The Divorce

The opportunity to move to China deserves a word none other than serendipitous. The caesura between the happy marriage that was my freelance journalism career and solitude and the life I lead now didn’t come overnight, jsut as a divorce doesn’t; the end of the line was visible as a day’s disappearance in a sunset. “For without death how can there be spring?” Thomas Mann wrote in The Black Swan. Something had to change. i knew it did, and I knew it would. A void stared at me through the misty peaceful haze that meditation and yoga brought. It stared at me when coming up for air from the intense focus that is writing, giving me the bends. It stared at me from the space of my queen sized bed, though I knew it wasn’t just loneliness. This void felt like a blank wall I couldn’t find the right art piece for. Only in moments of travel and planning for yet more travels did the void close in on me, warming me like a fire on a wintry Chicago night or a humid day in India.
There was something soothing about the anonymity of travel. Traveling is the only proper way to lose yourself in the pursuit of answers to life’s quandaries. It is only when leaving home that you can understand what home is, just as it is when medical emergencies bring you closer to appreciating the preciousness of your own shell. The ambitious years I spent tying to make a name for myself in the world of architectural journalism involved trips around the States. I foolishly continued that ambition when visiting India and Costa Rica and nearly ruined both trips until (again) medical situations forced me to stop working. I coudl not separate my career from the rest of my life. My life was my career. It caused the demise of relationships and financial devastation. My ultiamte goal was to travel the world, writing aotu architecture. I was jsut learning how to make my career pay for my travels and had almost year’s worth of travel plans to various cities across the States when teh structure tht was my life started crumbling around me. Now matter how hard I worked at it, I would not work myself around the economic downturn.
I moved from a spacious apartment designed by a bona fide architect in Sarasota, Florida, to my uncle’s cabin in rural Indiana. That was a strangely good thing. It would save money and free me from worry about paying a large chunk of my income to the expenses fo complete self-sufficience and I could focus on th job offers that were coming in from around the country. I coudl get my name in bigger publications and expand my international contact list. I could save some money to start traveling abroad again. That’s not how life saw it. The offers ceased and my established contracts were drying up. Then my uncle made sexual advances and threw me out for thwarting them. My own father, with whom I’d been trying to resurrect an all-but-defunct relationship, denied my account, opting instead to defend his brother and blame it on me. Those were bad things.
I manifested the silver lining of that cloud by moving to Chicago, where I was ironically supposed to visit and secure a freelance contract three days later. I secured the contract and an apartment within a few weeks, which were good things. But there was no work to be found, not in freelance or full-time journalism, not even in third, fourth, fifth– tenth– choice income sources. i sought work in bartending and at homegoods retailers. Alas, I doubt I coudl have gotten work as a prostitute or drug pusher.
The cost of self-sufficiency was choking me, draining what little retirement investments I had left. My beloved career had failed me. The five years I’d spent married to it (and countless years dreaming about such a life beforehand) seemed as wasted as my energy. Then the depression reared its head like never before, and I fell into an abyss that ended in a psychiatric ward.
The week of Christmas found me back at my computer, blogging a little about architecture to find some semblance of intellectual pleasure and trying fervently to upgrade my professional skills by becoming Web 3.0 savvy. Flipping for the 232nd time through Craigslist and other employment outlets I spotted an ad seeking English teachers in Asia. Within a week I had two job offers. I stopped blogging about architecture. I stopped reading about it. I tried to stop thinking about it, which was virtually imposible while walking through my neighborhood full of Victorians. Remorse set in about our love affair coming to an end. But it let me down in too many ways. I couldn’t continue giving to something that seemed determine to abandon me. There coems a time when pursuing one’s ambitions becomes foolish. If I was to travel the world and write, it would not be abotu architecture. I might marry an architect. I might visit certain cities or live in them because of my inspiration from their architecture. We could be friends. We could no longer be lovers.
Somehow, like the first indications of a new day that slip into your windows at sunrise, the void began to dissipate. Six weeks later I took my first steps toward a new relationship, one of travel and writing. Seven weeks into my residence in Huludao, a small city in northeastern China, a fellow English teacher, who hails from New Zealand, stopped me to poke into my lexical mind, which seems to trouble and intrigue him.
“What is a fenestration?” asks the lanky, dirty blond 20-something with speech so articulate it’s sometimes confused with a British dialect.
A twinge of emotional pain felt like a thorn prick. “An architectural term.”
“Of course. Leave it to the architecture writer,” quips my Texan roommate, a gorgeous Latina with a temper that rarely but entertainingly arises.
I kept my green eyes lowered, preventing the Western teachers around me from seeing that even the mention of an architectural word hurts. I won’t tell them that I also love the words aperture, turret, demilune, curvilinear. I won’t tell them I miss the sexiness of walking onto construction sites with builders, developers, and engineers and the semi-sexual stimulation I feel just hanging out in design offices. if writing about architecture was my marriage, scouting out architecture is foreplay and talking about architecture is full-blown sex. No. I won’t tell them this. For, just as years after a divorce some people find themselves trying to figure out when their marriage started slipping away, I could not escape that I was still in love with architecture. I will be for life.
As I explained to my university students the next day, on long drives my favorite thing to do is think about the architecture of words, the ascenders and descenders of my favorite words, allowing myself to brainstorm on words and finding the architecture within. Words to me look like miniature buildings. In a page of text I see rivers and skylines, great lakes or canyons. Words house me. They are my refuge, my recreation, my profit and my pride. They are the very reason I awaken every morning. They were the source of my recovery in the psych ward.
Words are my vehicle. Writing have been my fuel since I was able to write the alphabet. Now, however, they are not confined to buildings. Now, the world is my space. I’ve removed the walls I’d formed between myself and words through the objectivity and linearity of journalism to let them curve and swell like the very globe itself, the globe that is my new desk.
This love isn’t perfect. None are. Yet it is one that has been longer coming than a dream of making it as a freelance journalist. It is one that has persisted as long as my writing.