October 14, 2002
I'm back in South Brunswick, New Jersey, feeling that I really shouldn't be here. Tonight, or tomorrow night, I'm going to be moving into an apartment in Highland Park. I wish it wasn't happening like this, and it partially still feels quite wrong, but I have to move on.
Slow Motion
The last few weeks have been dreadfully slow - it feels as though months have
gone by, when in fact they have not. Only a few days after arriving in Australia,
where I was to be starting my life as a married man, having a family and being
the happy person I was meant to be, and my fiancée got "cold feet" as
it is called. The next day she called it off all together, and I was left with
no choice but to book a ticket back to the United States. I stood in line at
the ticket counter and had an Australian ridicule me for being American, Jewish,
or more likely the latter - though it doesn't seem to really matter. I felt
emotionally numb at the time. Many tears were, of course, to follow, as well
as an inability to sleep at night.
I spent the following week being comforted by, amongst other people, her mother, my mother, her brothers, her father, her rabbi, and a few friends who responded to an e-mail that I wrote out on the topic. Her mother seemed even more upset about it than I did. She told me that she loved me as a son and didn't want me to go. I responded that I didn't want to go either, but I didn't really have a choice in the matter. Relationships really aren't like nuclear submarines, as the joke went on Seinfeld. I certainly wasn't the one who wanted to turn the key, setting the missile loose.
Every morning I woke up with a sense of dread, with a feeling that I really had no interest whatsoever in waking up. I went over the short amount of time that I had spent there prior to what seemed like the world ending, and I could not figure out what I had done so terribly wrong that had caused the relationship to end the way that it did. I could not sleep very well at night, tossing and turning frequently, waking up several dozen times per night. My entirety was full of naught but despair. Once in a while, I would suddenly feel a burst of inspiration, a feeling that what was going on was for the better, and that things would be better off if they were going in this manner. But I would shortly thereafter go back to the hopelessness, and felt that there really was nothing left.
Trip Back to the US
The trip back to the United States seemed longer than the trip from it, perhaps
because of the fact that I had to wait so long at each airport stop. It could
have been related to the fact that I was doing not much but worrying about what
was going on, being tremendously upset about it, and an occasional bout of crying
that would last for a minute or two. In the meanwhile, my mother had managed
to find a basement apartment in Highland Park, a lovely community in New Jersey
where there are many Jewish people to be found. This is something that I was
happy to hear, albeit not entirely happy since I felt that my place to be living
was already fairly well set, and it had included a warm and loving person to
share the rest of my life with. In Highland Park I really felt that there was
nothing, so to speak. Nothing but opportunity, some might say. I couldn't help
but think of how lonely I would be feeling, inevitably.
From Los Angeles to Newark I spent the flight in what would have been the Business Class section but which was given to fortunate people in Economy class who happened to have the right row number. Fortunate! Oh, but what I would have given to have not had to been in that section of the plane, to have been back with the person who told me that I was "stuck with her," to have had everything work out how I had imagined it would have worked out. No, but I was to be on the plane, sitting next to a nice person who had only been in Los Angeles for business on that day. She had seen me when leaving the plane from Newark. Then, I had only started waiting for my flight. By the time the wait was nearly over, she had come back from whatever business she had to tend to and was surprised that I was still there. This led to another of what would be one of many conversations in which an effort would be made to convince me that it really was better off this way, that we hadn't known each other that well prior to getting engaged.
Then, of course, one cannot forget to mention that "there is someone out there for you." I would like to counter this by saying, why? Why does there necessarily have to be someone out there for me? Just because this is something I have dreamed of since I was six or seven, does that necessarily mean that there is someone out there for me? Not everyone gets married, after all. There are plenty of people in the world who are terribly commitment-phobic who end up getting married. These people do not want to get married, do not want to be in serious relationships, and end up getting married. Meanwhile, this has basically been what I have always really wanted - to be with someone who would love me for who I am, to marry and have a lovely little family - and once again, I managed to wreck an engagement.
United States Blues
It has been a little less than a week since I have been back in the country,
and I'm honestly clueless as to what is going to happen. All I know right now
is that I have a place to live, and I really have to find some sort of job -
again - in this country. Preferably one which is in reasonable driving distance
from my apartment in Highland Park. The people who live upstairs from me are
a lovely married couple who have two children. You can only imagine the glee
I feel every time I think of this. They are two of the nicest people I have
ever met, and really want to help me settle into my new place of living, including
helping me find some sort of job. Moreover, they want to help me find "the right
one" as it were.
Even only a day or so after I had come back, people were already trying to set me up. I was in the bookstore Borders, looking at calendars and feeling depressed, when I observed a mother having an argument with her son. After the argument had subsided, she walked up to me and told me, "When I was young, my mother told me that someday I would have a child that would behave just like me. She was right!" She told me that I didn't seem like I was married, so of course I felt obliged to somewhat correct her. "Really?" she said after hearing my story. "Well, have I got a girl for you. She's in Israel right now learning at a seminary, but she lives in Highland Park and she is so wonderful..." She told me the girl's name, and I went back to looking at calendars, feeling depressed. I have already been invited to a couple of meals at a rabbi's house - he too was already telling me about some nice girls that he knew. You would think that there are a lot of people in this world who just don't want to see me single. But then, I don't particularly like seeing me single.
Conclusion
I must press on, continue living, because that is what there is to do. One cannot
simply be faced with a problem that makes it seem as though the world has come
to an end and respond by shriveling up in a little ball and dying. Sometimes
one might genuinely want to do this, but one simply cannot do this. Life must
continue.
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