Day 26 - 26th Jan

FLIES

When money goes out the window
Love goes out the door.
Amongst so much more,

I was told
In my youth
That were not true.

A sore that has not pointed yet
But will,
And you can feel it
With delicious anticipation.
Composed,
Not in a hurry.
It comes up on the pectoral,
A manageable part of the homunculus.

Not the too sore,
Too tender palate
Or lips.
No kissing on the lips.
Kissing is extra.

The pus will come through
In a day or two,
And you wait,
Thumbs poised
To push it on through.
Summoned out
To yellowy cream,
Through angry hot head red.
The pain yours—
Searing,
Circumscribed.

And mind asks body,
As glob lies on chest:
How do you feel now?

Better.

Axioms relaxed.
That's what love can be.

A relaxiomatic.
Why do you do it this way?
I don't know.
Tone is for the birds;
Timbre is for the sky.
You must ask why
Of the other,
But not as irked sister
Or sullen brother,
But as lover.
Always as lover.

Because then the answer may come
Up like a buoy
Pushed too far down by ocean's rage,
And burst with foam
To centre stage
Of your marriage.
If you don't,
The tempest hunters will circle,
Storm chasers,
Telling you to give up and come back to family shores
Or friends' shores.
Spare rooms are made up.
Cup after cup of late-night tea is drunk.
Many a salvageable craft
Has been sunk
On the rocks of
The unhappy marriage of another.

So do not listen to jealous siren sisters
Or wounded beached brothers.
Listen to each other.

Your craft may sink—
The storm of old too great—
And you may land as castaways on alien shores,
Clammy and horrible,
Laughably tropical
In your misery.
But still together.

No money now.
No bank accounts to separate.
No lawyers to litigate.
Just the isolated opportunity to hate.

And maybe as you sit,
Totally spent,
On a foreign shore
With no room to rent,
And no will left to be bent
To the other,
And no shade to even cover
Your head from
Brutal castaway sun,
You will ask,
Stunned,
But as one:
Why?
And then the answers will come.

And you will busy to your work of basic sustenance.
Why?
As you pick abalones.
Why?
As you spear little fish.
Why?
As you smash coconuts
Onto the rocks
And drink your fill.

And you will stand up and say:
I don't know.
Neither do I.
And then you will both cry,

And grieve the lives you could have had,
And childhoods you should have had,
And love again as one being the children
You do have.

Or didn't have.

That night,
Under your own camp-light,
You burn the rags and ruins that brought you here.
They snap, crackle, and pop.
Look how flammable they were.
So itchy.

Fall asleep now,
Together,
Naked,
With no plan,
On the night beach.
No big built boat.

When you wake,
Poor,
But not alone,
You will be worn out.
Look back in the fire pit:

A passion pit.
Little ashen children babies.
Not yet a month old.
Top and tail them in the sea.
Get under their wee fat rolls.
Feel an unbelievable bounty.

Play together
As litter,
As happy old dogs
Bounding to show delivered puppies
How to live well
In this place.

Niall Campbell

Today, the book I randomly read a passage from was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

Here is the passage:

He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.

As always, great literature captures the truthful elements of the human experience in ways that codified explanations of "how relationships work" never can.

This book is notoriously strange. It was the first book of magical realism I ever read, after failed attempts with others like The Alchemist. At the time, I was too young, too sure of myself, too strident in my materialism. I thought such writing was lazy and too easy—if anything can happen, anyone can write such things. Nothing matters. It felt like watching bad improv shows where there are no real stakes or constraints.

Of course, I now see this as my own ignorance and immaturity, both as a reader and as a person. I still struggle to read books like this—my literalism streaking through me—but when I understood that magical realism operates like the restricted omniscience of a narrator in a James Patterson novel, it clicked. The characters exist in a world where their decisions, thoughts, and perspectives are entirely coherent within their own internal framework. The only know what they know. The laws of space and time may be warped from a Newtonian perspective, but the "inner physics" of the characters' motivations check out and are consistent across what time and space they do operate within.

If anything, because this variable of the individual is therefore isolated in magical realism, the characters feel more real than real. I didn't understand this the first time around.

This passage captures something I’ve encountered many times working as a psychotherapist which absolutely bears out in the ‘real world's —how a couple in serious trouble can find their way back to each other through effortful curiosity.

One of the first things I work through with couples whose relationships are on the rocks is whether they believe it’s possible to deepen and grow their love over time, like a fine old wine. As we age and the material aspects of life fall away—breasts sag, joints ache, trips get shorter, bathroom breaks get longer—it’s a challenging concept for many.

Often, they are incredulous that such a love exists outside of fairy tales. Most times, the couples in front of me grew up with parents who didn’t embody this possibility.

They often need to unpack the fact that their childhoods weren’t as ideal as they were led to believe. They’ll recognise this in their partner’s upbringing but struggle to see it in their own. The four grand parents often serve as a matrix, denying the couple the organic belief that love can deepen and flourish over time.

They aspire to this kind of love but think it exists only for others—not for them.

This is the crux of the issue. They grew up steeped in a scarcity mindset. It’s a mindset that can correlate with financial hardship but goes much deeper than that. I’ve met clients from wealthy families who grew up with the same scarcity mentality as those who didn’t have a pot to piss in.

It colors everything, including the belief in the possibility of abundant love under any circumstances and over time.

I don’t believe, as this passage doesn’t either, that poverty is a surefire midwife to deeper love. Not at all.

But what this passage so beautifully depicts is the kernel of truth in the reparative process of helping a couple come back from the brink. It’s the "awful privilege" of rediscovering the other person and falling in love with them again.

As Esther Perel says:

"Most of us will have two or three marriages in a lifetime. If we’re lucky, they’ll be with the same person."

The precipitant for entering into that second or third marriage is curiosity—not poverty. The relationship has become impoverished, but there is an opportunity in this austerity: reparation.

If I can help clients rediscover their curiosity about each other—even if it feels clunky and awkward—it can rekindle a deeper, more mature love that becomes indistinguishable from self-love. They also get a two for one, because the childhood conditioning is softened in this paradigm of self love. It flows out to parents, paradoxically through stronger and more easily patrolled boundaries.

At that point, the relationship either grows into a flourishing new colony, abundant with possibility, or devolves into Lord of the Flies.

I approach couples' work like a backpacker on a beach in Thailand seeing a pair of dogs bounding up the beach towards me—they might be playful, or it might bite your hand off and give you rabies. The highs and lows in couples’ therapy are broader than those in one-on-one work.

Its rough work and tough work for all concerned.

But as I once said to a particularly wonderful couple:

The juice is worth the squeeze.

You can stay together for the kids—but not just the external ones. Stay together first and foremost for the inner children, the ones inside you both, who may still love each other.