I always fantasized about leaving New York City. Always. It had been an intermittent fantasy that came and went with the ebb and flow of the city. It made me retreat to the palm trees and warm breeze of my Dominican Republic when commuting on a crowded train; it filled my down time with thoughts of a larger home, where I could drink my coffee outside in the yard, which would have a nice garden of herbs and vegetables to be made later into hearty casseroles. As a single mother living in the city, struggle was no stranger to me. My morning trips to the subway were always rushed, the heat of the bodega coffee warming one hand while prompting my son to walk faster with the other. “If only we had a bigger apartment, if I had a partner, then I would feel more rested, at peace.” I thought to myself almost daily.
With becoming a single mother came a dire need to fix that status. The part of me that had always pictured myself happily married cringed at what awaited me. And then there was the guilt. The guilt of having fallen in love too soon; of now providing an incomplete home to my child. After separating from my son's father, a kind of uneasiness took over me, making me uncomfortable in the presence of a man. This discomfort played itself out by me utilizing most of my free time to go on dates (bad dates); if there was a chance to meet someone, I took it. I felt an urge to “repair” my situation, but when opportunities arose for a man to get to know me, I rushed to bed with him, escaping the anxiety of being found not good-enough.
I remember vividly a man I dated almost 6 years ago. He was a painter from Chile whose charms included being a great chef and playing the cajón. His hair was dark and curly, waxy to the touch. His smell was intoxicatingly good, a scent I now recognize, upon further research, as lemon verbena. We met at one of his art shows and I remember being so young and impressed by his work. Tiny red boxes lined the wall at the gallery near the Hudson River, inside them writings from famous communist leaders. There were Che, Fidel and Marx, inscribed in plexiglas, their words as little treasures waiting to be unveiled.
With him I learned to dim the lights and to not remove my clothes all at once. I learned that slower is better and more satisfying. We talked about art, watched surreal Argentinian films, and enjoyed listening to Cuban boleros on my iPod, using only one set of headphones. Our conversations were seemingly profound and artful, but I felt the deeper parts of my soul were invisible to him. When I spoke about the things that moved me - a recent trip to Cuba, the relationships in my life, my son - he seemed uninterested and I was met with silence. We orchestrated our meetings around the time my son was at his father’s, and as time progressed this arrangement remained unchanged.
It was the summer of 2010 and I asked him to meet me at a place in Union Square. I was wearing a navy blue dress with flowers and he was eating a dish of pork and broken rice. I sat next to him and told him this was coming to an end, that I was slowing becoming disillusioned, the verbs I chose deliberately active, to hint nothing was set in stone and that I hoped he would amend things. He didn’t. He ate his food in silence, only commenting once on the rice, saying it was the smallest rice he had ever seen. When he finally stared at me, he said: “Can’t you see you are projecting? It is you who feels uncomfortable with intimacy.” His words made no sense to me; they struck me as utter bullshit as I stormed out of the restaurant, University Place now blurry from the tears coming up. However hurtful, this scenario repeated itself several times. I kept finding myself in bed with someone I barely knew, feeling unappreciated. But I told myself it was their fault; that they were the ones scared of intimacy.
My dating disenchantments exacerbated my thoughts about leaving New York City, and as if I had called it out to the universe, shortly after, a feasible possibility of relocating to South America was right at my feet.
That night at my goodbye dinner in Astoria, a friend gave me a farewell present: A silver pellet with a small yellow piece of paper inside that read: Write a wish, open it when it comes true. Later that evening when everyone was gone, I sat on my bed, a little drunk, and clumsily wrote: I want to fall in love. Two weeks later off I went.
Chile met us with its strangeness. Every sensation felt so foreign: the dry, desert-like cold that perpetually made our skin tight and defied alpaca socks; the bland food; people’s skepticism and skittish temperament, which I later made sense of as a direct correlation to Chile’s geographic insularity. A culture with so little embellishment that is terribly scary and truly magical at the same time.
I understood relocating to Chile as the panacea for what wasn’t working in my life. I was certain I had to surround myself with different circumstances and people in order to be more relaxed and present, to meet someone who wasn’t as distracted and self-involved as most guys in New York City, to know what if felt like to be intimate. I wanted to share my inner landscapes with someone who would value them, someone who could truly love me and allow himself to be loved. But Chile, with its shaky earth, with its way of almost expurgating you into the unknown, paved the way for another kind of intimacy.
I found myself devoid of distractions. Full time motherhood hit me like a ton of bricks. The space and slower rhythm I so longed for now made me feel trapped and domestic; it angered me when I cooked or spent time at home actually doing the things I had wished to have more time for in New York. It also angered me that Amaru became sad, homesickness taking hold of him, and demanded to sleep in my bed every night, which he never had. The walls of our nice, and bigger apartment in Santiago became mirrors and my reactions reverberated in those four walls making my words inescapable. The intimacy I so longed for was now crushing me.
Yet, as time wore on, I started to soften. Those first nights in bed with my son, feeling his warm, squirmy body welding itself to mine, made me feel so vulnerable. I became six again, in my mother’s bed, her icy body turned away from me. I remembered the times I tried to hug her and she avoided me. I remembered her harsh words and lack of patience when I hurt. I remember the loneliness of my big room and how I wished for someone to play with me. As I lay there, tenderly embracing my son, feeling his warm breath moistening my face as he fell asleep, I started to see the hidden forces behind my decision of moving to Chile. My soul sought a secluded place where its walls could crumble, where I could lick my wounds in peace, without distraction. I also remembered why I liked the name Amaru, because it contained the word “Amar”, which means to love, and just uttering its sound seemed like a loving act.
With each night I shared my bed with my son, I saw his big, beautiful brown eyes become brighter, and I understood that I was seeing him return to wholeness because I was headed there myself as well. With each bus ride to school really early in the morning, the both of us wedged tightly between people, with the creases of the bed sheets still lining my face, my son’s head resting warmly against my belly, I found the true intimacy I was so desperately looking for. And it had always been there. Small details around me, a purple sunset with curdled pink clouds, the leafy tree outside my window, became daily reminders of how full of beauty the present moment already was.
With all its mystery, Chile slowly weaved itself into the fabric of my life; first with the arrival of my son, who is half Chilean, with the guy I dated six years ago (whose words now ring so true) and then with my vertiginous move down there, each instance an opportunity to break open and find the courage to sit with what scared me. Deep into the unknown, encircled by the Pacific Ocean to one side and by the Andes Mountains on the other, I realized my pain could follow me six thousand miles to the end of the world until it taught me its precious lesson: that the love I looked for outwardly, was just the love I was withholding from myself.
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