About relationships

        


        The sky was so bright and starry that when you looked at it the first question that came into your mind was whether it was really possible that all sorts of bad-tempered and unstable people could live under such a glorious sky. Fyodor Dostoevsky


I could extrapolate a bit here— how come one that beholds such sky could not truly love? Because there is something in a starry night that may compel one to reach it, and how one can reach such sky other than truly loving…?


Dostoevsky’s “gentle creature” reminds me of my mother. My mother was a gentle creature. Somehow it was harder for her to deal with the vicissitudes of life, and perhaps that’s why she had to leave earlier from here, from under the stars. But she had her strengths; she had the strength of ideas. For example she gave me the idea of a true relationship, what it means to have, or live within one.


As I was growing up, turned three or something, my mom thought me to take steps alone, right near the fences of a few houses down from ours, and get to the house of a neighbor. The story goes that my mother, while pregnant with me was hanging out with the neighboring woman—she, pregnant as well. It turned out that each women gave birth to a girl, about two months apart. So, my mom would watch me as I was nearing the neighboring house to visit and play with the girl. It took us a little bit of time to get rid off the cloth diapers, constantly washed and boiled, to learn to walk, and say a couple of words, so we could start visit. And it was just the beginning, we kept on visiting; and visiting expanded in a network of interactions that soon enough became a relationship.


Well, today we live on different continents, far from the remote place of our first steps in life, we talk when we can, we meet where or when we can, and when we are doing it in the same place where we started off we take the same route near the fences of the few houses that are between ours. But time or distances don’t seem to count because closeness is just the same. I do not necessarily want to delve into what this closeness is all about, but I suspect it’s a connection of a deeper nature that’s hard to grasp sometimes; but you come to know when it’s there or not. I guess that loving comes with knowing— we tend to love what we know— and the realization of a deeper connection is this type of knowing. So, it is something of the realm of the stars to feel the vibration of one’s soul and to respond to it. It goes the other way too, like a circle. As two adolescent girls, we often walked under starry skies to places of dancing, dreaming of something special, a romance, but now,
when I am looking back, the “something special” was about us, our own relationship.


In relationships there is the beauty of old. We normally think of old as a form of decay, but in relationships old means strength and a form of blooming rather. So, I like this old; an old relationship is like a rock that you have placed somewhere and if over time you return to that spot, it’s still there. You see traces of the elements on it, you touch it with your hands, and it’s beautiful as can be. You feel there is a shelter there and you can fall asleep…


Later, when that unique time comes and a young woman wants to meet her man, I had a fancy encounter with someone and I felt that it was too fancy to dream about it. Fancy because I was on one continent and he was was on another and the possibility of a normal relationship as a man and woman seemed feeble. But somehow we persisted and in this persistence we discovered that we view the idea of a relationship in a similar way and this only added to the strength of the persistence. Eventually we figured out that a trip through the clouds across continents was not as crazy or hard after all, especially in the 21st century. And from the clouds to the stars was not too far…


Life is full of all kinds relationships. And some have the potential of reaching the sky. And I tend to weave and weave on them wanting to build them a ladder. But not all reach the starry sky. That’s ok because if one or two are making it there, I am there still…


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