eat. pray. love.

i picked up a novel at the SFO airport this past week. it's called eat. pray. love. a friend of mine had recommended it awhile back and i had been searching for the audiobook of it to save myself my eyes and my time, but i never found it. i had about 2 hours to kill at the airport. i wish i had brought another DeathNote with me but i had finished the volume i had and didn't want to twiddle my thumb for 120 minutes. so after much deliberation about which book i'd purchase and probably never pick up again after boarding the plane, i chose eat. pray. love. i'm glad i did. i have not gotten very far. but i can always appreciate a memoir about self-discovery and finding inner peace and balance because i think that has been my personal journey all my life. the novel is about the author's journey to italy (eat), india (pray), and indonesia (love) after a horrible divorce and painful love affair. i've always believed in going off to unknown lands after enduring troubled times as a way to regroup and find yourself again. i believe being somewhere entirely unfamiliar brings out the true you and you find out what you're made of. it also fosters major self-reflexiveness. after sharing the gist of the first few pages of the novel with D, to no surprise, he was in disagreement. there was a part of the novel where she is describing how painful a divorce was. she likened it to being in a multi-car accident everyday for 2 years straight. she also described the strange phenomenon of how two people (divorcing) who were once so compatible in so many ways become the worst of strangers so quickly. which reminded me of my brief text encounter with T, my ex.

i was in the bay area this past week for the best concert ever (pictures to follow). T knew i was up there, and that's where he lives. so he asks how long i'm in town for, but of course i had already left the area and had no intention of meeting him anyway. the text messaging that followed completely reaffirmed what the author in the aforementioned memoir was alluding to. we were so completely compatible in so many ways (back when we were compatible) but i was completely disappointed and rather sad when i realized we were these two strangers who now had nothing in common and could never bond in the way we used to so naturally and comfortably. i actually felt sick to my stomach when i realized this and when it became crystal clear to me. it was exactly the way the author described.

i plan to finish this novel, no matter how many airports i have to wait for delayed flights in. my quest is also to eat pray and love.