Here at the right time

It's easter again. Last year at easter, I was such a newbie blogger, so unsettled in so many aspects of my life. Had hit the nadir of misconnection with my ex, had moved, was exhausted and feeling my fumbling way toward the next thing. Not sure where my paying work was and even less sure where my real work was. I went to windsor to see my family at easter, and drove home still frayed at the edges. I have a vivid sense memory of being in the dark car on that sunday night, driving faster and faster as the car filled with music, and in that cocoon, able to feel reborn, opened up, letting go of the stuff that was besetting me. My therapist called it my own redemption -- christian metaphors aside, it did feel like emotional crocuses.

Into that space, I reconnected with F, went to Portland, got back into my work and refound the pacific. Then really connected with F, and found our way to where we are now, a full fledged couple of six months this week. Found my way, fumblingly, so much closer to my real work.

Today, driving back from roc after dropping F at the airport for a work trip to europe, I dragged a whole new basket full of frayings. It's... so full with him. Loving joy between us, he makes me laugh and sigh in all the right ways, supports me in my work, drives me forward with his ambition. Makes it okay to be me, in all my foibles and complications, sees my future.

And yet... I can't just relax into it, can't be happy in it. I'm always *poised* for something to be wrong, can't roll with the natural disrhythmia of trying to figure out how to balance our intense then apart time, life here and first lines of warp on the loom of us there. Less tangled into lives here, not in anyone's life in roc except F's. Not sure how to be "here" when here is in love, partnered but not in the same place, no "next life" yet clear, my life in toronto still pinning down the corners of my tent every time I try to up stakes (necessarily in the work sense), but yearning for a next place where I can feel a bit settled and find a rhythm. Colleagues and friends I click with here, flesh and ideas I click with in a place neither of us particularly wants to be.

The outside world glosses my current state as "busy." "Stuffed" is more like it -- gills bulging, eyes popping, touching down into each realm just long enough to almost get it right and then resent it for not being the only thing. I want reassurance that isn't possible from F, and it's about wanting so much -- life that holds everything I want to do more comfortably, more gracefully, more easily than now, life with love and work and home and friends entangled.

When I got home from Portland last year, I wandered around my flat in my bare feet playing Josh Ritter, just feeling the now, ripening with the imaginings from F, from the sense of my work that was starting to take shape. The colour of the sky in portland still perches at the edge of my consciousness, so much promise for clearing, for the energizing splash of coolness before and after rain. So much promise for feeling at home somewhere new. I am halfway to somewhere new, and am feeling ungraceful about knowing how to hold what's important in the past, threading into onto the loom of the new.