Destiny

E and I went to see Prince of Persia last night with about 5 other people. It was that popular, with reason. It was far less entertaining, despite the similar setting, than Sex and the City 2. The only parts I really liked, aside from Jake Gyllenthal's, were those that addressed the concept of destiny. When we came home to E's place, curled into bed with the lights out, I asked him, "What do you think of destiny?"

"Nothing," he replied.

"Nothing at all? It has no resonance for you?"

"None at all."

I then told him, again, of how on my honeymoon excursion to my ex's co-worker's cottage. On that trip, my ex and I had stopped at E's local mall. I didn't tell him how that moment made me feel. How strange and familiar and odd that stop seemed to me then and why it still resonates with me now. Maybe I am simply revisioning my past with a view to making this present make sense, or maybe I really did anticipate that this place where E lives would somehow become important to me and have something to do with my marriage. Maybe I intuited somehow that this now-familiar and ordinary setting would be tremendously important to my overcoming the pain, failure, and humiliation of that badly-matched, 5-minute marriage.

"Have I told you this before?" I asked E before I started.

"Can you scratch my back?" E replied.

"Have I?"

"Over more."

He had heard but not heard, but I didn't care. I was scratching him and at something that continues to itch, this notion that my life is patterned and that it somehow does point to a sense of predetermination.

Like, for instance, the fact that I am back here, in Ottawa, and as an adult reprocessing the place I fled to at sixteen, when I was really just beginning to feel out who I was as an adult and when I lost something important of who I was as a child. This is a long, convoluted series of reflections, but what I think about in relation to destiny is that I was bound to return here to recover something and heal something and that's why I'm in this horrible, painful emotional conflict with my ex, who represents something bigger than himself, even as he is the most awful human being I think I've ever met.

Anyway, maybe this is all too oblique to relate to, but again, that's because to nail it down might be too hard right now.

E said, "I believe we choose our fate."

"You don't feel destined to be with me?"

"No. I choose to be with you."

Which he does, every day, despite the mess of all of this, and I'm thankful for that. Maybe that's a stronger thing than destiny . . . but I still believe that there is some arc to our lives which is beyond our control and somehow designed, not by us, but by some wiser, richer, more spiritual aspect of us.