- Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

- The Velveteen Rabbit

- Brian Andreas

But I guess, like most interviews, there’s always some conversation you weren’t privy to that changes everything, some little thing you did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, or perhaps it was that your shoes didn’t match your suit. Maybe there was broccoli between your two front teeth for hours, or maybe you snorted when you laughed? How can anyone ever know?

I received a text from him, days later, flirty and casual, to which I responded with restrained gusto. This continued on for a short while, and then nothing for hours, until he finally texted something about me being a “great woman,” but “geographically undesirable.” We live 80 miles apart, so while it’s a fact, it wasn’t a reason. I put my phone down and furrowed my brows. Again. Again with the geography.

Nothing is ever just about geography, in the end. I actually used to believe that it was. I used to think, oh, but if we simply lived closer together, it would be romance and butterflies and rainbows and unicorns. The thing I never realized is that it was all those things, but all of those things are invariably frightening, in the way that getting exactly what you want with no warning is cataclysmically shocking because you don’t expect it and never believed it would happen. So when the potential for unicorns is there, people freak out a little bit, and they look for something tangible behind which to hide. In my experience, this is always geography.

Geography ups the risk level of what might otherwise be a reasonable gamble. So if you’re already afraid, you’re going to be even more conservative when you realize there’s rush hour and rail schedules and bridge tolls in between you and another person. In the end though, what I’ve learned after years of the “geography” rationale is that it’s not about me, it’s about that particular man’s risk and reward tolerances, all of which are bound to palpable complexities he feels the need to address much too far in advance. Why? Because this is what everyone does when they hesitate.

The thing I always forget to bank on is the immutability of being male. As a woman, in my moments of profound certainty, those instances where I know what I want and can see it in all of its corporeal clarity, I do not have existential doubts. Men seem to always have these. Even when angels and trumpets are coming down from their Monty Python paper clouds to signal to them the path they should take, they are never free from the practical, because logistics help them to avoid the uncomfortable sensation of emotion. Geography is an excellent example of this type of detail.

I’ve tried to solve the geography “problem” in the past by suggesting one or both of us move. Usually, I suggest that I move, since I’m always the one with fewer obstacles in my head. The typical response is first disbelief, and then, “Oh but no, you can’t do that.” Of course not. Because if you’re afraid, geography is not a fixable problem. It’s permanent. This of course leads me to believe that it was never geography to begin with. If it was, someone could just move. Instead, it’s something he won’t admit to, like fear, fear of me, fear of desire, fear of getting exactly what he wants. Or maybe it’s just Occam’s Razor and he simply doesn’t like me that much. I’ll probably never know. What I do know is that turning down opportunities that have the potential to be totally awesome due to fear of enjoying them too much and developing a dependency on them is pretty common human behavior.

I have a friend who plays arena polo with me. We started polo at nearly the same time, having both ridden horses for years before getting hooked on the sport. As of a couple of years back, I stepped up to playing grass polo full time, still playing arena once a week and vigorously encouraging her to do the same. Polo, for some context, is more addicting than heroin and a lot more expensive. The outdoor (grass) as opposed to the indoor (arena) variety, doubly so.

“No,” she said, “I don’t need to get addicted to grass polo too and then spend more money on that.”

I have to say, the reasoning here, at least to me, was somewhat unbelievable. She would rather deny herself an incredible amount of fun, than spend money she could be saving. Now, don’t confuse this with not being able to afford it. Just like me, she works in the valley and does just fine for herself. It was an actual, uncoerced, denial of pleasure, with the stated reason that it’s better to avoid doing something she might enjoy than finding out she enjoys it and thus having to go through the “pain” of spending money on it.

She’s not even going to try it, because to dabble is to tempt desire. Buddhism suggests that desire is the root of all suffering. But the fact is, very few of us are going to go up and sit on a mountaintop and not own or want for anything. In normal, everyday life, avoiding desire is like avoiding air. Eventually you’ll just turn blue in the face and feel extremely uncomfortable. We can spend our lives taking in as little air as possible so as not to get that oxygen rush you get when sticking your head out of a car on the highway like dogs do (one of the few species that knows how to live the good life, better than we do), or we can learn to breathe, we can learn to love adrenaline, and we can know that while we may want more once we experience it, it’s a healthy, driving, desire.

