K

I wrote below:

"I live in Europe now and recently fell in love, most unexpectedly, with a younger man. Even more recently, he gave me the boot, which was the trigger for my current interesting situation."

and promised to say more about K later.

K is an American graduate student who lives in the same town and goes to my church. We both inhabit the same social circle of English speakers living abroad in this big city, and we have many of the same cultural, political and religious ideas and we share a similar sense of humour. For these and for no reason, I suppose, we hit it off last year and shortly after I arrived, he was, as he put it, "chasing" me. After a short period of hesitation and doubt, (mostly self-doubt), I allowed myself to be caught.

Things went well and we grew very close. Closer than I have allowed myself to become to anyone in my recent history. We talked about marriage, because we both believe that that is the natural end of "dating" (faugh! what a horrible neologism!). Then, a month ago, after we had begun to experience various problems, he suddenly broke it off. It was not completely unexpected. I had done the same thing to him in June, then changed my mind. We had had problems, things had been difficult.

But he was serious. He believes he has done "the right" thing for reasons which I can't really understand. But I knew it was wrong. It was wrong like water flowing up hill was wrong. He has since said that he is "open to reconsidering". I still do not know what this means.

It has been a month plus a few days and I find that I almost panic when I think of the time flowing along, taking us further away from the time when we were happy together. And of course, the memory of our happiness is now like swallowing a red hot coal. Pain seeing him. Pain not seeing him...the usual thing with love.

We had our break-up discussion on December 7 and I felt as if I had been cut in half. That was the most memorably bad week I have experienced in the ten years since my previous serious depression.

There is more to all this story of course, but I have many reasons to not write about it too much now. I am finding it difficult to get this much out and I can feel the pain starting to build like a fire of dry paper as I write. I also do not want to write about K in a public forum. It is his life as well and he has his right to privacy.

But the depression that had grown from low levels into the middle range during this year's dreadful summer, suddenly flared up after this and took possession of most of my thoughts.

We still see each other a great deal, and that has been very hard. I made the decision right away not to withdraw from him. Partly because I hoped to mend things, but also because he is at the centre of our social set and to withdraw from him would have meant withdrawing from everyone else, and changing churches. How things are now, I can't really say. I don't know where we are going, but I cannot give in. Something in me refuses to let go, and K has not withdrawn either.

How commonplace, though, to be pining for love. How sad to be doing so in one's forties.