I’m out of school with no job prospects. I’m slacking along day to day making no real use of myself. My newest personal philosophy is that I have to appreciate the moment I’m in and what I’m doing in it. Whatever I’m doing is what I’m doing and I ought to be satisfied with its value. I can’t be living my life fretting over what I should be doing, or if I’m wasting my time, or if I could be doing something better. Whatever I’m doing, I am doing because it was my decision and it must have some value.
My relationship with Josephine is feeling more secure, but it’s strange how much things have changed in the past few months. I feel that I’ve re-invented myself and I’m a completely different person than I was several months ago.
I was in the law library and I just closed my eyes and thought about the alternate reality I was in over the summer in Bangkok. I was a completely different person there. The reality of the hotel is so distanced now; the air of Bangkok, the feel of Bangkok. I was not who I think of myself being when I was in Bangkok.
I close my eyes and imagine the space I occupied while in Bangkok: the hotel room, the furniture, the air conditioner problems, the windows, the view, the heat and humidity, all the places I went, all the spaces I filled. My second time there, all of it vivid, but still so far from me, so detached. And it is so easy to forget that at the beginning, when I went to Bangkok, Josephine and I had called it quits. So even though our relationship was on the road to recovery and reconciliation, the word was that we were over and any future relationship had to be earned, and our growing process had to be continuous. Any complacency would be the death again.
The death of our relationship as it was. I guess that was the major change, because our relationship occupied my entire last year and it became who I was. When we killed the relationship, we killed my entire past year, and the summer was the time when I was recovering and readjusting to having an entire year lost. When I finally landed on my feet, I was starting anew, the nearest thing to what I “was” was over a year prior.
The destructiveness of the relationship was so subtle that I feel that I was re-invented without a crisis, but the whole relationship was a crisis of sorts. But it wasn’t a personal crisis, and that’s what’s missing from my life; what I need to break through to something different or new, something that is not predictable and constrained in my old patterns.