Yearning

Last day in TO for a while. It was a busy errand day (waxing/polishing/haircut/colour/coffee with kat/late lunch with B) kind of day, punctuated by torrential rain, navigated mostly on my bike, until B took pity on me and drove me home.

Then it was a puttery early evening, laundry, packing, cleaning my wee place so I can leave it for 5 weeks. And while I was cleaning and poking about, Josh Ritter came on my itunes. All of the songs from Animal Years, which I so associate with my sojourn in portland three and a half years ago, sitting in the coffee crutch coffee shop beavering away on my human development knowledge area, trying to make meaning of my shifts in identity.

There was such a YEARNING in that music, especially Here at the Right Time. It fixed itself on F, but in some ways, the free floating anxiety I've had as long as I can remember has been counterpointed by a free-floating yearning. I felt it again today, in this music, and couldn't even figure out what I was yearning FOR. I remember once buying a card that had a fragment of a poem on it -- I think sappho -- I yearn and I seek (google is a help here: kai` poðh'w kai` ma'omai -- I yearn and I seek). I think I bought this years ago, while I was still with B; thought about sending it when I was adoring K; ended up, I think, sending it to someone I had a mad online flirtation with that didn't sustain into actual meeting. But it's something I've been carrying for so long that I know it doesn't really have a lot to do with F. There are things we did together that I keenly feel the absence of, and aspects of who we were together that I'll always miss, but the real heart of it is losing the *possibility* of intimacy... and today, I think I'm sad that I've lost sight of myself in a way as a hopeful person about that.

Renee pointed this out, and I think in some ways it's true -- building myself the perfect transitional life where I try to balance and bridge my grounded, open west coast self with my dynamic, busy, successful TO self, where I plan trips to africa and iceland, co-edit books and position myself as part of a broad theoretical community -- all of these are things I want, AND they are tropes for a life structure to essentially compartmentalize and fragment intimacy, to close off the likelihood of meeting someone whose day to day can fold around mine. I can't quite figure out if this is a substitution that I'm not truly comfortable with, or whether it's genuinely grabbing a brass ring of claiming full life. And of course, it's both. Some days the ersatz nature of it has a stronger aftertaste than anything else. Which, maybe, means it's time to go back to BC.