I am not a person who favours drama off the stage.  I am a simple, lazy person whose dark character forms part of her charm, put down to her Irishness by many of her friends.  Anything for a quiet life.

In the past month or so, my husband and I have separated and then reconciled, under conditions.  We have no desire--indeed, no capacity--to live as lovers, but we have a strong bond after years of living as loners together, and are hopeful that we can build a strong partnership and business relationship. 

The boy, who must be weary of my pessimism--it is no longer as fashionable among young people as once it was, and he comes from a country not overly given to it at this point in its history--assures me in emails that we will see each other again.  That we will be together next January.  At worst, next July.  To him, that is the end of worry.

He knows something of my recent turbulence.  Not all.  He invites me to tell him about it.  He does not mean it, and he knows that I will not take him up on it.  He is well-raised and polite.  And so am I.

***
Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It observes that “men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”  Love is not actually an illness, a pathology in exactly the way of other pathologies, but it, or its loss, can hurt, and can affect us physically.  It can bring us low.  I have in the language of pathology found a good model for the ebb and flow of my heartache, and, by extension, my general melancholy--the former a condition, the latter indigenous to my character--that allows me to think of them in a clinical, containable way and separate the rest of myself from them.  

Years ago, I ran the office of a small non-profit organisation, many of whose members worked in the developing world.  They were frequently exposed to misadventure, danger and disease in the course of their assignments, and one of the legacies many brought home with them was malaria.  Certain types of malaria can recur repeatedly in sufferers, sometimes years after the initial affliction, often flaring with little warning.  I remember two of my colleagues speaking about it one morning; one had worked in the field in Africa, the other in South America.  “I think my malaria may be rallying,” the South American veteran said, while the other empathised.  The sufferer looked weary and slightly feverish, and we both encouraged her to take it easy that day.

I have an American friend who has recently been abandoned by a mistress, and is devastated; I shared this model with him, and now we ask one another, “How’s the malaria today?”  It allows us both to speak with some humour, but also with sincerity, about how we are doing.  Of course, people who do contract malaria, and survive it, are somehow heroic among those who know nothing of the depredations of such a disease; they are exotic creatures whose infirmity was usually got in the course of trying to help others in worlds where the business of everyday living is infinitely more fraught than in our own.  Love is not viewed that way by us, because it is not like that--it is ubiquitous, yes, but it is also sought, sung to, invested simultaneously with tremendous import and little respect, precisely because it is packaged and bought and sold and everywhere.  It does not kill; but if it did, so what?  It is inevitable.  There are no rounds of tablets one can take against it before entering the fray.  We who love are not, whatever we may think, heroes.  We help no-one, including ourselves.  So I prefer the language of disease, the thing that makes me feel bonded with other survivors and allows us to be bluff with one another in our mutual support.

The malaria was almost dormant in me, but it has flared up again in recent days, triggered by God knows what--a song in the boy’s language, a scene from a film, something trivial and unavoidable.  I ride it out.  I remind myself that I’ve survived so far, and will continue to survive.  Limping or blind in one eye or hard of hearing, like a good veteran.  But surviving.  I tell myself that.

 

No drama.  Anything for a quiet life.