Scratchy

F's term for people bickering and at odds is "scratchy." And I seem to be scratchy with everyone in my world at all these days. It's trite to talk about the stress of moving, but it's real -- and here I am again, on the brink of some adventure, and instead of feeling graceful and brave about it, I've got my mouth open in a big yowl of anxiety and fret and sullen stompiness that I am alone in feeling this.

I have a slurry of emotions about this move and its magnitude, and somehow every moment of loss and fear that I've had has encrusted itself to this moment. And I have that dark inversion happening where I can't see the bright spots, can't stay focused on that image of the goat cheese and arugula salads and the ocean, can't hold it in the centre. I'm just agitated, sad, worried and -- oddly enough -- feeling abandoned, despite the fact that this loony move is my choice.

I think part of it is just the disorientation of watching three strangers drive off with all my stuff, and being experienced enough to know that the disgorging will mean weeks of not knowing where anything is, wandering around holding a single spoon and feeling its existential, dislocated angst. And part of it is a sort of constant inner dialogue about realizing I'm on my own and that the people I've imagined spending my life with are off on their own rides, just as beset as I am in different ways, but far away.

I'm also really conscious that the intensity of my physical presence when I'm scratchy can be so hard to digest that the people who are best able to support me are the ones at arm's length -- either the ones I talk to in small doses (thanks, Kat ;-)) or the ones at the streamlined end of a data line.

In real terms, it's been a extremely overwhelming week. Ian's funeral, and the waves of people who call me by a name I don't even recognize as my own anymore. Then the strange little interlude with the other Ian, the poet, and the sudden choking off of the effusive interest, fantasy burst before it even formed off the end of the bubble pipe. Then of course, the news about bp, which suffuses me with inarticulable sorrow and a kind of panic at losing my touchstone to grace. Trying to articulate my untethered feeling to my here-community, and finding myself so out of sync, a blast of angry agitation that is so much about feeling alone. Then the absurdity of believing that I could be light-hearted with someone, find a balm in the physical, with my young courier boy, when I'm feeling like this -- and our sunday afternoon date turning into "I've met someone else." And, ironically, his showing himself able to stay and talk about the intimacy of fear and death -- more digestible small bursts of me.

Me, scratchy, preaching so eloquently about embracing the uncertain and emergent to the learners in my course, drowning in so much abstract anxiety about what's in front that I can't pause to form any kind of appealing story of possibility. Pause, breathe.