The Bathers

A year ago today, I moved into the apartment in J&S' house. My chosen family in the typically queer sense, held in the warm borders of their little trio-with-large- Saturnic-rings.

It was a good space for re-finding feet, letting myself feel through the waves of letting go, moving forward, that I staggered through over the next few months. It started out with a carapace of mimed strength, scaffolding my trembling self through the unfamiliar motions of figuring out solo future. Painting my bedroom crimson, vowing to not turn it into a monastic cell, my trip to the Nathan Phillips Square art show to insert some narratives of my own into my space. Dripping tears on the subway over my art on the way home, so sad that A couldn't meet me even in the closing ritual I wanted of buying each other a piece of art. Buying some for myself.

I hung that image of The Bathers on the wall at the end of my bed, and gazed at it many times over the next few months. It's the sense of memory. Smiling, relaxed, women by the seaside, recreated from snapshots, colour added by the articulator, seen through a yanked-through-time lens, fogged over. The bottle that floats half up through the image feels like the last picture on a roll, the stuck moment in an old-fashioned slide show when you split the pic in half and see it from the middle.

How we make stories, bricolage of what's there, our own memories, our own hopes. Certainty and wonder always contrapuntal. We are so knowing, then the story shifts slightly and all is questioned. Emulsions of perspective, slivering of meaning. I realized last week that I thought for years my Grandmother's middle name was Evelyn, but read something a couple of years ago that made me think I was wrong. I never asked her. Her obit didn't include it. I'll never be certain, just as I can never remember if my dad's death day is March 21 or March 22 without checking the perpetual calendar for 1992 for which day was Sunday.

Much of the last year has been about living into my Cateself, my me so joyful in this flat, enlivened by the work I'm doing, the way I am me with people whose hands I didn't know I'd wander with, watching myself unfold with F in a wholly open, grounded way. It's also been about framing the story of the self-with-A, the decade and a half that made so much of me, facing the parts I played in that theatre of acceptance and rejection, recognizing them in me now as backward-through time, fogged through a split lens, tangible to look at, no longer possible to remember what the inside really feels like.