Seismic Shifts

I was shaken from sleep last night by a tremor that seemed to go on for at least a minute. It was about 2:30 and I'd been asleep for at least two hours when I felt my bed shaking, my body moved on the waves. We had just felt a mild quake a couple of weeks ago in Ottawa that we'd at first mistaken for snow removal equipment advancing heavily down the street, and this was a milder echo. I listened for the rattling we'd heard then, but my walls are empty of art right now -- everything is wrapped and packed for my impending move -- so there was nothing to reverberate against the rich red that's enveloped me for the past 8 months.

I was suddenly, acutely, awake, and picked up my book to read myself back to sleep. I felt surrounded by an odd thickness of energy,a resonant silence that seemed to hum in a sort of empty, inverted way. As I drifted back to sleep finally, I saw images of B, dangling in front of my closed eyes, sort of disembodied, hallucinatory, repeating themselves into meaninglessness, like the endless mirrors-within-the-mirrors you used to encounter in "fancy" ladies' rooms, or the way a word mutates when you repeat it so often that it loses all familiarity and sense-making. I felt like she was fading into the kind of grey that happens when buttons on a computer are not enabled, completely visible but not accessible and without force. I felt... satisfied, wonderingly curious -- it no longer seemed possible that she had been so present an emotional force for me even the day before. She didn't disappear, just untethered herself from the clutch of yearning that I've tried to unclench for the past year.

When I woke up this morning, I checked the news, talked to people -- no one else felt that tremor. And I felt buoyant, expansive, chipper, even. I marched down to Queen to get the streetcar in the rain, feeling a pleasant hum of possibilities, choosing the streetcar instead of the subway so I could see where I was going as I traveled west across the Don Valley, back to the unmuffled part of the city. I went to my lawyer's and signed a lot of papers, picked up the keys for my new loft, went to a gallery to see an exhibit about desire I'd hankered after.

Last summer, when I moved into my transitional space, I jogged down to the lake and the Spit, trying to literally run myself into a zone of expansiveness. I wanted the water, the sky, the air to beckon with openness, and I forced myself through the paces of feeling the sun on my face, breathing deep, going on dates, driving around in the cutest car in the world with the roof open, trying to enfold myself against the new flesh of T. In all of this, I felt wrapped in a thin azure film, tripping constantly on uneven ground of unmet yearning, open jaws of loss, wanting to grab onto the lines that no longer held any life.

Today, as I made the pilgrimage to pick up my keys, fit them to my shiny new fishy keyring, bought a woo woo candle to bring good energy to my new space, the film truly began to dissipate.