Navarre

Like Tom, Navarre was important to me. Unlike Tom, I don't have an obit for him telling me he no longer can be harmed by the words of a woman who once knew him, so Navarre is not his real name.

It comes from the movie Ladyhawke and was chosen years ago because his French was better than mine, because we were "always together, always apart" for some years, because it was daytime where I was and nighttime where he was.

It was chosen because he was an elegant, well mannered man and because I dreamed of him as a black wolf or a shark or a cold blooded alligator warming itself in the light of my sunny disposition.

He was substantially older than I, so in my thirties while divorcing a man I finally admitted to myself saw me as fat and ugly and while the world around me treated me the same after many years of the world telling me I was gorgeous, I got to feel like a pretty young thing in the eyes of my love interest.

He had a failing business in part because of American political policy towards his country and I worried that he spent too much time with me and I should let him work and sort out his financial problems but then I would hear in a voice in my mind "He doesn't need money. He needs Michele." 

So I continued to let him waste his time on a younger woman he would never meet in the flesh rather than telling him "You should work."

 

He spoke four languages if I recall correctly and we talked for hours every week. I needed him and he needed me for the same reason it seemed: 

Because of the three years he spent in prison many years before we met when I was still a child, time served for his political activism and because he had been questioned under torture and according to him gave no one up. The string of arrests stopped with him.

It's a story I believed because he was a man of uncommon self restraint and this was good for me. If anything we discussed made me uncomfortable, he often simply stopped and dropped it entirely and immediately and that helped me get over things rooted in other people having no such self restraint and telling me it was my fault they hurt me.

As much as it was nice to feel like a pretty young thing in my late thirties and early forties while American culture around me hated on me for no longer being seventeen and rail thin, I eventually concluded my looks were not really the draw for this man.

There is an episode of Deep Space Nine where Lwaxana and Odo are trapped in an elevator so long he needs to revert to his liquid state, his equivalent of sleep, and he doesn't wish to do so in her presence, telling her "No one has ever seen me this way before."

So she takes off her crazy elaborate wig and tells him no one has seen her that way before and talks about how plain her real hair is and how much she dislikes it. She manages to put him at ease and he literally becomes a puddle in her lap.

Having been traumatized myself and dealt with my trauma, I was able to comfort Navarre and accept him and help him put down some of his baggage from paying such a high price for his convictions and standing his ground so many years before. 

And I think that was the real reason he spent so much time with me for some years before life got in the way and we drifted apart and went our separate ways.