Bluebirdy

I’m a bitch, I’m a tease
I’m a goddess on my knees
When you hurt, when you suffer
I’m your angel undercover
I’ve been numb, I’m revived
Can’t say I’m not alive
You know I wouldn’t want it any other way

- Bitch, Meredith Brooks

Jokingly, I’ve told people that I feared I’d wake up one day and announce that I had the craziest dream that I lived in Europe for two years. Well, If it was a dream, it was a most amazing dream, one in which I traveled the world, met new friends, hiked the mountains, played hockey in the snow, rode horses through the Swiss countryside, lost love, discovered love, got healthy, found myself.

And so I’m compelled to ask, was this return to what I call home really a good idea in the end? California, or rather, what I know as “home” is this deafening cacophony of demands on my body and soul. While most people might see a return to home as a time to relax, I see it as what I have grown up knowing it to be – a pushing, shoving, fall down, get up, scrambling race to get things, to get somewhere, to get whatever it is that I think I need before someone else gets it. A day after I’d landed in the bay I was in my car, which, like me, had picked up right where it left off and started up immediately after two years in storage, racing around the local highways with inexplicable urgency. I was eating with wooden chopsticks out of Chinese take-out boxes, then throwing them away to dash off to my next appointment. The phone was ringing, my inbox was overflowing, and I was still opening paper mail hours later. I’d made offers on houses, on horses, on work; I even half-heartedly tried to make offers on love but all I’d get in return is, “No Jess, you shouldn’t miss me.”

A long time ago someone I went to school with in Pittsburgh said to me regarding our imminent graduation, “Of course I’m going back (to California). My life is magical there.” I’ll admit, for years I didn’t understand how anyone’s life could be that wondrous anywhere, let alone in California where I’d spent so much of my life unhappy in the midst of seemingly impossible opportunity. What I learned half a decade later is that living an amazing life isn’t really a location-based accident. Ironically, I had to move to another country to make this discovery. Out of my element, I couldn’t make assumptions, couldn’t lay blame, had to react with curiosity and wonder to all things new, good and bad. People who have visited countries like to tell you lots of things about that country, about things they’ve seen on the surface or stuff they “know to be true” because they were there. But as I’ve said before, visiting isn’t living, and when you visit you take with you all of your prejudices and you hold onto them because there is no reason to let go, no need to integrate or understand or make friends. You’ll be home in days or a week, and you’ll be back to what you know.

When I returned to California what I feared most of all was returning not to the place, but to my prejudices and my experiences and myself, to that past person always unhappy and forever chasing the unreachable lure. But serendipitously, that person isn’t here anymore. I even looked for her, sought her out, challenged her to appear by falling back into my chaotic routine. She’s gone, and more importantly, she was never me. The person I came back from Europe with is me, was always me, just locked away for a long time waiting for freedom. When you wake up from a dream you’re the same person who fell asleep. This wasn’t a dream.

I was in Alicante, leaning on both elbows towards the person on the other side of my table when I said out loud, “My life is magical. I know what this means now.” And I knew, from that moment on, that wherever I went in the world my life would continue to be magical. I knew this because it’s not a place or a person or a thing that makes it so. It’s me. And the person across from me smiled and said, “It’s true.”

Do you hear me,
Talking to you,
Across the water, across the deep blue ocean
Under the open sky, oh my, baby I’m trying

Boy I hear you in my dreams
I feel your whisper across the sea
I keep you with me in my heart
You make it easier when life gets hard

Lucky I’m in love with my best friend
Lucky to have been where I have been
Lucky to be coming home again

They don’t know how long it takes
Waiting for a love like this
Every time we say goodbye
I wish we had one more kiss
I’ll wait for you I promise you, I will

- Lucky, Jason Mraz & Colbie Caillat

This week in Argentina I had the pleasure of walking into the women’s restroom at a polo clubhouse in Lobos. The woman who accompanied me looked at the markings ”C” and “F” on the sink faucet before choosing one.

“F,” she said, “that must be for ‘Fuego,’ which is hot.”

“Uh,” I replied, “I think that’s ‘F’ for ‘Frío,’ which is cold. Unless you thought ‘C’ stands for ‘cold’ in Spanish too.”

“Oh.”

When you’re a little blue bird subject to the whims of your seemingly unpredictable human being, you start to understand the concept of destiny. Jujy, despite all her opinions and outrage, lives in a cage that is her home and she goes where her home takes her. Recently, unbeknownst to her (as always), Jujy’s destiny has been in limbo. Will Jujy remain in my mother’s living room in San Mateo, California, will she be shipped across the Atlantic in a box to end up in a living room in Europe, or will she be surprised one day to discover her favorite human’s permanent return home only to be whisked away to yet another foreign living room? Life isn’t too complicated for Jujy, but it is uncertain. It’s uncertain in that worst of ways, the kind that gives no warnings and accepts no resentment. Jujy’s trapped in her cage, and if that cage takes her to Istanbul, well by golly, I guess she’s going to go there.

You might be thinking that this is merely the consequence of being an ornamental pet bird who lives in a cage. We’ll all take a moment to thank the stars that we too, are not caged birds. When it comes to people, we like to think that we’re in charge of our own destinies, that in fact, the idea of “destiny” or “fate” may not even exist. If I can make decisions, and my decisions affect changes in the future, then how can fate exist? Consider this: Jujy, when her cage door is open, makes decisions too. She decides whether or not she will come out of her cage, where she will climb to, if she’ll fly and where she’ll fly to, whether she will socialize with the other living room birds that day, and whether she’ll allow me to pick her up and scratch her head. It’s only when Jujy’s confined to her cage that her destiny becomes dependent on me.

Lately I’ve been in a position to make some life changing decisions about whether I will stay in Europe, return home to the U.S., or move to some other location altogether. On the surface, these seem like my own independent decisions. At a deeper level, however, very few decisions are free of outside influences, especially those that involve other people. Even Jujy’s decision to come out of her cage depends on my decision to open the door.

To say that we don’t have destinies, even if they are short term fates, is a crazy thing considering how significant a portion of our decisions aren’t ours to make. We’re confined just as Jujy is, to the cages of our hearts, to other people’s decisions, other people’s hearts, and to time and space and luck. While we’re never trapped, and we’re usually in better positions than pet birds, other people’s uncertainties can be our uncertainties, and my destiny can be Jujy’s as well.