Another goodbye

I broke up with Lily. Yesterday. She is the Chinese woman. China is a bit too large a concept to be meaningful so let me add that she is from Liaoning province. That is somewhat more precise. Somewhat. I do not know a whole lot about her – she is obviously more Manchu than Han Chinese – but I do not know where she was born exactly, or when. I do not know her family name but I know both of her parents are still alive, and that she has a younger sister and brother. She misses them. A lot. She has not seen them since she came to Europe to do what she is doing – and that is to earn good money as a sex worker. But she calls them regularly.

She has a boss who gives her appointments if she cannot find them on the street. She told me she came to Europe about three years ago. Before she came to Brussels, she was in Madrid. Since I met her – just a few months ago (she had just moved from Spain) – her business boomed. She took my advice: go for regular customers who are well off and avoid abuse. I told her that should be easy for her because something inside of her has remained very pure. She gives clients more than sex. She fills their souls. Prostitutes are the bests of therapists for wounded men. Temporarily. The proof is that she did fall in love with me. Our relationship transformed from easy pay-for-sex to something that we both believed in. I showed her the city (Brussels is not bad), introduced her to my friends and we talked a lot about spirituality, love, friendship, intimacy and sex. We communicated through Google translate on her phone, and the usual more-than-intensive WhatsApp chatting one does with a lover. It made for slow but deep conversation.

I did not pay her anymore but showered her with small gifts. Decently priced jewelry, funny plushies (we both have Lilo and Stitch in our beds now), fresh flowers every week. She kept telling me to take it day by day and not think of the future but one inevitably does when one has good love. It consumed me. It consumed her as well. She kept complaining about not being able to take late-night customers when seeing me, and I kept complaining about the unpredictably of our encounters. Like I had to be on standby for her all the time. Just as much as she had to be on standby for customers. She does not drink. She does not smoke. Or once in a while only. When she is with me. She felt safe with me. I would never take advantage of her. I was happy just to see her sleep and recover next to me. When we had sex, it was because she wanted it. I never took any initiative on that front. She had healed me and that was enough for me.

I gave her confidence. I told her it was the customers who should be ashamed of paying money for sex rather than her feeling bad for selling her body for money. I told her prostitution was an honorable profession because it fulfills a real need and may well be the oldest business in the world.

But yesterday I felt my love for her was draining me. One should not calculate in these things – one should give without expecting anything in return – but I suddenly felt very weak when she texted me to tell me she had just lost 280 Euro on gambling on slot machines. She said she had felt restless and just wanted to waste money. 280 Euro is the price of the jewelry I bought her. It is about the price of all of the plushies I bought her. The money that has gone into flowers so far. The money I spent in bars with her. It is far less than the money I had paid her to have sex back in January. Far less than the money I spent on other prostitutes. But it felt like a slap in the face. We wrote some more up and down, and then I asked her if she would see me that night. She said no. She said she wanted to earn that money back. The evening before she had cancelled an appointment with me because of a late-night customer who paid 250 Euro for midnight sex. I suddenly felt very tired and weak and told her my love for her seemed to have suddenly evaporated. I told her I felt very bad she could not see me the night before because she wanted to earn 250 Euro on some other man, and that she could not see me this night because she wanted to recover the 280 Euro she had lost in gambling. I told her that – as far as I was concerned – she had gambled me away.

She sort of agreed. That was it. She asked me not to block her on WhatsApp and keep her number but I did block her and erased all traces of her on my phone. She knows where I live – just ten minutes from where she walks the streets – and she can come here if she wants to. She probably won’t. Not anymore.

I was obviously restless and could not sleep. I went to have tea in the Albanian bar inbetween her area and another rather nasty neighborhood. I took my tea outside to watch the ladies and men go about their business: selling sex, selling drugs, or just hastily passing through to some other destination. Suddenly an Iranian woman walked up to me. I had met her before but I could not immediately tell when or where. She knew and told me. I had picked her up from the street in December. I remembered because she was in as bad a state as she was then: high on cocaine, almost freezing to death and very confused. Her name is Myriam. She is tiny but speaks Arab, Farsi and a few other languages. I think she might have bossed others around before she got so terribly addicted.

Her mind had a few sharp spots left as she talked about what had happened last time: I had taken her home to let her rest and sleep. She had an appointment in a rehab center the next morning. She told me things I had told her and asked me if I could take her home with me again. She wanted to sleep. I did not need much convincing. She was in a mess. Nothing in me called for sex or anything indecent.

Unlike last time, she really misbehaved. She asked for snacks and chocolate and ate fast and hungrily while taking more cocaine. I had paid her a good meal on the way home so it looked like she had not eaten for two days or so. I did not try to stop her taking more and more drugs as she was clearly not in any mood to be stopped from what she was doing. I put up some Zen music to calm her down. She searched on YouTube for Iranian love songs and cried as she was listening to them. After two or three hours of restlessly getting herself more and more into a gradually deteriorating physical and mental state she fell into sleep. Only to wake up after fifteen minutes or so to try to take more drugs. I calmly but firmly prevented her from doing so.

