i=realigning
Is it wrongheaded to try to get back to normal? It's what I've been doing the last week or so, and it doesn't feel right; I have this little empty, meaningless space in me. I mean it's been instinctive; I haven't cried in over a week (wow, that feels a lot longer than it sounds), I think about him less and have been less inclined to indulge my own moroseness, I've started picking up the threads of old routines and so forth. But maybe my old routines weren't good anymore; maybe the old normal isn't it. If he overturned half of my assumptions and ways of doing things, maybe I need to leave the pieces scattered on the ground like that. I'm just not sure how.
Antonio wants to get back to the way things were - I feel it in every way he interacts with me. But our lives now are so unbelievably far from the way they were when we lived in Arden Street or Spottiswoode Street, and I don't think we can just have the same rituals or rhythms. We both work now, a lot. We live in an American city with lots of straight lines and full of a thousand different kinds of people, all struggling in very un-European ways, in this safety-net-free society, to get by. We have piercing sunlight in the summer and then we plunge into a truly barren and frigid winter, with this sugary poignant explosive autumn in between. And if we don't acknowledge and live inside all these things, now we're here, we won't be living at all.
When M was packing on the last night in our flat he gave me a whole bunch of stuff he didn't want to throw away, from pens and stamps, to a pile of cigars, to the binder of his stories from his writing class last summer. I haven't opened the binder in a while, but I still have his dirt-encrusted baseball sitting next to the cigars in front of the desk on our windowsill. It's not an object either Antonio or I would ever have, so it helps take me out of myself sometimes when I see it in our tidy bohemian British little bedroom; and if there's anything I need to keep on living in my life now, it's that multiplicity - it's stretching myself to live more outside of Me. Even if I want to scab over and heal now, and move on and away, that's one thing I think I need to keep from all this. I just have no idea how to do it yet - apart from leaving that dirty baseball there on my windowsill.
Antonio wants to get back to the way things were - I feel it in every way he interacts with me. But our lives now are so unbelievably far from the way they were when we lived in Arden Street or Spottiswoode Street, and I don't think we can just have the same rituals or rhythms. We both work now, a lot. We live in an American city with lots of straight lines and full of a thousand different kinds of people, all struggling in very un-European ways, in this safety-net-free society, to get by. We have piercing sunlight in the summer and then we plunge into a truly barren and frigid winter, with this sugary poignant explosive autumn in between. And if we don't acknowledge and live inside all these things, now we're here, we won't be living at all.
When M was packing on the last night in our flat he gave me a whole bunch of stuff he didn't want to throw away, from pens and stamps, to a pile of cigars, to the binder of his stories from his writing class last summer. I haven't opened the binder in a while, but I still have his dirt-encrusted baseball sitting next to the cigars in front of the desk on our windowsill. It's not an object either Antonio or I would ever have, so it helps take me out of myself sometimes when I see it in our tidy bohemian British little bedroom; and if there's anything I need to keep on living in my life now, it's that multiplicity - it's stretching myself to live more outside of Me. Even if I want to scab over and heal now, and move on and away, that's one thing I think I need to keep from all this. I just have no idea how to do it yet - apart from leaving that dirty baseball there on my windowsill.