“Hola, senora! Lectura de la palma?” Asked a woman with blue stripes under her chin and a colorful scarf.
I responded that I was not ready to have my palm read. I tried to avoid the woman by acting like I did not understand Spanish.
“No espaniol,” I lied.
“Ah, Americana?”
Damn, how did she know!
During my years of studying in Madrid and the years that followed, after I moved back to New York, I had made it a habit to visit El Retiro Park for either a jog, a walk or the mere pleasure of sipping freshly brewed coffee, and getting lost in the glorious beauty of the Galapagos fountain that centers El Jardin de Vivaces. I completed my studies in anthropology in 2009, and have been working as an assistant professor at NYU as soon as I got back to the States.
I thought it would be best to weasel out of that awkward situation I was forcibly put in. It was a sunny, crispy June morning, and I would rather spend it sipping on my coffee and breathing in the view rather than having a random woman rip me off, promising me a slice of the sky and a pack of stars.
“Es oke. Ay can rid fo ju. Pleess gib me ju khand.”
I twisted my lips, looked down helplessly, let out a sigh and threw in my palm on the table. The woman helped herself to it gladly.
She inspected my hand back and front. Maybe that was a chance for me to interview the gypsy. Such native source is a rich material for a study case, but maybe it was not the right time. How can she bear wearing that scarf during summer? And those blue beads around her neck – they looked precious. Did she steal them from somewhere? Are they really precious?
I snapped out of my reverie when the gypsy squeezed my hand. I noticed the woman was still standing.
“Sit.”
Something about the gypsy’s smell was appealing. It wasn’t a perfume she wore, it wasn’t a perfume at all, it was her body odor that was a mixture of incense and burned flames. The smell of future.
“Ju layns bery clerr. Ju khand bery smol.”
“Thank you for introducing me to my hands,” I mumbled, and nodded with half a smile.
After a good four seconds of examining my palm, a blank skin over flesh to me but apparently a volume to read for the gypsy,
“Hmm, ju neber kip dinero in ju pocket. Siempre spend, ol fly. Ju fly. Todo fly.”
I instantly thought about my life as a constant globetrotter. I did and still fly a lot, and I’m a spendthrift. I mean, I make good money, and my family is well-off. My father, who was an army contractor, wouldn’t like me to live alone during my stay in the Gulf. I used to travel a lot when I was younger, doing volunteer work, and I couldn’t resist the idea because partly I missed my family after all those trips and I wanted to spend some quality time with them, and partly because I could use the fresh and clean cooking of mother, and the stable homely atmosphere I lacked while away.
“Ju luk for lub.”
“For what?”
“Amor!”
“Oh, love! Yeah, well, aren’t we all!”
“Ju marry man khe trabel too, ju lib far, he lib weth ju. Khe will lub ju mucho..ju and khim will make ninos…”
“Yeah, I want to have a baby boy,” I said with a grin.
Somehow, the reading was not as bad or heavy on my heart as I thought it would be. I actually enjoyed the company of the exotic woman, and liked what she said to me. Maybe she could tell the future. It might have been that she was a total phony too, using love and marriage as the cheesiest topics to talk to a woman. That was what old women tell young women: “You’ll fall in love and have kids.” It was what they all agreed on, like a school curriculum.
“We all know you’re a successful woman. You are in your second half of your twenties, but that would not mean anything if you don’t have someone to share that success with,” my mother had said once.
As if it was not enough that I could share my own success with myself and with the world. As if it was not earned if I did not have a male in my life. As if it was all for nothing, the degrees, the appreciation, the respect, the sincerity, the dedication towards a career. There must be a moustache to steal all the glamor. They say, behind every great man is a supportive woman, but women don’t need men to make them great. A woman can be great because she wants to, but that was not my mother’s logic. There always needs to be a man. Otherwise, it’s a broken success. It’s an incomplete achievement.
