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.