Rain run reset

Today I left my loft in viewer shape, did a focus group in a hospital @ 730 am, took my car for service (summer tires and vacuum, in prep for handing it over to Liz), took cab home in pouring rain, made phonecalls for car insurance and to book a flight for Renee to visit me in May. Hovered over my workspace to not leave even a fingerprint and designed and did slides for a meeting tomorrow, crammed myself into the pandemic anxiety of the crowded streetcar in chinatown , ran off to my tax person (owe too much), went to bank to get certified cheque for Audi, and am heading back to the hospital for another group.

Oh yeah. Then I have a date type thing. Distractions, possibilities. Hum. Unless of course Suzie's anxieties are valid and he's a Craigslist Killer. In which case... bye!

Myself at this station

Once when i got off the phone with my sister, F commented that I had a sort of nest of people who cared about me that he lacked. It was during one of the not infrequent weekends where the space between us seemed to conjure up violent and sudden storms, spring on the prairies -- and he dipped into a fairly rare moment of a kind of regret, noting the way I seemed to pass from hand to hand among warm configurations of people.

I think I've always known that, but deep in the heart of yearning for a lover, the emotional impression of people outside that centre is a pretty thin watermark. But in the last couple of weeks, I've really felt those hands in a new way. Suddenly I trust the constellations around me, feel anchored in them in a way I don't know if I ever have before.

When B and I broke up, I stumbled through an orbit that felt more like the breathless gravity of a black hole. The people around me were really holding me up -- D, Suzie, B, my online community, J&S, R, M -- the many people who gravely and patiently listened to me howl with angst, with fear, with deep sorrow, nodded and encouraged as I patched life together. Then, I gulped at them, wanted to feel like there was something mutual going on, but I was voracious and endlessly needy. That certainly got thinner, but it continued to stretch itself out as I strived to find my feet in work, meaning, writing.

Ending a nearly 3 year relationship with someone you've never lived with is obviously a massively different thing than stumbling in tears out of a 14 year relationship your life is scaffolded around. But even so, I'm bruised, I'm sad, I'm a little lonely. But my world, my night sky? It's complex and unbelievably profound. Multiple constellations, each one signaling love, caring, endurance. Beams of light in silico from my people across the continent, the ocean. Warm chaotic life around tables, food, music, arms around me. Dinner and narratives and hilarity and new lives. Just... all there, all in orbit, keeping me in gravitational pull.

If I flick back through this blog 3 years, I realize that I nested a lot of emerging identities in the push/pull with F. The passion pulled into being first by a Leonard Cohen song years before I met F that formed the underthrum. The StraightCate persona who could navigate and hold the cultural warmth of the dyke community and the hand-in-hand couple across a table, heels of hot boots tucked neatly under. The academic with purpose, drive. Work that comes from someplace bigger. And I think what I've realized is that I found a way to live into those stories that was enabled in the dance with F -- but not shaped by or limited to him. Recognizing that the emotional self of me isn't separate from those parts of me.

This week has been wearing. I flurried my way through decluttering, getting my place into the crisp template of desirable locale. LIsted it. Hoped to sell quickly, resigned myself wobbling hope and disappointment through my fingers like trying to carry too many wineglasses by their stems with every viewing. Fled the place while people tried to imagine themselves here. Planned the business life with D & J. Worked. Hit walls of fatigue. Felt the whiplash shock as every night at bed I faced again the complete disappearance of the person I'd processed my days with for 3 years. Found sleep, imaginative dreams. Launched new stories, a co-edited book, kayak lessons.Felt loved.

Pics

The slightly creepy, smoke-smelling guy with the excellent clothes who came to photograph my loft today left his reading glasses on my bed. He was the sort of fag who, at dinner parties, would definitely fall into some of the worst misogynistic comments about women and their Parts. He made comments about being scared of women, in a sort of mocking moue. I did not enjoy finding his glasses camouflaged on my duvet cover.

However, he took some excellent shots, and now my place is listed for the whole damn world to see.

I'll miss my cork floors and the smick smick noise they make under my bare feets.

