viernes, 25 de mayo de 2012

Interleaved alternate futures

Presently I am a middle-aged jobless lawyer, living in a relatively small city in the South Cone, struggling to make a living with my private practice. Until recently I was working as counselor for some lawmakers and before that I was attorney and counselor for the city government, comprising all in all a time span of about nine years. And before that I worked for a union for several years. Never quite letting my private practice get a real start.
 My children, now between 20 and 30, aren't quite happy about my career choices. They have suffered the most, as money never flowed well into our home; since my divorce I have been struggling to support us the best I could think of, and in fact they did great: all finished high-school, learned languages and some other skills and they could live through their childhood without much thinking about it; but they resent the fact that there never was enough money to do fancy holidays or to buy us a house, o even a new car. One of them even resents the fact that I've moved to such a small city...
 Well, that got me thinking, what would my life have been like, hadn't I left the big city? Would I have been happier? More proficient in anything? More able to make money? I really doubt it, for a long time I held the feeling that, had I continued living in the capital, a car crash o some other likely accident would have killed me, since my soul was almost completely outside my body; considering that barely a month and a half since my arrival in Bariloche I almost got burned up, that feeling seems not to have been much far-fetched. I cannot be sure, of course; nobody knows what “would have happened if”, only what really happened is certain.
But nonetheless it might still be an interesting exercise, to spun other possible futures, trying to see how things would have developed if certain decisions had been different. So I feel I owe myself some thinking on it, starting from the most significant turning point, that is, my decision to move to Bariloche. Maybe I begin to intermix English and Spanish, I don't even know why I chose English now – maybe to detach myself enough as to be able to think other possibilities? Or would it be that my Spanish is too tainted by legalese that I can't write in a normal, colloquial style anymore? I don't know, let's see what comes out of this.

I'm not moving
How do you begin imagining other possible future? Most probably by bringing to your memory the events immediately surrounding the one you are not going to let be.
So maybe it helps to remember why I moved, why I was eager to relocate to Bariloche. I had recently, lost my job. A good job, with good pay, at the Legislative Branch; but it didn't make me happy, there were too many downsides to it, I didn't feel like making a political career and abiding by the intricacies and obscurities of political negotiation. So I dind't try to get it back, which might have been possible if I weren't so intent on being myself. (Maybe this would make another interesting turning point, and the question arises again, if a political career is that much not being myself...).
I began looking for other things to do. Beginner's work at some lawyer's office did not seem something suitable, most of the available posts required extended work hours, a considerable investment on bar fees and offered a very poor pay in exchange. As it would be the norm afterwards in the real future, I looked fervently for ways not to put my lawyer qualification to use. By that time I met the man who would eventually be my husband in the real future, and together we did some Shiatsu and distributed new age music. He had family in Bariloche and I wanted badly to move away from the hot and wet weather in Buenos Aires; I guess I wanted also to move away from some painful memories that I didn't seem to be able to get over, and away, away from my longing for Japan. It had been almost five years since I returned, but I missed everything Japanese so much that I wasn't even able to breathe without longing for the smells I had been immersed in for about a year. So many awkward feelings overwhelmed me during those five years! Like feeling that crossing the next street I would appear on some specific spot in Tokyo, or feeling I saw and heard some friend from overseas; all in all it was like living with one half of my body in Buenos Aires and the other half across the divide; or rather, more accurately, having my body in the present city and my soul in Japan; I never got to reunite both at that time; all the while I pictured myself standing across a rift, one leg on each side, hopelessly wishing to jump to the one side I felt my home. In many ways, my return from Japan left me in a much worse state than the broken love before the trip; at least, soon after it became apparent that my love project wasn't having any future, I had the stamina to think about journeying to Japan all by myself – not that I didn't suffer the loss while there, the leaking hole was there, but it somehow didn't engulf my whole being and I was able to enjoy life, too.
Things being so, I was more than happy to relocate to a remote place in the South, where summers where not humid and snow fell in winter; a place with woods surrounding it, where nature was a real presence. But things didn't turn out that well in the South, either. What if....? How would things have turned out if I'd stayed? To figure this out, it's important to remember that my mood was awful at that time, that I had no balance, I had lost my center...
(... to be continued...)