“Ju khaf ninos,” she affirmed. “Beyotifol nino,” her face glowed. “Ju brothor khass amor for chica, but dey no marry.”
“What?” My face shrank at the mention of my brother. Why was my brother on my palm? He never told me he loved someone. Wait, how did the woman know I had a brother, anyway? Something started to get serious about that reading. It was indeed reading a book that no one could see the letters of but one person. Her penetrating words marked my heart and now I sort of wanted her to say more. I wanted to believe what she said. Maybe I should speak to her in Spanish, after all. Her English is not all that, and if she told me about my brother in English, she might be able to tell me more in Spanish.
“Que mas?” I asked.
The gypsy smiled, and nodded. Something made me feel she knew I spoke Spanish all that time.
“You live happy, tita. Please stay safe because we never know when we leave this world,”
The woman shook her head dismissively, and got off her seat. It seemed to me that she saw something she didn’t want to tell me of,
“…because when time goes by, there is no coming back.”
“Yeah, time flies. Are you done? Is that all? Look again, please.”
“Wait…”
She turned her back to me and started walking when I fished for a five dollar note to hand to her. She wouldn’t take the money, but she stood there staring at me with an aging smile. I saw my life in her old eyes. I saw a film reel reflected in her shinny brown eyes. Brown eyes looking at browner eyes. I saw trapped words struggling to flow from a closed mouth, faking a smile. Something was off suddenly. Something told me that danger would encircle my life. It was unbelievable how ten minutes ago, I never wanted anything to do with that gypsy, and now her broken English messages seemed, alarming, worthy of attention.
The smile on the gypsy’s face faded and she put her hand on my shoulder, pressed it in a motherly fashion, trying to comfort me, then she walked away without taking the money.
Being self-aware was a curse. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t even want to be sentient. Four years had passed since that palm reading session, and I wouldn’t stop thinking about what was said. The words uttered by that woman always echoed in my ears like a coin hitting the ground of an empty temple, except that they never faded away. Was there an easy way to ask God and get an instant answer? Some sort of a divine device to text Heavens?
I was lonely. I was taken by force from my childhood to become an adult while I was still eleven. My mother wanted to snatch me from the “distractions” of boys and the life of dating, until I became success-centric. All what impressed my parents were scoring great grades. The Alfa student was the kind of child they raised me to be, until I grew oblivious to my own needs. I watched my friends going out on dates, and all I did on Saturday nights was either watch a movie with my parents or read a book my mother thought was good for me. It wasn’t until I was fifteen when I started going out with my friends alone without my mother tagging along with us. I still had to listen to my friends gossip about their dates, and I smiled to conceal my envy. I never went out on a date, because I didn’t know how to handle boys at the first place.
My career had been going well – I had been on more flights to more destinations, helping disadvantaged children and deprived mothers in war zones. I immersed myself in more work, avoiding phone calls from my mother because I knew they would not end well. I knew she wanted one thing only,
“Nadine, you gotta see someone.”
That was the movie she wanted to watch, regardless of who was the man or what events led to it. For her, that was the one thing to guarantee my stability and safety. For her, marriage was the primal goal. It should be any girl’s primal goal, and anything they accomplish in life had to be completed by marriage. Women were halves until they met a man to complete them.
“Why don’t you create a dating profile?” seemed to be my friends’ suggestion to when I told them about my mother’s persistent endeavors to set me up with someone. My mother never wasted a chance when I was in town to introduce me to a friend’s brother or son, to take me to random weddings, hoping some potential suiter would like me,
“A good looking woman like you, long dark hair, amber eyes, beautiful olive tanned skin, a blend of the east and the west is a catch,” she’d say.
I just didn’t settle long enough to attract anyone.
“Mother, I’m a smart woman. I don’t need to sweep men off their feet by looks.”
“When a man first looks at you, he will not figure out what your brain carries, but what your clothes do. The face and the body. The brain comes after”
“But he will not like me more if I was dumb.”
