Again, sitting down to write without much of an agenda. Yesterday I biked to the beach. It was packed. I listened to a voice message sent to me by a girl with whom I had a brief romance a couple of months ago... Perhaps I ought to write about that?
Ugh, I don't feel like it, but I should anyways. Let's get over with it.
I arrived to Cancún from Canada in September and stayed over with friends, two of my best friends with whom I share a long and special friendship. I took a yoga class at a nearby studio, the class was too soft for my liking, but the teacher was soothing and attractive, so I came back for more soft yoga. We chatted a little bit in-between classes and we seemed to have chemistry.
I felt a responsibility to have my feeling known to her in a cool, detached way. If she had a boyfriend or was in a relationship it was OK, I'm fine with that. The fact that I like someone will not ruin whatever comes next, though I would have frankly stopped attending her classes because it was not my type of yoga, so I tried booking a class but they told me she wouldn't be the teacher that night. I tried booking the next night, same story.
Then I received a voice message. She is almost blind because of a genetic condition, something I didn't understand at the time because she conceals the extent of her blindness (to her students, and frankly to herself too), so she doesn't type on the phone but communicates via voice messages.
She apologized for not being available, but she had been sick. The receptionist told her I'd been trying to book a class with her and that's why she was reaching out. She'd be available next Monday and she'd love to see me then.
I told her I'd been trying to book a class with her because there was this thing I wanted to say to her... That I simply liked her, that I didn't quite know where I was going with it, since I was only going to be there two weeks, but that she had really nice energy and that I felt a responsibility to tell her. I said that I didn't know if she was married or that if she had a boyfriend, and that if that was the case I'd simply leave it at that, and that I would hope it would be flattering if that was the case.
She said that indeed, she had a boyfriend, but that her boyfriend lived in Colombia, and they saw each other every two months or so, that she appreciated how I put it forward but that we should leave things "up in the air", that she was interested in getting to know me better, that she liked my vibe to, and she wanted to inquire what this was about too.
We exchanged voice messages over the weekend, and she unravelled a lot of stuff. Many people who are into yoga come to it because they are trying to resolve some sort of trauma (I'm not exempt from this), and part of the process of knowing somebody who is into a spiritual practice is knowing their trauma too. I was empathetic but it was also a sobering experience, because I had idealized her and she was human, all too human.
She had a significant number of addictions which I will not detail because that's not the point, but what really put me off was that she badmouthed other yoga teachers, had no respect for her boyfriend, and ignored my boundaries when they were clearly expressed. Still, I was infatuated and trying to make things work out. I attended her classes and we would chat after class. We couldn't act out much our attraction to each other, as her father drove her to and from the studio, but after a long romantic hiatus for both of us, the arrangement was pleasant if a bit naive.
When I went back to Puebla things started getting out of whack for her, she would send me dozens of voice messages per day, call me in the middle of the night, she would say that she was planning on leaving her boyfriend... I consulted with my friend back in Cancún about how I should handle the situation. She told me to block her, there was no other way out. To me it seemed cowardly, but my intuition told me trying to explain things to her would only intensify her drama and I had to admit to myself that yes, the only way I knew out of the situation was letting her know that I was overwhelmed with everything, that I wanted to communicate only once per week, and to please give me some space. The next thing she did was call me, which I interpreted again as a violation of boundaries, so I blocked her.
I spent about a month and a half in Puebla before coming back to Cancún. I wanted to reach out to her because I felt things were improperly closed, I hadn't done the "mature thing" and given proper closure. I looked at her Instagram and saw that her boyfriend was here, and I thought "now is not the time", and after a couple of weeks I understood that was all the closure needed. That I was seeking her for my own closure, not for hers.
Soon after this realization she found me on Instagram. She messaged me: I think I'm blocked on WhatsApp, why?. I unblocked her, sent her a message. I admit to sugarcoating it: you have a stable relationship which you and your father depend on. I'm a nomad. This was a train wreck waiting to happen. You didn't understand my boundaries. I'm very sorry, it was the best way I knew how to handle the situation.
She replied quickly, but it took me days to bring myself to hear what she had said. And this was yesterday, at the beach. She had called me in the middle of the night before, but I hadn't answered. She voice dictated that she really liked me and that she wanted to see me. She was getting overbearing again.
I sat down on a bank of sand and listened to her message. She begun by saying that she had been hurt, and then had some very nice words to say about how she experienced our relationship, and then got a little too intense.
I wanted to be friends, but I understood this couldn't happen, the train was back on track to a wreck again, and it had been my own doing. I tried to formulate a compromise, but then I poem by Khalil Gibran came to mind, here is a fragment:
If you accept, then express it bluntly
Do not mask it
If you refuse then be clear about it
for an ambiguous refusal
is but a weak acceptance
"I've thought things out. I'm really really sorry for what I'm about to do, it's not about you, or even about me, it's what lies between us. There's fire and gunpowder. We can't be friends. We can't keep in touch, I'm really sorry".
Then I blocked her from WhatsApp and Instagram.