Mango Gelato

When I was in BC last week, I think I was simultaneously clenched and open. I think it was kind of like that moment of paralysis that happens when you're scrambling on kind of scary rocks -- where you hang too tightly onto the ledge above you and have to force your fingers off painstakingly one by one, even as you know that as you step down that welled up sense of fear will just vanish. That paradox where I knew how damned sad I was, agitated with emotion, but still able to slow myself down to walk along the seawall (is it a seawall?) and eat a mango gelato.



I'm still hovering in that space a little bit, sped up emotion like having a birth induced. All happening faster, contractions more intense, eagerness to see that baby shot through with waves of pain. In this case, the baby seems to be full package life adventure. Since I got home late thursday night, dragging sadness and metallic exhaustion behind me, I've managed to visit with my sister, get a new iphone, accidentally buy a new car, deal with the recursive loop of problems in Uganda, toss an endless supply of unneeded stuff out of my place (from jigsaw puzzles to paper to clothes), meet with my real estate agent twice, get my place in shape for listing, have it photographed and listed, hang out with my slightly chaotic and sweetly loving chosen family (bosoms indeed), buy some outdoor furniture for my new place, decide NOT to buy a new place in TO but to rent... and do some much-needed work. Phew. My eyes are truly glazing over, but it's not manic energy -- just, putting the pieces in place for what comes next.

I'm heading out to buy some yarn to finish the blankie for paula's almost-here baby, and then to meet D at the gym -- and really, my bed is beckoning, despite the fact that it's 3:36 pm. But it's all okay. Really reminded of the amazing, supportive and loving people in my life with whom I'm pretty much able to be my best self, in all its complicated glory.

Pdx

The last time I was in the portland airport in any conscious way was nearly three years ago. I was enamoured of the free wifi, listening to someone playing the piano, drinking a good coffee. It all felt so civilized, a kind of symbolic space that came to represent "the west" between me and F. He and I hadn't met in person yet, but we were fast-dancing in email, and as I sat on that round bench right over there, I opened one of the emails from him that had me so excited about our potential meeting. A vision of a shared narrative on mountaintops, sharing work, sharing flesh, sharing life.

Today, as I bolt back to Toronto in a little tumult of waylaid plans (L had strep, now there is something wrong with her back, so K and I aren't going to Sonoma after all), and missing the phone that I left in a rental car and lost forever yesterday, I'm wistful. I feel like I want to compress the time continuum, find my way back to that era of open-lunged hopefulness, remeet the playmate I thought I could have and do it right. And just as I feel that, just as quickly, I feel the ironic detachment in that opening -- F termed the shared narrative a "dangerous folly," the belief that two fiercely single-minded people could carve a life together. And, I wanted it... desperately. The big-ness of the leap of crossing borders, attaching myself to a man larger than my life so far.

He was some kind of crucible for me. I refracted against his sides to hack my way through my dissertation, to recrafting myself as a phd. In his encouragement, in his open engagement with my ideas, in the edges that I disagreed so strongly with. At the beginning, the disagreement cowed me -- made me angry and frustrated that I couldn't express myself, couldn't translate. It taught me how much I needed to do that -- and taught me a lot about what happens to me when I'm frustrated.

I was frustrated a lot in this relationship. (And lord knows, so was he). I have the uncomfortable ability to look at my interactions from multiple angles -- from inside me where the small voice is constantly explaining, accounting, justifying some of the moments that defined us as a pair, but also being so clear that I am capable of behaving as badly as a person can behave. Epithets hurled, once an actual small pot of hair gel that miraculously bounced out of the bathtub with a trajectory that smashed up and knocked down a framed picture. Shattered glass in the bathtub, my sense of civility shattered on the floor. Hectoring insistence on being in the centre when he needed space. Mistrust borne out of our jagged beginning, chiseling away at every story to find the weak spot. Impulses simultaneously understood and reviled, even as I was enacting them.

I see myself in my fullness -- from his point of view -- volatile, relentless, self-absorbed. And I see myself weighing all of that, shading it, finding more even tones, distance from the emotion, probing at my own past with an awl to disrupt long-carved patterns.