“I said the brain comes after. The looks come first.”
Wow! That could not be the same mother who once shunned me from boys, who made me think they were monsters who wanted one thing only. Who crammed my head with male resistance the way she crammed my bookcase with feminism literature. That could not be the same woman who encouraged me to cut my hair short and wear my bothers’ clothes, to play soccer and be praised when her friends called me a tomboy. What a hypocrite piece of shit! Now she wanted me to reveal some skin and “act girly”, she wanted me to throw all my intellect out the window and flush my brain down the toilet because it would not get me a man. Now that I was twenty-seven, she wanted me to go out more and meet people. Where was she when guys had a crush on me and I didn’t know, and when my friends told me, it felt like they wanted to rape me and I felt disgusted of my own skin? Where was she when I saw girls my age fall in love and speak about their first kisses while all I did was read about that in books and turn my face the other way when I saw it in movies like a five-year-old? How did she react when I got my period for the first time? She told me to wear more shorts and pants and less skirts because I was a big girl now, and boys would want to hurt me more than before. Now she wanted me to open my legs to the first man who would knock on the door, get down on his knee and show a ring. Maybe she wanted me to get down on my knee for him. Someone would get on their knees eventually. Mothers. We place them on pedestals, cherish them, glorify them, take their orders like daggers with no shield and are accused of ungratefulness and disobedience if we refuse. They perform a fulltime job of caring for us, they say they do it out of love, then they want a price, a reward. Something in return. Not physical. They want their lives back in the form of ours. They want our lives in return for the years they spent bringing us up, their children, who never asked to be born, never asked to exist. Mothers birth us to enslave us.
Eventually, I did want to challenge my mother. Despite what she had said to me about boys, despite the fact that she nagged about me being good at everything except love, I would show her that yes, I could make a man fall in love with me. I was ripe enough to be picked up by the right man. A man I would choose, the way I choose, in the time I choose.
I set up a Cupid profile. At first, I did not know what to write about myself,
“A passionate traveler, and a human worker.”
“A degree in Anthropology, in International Law, and in English Literature.”
“Spoken Languages: English, Ar…”
God, that was a resume not a dating profile! Okay, I thought I would only fill in the physical details about my height and eye color, and leave the rest to when I was interested in someone.
The strenuous search for picture to that profile was yet another inconvenience. I was either dressed in neon vests with rubbles in the background, or a suit in one of the United Nations conferences. I knew I did not belong to the virtual world because I was too real. After hours of shuffling between folders in my hard drive, I found a decent photo with my younger brother on a trip to Rome. It was the summer of 2004 right after my graduation from my first school. I wore a white cotton t-shirt, a yellow scarf and jeans. I didn’t wear makeup, because who wore makeup going to a museum? I cropped my brother out of the picture,
“This is it! This is my profile picture, and if people don’t like my face in it, that’s fine. I lived with it for twenty-seven years, so they can live with it too.”
My inbox was bombarded by tens of emails from males interested in me. My profile picture was not that unappealing after all, which shows men are desperate for a female in their life, regardless how “attractive” they deem her to be. Was this why some men prefer female pets?
“Lawyer, no. I hate lawyers. Doctor, okay maybe. Engineer, no. Too geeky. I am a geek too, but no we both can’t be geeks. Entrepreneur, what’s that? A human organs seller? Be specific, dude. Ugh! This is annoying! I don’t know, they are too many. Men too are having a hard time finding women.”
“I like women who don’t wear makeup. Simple is the best makeup nature can wear.” I smiled at that private message I received on the website. It was from HisNameDoesntMatter.
“And we are all part of nature,” I messaged back.
Thirty minutes later, “J I’m Zak.”
“I thought your name doesn’t matter.”
“HAHA, good one. Yours does, though.”
I raised an eyebrow at the virtual stranger. Nice attitude! I was instantly intrigued. That should be fun.
