Passing Love

This perhaps falls under the "dark side of love" topic I mentioned in previous posts and haven't gotten around to following up on, but it wasn't what I was thinking of when I wrote that.

I have unsupported and unsupportable deep convictions about how the world works sometimes. How my world works, anyway. This is the mostly pleasant residue of my nightmare OCD year (age 11), when I thought every word I uttered or step I took was essential to keeping disaster at bay. Now that direct control fear/fantasy is mostly limited to determining the fortunes of my Tigers, but I also retain a broader belief about cosmic balances of good and bad, success and failure. In a nutshell: life never lets you--or perhaps just me--get too many bad things, or too many good things. I have one year of almost uninterrupted disaster per decade, but that opens onto 9 years of good fortune. Even in the good decades, though, I can't have it all. Job, love, economic security, health, friendships: I get to bat .750 or so.   I have little control over how and when the substitutions and compensations occur (in that way, it's the opposite of the OCD/Tiger fan delusion of control, but they share a belief in a sympathetic connection between events that has no basis in logical thought)

I'm not going to trace out how this principle has worked throughout my whole life, just its relevance with respect to Sancha. I adopted her in January 2003, as a long-term relationship ended. I can't say she nursed me through the breakup, because I was the breaker-upper rather than the breakup-ee, but in my view of cosmic compensation, she was the love and companionship that I was meant to have, in place of the human kind. I didn't miss dating or a sexual relationship--on the contrary, I had broken up with M because it became clear to me that I wasn't cut out for that kind of intimacy with another human. 10 years passed without me noticing its absence. But about 3 years ago I decided to go back to the pool (the pool I had sent M off to, so full, I promised, of  other fish). It had been 10 years of academic success, good health, relative freedom from my "issues," good friends and family relations. Lacking: human love, of the maternal and conjugal variety.

Cue disaster year. A child (not my own, but como si fuera) and a love were gained and lost.  Job, self-esteem, home, and important family relationships got wiped out as well. Through it all, the one constant was Sancha (Sancha and a few dear friends). If before Sancha had been the counterbalance to M,  now her little furry figure was the only thing left on the good-things side of the see-saw, holding her own against a pile-on of shit.

The year passed. New job, new home. Sancha walked me through the transitions and the change (we always knew who was walking who). A new life, new self-esteem, new contentment, new routines, same old Sancha. And left on the bad side of the see-saw: a profound belief that I was too odd, old, inflexible, unattractive, unloveable and worse, unloving, to ever find human intimacy.

In March I met someone who feels right. He met Sancha once. She didn't exactly invite him to move in, but she seemed to give him a tacit lack-of-bark of approval. I had them both for just enough time for the handover of fortune to occur. I will never relegate Sancha to the status of a bridge between men. If I could go back, I would reverse the exchange. But Sancha, I do have the sense that there was a hand-off. And a week later, I want you to know--although I suspect you already did--that I think you delivered me into good hands.*

*Obviously, it's still very early. But as you will recall from our meeting January 21, 2003, I have a good record with first impressions about love.