Losing It

It only seems appropriate that this blog should come full circle. I just re-read my very first post here and it really broke my (already broken) heart. Let's reminisce for a moment:

"I am so grateful to have Patrick, my love, to share this experience with. I feel that from this point on, we are bound together in a way I have never tethered myself to another in the past. Now, we share the bond of having done something, together. Now, we are not only together, but making our way forward, establishing memories of a great experience (or awful, who knows?) that will last a lifetime. Now, no matter what we become in the future, we will always be each other's partner in this moment of extraordinary experience."

After months of struggle together, suddenly we are no longer together. And although it is tempting to say that this recent development has made the experience awful, it is not true. This experience has certainly made me stronger, just as this break-up inevitably will. But the end of my relationship with the man I truly loved and treasured and counted on and trusted in- my so called PARTNER- has definitely made the entire purpose of this trip seem more obscure. Why did I come here, to the end of the world, if not to live with my love and build a life together? What was the point in sacrificing so much if the end only brings... the end?

When I think about those first hazy, humid moments in Buenos Aires when I wrote those lines almost 8 months ago, I see that for me, the experience was always about being together. Because of this unwavering conviction that our love was the first priority, I allowed our relationship to consume about 95% of my time and energy here. I have spent so many- countless- hours loving and loathing and pleading and pacifying Patrick that I often felt like I didn't even know where I was. In those moments of pain and elation, we might have been on the moon or maybe Timbuktu. We might never have left home at all.

Unfortunately, I think that Patrick would have preferred it that way. From the beginning, he was afraid and reluctant to try nearly everything: making friends, teaching, applying for jobs, taking classes, finding an apartment, finding any sort of happiness. He has been determined to live like a tourist- always looking toward the flight home and his comfort zone. Over the last few months, it became frightening clear that my love was willing to do almost anything to get out of this situation. Very quickly, I was the only reason to stay, and so all his anger and frustration with himself and his circumstances were unleashed on me. Suddenly, I was the culprit who was ruining his life, instead of the lover and friend who he began this journey with. And in the end, I was left with that old clique: "It's absolutely not you, its me." But is this ever really the truth? And does it really matter, since I lose just as much (or more)?

I feel betrayed in many ways. I feel that Pat betrayed me by agreeing to embark on this adventure and then never actually committing to live it. I feel that he betrayed me by convincing me to quit my job and leave Argentina several months before we agreed upon, and then breaking up with me anyway. I feel betrayed by his behavior in the end, when he chose to make me his enemy. But I also feel that I betrayed myself. I fought for this life and this dream for a long time. It was a changeable dream that started as Africa and the Peace Corps and a solitary adventure, and after much revision, finally ended up as a delayed arrival in South America with the man I unexpectedly fell in love with while waiting to leave. But I allowed this dream to dilate into a single pinprick: my relationship. I allowed myself to ignore so much, to not experience so many unknown facets of this place, because of my stubborn conviction to be in love. And so this is the reason why this break-up feels doubly painful: because I am losing both the dream and the love.

Yet, the trip isn't quite over. We still have nearly two months before the first available flight leaves for home. Two months that just happen to include Christmas, New Year, and our would-be two year anniversary. Two of the hardest months to be suddenly, oh-so-painfully alone. And despite all his best efforts to leave, Patrick is stuck here too. So now we are faced with the momentous task of starting a new kind of relationship: friendship. In three days, we leave for the organic farm where we have committed to six weeks of work. Separate beds, but not separate lives just yet. I challenge myself to spend this time neither wallowing in depression nor obsessing about how to be friendly, but simply soaking up as much of the present as possible. And I guess I have to ask myself: would I do it again? How can I learn to balance love and my seemingly impossible, unreasonably huge dreams of living a different kind of life? Will I ever be able to find a true partner who can help me live the dream instead of reducing my world to a single ambiguous space?

I am still searching: for love, for my dream of a different sort of life, for a way to love myself, even when I'm alone. It is the search that brought me here and I guess it is my purpose in life. But from now on I think my priorities will be different: Love myself, love my life, love another.