healing

Today is a day for farewells. I caught the early train to London Paddington to take lunch with the family of a former student and two of my colleagues. These are not just acquaintances, no mere ships in the night: these are people who I have shared my work and (quite literally) my world with for the last six years. When the time comes to say goodbye, I usually make a habit of leaving a parting shot in the form of a lengthy card or letter, but I wasn’t in the right headspace today. I’d have probably stayed longer if She wasn’t in town.

It’s been a very long and painful summer. I can’t remember one quite like it. It’s nearly over – thank God – and work, the Great Healer, will soon put me right. But heartbreak is a hard thing to manage when you live alone, far from everyone and everything you know. How do you move on when your heart is still broken, nearly two months on, and your world is at a standstill?

I’ve been reading a lot. I’m working through John Vaillant’s The Tiger at the moment, which deals with a much starker isolation in the Russian Far East than the one I’ve known this summer, albeit much less melodramatic. One quote from this morning’s reading has stuck:

The most important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation. Alone and with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself – who is he really? Because nobody’s watching, you can easily become an animal… […] You can run in fear and nobody will know. You have to have something, some force, which allows and helps you to survive without witnesses.

John Vaillant, The Tiger

After thirty summers I know who I am, and I know my weakness for acting on heart over head. So instead of buying an off-peak return – which would have given me the time to say the goodbyes I wanted – I booked myself onto the 5.30 train home, with no room for manoeuvre. I suppose I wanted to stop myself from doing something rash.

In another universe, I would have watched the sunset from London’s famous Sky Garden with her tonight – my idea of a final goodbye to the city where we met – but in this reality, I must be the gentleman and let her go without another word. So this is me, the dichotomy: the gentleman and the animal, doing the right thing and running away.

My head, for once, is talking to my heart.

My only regret is leaving before I could say a proper farewell to my dear colleagues. I will make it up to them with a handwritten letter this evening. I’ve always been a lot better at conveying my feelings in words written rather than spoken, anyway.

My force – the thing that keeps me going without witnesses – is Hope. Hope that, someday, my heart will heal and things will get better. Hope that these things are sent not just to try us, but to bring a moment of light and happiness into our lives, even if, like a match on a winter’s night – or even a shooting star – that light is followed by a temporary darkness. Hope that somewhere out there is a future where somebody falls for me just as hard as I do for them. Where “sorry” and “thank you” are not our watchwords.

I have not given up on old fashioned romance, and I never will. It is out there, shining, somewhere beyond the stars.

Heartbreak is good for you. It brings you to your knees, but that only makes it easier to look up. It forces you to look inwards and to love yourself again. It reminds you that you were not afraid to love with your whole heart, even if you had no idea that was your intention.

Ride north, Macumazahn, for there you will find great happiness – yes, and great sorrow. But no man should run from happiness because of the sorrow.

Henry Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife

Feeling with your whole heart makes you vulnerable, especially in affairs of the heart, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. Because, hand-in-hand with the gut-wrenching lows come soaring highs, an ecstasy of joy and excitement that is impossible to convey.

I cannot escape it; it runs in the family. My great-grandparents found each other in the middle of a bloody civil war that threatened to tear their country apart, and they held onto each other even as the regime started to eliminate their loved ones for their beliefs. And still they believed.

My grandfather put his whole world on the line for an English girl who captured his heart one summer, risking everything to hold on to the happiness he had found. Would their love have stood the test of time? I will never know – he lost his life in his early twenties in a hit-and-run incident that tore his future apart – but I am convinced that it is that whole-hearted Hispanic passion for life that runs in my veins.

Today is a day for farewells, and I have made mine. The next chapter is about to begin. BB x

What a vast gulf there is between love and loved! It is measureless. Still, most people have crossed it in their lives, some of them more than once.

Henry Rider Haggard, The People of Mist

Summer rumbles along. August yawns before me, and once I’m settled into my new home at the end of the week it will be a quieter month than this very to-and-fro, up-and-down July. I’ve managed to book in some driving lessons starting next week, despite the ongoing national shortage of instructors, so I should count my blessings. I’ve also been very lucky to have traveled so far. I mean, honestly: four weeks ago today I was wandering around New Orleans. Three weeks ago I was on an island. Two weeks ago I was sitting atop Montmartre in Paris, eating frites and watching the sunset.

I really have moved around a lot this summer. I should be grateful. That’s what I tell myself.

The summer holidays are a rough time to handle heartache. There’s never a good time, but the holidays really are the worst. For dealing with affairs of the heart, the best things to have around you are friends and family who will listen, advise and support you, if not a job that will keep you too busy to dwell overmuch. All of these are close at hand when you live and work in a boarding school (or any school, for that matter, though the boarding scene does amplify most things).

Come the holidays, however, and you can find yourself cut off. Marooned. It’s like floating in a wide, wide sea, in a boat that has lost its motor, looking and hoping for the afterglow of the stars you’ve been chasing, even though you know both the looking and the hoping will hurt your eyes.

I love a good quest. It gives one’s life meaning, purpose. Something to come home and tell stories about. Seeking out my long-lost family in Spain – that was a quest. Walking the Camino for my grandfather José – that was another. Even the ten-metre colossus of a drawing I created at university was a quest after a fashion. In short, any endeavour that you put your heart and soul into is a quest. So perhaps you might forgive me for trying to catch a shooting star this summer, knowing full well that they are so precious precisely because they are fleeting.

It’s just because it’s in those fleeting moments that we truly feel alive that we hunger for them so.

The hardest relationships to walk away from are the ones where you both still care about each other. Where, by whatever divine prank, the whole world stood between you, telling you to listen to reason and face the enormity of the Ocean, even as you railed against it. Bloody Hinge! Bloody Atlantic! Bloody bleeding heart!

One of you must be the brave one and make the bitterest of choices. Somebody needs to be the one to say “good bye”. Good-bye is a powerful word, and one I try to avoid – it is so much more final than “farewell”. And even when it is the right word to say, it’s never easy to cut yourself off entirely from the person with whom you have come to share a corner of your heart. But one of you must do this, and that will always leave the other with questions. What more could I have done? Did I let the flame die out from a lack of attention, or did I snuff it out from too much? Had I the winged sandals of Hermes or the might of Moses to part the sea between us, would it have been enough?

Questions come easily in the silence of the summer holidays. So I’ve been going out in the evenings for long walks to clear my head and focus on the beauty of the world around me, as the year turns.

The harvest season has begun, and the wind among the gentle fields of barley can hardly be heard over the distant roar of the combine harvesters up on the golden hills. Hay is in the air and, every now and then, the faint smell of mushrooms. Autumn is waiting in the wings. Change is coming.

One thing I’ve noticed this year is that there are so many owls up here in Lincolnshire. More than I’ve ever seen in the south, that’s for sure. Owls are an omen of bad luck in many parts of the world, but here in Europe we chose to see in them wisdom. Perhaps that’s on account of their enormous eyes, or their ability to turn their head in seemingly all directions.

Last night I saw a barn owl quartering the fields after sundown, a ghostly silhouette against the evening sky as it flapped noiselessly overhead – or rather, noiseless in its wings, for it was shrieking as it went.

Barn owls. Flamingoes. Rollers. Swans. It’s a strange quirk that the most beautiful creatures make the most alarming sounds. There is nothing alarming about the wind in the barley tonight. It rustles softer than any sigh.

Nature is a powerful healer, and so is writing. I will make good use of both in the weeks to come, until life and work begins again. A new world is waiting! I have waited long enough. BB x