The state of the union

After 3+ years and 3+ continents, you'd think we'd know, wouldn't you?

We don't know. I don't know.

On the one hand, the K-ness of my life has a certain feeling of inevitability about it, at this point. On the other, although getting out of India resulted in an undeniable bump up in my quality of life, I'm still not completely happy. But whether that's due to my relationship, the fact that I'm in a time-sucking career toward which I am, at best, indifferent, or because I don't know how to be happy -- or some combination thereof -- I just couldn't say.

One doesn't want to be rash, but one does find oneself in thought experiments. One envisions roads not taken, all the past boyfriends for whom one can't immediately answer the question "why did we break up, again?" (There aren't many. There are far more for whom the unanswered question is "why did we go out, again?") One doesn't go too far down these paths. There's usually some major obstacle pretty early on, like would our cats get along? Or, y'know, the fact that I'm nearly impossible to live with.

K does not have a job. When we were overseas, there was always the stumbling block of papers we didn't have, visas that were needed. There are no longer any stumbling blocks. Externally speaking, I mean.

This has caused a little bit of friction.

We're pretty well entrenched in cycles: we argue, in ever-widening well-trod spirals; we reach the point of breaking up; we have long, dreary, circular, well-trod talks; things improve for a while. There are meta-patterns, too; this is a fractal (and fractured and fractious) relationship. The cycles start spinning by more and more quickly, until I say something like "haven't we been here just too many times before?" and am about to take Drastic Action, and...

...then, well, the first time, it was a train station bombing a short walk from the house. And there was confusion, and overloaded phone circuits, and I knew K was supposed to take the cat to the vet that morning in that neighborhood, and he knew I was in a massive target zone, and we couldn't reach each other for hours, and then nothing else mattered.

Almost exactly a year later, and the bombs were further from the house, and we were together and safe inside our guarded residence. But I couldn't reach my staff, and decided to go into work, where the phones stood a chance of functioning. There were rumors of further strikes, and mobs and violence on the streets. K encouraged me to go in, and our driver refused to let me take a taxi, and I was proud of both of them. But then, as I grabbed my keys, K took his, too. I looked at him questioningly. "Where you go, I go," he said firmly.

That bought us another year.

I don't know what happens next; only that we're on a sandbar in the middle of a fast-moving river, and, whether we go forward or back, singly or in tandem, there's going to be a bit of an uncomfortable slog in both our futures. Oh, and that it's July again, in this city of mass transit. Y'all be careful out there, now, ok?