Installment Thirty-One

My phone conversation with my former Beijing BFF Samantha the other morning has been running like a loop in my head ever since we spoke.

Of course I didn't need to be told that Brian and his father's Chinese squeeze are close in age. God knows what might happen with them living under the same roof. I fret about this even in my restless sleep, waking up in a sweat (which I can't blame on menopause since I am taking HRT) from worrying about my son.

But Sam's blathering about life in Beijing, all the parties, the gossip, the hum (not the 'hmmm' of a shrink), have made me realize something:

I have become a totally bored hermit.

My social life is zilch and my sex life exists only in fantasies about Mad Men's Don Draper. When I think of yet another professional rejection, I wind up so tight I should be sleeping on my ceiling instead of on Deborah’s old futon, borrowed for this tiny little...dump. My life has moved from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Memories of fifty plus years of living large in the world, and most certainly the past three decades as an expat oil wife, can't just be deleted like unwanted e-mail. And despite my aversions to cocktail parties and the related phony air kissing, in my idealized, brooding memory, my life was never dull.

The homes we lived in, always too big for what we really needed (big oil = huge carbon footprints even in the living spaces of its employees = no big surprise) were usually straight out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

New and exciting people, always coming and going, helped us indulge in too many late night alcohol-fuelled parties leaving someone else to clean up the mess. Political intrigue was naturally a constant when we lived in the Middle East. Fascinating, often celebrated, visitors would step into our frame in a way that would never have happened in a life spent in one place. I can even remember some of the steps from the Scottish dance classes we all took in preparation for a St. Andrew's Society Ball! Scottish accents and men in kilts come close to my obsession with Irish men.

And I miss all the adventure travel, first with my parents as a young child and later with Martin as a young couple with the world as our oyster and air tickets to burn. Did I imagine it or did we really take the kids on safari in Botswana, to orangutan sanctuaries in Borneo, to the rainforest of Brazil, to China to climb the Great Wall, or just to visit tourist sites like the Eiffel Tower?

I now feel like my life was one long travel movie. The credits have finished rolling and the theatre is empty.

Can it be that I actually miss expat life?

My gratitude sticky notes are still plastered in conspicuous places around my apartment but I've been ignoring them.

I'm trying hard to be grateful in the macro; it's the bordeom of my micro that's killing me.