In this relationship, I simultaneously saw myself as demanding, needs unmet, insistent -- and continually finding ways to let go of my rehearsed, long-scripted expectations as I realized that so many of them were stale, outgrown. Shifts sometimes subtle, sometimes too late, sometimes more in my own breathing space than enacted between us.

Against this backdrop, so many magical moments that embodied that imagined narrative -- hand in hand up a scary mountain, flesh on flesh above life, howling with laughter in bed at his mother's impression of his brother's ex, drawing pictures of what my work could be on a placemat. Hand in hand wistfulness at hope of new work for him. In these moments, and their wake that let me set out for uganda, ride off on my roadbike, accomplish the phd, lift weights, weigh my strengths in his wake, arise ripe and desirable ... a huge part of me still wishes those moments could be strung together to make a whole.

I ran along the willamette this morning, a run between bridges I've now done enough that it's one of "my" runs. One of my rhythms was the chorus of "what will I say at my graduation" that I mentally wrote for the 6.5 years of my phd. Made me so aware of the role of these shaping narratives -- it's in the yearning and reaching for them that we get momentum. When it actually came time to stand on the stage, I still hadn't found the right words -- was rewriting as I sat on stage, forgot to thank several important people, uttered nothing profound. But the practice for that perfect moment was what got me to it. Just like the writing of the narrative of the shared mountaintops with F, on a two-generations-ago now i-book right over there at pdx, was the practice of enacting the belief in love, the belief in growth, the belief in hope and intimacy and connectedness.

Last fall, when I went to germany, I had a narrative that I was going to rent an Audi A3 and drive as fast as I wanted to on the autobahn as I traced over my childhood myths. When I landed in frankfurt, I ended up with the crappiest of german cars, an Opel with a saggy clutch and feeble power. I spent a few moments feeling dejected, and then I just... adapted. It wasn't what I wanted, but the imagined story got me to germany, through the important encounter with my childhood town. My time with F was that epic for me... sliding forward on a narrative that we only ever lived in haiku-length moments, but conveying me into a space where I can see so much more than I did before, can write myself with the same confidence that my niece writes out words phonetically.

This is my new place in White Rock.



Leased for a year, shaped by and holding someone else's hopes, open now for me to write. The emerging narrative is still subtle and vague -- find my writing voice that's been on hold for a year, ride, hike, find some people who could constitute community. Runs along the water. A red mosaic tile bistro table on the deck. Myself, entering anew.

pffffft

blowing off the dust

When I traveled to santa barbara for the first time, for the orientation week for my phd, I took the bus from LAX to santa barbara. It was March, and brilliant sunny, and for part of the ride I had the pacific on one side and fields, green with something unrecognizable, on the other. I toyed with a little metaphor in my learning plan about those fields, that I knew something was growing but couldn't tell what the crop was yet.

On that first ride, in the half empty, lumbering and slow bus, I listened to Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball on my portable cd player. Mournful, wrapping my sense in slow motion. The green, the diamond sea pacific, the sun, the bus driver, the woman I'd met at the bus stop who never quite became a friend. Hope.

Three years ago, I came back to my empty loft after being in portland for a month. Played Josh Ritter -- tell me I got here at the right time. No cds anymore. I padded around barefoot, eating raspberry gelato out of the container, filled with the possibility of the man I'd been crafting an imagined future with, tapping into my keyboard in the wide bed in the eeyrie in portland.

A week later, he was wrapped around me, and the song rang in my ear. He warned me then that he thought we'd have trouble with each other's music. He listened so hard, wanted to hear me share myself. So much that didn't fit, so many false starts -- and so much that locked in as though we'd been born to wrap around each other.

Life in orbit for three years, shot through with hope and intense emotion and coffee stains. Airplanes, sheets, beaches, tears, disappointment. Finishing the phd, swinging my own wrecking ball.

Today I sit in the airport -- how many times does this make? -- waiting to fly west to finish our breakup. The raspberry gelato taste still on my tongue, no new soundtrack. Still wanting to grab at hope. Stains under my eyes. Feeling like I learn every lesson one relationship too late.