The Stars are making me nostalgic

It started in a little Italian deli around the corner on Hudson. I had just paid for my sun dried tomato, mozarella and olive spread sandwich when the guy ringing me popped in his iPod and started up the Stars "Your Ex-Lover is Dead." The opening strains of that sad and beautiful song made my throat catch. I stopped fiddling with my wallet and took a look at him, a real look at him--no one loves that song unless their heart has been broken--"I love this song," I said, almost as an afterthought to the look, because he was looking back at me. In that one palpable moment we shared this tremendous, cosmic, mind-blowing sorrow. My heart danced. In the next second he went on to the next customer and I folded up my wallet. Gone like that. Re-lived when I came home and put in the Stars' latest, Heart.

For me that album is indelibly etched with India, so I'm reminded of Nick. The Nick who oddly felt the need to break up with me gently via email, a month after I had left the country, a month after he mysteriously never showed up in Colaba for one last rendezvous, as if, well, what exactly was he thinking? That somehow my leaving was a ruse for a deep seated need to make him mine? Part of the grace that's entered my life enabled me to write and wish him all the best, to have everything beautiful, when what I really wanted was to point out, uh, you can't fire me, I already quit. Except maybe I didn't.

Nick and I probably have very little in common, I can't say for sure because I hardly know him. But God, he made me laugh. Something about him made me want to come out and play. I loved the spirit. So why'd he have to go and fire me?

In my writing class an older woman is writing a memoir about her disastous marriage. The chapter we read the other day detailed an illicit affair that took place in Paris and Germany. I'm pretty sure she would have been living in the U.S. at the time. How did this woman groom an extramarital liaison across continents when I can't even seem to score an in-town, no-brainer hookup? And just now, on the phone with Karen, when she told me about a guy she dated who getting back with his ex-girlfriend. How in the hell does that even happen? More to the point, what is so hideously wrong with me that I couldn't even get my ex-husband to return email? (I gave up trying a good six months ago.) That I was un-hired from a relationship that never was?

And then the music brings me back: You're cold, maybe you just missed the sun. You fall, feeling like it's just begun. So far, keeping it together's been enough. Look up. Rain is falling looks like love...your girl, she's a renegade. A hurricane that keeps you there. Safe.

I remember that something enjoyed once can be savored again and again, so long as I stay in the enjoyment. The beautiful moment. I need not give wings to thoughts that try to steal it, or buy into the drama of the stories I like to tell myself around it, the crashing, the burning. I remember to wrap up in the safety of my renegade shelter.

The last time I had sex

I've just been through another one of those merciful times where I haven't spent much time thinking about sex. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof.

Then there was Adam in yoga class this morning.

Not that Adam is my kind of guy, or possibly any woman's kind of guy. But, as is so typical of hatha practice, he touched me. Adjusted me, I mean. No, I mean touched.

After one posture I was lying face down on the ground and he came up beside me and I thought, o God, he's going to yank back my shoulders, I'm dying here... but no. Instead he pressed his fingertips into my shoulder blades, finding the many tensions stored there. I let my body go and dropped into the mat and just lay there, part of me wishing he'd never stop, part of me getting slightly embarassed that someone else in class might wonder what was going on, and part of me suddenly, inexplicably, wanting to cry. And then we moved on.

To baddha konasana. In this pose you place the soles of your feet together, using your elbows to press against your thighs while you reach forward with the crown of your head, taking your forehead to the floor. He asked us to lie on our backs following the pose, keeping the soles of our feet together. Again an adjustment, this time a very gentle pressure on my thighs. It was excruciating; I grimaced but tried to breathe into it. When he let off the pressure he squeezed my thigh, shin and then, delightfully, my feet. It sent a knife of longing coursing through me.

I was reminded of the opening scenes in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind, where the Jim Carrey character asks himself why he is so helplessly drawn to women who show him the slightest kindness. At the end of class I asked Adam if he gave massage. He said he did, but that he didn't have a card. Part of me wants to go and get a fabulous massage, part of me hopes he was just saying that because, in fact, what he wants, too, is to massage me, making the last time I had sex not so far in the distant past, but probably not any more likely in the near future, either. Assuming he's even straight, that is; not what I want.