That same friend used to, for work, identify supply chain management problems in the factories of second-world countries like the Czech Republic. During one of her visits, she observed a factory worker whose job it was to put plastic zip ties on every bag coming down the conveyor belt. She remarked, “I would go stir crazy if I had to do that job. I’d hate my life, knowing that’s what I was going to do forever and ever!”

I said to her, “But how do you know she wants to do anything else? How do you know she wants something other than the world that she knows?”

“I guess….” she replied, unconvinced. “I don’t see how you could be happy with that life.”

“Look at it this way,” I said. “Let’s say you’re aware of the existence of a place called Planet Paradise. It costs $1 billion a ticket to visit Planet Paradise, and you have to ride a spaceship to get there, so you pretty much know you’re never going to go there. You hear about Planet Paradise anecdotally, through friends who have never been there, and you even hear about it through the couple of billionaire friends you have who have also never been there. Either way, it doesn’t have that big of an impact on you because it’s just something you’ve maybe seen occasionally on TV, if that. You continue on with your life in Silicon Valley, going to work at your computer, decorating your house in the burbs, and playing arena polo on the weekends. Everything is pretty good.

“Now let’s say that one day one of your billionaire friends says, ‘Guess what, I have an extra ticket to paradise, wanna come with me?’ And you’re like hey, ok, a free ticket to paradise, I am so there! Your friend says it’s only for the weekend, but you don’t care, because you’re going to paradise! So you go, and it’s amazing, unbelievable, indescribable, basically, it’s Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island on steroids, the forever high, a perpetual orgasm. And then you come back after the weekend is over, and on Monday you go to your desk job in Cupertino and you think, damn, I really wish I was still in paradise right now. Your coworkers, on the other hand, seem pretty happy doing what they’ve always been doing, but you, for the next three weeks, you’re a disagreeable wreck. ‘I didn’t know how lame my life was until I went to paradise,’ you’ll snivel and whine to an acquaintance of yours who’ll roll her eyes in disgust. Now, my friend, what you’ll be suffering here is desire.

“If you gave that factory worker in the Czech Republic a ticket to your life for a weekend, she might think, hey, this ain’t so bad. I make good money, I don’t have to do manual labor anymore, I own a house, and I play arena polo. Now send her back home to the Czech Republic. Is her respectable job putting plastic zip ties on bags so compelling anymore? Probably not. And there’s the problem. If you don’t know how good it can be, then it’s unlikely you’ll spend your waking hours yearning for it and wondering what it would be like if you had it again. You also won’t have to deal with the problem where you have to spend $1 billion, get in a spaceship, and fly to Planet Paradise every time you want to go there. Or in the case of the Czech girl, $1500 and 14 hours in the worst coach seat imaginable on Lufthansa.”

Paradise, being potentially amazing but otherwise an uncertain thing, carries a level of risk with it that people fear. Logically, it’s better to have never known paradise and be content with what you have, than it is to get a taste of it and spend the rest of your days trying to figure out how to get back. But no one ever said that logic made for a satisfying life. Perhaps what’s really unfortunate is fearing to find out more, being afraid to enjoy something or someone and wanting them again, and making up excuses to avoid things you have the potential to love due to a host of connected inconveniences. Maybe the true disaster here is walling yourself out of your own personal paradise.

Download audio file (geographyofdesire.mp3)

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m getting ready to go back, for the first time in a year and a half, to do a little work, meet some old friends, and revisit my memories.

The cheese and crackers are tasteless, and my hand holding the little packets is trembling.

*

I’m in London, checking into a familiar hotel near Victoria station.

“You’ve stayed with us before?”

“Yes,” I say.

“And your address is in Zurich?”

I’m surprised, though I’m not sure why. The last time I came to London, I was a Swiss resident.

“Ah no,” I say, a strained smile forming on my lips. “I’ve moved home to the U.S.”

