reviewing risk versus right, pursuing integrity and discretion

I am left still with a strange feeling of dissociation, or a flavor of deceit. Perhaps it is not so dramatic. Perhaps it is only the chewing of stale bread, perhaps it is a dryness in the mouth, a passivity in the place of once passion. Maybe it is a sameness now in the absence of love, so to fill the void I conjecture, instead.

Or perhaps it is actually discretion. Perhaps it is actually the flavor of my value set, manifesting, a mother yeast to raise my dough.

I feel badly, now, that I couldn't look at her. I enjoyed her voice, her velvety singsong -- I caught the contortions of her hurt in recalling the events of the last year trying to secure her adopted daughter. It was a small gathering -- she could tell that I couldn't look at her, I'm sure. When I parted we hugged and she said, "Goodbye Melinda" and I knew that perhaps it was really finally over.

The narrative starts somewhere in July, I think, in her improvised monologue to the choreography of swinging balls. I think back, to the caged green soccer lawn across my building's front porch, a brightness too impossibly bright, a summer long bred of a spring promise where taunting buds gave sprouting kisses in March only to hide coy till June. Flirts. Hangers-on. I'm on the phone with her somehow, catching up, speaking about relationships, the adoption, the something-project with the Bulgarian Cultural Minister, I don't know. Sometimes her stories carry such a conferred weight of self-importance usually accrued to international diplomats or dignitaries that in memory perhaps I embellish similarly. Who knows? It's sunny, I'm confused and gregarious, I'm hunting for a sense of my life, I'm proud of the mature distance I have from hers but we're good now, we're friends, we're shooting the breeze, I'm finding out that all the tragedy of the past was now in the process of becoming a hoped for future and--oh--did I think I could help her launch a fundraising campaign for the additional adoption legal fees?

Back in 2011, tonight in that fourth floor East Village studio, my inner vision is being intruded upon by the memory of Jeff's gold-plated faucets and tap circa late 2008, the ones we'd have to spray after using to clean up for the patients, wait, why am I there signing Donna's proof of income? I don't know. Was I on the phone with her at the time, sequestered in a very private place, to commit this very quiet act of signing fallacious documents? "Donna X earns $50,000 per annum and is able to financially support an adopted child as a single parent, Signed, Melinda Lee, Company Manager." I can still feel used, and dirty. My peace and calm and happiness for her final result being shared with the community tonight, well, I'm being intruded upon by weird memories instead and I have to keep my eyes lowered as she swings balls and continues to narrate her noble, angry struggle.

I wish I could say it's all a blur to me from that point on. My memory is slowly loosening its hold on my mind and ability to be in the present, but when triggered I remember only too well. On my way home tonight I look for ways to either feel the fullness of my indignance as I used to, laying hunt upon my own tail--hurried, harried, loud and biting--or to find some fantastical otherness to eradicate the memory of standing there with cheese and wine, smiling-faced with a sense of both boredom and social idiocy, to find something that takes away the strange emptiness I have from this night. Nope, not even the promising distraction of a getaway to Montreal with money I don't have to be surrounded by francophiles who will inevitably only make me feel not french and the ex-lover who will likely be nothing but alternately cold or pining is enough to empty my mind, once I arrive home. My growl at impinged upon space and subsequent mini-fight with flatmate is too regular an event to warrant a clean slate. The only DVD I have to watch is a PBS documentary about contemporary artists, but somehow everything has an "unflavor", my new intellectual passions are unnuanced ambitions, everything art-related is emblematic of my uncertainty; I resort to hanging folded clothes carefully in arrangement by shape and function. I look at the string of tabs in my browser of what my Montreal weekend was going to look like before I became entirely negative of it, possibly if I could just maintain the infatuation long enough that I'd once again carry through an impossible dreaming... but you cannot really tint the lenses rose-colored again, save for the Infatuation, for years now, Infatuation.

I pause to remember that I had noted while glancing down, somewhere, tired eyes sometimes upwards trying to look less reprimancing (a typo that better represents a simultaneous reprimand and wince, I think), I remember that I thought to myself that I was going to focus on writing again for once, to conjecture and validate my experience and to think about the sometimes ongoing conflict not of wrong and right but of right and risk. When is it braver/better/stronger to commit to risk rather than to right? Living a life in pursuit of the right -- meaning, by ethics -- but what are the laws of these ethics, and are they all indeed permanent or permeable? Is it ethical to pursue the primacy of a profit-motive because one wants to start and support a family? How is it not ethical to lie about one's income in order to leap hurdles of bureaucracy so that you can save a child from an orphanage halfway across the world and love her unconditionally? Who made me an arbiter of what is ethical anyway?

Risking wrongness to pursue what's right, the right to risk, this is not about capacity to act, this is contextually dependent for sure, but not necessarily a Western right. This is not about me playing some kind of Nightingale victimhood or pan-Asian passivity, and then lambasting conservative values within the Christian doctrine I came of age in for the feeling that I can't risk, and therefore that I'm not true. Not aligned. A bent wheel.

I still think it was wrong to place a woman at the behest of her yearnings in dance and art in a position where she knowingly creates documents that falsify another's means--even as she (me) was never at that point given the full facts. I think, in a positive light, that a Mel that learns from the past would know now when to say, rather than a desperate "enough!" only when neck deep, to adjudicate and say, "Wow, thank you for trusting me with all of this intimate, difficult stuff. I would like to help you. But I'm not sure if I am equipped to handle so much of your life stress when I myself have dreams to embark upon, difficulties to negotiate, dangers to diffuse and others to pursue. In what way can you exert leadership in this situation that would not compromise our relationship?"

Or something like that. Of course, the other option is to learn to say No, a flat out No, questions if necessary, but from oneself it's a I Know, and a No. In pursuit of living completely without the downcast shame of getting way too involved, it's time.