers in boring, plain coloured china and they end up thinking we are not the 'perfect couple'. As if there is such a thing! The myth about perfection is debilitating because, while in truth something that doesn't exist cannot really hurt you, in essence it can unravel your entire premise. At the end of the day a woman will always want more than she has. For better and for worse. And she will also always aspire to perfection in this regard. I have come to believe it is the curse of our sex.

While my husband seems perfectly content watching a game of football, taking a walk down the marina and planning vacations; I always find myself fretting over job prospects, whether our house 'looks' clean enough for guests or whether I have the right clothes to match that adorable shoe. Protecting and preserving the prototype of a fairytale can be exhausting. Especially when one has no idea who invented the fairtytale and why and when it achieved such coveted sacred status. I mean, who really is to say what an ideal marriage looks like? Is it really the picket fence and three bedroom house complete with golden retriever playing in the yard or is it the confused and confusing mesh of peaks and valleys, fights and make ups, kisses and curses that fill all the crevices in to colour real people and real lives?

When is it socially acceptable for a newly-wed couple to shed the skin of a 'good looking' marriage to a real-looking marriage and be the prouder for it? I believe I have finally stopped my quest for achieving this supposed perfection. The initial exercise in sublimating the perfect meal, the perfect outfit, the perfect picture frame shots capturing the perfect blissful smiles simply became far too exhausting. My husband and I now spend our evenings watching Game of Thrones re-runs on television, chomping down on cookies and ice tea, while he tells me my eating habits will lead me to an early grave and I chide him for having the palette of an octogenarian with diabetes. I read with the bed site lamp on for hours after he's fallen asleep and he still wakes up at the crack of dawn to pray and then watch some 'Danish a.k.a light' news. We squabble over remote rights and how often to visit family and it is finally all 'real'.

And while I can by no means claim perfection, I can officially state that in an honest balancing of scales where independence means complete freedom to do whatever one wishes but do it alone and dependence - or the more politically correct 'interdependence' - means rearranging some life goals to make space for new ones or harder still, someone-else's goals -the latter wins. It wins in spades because you love someone enough for none of it to really be classified as a 'sacrifice'. It wins because there really is 'that much' to be said for having someone to hold your hand when you're walking down the street.

Marriages require a premise, and the initial phase involves looking happy because feeling it comes in episodes featuring valleys of misery and peaks of magic. This naturally forms a framework of subtleties often lost on the outside world and so 'looking the part' can sometimes take precedence over feeling it. All justified in the attempt of reassuring all those around us that ...yes, this really can be the Disney version of Anderson's fairytale and the Little Mermaid doesn't despair and die, she lands her prince and they live...wait for it, happily.