Dirty laundry and narrative illusions

I tend to scribble down the messy gist of blog entries on my way to and from work. For various reasons, I haven't had much time in front of the computer lately, which means I have a queue of random observations and half-baked ideas waiting to be typed up. Some may have to be backdated. Some, I fear, are now OBE (overtaken by events)

In the "look, do you really want to go on this trip/it means a lot to me/ok, fine, let's do it" run-up to my now annoyingly finding myself facing another week at work, K and I did indeed have a few arguments. In the course of one, K quietly suggested he leave.

Now, we've reached this point before -- a few times -- but it's always me who gets us there. K can get snippy, but it's me who has vast reserves of nuclear weapons-grade anger. The fact that it was K to reach this point in our dispute, which are generally as formalized as Kabuki theater, truly gave me pause. I spent a tearful night writing frightened emails to friends.

The next morning, K was supposed to go out with one of our friends to pick up a very large rubber-tree plant he'd admired. As I left for work, I pointed out that he really shouldn't waste our friend's time and jeopardize the life of an innocent plant; if he left, all our plants were pretty much goners; with my schedule, it'd be all I could do to keep the cats alive. Abruptly downshifting from a general declaration ("maybe I should just go") to something as concrete as canceling plans with friends and deciding to abandon his garden seemed to suddenly make it real for K. I could see it sink in. He agreed, but got very quiet.

Though I was upset and distracted at work, I was also a little amused to think that the likely outcome of our relationship was going to be forecast by whether or not, of all things, a rubber-tree plant was going to be purchased. Especially, you know, because of that song about the ant and the rubber-tree: "Anyone knows an ant, can't/Move a rubber-tree plant...so any time you're getting low/'stead of letting go/just remember that ant...", etc.

These are the bones of a blog entry I'd scribbled out last week. The thing with a travelblogue like this: despite my tendency toward verbosity, 99 percent of what happens here doesn't make it in. India is, as I've said, is amazing for the intensity and rapidity of its challenges. Chiang Mai was manageable both because it was a small town and because the language barrier kept me insulated from just how strange things were (indeed, the more acculturated I got, paradoxically, the weirder things became). London was less foreign than South Carolina would be. But Mumbai just doesn't let up. The enjoyment (for me) of writing this blog is the chance to review a largely undigested corpus of experience (food-poisoning joke redacted) and tease out strands that roughly adhere to a narrative structure. Naturally-occurring plot-lines do happen. To wit: when I came home, there was a beautiful, eight-foot-tall rubber-tree plant in the living room.

But: in its own blog entry, that story would have ended there. It's a true anecdote, but it's amazing to me how a collection of true anecdotes can present an utterly false picture. The submerged bit of that story-iceberg is huge. K is here on a single-entry tourist visa (which is why our vacation couldn't be extended to delightful non-monsoon places like Singapore). He's had the opportunity for (admittedly menial) employment at the Consulate, but has turned it down. It isn't clear to me -- or, I think, him -- what he can do here. Nor is it clear to me -- and perhaps not him? -- what he would do in the States. We cycle through breathtakingly broad options regularly. I review for the LSAT. I brush up my GRE math. I read the cables soliciting volunteers for new postings first thing at work every day. I look at the other, non-government, jobs I could possibly get, and conclude I'd be nuts to leave mine (except that I hate it). We talk about what K could do if I stay in. We talk about what he could do if I don't. We run both scenarios with an added starting-a-family factor. We discuss whether to marry, and (rationally and non-heatedly) whether the exigencies of the nomadic life make it better to part. Essentially, we've got a set of simultaneous equations to solve, but the variables shift daily. Call it the rubber-tree gap: the necessary tidiness of narrative, and the ambiguous and complex mess of my life. I wish I could say I had high hopes.