In the City of Men - Day 2

I have checked at least the health pages in Polish - not a word about any possible increase of sexual drive in connection to the menopause. Rather to the contrary: a long list of factors, reasons, mental and physical issues to explain why at the menopause you are roughly speaking done, finished, khalas as a woman. I remain with the gallery of Shakespearean queens for all my knowledge and awareness in the matter. Well, perhaps the first step out of this predicament should be to stop checking Polish websites for any such issues. And to remember that at least the fictional I of The Almond was a woman writing all those things precisely as a way of facing (celebrating?) her menopause in the company of none other than the angel of God carrying a penis of such a remarkable aspect that he was poetically compared to a certain donkey belonging to the local dealer in donuts. And in her story, there is the question of achieving something she had never achieved before, in erotic matters. I should read the book once again; I have it in an English translation. Paying special attention to its conclusions.
Meanwhile, I descended to Leiden today, went to the university, arranged a couple of issues totally unrelated to my menopause, and returned to Amsterdam. I sleep in a small hostel near Leidseplein; when I came, I passed along it two times without realising that was actually the place I had reserved on Booking.com. I took it initially for a brothel. 
But curiously, there is practically no women in it; it seems entirely dedicated to men, and what men. The receptionist, as I cared to enquire, is a Cypriot Greek; no need to ask, by the way; he is lithe and handsome as a Cypriot Greek should be. There are also two Arabs who, on their side, cared to check my melding card and to enquire if I am truly a professor and what subject do I teach. They laughed like squirrels, as if they did not believe me. At the moment of leaving I greeted them in Arabic; I presume the result sounded so genuine that they greeted me back quite naturally, without even noticing it was said in Arabic and without being surprised by it. I wonder what their ghazal might be tomorrow morning at breakfast.
But the anecdote should perhaps switch a red light in my head. I arrived at the very bottom as to my appearance. The lazy months spent in France did not work to my favour. It is indeed several years now that my marriage became a shadow of what is used to be and I grew accumulating fat and forgetting even to dream, to hope, to desire. And that is not only erotically speaking; that is to such a degree that I don't even seem to be the person I actually am. 
Who knows, maybe all this story about menopause is just a bullshit. In any case, if I measure myself to Polish standards, I've been out of the market for years now. And as simple as that, my divorce is heavily overdue; this is the reason of all the mess between me and the City of Men, although my husband seems not to see it this way at all. That's an African novel, by the way: older, established females divorce their males and take revenge on them; it appears in Paulina Chiziane, in Niketche. Certainly not a Polish story. But gosh, what a Polish story actually is? Have I ever read any? Do I have it in my library? There is no Polish story whatsoever in those things. 
As I try to make myself forgotten, to disappear surreptitiously from his view, my husband sinks deeper and deeper in his Arabian love. Arabian love that is the opposite of our European fairy tales: it doesn't end by the marriage. It starts by the marriage and never ends; it is an open structure that flows, eternally bringing forth new stories. 
And here I am, in the City of Men, falcon or falconer, who knows which, with a viral interpretation of an Andalusian poem looped on my mind. 

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There is nothing better than putting my own advice into practice. I've just written in the Google: "menopause" and "increased libido" (in English and in old good Latin). Not quite surprisingly, what jumps to me from the screen differs from the Polish version. Or rather, it contains the other half of it, neglected in the Polish sources: "some women may experience an increase in libido, while others experience a decrease."
As a woman, I have been cheated and stuffed with lies from tender age on and on and on. I was cheated as a teenager, and I am still cheated at forty and many. Why on earth should I even remember the name of the country where I came from? Is there no ENOUGH ?! For how long should I be its victim, living unspeakable destinies?

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