In 2012, when I was 22, I have lived with a girl who wasn’t my girlfriend. While I still had a girlfriend, or so I thought. A year later, I’d do the same mistake, living with a girl I’d like a lot, but not letting us happen, solely because I couldn’t stop thinking of the very same girl, whom I considered my girlfriend. Well, she was very special for me, and so that made the whole thing complicated.
But this time I’d write about this first episode of a brief living with another girl. In a way, I used her as an opportunity to live in the very centre of Moscow, which is in so-called Russia. Well, she was aware of that, as she knew my (as I thought of her back then) girlfriend, and it was through her that I’d visit her, and spend a couple of weeks in her place. The girl still had a husband in Australia, whom she’d divorced (or be divorced by, however this difference almost irrelevant for this story). Their love story is somewhat sad or funny, or I don’t know, too real. He hates Russia, she loves Moscow, he did his best to leave to Australia, she returned home. Yeah, that’s how I separated the girl who I was in love with, the one I lived with in 2013, solely because of the very same thing: I hate Russia, she loves Moscow.
Okay, fuck you then. These days, I won’t even consider talking to a Russian-speaking girl, not to say be interested in her. That’s a pretty deep and complex thing for those who does not bother to understand the whole context.
This story is about the ex-Australian girl though. She loves sex, as I’d heard from my then-girlfriend (the one I thought I’m in relationships with). That was after I lived with the ex-Australian girl. The thing is, I love sex too. I bet I love it much more than both of them combined, I’m a man after all. However, at that point in time, I was too preoccupied with ‘cheating’ — I never wanted to be a cheater! — and so I have never considered having a sexual affair with someone else, while I’m in a relationship.
The hostess girl is five or ten years older than me (I don’t remember, sorry), meaning she has a bit more experience in the matter. Heck, there’s a great deal of difference between 20 and 30, especially when you consider that a guy had just one sexual partner at his 22, and the girl had quite many of them by her 30.
I’d have a first kid by my 30, however. Desired, expected, and dreamt of. With the woman I thought as the best fit for the role. Of which I never regretted. Yet, this is a very different story.
We’re drinking some tea, with cold ice from the freezer, eating some super-shifty microwaveable pancakes from the nearest shop. We’re talking about Life ,and that’s where she learns my age (I was always appearing older, which I never challenged, letting people think I’m older than I really am). And she gets this opportunity to find a good excuse to not have sex with me, as obviously she wants to have sex with me. (That’s what I know by being much more experienced in the matter, almost 14 years into the future.)
Here she says this phrase that truly stuck with me. It was something about me having these crises up to my thirties, thing like that. That was a comparison with her (Australian by then) husband, who is older than me. I did know that I’m destined to have this middle-life crisis, and other crises too. Destined, as everyone else.
I’d spend a decade, or two perhaps, coming back to this ‘is this the crises yet?’ Thought. I’m 36 now, my second kid just fell asleep near me, and it’s too late for him to get asleep, yet here we are today. We’re sleeping together, me and him, and he likes it when I’m hugging him tightly. We invented two poses: first one is a cat and kitten pose, or as he called it just a half an hour ago, the belly and the back pose. My belly his back. The second pose is bird pose, him being a little chick and me being a hen. I call him by various birds names then. It’s when he’s facing me. There’s no back-to-back pose for him, he wants me to hug him, hence belly and the back, as the opposite of back-to-back.
Hnat fallen asleep, and I missed that opportunity, as always. With the exception of the couple of weeks when I was taking melatonin as a supplement, with it I was sleeping like a baby.
There’s a wast thinking train I’ve got onto, and I started thinking of the crises. Apparently, I want through some, but I missed to reflect on all of them. To get the context better, I’m super focused, to the point of being obsessed — I’m super focused on reflecting over my life. I’ve been always like that. But this last 6 years, since we had Nadia, I had no opportunity. The life became too complicated. Having a special kid with disabilities is very exhausting, and having close to zero external help is a double challenge. Not to say full fucking war with barbarian neighbour, being pushed by the geopolitical partner, who turned out to become a traitor and an enemy. Orange monkey and his administration.
There certainly was this crisis of me realising how wrong I was about women and my naive approach to them. When I started being honest with myself and others, I found out that, say, the cheating part, I don’t care. If everyone involved is open, I don’t give a single fuck about my partner fucking anyone else. And I don’t give a single fuck about them giving fucks about me fucking anyone else. (Of a legal age, obviously. Human, obviously.) This cheating non-cheating approach already ruined one of my relationships, and while the girl was obviously seeking ways to fuck someone else, and I was the opposite, obsessively not willing to have sex with anyone else, even years into being single… It was just wrong for me to care. Solely because I didn’t know myself well, and pretended to be someone else.
That whole relationship and the after effect, it was a pretty huge crisis, but I bet it has nothing to do with the age. It wasn’t that infamous middle-age crisis, or any other. I don’t believe it’s just some kind of ‘first love crisis’ either, since people can get into this at any age and at any relationship. Plus, my drama was also about us not being open and the girl not telling the truth was driving me mad. That’s about trust in relationships, and again, that’s not even a crisis to start with. That’s a pretty universal thing, and that’s what I teach my 4 years old now: if you betray trust, it’s very complicated to get it back. So you’d better stick to your promises, otherwise people won’t trust you very quickly.
Apart from that, I cannot find a crisis I went through. I don’t mind I didn’t have them. I certainly had, and I even think I had quite a lot of them, certainly more than an average Joe. I migrated from my home country, basically being a refugee. That sparked some crisis. I went through reconsidering what my home country was, one and another. I went through reconsidering of the role of my father in my life, and my mother too. And my cousin, both of them. And the other random people. And me, my lovers, my friends, or those I considered ones, workmates, internet strangers, real life strangers too. Society as a whole, different societies. Humanity as a whole. I certainly rethought people. But what bothers me, I did all that sub-consciously, barely noticing.
I went through my work self, understanding who I am.
Not really, by the way. I just learned how to position myself towards various roles, but inside, I’m still the person who’s deeply interested in very various topics, sometimes of the opposite spectrum.
I went through re-learning the role of my mother, which is the separate entity among all others. Russian war helped a lot, as I found quite many parallels in the global war with the relation to my local war with her.
I went through re-learning the role of women in my life, especially as now I have this little cub we have, the autistic one. Not that the circle is complete now, when I have a woman kid of my own, but at this point in life I am experienced with women of al ages, from little rodent to a huge cougar. (A loose reference to Zootopia, that’s what the Chef was saying about the lost animals.)
I went through re-learning computers too. But as with the other things, I’d call them learning or re-learning, not crises. I surely had them, many of them. Yet, I missed to notice most of them, solely because I was too tired to notice. Too exhausted even.
I’d try to not paint it black or white, and in general I don’t even think in good or bad categories, but if I’d do, I’d say I think that’s a bad thing. Yet, as being pretty experienced with life by this point, I’d say — well, I can live with that. There’s not much I can do right now. I’d try to reflect on these things when I’m having some headspace for this. I afraid it’ll take another decade, if not two.
Yet, as the officer Joody Hopps, said, the only thing we should be fear about is the fear itself. I think that’s the primary thing this war Russia wages on us taught me. I’m not even afraid of dying any longer, and I can say with the confidence that living in fear is much worse. The phrase from the cartoon may sound too pretentious or silly or whatever, but it contains the wisdom, actually. The only thing we should fear is the fear itself.
Yeah, okay, and the foxes lack of sleep too. Off I go, but the point stands. I missed to notice some crises I went through, and I hope I’d catch up at some later point.