Perhaps it was the forced admittance of it, the palpable reminder of the memories I thought I could avoid at least just this once. I’m not a tourist here – I haven’t been for years.

“Can you write your new address on here please?” She hands me a printout with my Zurich address.

I start to cross out the lines, then pause. “Oh, I have a new passport number too.” I cross it out.

She laughs. “Everything’s changed, right?”

*

I’m in the London office, and I’m bumping into my past left and right at the company meeting. A Moscow acquaintance I met in Zurich who has since moved to London.

“I chose London because Zurich is just too small,” he says in his bold Russian accent.

A Swiss intern who’s started his second summer internship in the London office.

“I like Zurich better than London. There are too many people here.”

Perspectives. Everything’s the same, except our perception of it.

“Are you still with that Spanish guy?” the Swiss intern asks.

He remembers you from the party – everyone does. I had on sky high heels and jungle print slacks, and I had leaned into you at the kitchen counter.

“Que alta,” you had said. I bent my knee to the side and showed you my flowered leather heels.

“You understood me!” you said, surprised. Of course I did. I always understood you.

“No,” I said, “geography.” The Swiss intern nods, pretending to understand.

*

I’m in Zurich after dinner, at the Paradeplatz tram stop, sitting in metal bistro chairs in front of upturned tables. Lights glow from the tram station and the surrounding building windows, illuminating the overcast night sky. An old friend sits in the chair next to me, speaking enthusiastically about the upcoming gallery showing for his photography. I try to engage him as best I can, try to divert him from the inevitable question. There’s an awkward pause when we abruptly run out of conversation.

“Are you still with him,” he asks.

“No, no of course not,” I say, as if the question was silly, and not dreaded. “We live in different countries,” I continued. “It’s too complicated, you know.”

“Right, right,” he agrees, nodding.

But how could I tell him the real reason? How could I say, We were too afraid to love each other, we were too afraid to risk a heart for an amazing lifetime?

“We’re on other sides of the planet,” I say instead. And in between us, oceans of fear, regret, and everything unrealized.

The number 13 tram squeals into the station, white sparks lighting up the wires in the Zurich night.

“It’s been great seeing you,” I say, squeezing him in a fleeting hug. I jump on the tram and when the doors fold behind me I don’t look back.

*

You can always go back, but not to the life you had. You can return to your old haunts, even your old friends, your desk in your office and your favorite reading spot by the lake. You can ride the same tram and get off at the same stop where you used to live, and you can smile remembering the old parties and the past mishaps and all the joy and regrets in between. But you can never really have it back. You can’t sit with your circle of friends in a restaurant at Sihlcity, you can’t sunbathe on the shore while those same people practice diving into the lake, you can’t skate outside in the snow covered ice, you can’t hold your lover again while he cries in front of a backdrop of mountains and ferris wheels and Swiss memories.

But do you want to? I’ve gone back to Zurich, but I’m not going back to my life there. I often wonder if I would, given the chance. We always say that if we could go back and do something over, we’d do it better, we’d change our ways and smile more, have more fun, be less irritable, try more things we were too afraid to do the first time.

I’m ready to try.

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

- Alfred Edward Housman

The Portuguese have an untranslatable word, “saudade,” that describes the longing for something that you know will probably never return. From a 1912 book on Portugal:

“The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.”

Saudade makes me ask myself whether what I want is reasonable, whether I am truly missing it or the fanatical ideal of it, and whether I really have a plan if it returns. In the end, getting what I want requires knowing what I want. It requires a kind of foresight that I think humans in general don’t have, and which is why they long for anything other than the present.

I’ve spent a lot of time sabotaging things I think I want. I’ve asked myself in the past why I push away so many wonderful things I’ve desired for years. Is it because I never actually wanted these things? Is it because I wasn’t ready? Is it because I think someone else needs to give freely first before I will play my hand? Maybe the reasons don’t matter. There are many other things I have that I know I have always wanted, and I made no concessions about obtaining them. Does the saudade of my heart only respond to that which I know I cannot have back?

Download audio file (saudade.mp3)