It was a bad night. She peed in bed. Next to the bed. The whole room stank of her urine. She kept opening and closing the window. Wake me up to turn the computer back on and then tell me to go sleep again. She had brought a bag of sunflower seeds on which she snacked but littered everywhere. She asked for paper napkins which she used to spit in. When these were finished, I brought her toilet paper.

We both finally managed to sleep for four or five hours. We both woke up around 10 am. Me a bit earlier. She a bit later. I brought her coffee on the bed and rolled some cigarettes. I was angry but kind. The fresh tobacco did me good. I did tell her firmly she should go. Within the next hour. That this had been the first time someone used cocaine in my house and that it was definitely the last time I would allow someone to do that. She got angry and pathetic. She shouted at me. I told her to go. She looked much better. I could see she still felt bad but she was more in control of herself and could walk and do whatever she would want to do. Otherwise I would not have asked her to leave the house: you can only ask someone to leave the house if he or she is capable of doing so. If not, one calls the police or an ambulance. When she said she did not want to leave, I did tell her I would call for medical help. Or the police if necessary.

I trusted her too much. I let her walk around. She showered. She rummaged for food in the kitchen. While I went down to make more coffee she took my wallet. I only noticed when she had gone. I was too tired to feel angry. I had given her 100 Euro as that was what she had asked for: to pay some debt, get food and a taxi. My wallet was in a drawer in my bedroom and so she could see where it was. I had never expected her to steal so I had not taken it with me when going down. It felt like a slap in the face. Of course, I had been stupid to expect some kind of gratitude for giving her shelter for the night, and a lot of patience and heartfelt advice. That she should stop killing herself. That she should deal with whatever it was that had made her dependent on drugs (she talked about a lover who broke up one year ago – but I do not believe much of it).

I called the bank to block my bank cards and order new ones. My ID card is gone too. I did not mind the money all that much – it was only a few hundred Euro so that is one of the reasons I never really thought about it – but she is smart enough to know that the loss of bank and ID cards and other small stuff in a wallet is quite a headache. I feel sad for her. She has beautiful eyes and spoke flashes of wisdom inbetween her rants and moaning. I felt abused already but I cannot believe she took the whole wallet. She could just have taken the money only. I would not have been upset too much. I would have been angry as well but it would just pass as I understand how drugs distorts one’s judgment. Now she is alone. Truly alone. It is probably a good way to say goodbye because now I do not have to think of the prospect of her dying from some overdose in a cold corner somewhere. She probably wants to die but she is just not courageous enough to make it happen.

That is OK. Not every human being is equally courageous. Some are just smart animals whose programming runs haywire. One should not worry about problems one cannot possibly solve. She is such problem. Lily is not such problem. I love her still.

Post scriptum: Love and God are related concepts. They are equally empty but they are sort of a two-stage psychological mechanism to fill any real or perceived gap in our souls. Love is the illusion we can solve our existential loneliness by solving the existential loneliness of someone else. The concept of God is one we invoke when nothing else works. Both are useless. Life is about facing loss and decay and, ultimately, plain simple death. Our body keeps us going until it falls apart. That is all there is to life. It is enough to keep me going – even if it sometimes feels like I am just scraping through.

[…] That missile strike missed me. Some saw the sky turn red. I did not. It was just another close call. I just saw the explosions – pretty huge (I got used to smaller stuff) – and instinctively knew what to do and where to go. There had been an air alarm just two hours earlier and I had kept my clothes and boots on. I calmed down others and everyone evacuated orderly. Only my guardian angel seems to truly love me. Otherwise she would not save me as many times as she does. Clean the gun, reload your magazines, and make sure you keep a few bullets in your pocket. Make sure you aim well before you shoot. Always. You want the thing that will ultimately hit you have a good aim as well. Preferably, you do not want to see it coming – but I guess that is a bit too much mercy to ask.

What happened with Lily and Myriam feels a bit like an emotional missile strike. Just like the Yavoriv strike it came just because of presence: we attracted shit just because we were there and the Russians knew it. Something inside me also signaled that Myriam would just take advantage of me. She did. It is OK. One gets used to it. Some people jump off cliffs expecting God to save them. I do not. I broke up with Lily to avoid more hurt. To avoid big trouble further down the line. Once in a while I feel I am really good at navigating cliffs – or that I am getting better at it, at least. 🙂

To be honest, I am still reeling from it all – but I am confident these were just loose ends to be tied up. Or to be cut loose. Whatever. It is done. The bleeding inside will stop. One day.