It became a ritual to talk to Zak every night for the week that followed our first exchange, until I realized I could download the Cupid application to my smart phone then it turned to be a constant open conversation between us. Distance was the only misunderstanding we faced,
“I used to play soccer,” I once told him.
“Yeah? What’s your favorite team?”
“Barcelona, dah!”
“Don’t dah me, woman!”
“LOL”
“Plus, Barcelona was born yesterday.”
“Which is an even better reason to admire them. In such a short period, they made a team every SANE footballer wants to join.”
“They just have a lot of money.”
“Why is this a bad thing? Lol!”
“It’s not..forget it!”
“Wait, let me guess..you’re a Man U fan, no?”
“They are good.”
“’They WERE good’ here, I fixed it for you.”
“You’re biased.”
“Ahhh, did I hurt your Man U feelings? You know they play like old women in red jerseys and white shorts, no?”
“Shut up!”
“Truth hurts.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t. :D”
We talked about everything – soccer, politics, work, relationships, money, humanity, conflicts, books, music. He was thirty-five, a businessman who inherited his father’s company. He studied business administration in London and his mother was Croatian. He too spoke many languages and traveled a lot. We had many traits in common that made it easier to communicate, but we were also different in many ways that made it easier for us to understand each other. Zak was a strong man who rarely delved deeper in his personal life, while I wanted to know more to get closer. I told him about my relationship with my mother, but he only told me where his mother was from. I told him about my years in Spain and my rescue trips, while he only told me about his multiple flights with no details to flip through. I felt I had shared a lot, and he felt he had shared enough. I got too clingy, my phone had become part of my existence. In meetings, I put it on vibration mode and when he texted me, it shook my heart. Every time my phone blinked his username on the screen, it my eyes lit up. Could he be the light at the end of a dark, lonely tunnel? When my friends didn’t see me with me phone, they didn’t recognize me,
“ha ha, not funny,” I said in a monotone.
I had become addictive to the virtuality of the relationship, to the blinking light of my phone and the notification sound alerting me of a new message from Zak. I no longer treated my phone as a device, but as a person I wanted to keep company with all the time. I treated my phone the way I would have treated Zak. His morning texts delighted me, and his late-night conversations numbed my loneliness. I grew fonder of an idea. I realized that what was once zeros and ones, was now a materialized flesh and blood. My phone has become a real human I wanted to meet, smell, and touch. For me, it was time to turn what was pixilated to something real.
Nadine thought maybe if she asked to see Zak it would be a natural step to take their relationship to the next level,
“I can’t,” he responded.
“But why?”
“I just can’t.”
“I don’t understand. We’ve been talking for a month now, and it makes sense we meet. I can come to you, if you cannot make it to the US.”
“I know you can, but I’m busy in London. It’s not really easy to sneak out from work to meet a girl I only met online.”
“What do you mean only met online? Wait, I thought you felt something towards me, otherwise why the continuous texting and the whole idea of carrying on with someone you met on a dating site? Wasn’t this why you’re meeting someone on a dating site? To actually start dating them?”
“Yes, but it’s not like you think.”
“WHAT DO I THINK?”
“I just cannot meet you.”
“WHY? AM I NOT INETERSTING ENOUGH? WHY, IF SO, DID YOU WASTE MY TIME, MY EMOTIONS, YOUR TIME?”
No reply for fifteen minutes.
“Are you there?”
No reply.
“Why are you not responding?”
Nothing.
He went off five minutes later and never came online again. I waited for a text from him, something to hold my grounds to the wavering idea I almost had that he was just there to kill some time. I wanted him to at least tell me he didn’t like me anymore. I searched my memory for something I might have said that might have hurt him, but even if I did, wasn’t I worth being confronted? Wasn’t it a sign of camaraderie, even among friends which I thought we were more than that, to tell them they hurt you so you make it up quickly? Amend things before they get out of proportion?
