"I think pessimism is completely out of date. I think that's a romantic indulgence. I don't think anybody can afford to be pessimistic anymore. I mean, there's so much that can go wrong, optimism is the only thing possible[...] I've always thought that an optimist was a person who knew exactly how sad a place the world could be and a pessimist is a man who finds out anew every morning. That's the real difference. I'm obviously optimistic because you simply have to be. It's an obligation to be optimistic." Peter Ustinov
I'm sitting at my desk, in a black dress and black cardigan and I'm on a second glass of champagne and my fourth chocolate, surrounded by three fashion magazines. This scene pretty much sums up my state of mind, if you are discerning enough to read between the lines. (Yes, I'm hormonal too. Why must it be that obvious?)
I ruined a friend's birthday this morning by bursting into tears almost the minute she walked through the door. It was ex-partner's birthday yesterday (a very significant one) and I somehow failed to mention this in my explanation of why I was in floods of tears. It's all a mess of various different feelings and situations anyway. (As it always is.) It got worse because of not being able to buy my friend a better birthday present. I really wanted to make an effort for her, because I would want the same if it were me, but she seemed genuinely happy with what I'd already got her and didn't mind that I'd run out of time to wrap it up.
[Czechs appear to have low expectations and even lower hope of any surprises that prove their low expectations to be a little pessimistic. This is one of the things currently bothering me. Most of all because when I purposely try to exceed their expectations, just to surprise and delight them, my efforts are met with a look of bewilderment or, worse still, disdain that this is wholly unnecessary and over the top. Since when has being extraordinary been such a bore? And, for heaven's sake, WHY?]
I suppose my desperate mood all stemmed from the difficult weekend I'd had of feeling snuffly and panicking about losing money for being ill (thankfully, my cold hasn't so far gone beyond headaches, the occasional sniffle and a sore throat) but my Tuesday was a 'task-and-a-half' and nearly wiped me out. Not least because I had to get through so many meetings, so many questions, so little appreciation and all of it on ex-partner's birthday. Needless to say, I couldn't face calling him. I just couldn't. I knew I'd only burst into tears.
I should have had a lovely weekend. A list of delightful things were in place:
1) Thanks to IKEA's genius in economical flat-packing, the huge bed and even the sofa (yes!) made it through the door. (And thankfully, we made it through the night of assembling both bed and sofa, still a couple. Which is some sort of miracle, surely?)
2) There was indeed some sunshine over the weekend, despite a few gloomy, or misty hours
3) The autumnal colours of the trees were stunning
4) The IKEA "Hemnes" bed was even more stunning. It's HUGE!
5) The flat-screen TV that got delivered on Saturday was pretty damned sizeable too
But there were thoughts in my head that gnawed away at me. And there were things in the architect's mind that were gnawing away at him too. He needs to feel proud of having achieved something so urgently, that even the tiniest detail of whether the furniture ordered fitted the size of the room absolutely proportionally, or if the colours worked together, or if the flat-screen TV was at the right height from the floor were huge setbacks if deemed 'not quite right'. I tried to tell him what a great achievement it was to have this flat in the first place, to have put up with a job that doesn't appreciate him enough and treats him like dirt at times, in order to be able to afford this stuff, but he was hell-bent on focussing on all the possible ways of looking at things negatively and of seeing himself as a loser. Somehow nothing I said or did was enough to override that for him.
And he sensed that my thoughts were elsewhere too. The funny thing is, they wouldn't have been, if he could have trusted, believed and appreciated my words of encouragement. If he hadn't teased me when we went for a walk that I'm so spoilt for mentioning there not being any hot water by the afternoon because the boiler, which only heats up water overnight to save on energy costs, had run out of it, or hadn't teased me about how long a walk it would be if I carried on walking so slowly as it was getting dark, and instead had at least equalled the teasing with a proportionate amount of affection or words of support, I might have been more focussed on him and not on my sense of loss.
But there's something funny about how your perception changes when you don't have someone backing you up and supporting you as much as you support them. When you've lost someone who used to, once upon a time, a long, long time ago, think the world of you and appreciated your efforts both in your work and within the relationship, that sense of loss is reflected in your surroundings. In those days, I used to go for walks in the woods with this someone and feel 100% safe and cared for. I would look at the beautiful colours of autumn leaves and see the trees as friendly beings, just flaring up a last bit of colour before settling down for their winter nap. Now, in the light of losing ex-partner to someone who fits his life better than he could ever have imagined (and I stupidly believed that no-one, but no-one finds this, but I realise now that good fortune breeds good fortune ad infinitum just as the reverse, sadly, also appears to be the rule of thumb), all I see is the pain of the loss of the trees' leaves and the sadness that they emit in a 'last shout' of colour before they are robbed of their strength and have to 'shut down' for winter.
I did try to tell myself, that this is my perception, my choice, so I can change it. But it is remarkably hard. It's sort of like asking myself to retain the kindly notion of a rickety old bus, in the way that it is portrayed in Mr. Men books, when regularly having to get on the real thing, all damp, leaky and full of miserable commuters at 8am, on your way to school. It somehow isn't possible.
And I don't feel safe and cared for. I feel like the isolated foreigner I am. (Though isolation is not a concept limited to my time abroad, by any means.) And that foreign-ness was never more acute than today. I never thought, in a million years, that I could go somewhere and become the optimist of the crowd. In London I was the pessimist. In New York, I was the downright suicidal [not to mention far too socialist] pessimist. In Prague I am the optimist who is living in cloud-cuckoo land.
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