Currently viewing the tag: "relationships"
I’ve never gotten along with my father; we’ve never understood each other and we’ve always been very different people. When I was 13 he left, and thus ended the time when we would be in each others lives on a day to day basis. He tried his best to maintain some semblance of parental control by enforcing a set of rules on my sister and I from outside our house, but as the first couple years passed and we got used to him not being there, his authoritarian grip quickly loosened, and eventually was removed. From then on my father became someone that I was related to, but not someone I would know anymore than an acquaintance.
However the older I get in this age of my life, the more I come to realise the things that he had to face and better understand what kind of choices he had in front of him. I still find that I don’t agree with the things that he did, but at least I feel I can appreciate what his circumstances were and how he could have taken the forks in the road that he did. I also feel I understand why he had such problems relating to his own father, and why they spent nearly a decade not talking to each other.
Funny how history repeats itself.
Andy.
Last night I went to a birthday party of a good friend of mine. She decided to do something different from the usual drinks in a bar type bash that is soooo typical of the Amsterdam socialite crowd by booking a couple of lanes at a big bowling center in the south west of the city. Me being me of course, I turned up so late I missed the bowling completely and was only there in time for the last round of drinks. To be fair, I was at a poker game organised on the same day and I had forgotten about the birthday party until I made a phone call to find out about another birthday party that I thought was on that night, but had actually been on the night before, to which I was informed I had totally missed. So all things considered being two hours late on the day wasn’t that bad (and I’m a liability on a bowling lane at the best of times).
I did however meet someone that took me back in time about 10 years to my first month when I arrived in Amsterdam. One of the couples there was an English woman who had sitting next to her a guy I would have picked from some part of latin America but was to later find out he was from Mexico. I got talking to him and found out he’d just recently arrived in The Netherlands to make a serious go of the relationship with the English woman which started when the two of them met while she was on holidays in his country.
I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or give a phone number to him of someone who could help him with legal advice when the shit hit the fan. This guy was telling me the exact same story that I had heard from my Venezuelan soul brother, Balduino nearly 10 years ago to the weekend, on the day that we first met in a small cafe close to where I now live. Mexico man told me of the troubles he was having meeting people, and how left out he felt being here. He also said that he really appreciated that I took the time to talk to him and include him in the conversation because most people were treating him like he didn’t exist. The poor bloke! I felt like telling him he has a hard road ahead of him; that more than likely he’s going to get fucked by the bureaucratic red tape attempting to get a visa to stay here; and that his girlfriend is more than likely going to turn into a flesh eating psychopathic killer before the end of the year. I’d gone through all of this with Balduino, and seen the hardship and triumphs in his own struggle to make a place for himself in clog-land. I didn’t though, but instead told him that he would take some time to adjust and to give it time with finding his feet.
We talked and all too soon it was time to go. Mexico man asked me if I would like to get together again for a drink somewhere as I had been the first person who taken the time to talk and get to know him. I said yes, knowing that really he’s just reaching out and trying to find that one friend that will help make him feel like he has something here, besides his girlfriend (who said fuck all to me for most of our conversation anyway). I figured it was the least I could do, but couldn’t help but wonder if at some point in the short term future there would be a nasty breakup and him landing on my doorstep asking if he can come in because the ex is trying to kill him.
Life it seems, really does have a sense of irony.
Andy.
“People come into your life for either a reason, a season, or a lifetime”.
A friend of mine told me that. It came up because I have a habit of falling out of contact with people, and I will go for long periods of time without reaching out to people that I am close to. So much so that this friend of mine thought our friendship had come to an end. When I asked her why she thought that, that’s when she told me this.
When I first heard this I thought it was just another fish wives generalisation that said nothing meaningful but sounded very profound. However on the eve of turning 40, I’ve been reminiscing on my life and looking back on the years that were the decade of my 30′s, and realising there is more truth to this than I had first given it credence.
For me, the 10 years from 30 to 39 are marked by these series of significant relationships that lead in a line, one to the next, with each period of partnership representing a time of happiness, introspection, pain and personal growth. Each individual I became involved with started for reasons as unique as the persons themselves, and ended in the same way. Some of these women were only with me for a short time, and left to leave only a memory of the time we spent together, and a select few others are still with me today, being part of my life and growing with me still. I do wonder why it is that this friend of mine from Australia is one I am still close with, and yet the woman from Almere who I had an intense affair with is now only in my past life – in every way? It can’t have anything to do with the depth of feelings because that would mean we would not have left each other. I think perhaps it is because the two of us found of each other in a time of desperate need when we were both overcome with feelings of loss and loneliness. We shared some wonderful moments, and saw each other through a dark time, and then when that period of our lives changed, we didn’t need each other in the same way. I’ve not had contact with her now for several years, but I suppose she is still with that same man she was with, living the same existence of being patient, waiting for the time she could leave and create a new life for herself.
Maybe you can’t really simplify relationships in this way. Relationships are inherently complex things that are all messy because of the nature of being human, but it does seem to me that there is an inextricable link between the timing of a persons arrival in life and the significance of their presence.
Andy.