It was three days and nothing from him. I didn’t have his number to call him, I didn’t see a need to take it because we always chatted on that site. I should have taken it, but what use would it make me? If he wanted to talk to me, he would have done that already.
“Zak, I want passionate fiery love. I want to forget myself with the one I love. I want to feel all emotions, a blend of pain, satisfaction, happiness. I want a love I don’t want to wake up from. I want love that doesn’t force me to do things that are not me because I’m pressured to satisfy someone. I want a love the gives me a rebirth, that equals understanding and respect. I want to be loved. I thought you could offer me that. I thought you were as simple as the picture you saw of me with no makeup. I thought you wore no makeup either, but you are fake. I don’t even know how the hell was I dragged into all that. I was doing my thing, living my life and just happy the way I was, then you, YOU, texted me, and went on texting me and talking to me. I don’t get it, something is missing. Why? WHY? But I guess you have no answer. Or maybe you do. Your silence is an answer. And here is mine.”
She deleted his messages, deleted his name, blocked him, and deactivated her account.
I was back to my loneliness. Maybe my mother was right when she turned me off against men, but then now she wanted me to be with one. I wore loneliness like my favorite sweater. It suited me well, that it wouldn’t let me go, or I wouldn’t let it go. What was the matter with me? I got attached to a ghost, clingy to an illusion. My life was perfect, I had everything anyone could wish for, but I still felt unhappy. That was it: unhappiness, not loneliness. I felt unhappy because I was lonely, though. It was both. I was raised to love my solitude, my “uniqueness”, as mother used to call it. However, I still wanted someone to share my loneliness with. I wanted to be alone and unique with someone. When I went back home from any of my trips, I wanted to open the door and see someone eager to see me. I wanted to feel excited to come back to someone, to listen to what they had been without me, what they did and how they lived. All I went back to was vacancy; a vast space of nothing. I was invited to partied and dinners. I was surrounded by persons I cared about and they cared about me all the same. I still felt lonely. I still, when was asked how I was, felt it was out of courtesy not genuine care. I felt that no one truly wanted to sit down, order a cup of coffee and listen to how I was; that no one expressed a desire to hold my hand while I told them how I liked that movie or that character in a book, and squeeze it when I speak passionately about how they died at the end of the book. Everyone was busy with their lives, but who was busy with mine? Whose mind did I occupy? Whose time was I worthy of?
It took me another month to recover from the Zak Conundrum. Work was not enough to snatch my mind out of it. It all came to one question: Why? But not every “why” had a “because”. Maybe he was there for the fun of texting someone, and he freaked out when I asked to meet him. Maybe he wasn’t expecting it. Maybe he didn’t want to meet me at all and aimed for something else, something sexual, some cyber porn. Was mother right about boys being monsters? Thank God it was too soon I never told her anything, she would have told the entire country, bragged about me finally finding a man and puff..gone with the wind. But he never spoke that way, he never even hinted it, no. Maybe he was married, and was not happy in his marriage, and only wanted someone to be by his side, and support him. That was sick, though. Maybe he was not even real, but then who was that who texted me all day long? Was it a prank from one of my friends? Oh, silly, no one knew I already set up a profile, or knew about my username. Remember, he was the one who texted me, so he found me. Maybe he recognized me by my picture, but that was an old one and I wouldn’t even recognize me in it. That was the problem with social media, nothing was social about it. Even there I was not social enough. Was that what made the gypsy frown at my palm? Was that the bad thing she prophesied? That wasn’t as bad, though. Everyone gets their heart broken at one point, I was no exception. I didn’t know. I was terrified that no one was ever going to love me as much as I loved them. That no one was ever going to constantly want to see me and get sad when they didn’t, that no one was going to think about me a lot and want to own an apartment with me. That no one was going to make me a priority. That no one was going to choose me first. Maybe I would die alone, and that was a terrifying thought.
