Random Light

Oh, I had such high hopes! I was sure I'd be here every day, posting and commenting, but it turns out reforming a habit is as hard as breaking one.

In truth, I am exhausted. The magazine is very close to print. It puts me in a low-grade panic - I scrape around in the back of my head, sure I've forgotten something. Hot on its heels is the launch event, which carries its own kind of anxiety. Like all parties since the dawn of time, there is no relaxing until you know people will show up - and you can't know it until they do. There's drama at work and I'm falling in love and I'm flat broke. I got a $180 traffic ticket for running a red light on my bike (which didn't really happen but is too complicated to explain). I have some sort of physical issue that I have been trying to make jokes about but that makes me feel ugly and keeps me up at night. On top of the last, my health card has expired (necessary for making an appointment with the specialist my doctor has referred me to), which means lining up in a government office - a task for which I am ill-equipped. 

I had to stand in line when I went to appeal the ticket. By the time I got to the window to get my number, I was pale and sweaty and shaking like a leaf. I looked it up once, my symptoms of line aversion. I thought it was an anxiety disorder, but it turns out to be closer to a form of agoraphobia. I'm afraid of embarrassing myself and afraid of being unable to escape. My needless panic makes me feel stupid and, subsequently, every line that follows is more frightening. I see a weird humour in that (after all, experience proves these things are not scary at all), but though it keeps me from feeling sorry for myself, it doesn't really help in the moment I'm wondering whether I'll collapse onto the nice East Indian man in front of me. I'm the same way with public transit. Lord, but I'm an idiot.

I'm not unhappy, though. That's a thing.
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The Ballad of Love and Hate

When's the last time you heard something so pretty it broke your heart?
Get out your kleenex and listen at your own risk.

I told you so.
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Shark

I cleaned out my closet. Sort of. Mostly. I managed to fill three garbage bags with things to give away, and stashed an equal amount into boxes - voluminous ball gowns and vintage shoes I can't bear to part with but have no need to fight my way past every time I need a damn shirt. It's a good start, at least; I can walk into my walk-in. It could be better but I am, after all, a packrat, and Rome wasn't burned in a day. Ha.

I'm feeling the need to simplify these days. (That sentence means so many different things depending on where you put the emphasis.) I've been in this apartment too long, perhaps. I've had no cause to streamline the way I did when I moved around more. Lately everywhere I look is nostalgia and crumbling landmark, an ode to remember the time when. Accumulation is stifling. 

Since mom died, dad's been making these piles of things around the house. Every time I go home he points to a stack of pots, a container of utensils, a heap of clothes; "Do you want any of that? Take what you want - I'm getting rid of it." Until now I didn't really understand. It's not as if the house is getting smaller, so why not just leave things where they are? Now it occurs to me that if it is difficult to move forward with only evidence of myself in the way, how hard it would be with evidence of another. That house is stopped in time. That house is Groundhog Day.

The other day I ran into someone I used to know. Sort of. Mostly. He was the friend of an ex and we worked on the same street. I'd always been fond of him, so rakish and handsome and impossibly charming. He was hard not to like. I said hello, gave him a hug. It had been almost five years since we'd had any kind of regular contact. So what are you doing now? How are things? And it was nice to see him, it really was - except that it was not. So much has happened in last five years, my internal landscape is utterly changed, but suddenly here was a person who only Knew Me When. It was the sensation of wearing itchy, ill-fitting clothes. The me I saw in his eyes was not at all me, and I felt fenced in with fact that was much less than truth.

No, I don't care to run into old friends. For better or worse, my pasts were meant to be past, and my closets cleaned.

Sort of.
Mostly.

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Letters from a Cottage in August - Day 3

Saturday

It’s my third morning on the dock – the last day of our vacation. I woke R to watch the sun rise but, in truth, I thought the moments before were prettier than the thing itself. Now R is back “upstairs” reading, the sun is conjuring a mist off the lake and I, I am here wondering how anyone would not want to get up early. I would have made a good sailor, I think.

Damn, but this place smells nice, sharp and heavy with green and decay. There is such impossible richness in rotting things. It’s so absolutely corporeal and stops the driving, reckless greenness from overwhelming all. I sit on the dock, sniffing the air like a dog, trying to separate every scent, decoding hidden messages.

There are trees and more trees. They are the pushy ones, schoolyard bullies. If this were a perfume they would be the “top note”, the first impression, stinging and tickling all the way back to your ears. (In a symphony I imagine them as strings: distracting and jealous of attention… But I ought to try to stick to one metaphor at a time.) Only the rich, acid undertones of live wood keep them from being completely insufferable.

Then there is water – inland water. It seems so smooth and cool at first, landlocked and waveless and without the madding salt sting of seawater, but it’s secretive, too. Inside it teems with slimy, grasping life that can bear to live in darkness. It is all blind desire and need, and the smell is carries is heavy, sweet and wet – indecent, somehow. If I concentrate I can feel the weight of it in my lungs. (I remember coming back to Ontario after a couple of years on the east coast. Breathing in that syrupy-lush water felt like eating food.)

Somewhere between these two are people smells: drifting wisps of morning coffee, gasoline, hideous closed septic systems. I actually like these, too – maybe because I belong to them; my beloved tribe of blundering destroyers. Still, I know these odors are as transient as the species that made them. In this perfume they are the beautiful but utterly manufactured chemical molecule, surprising but, if not quite easily ignored, quickly forgotten.

But underneath is soil and rot and slowly, inexorably, it gathers all. It is the base note, the foundation on which all the rest is built, and it smells warm, comforting. (This is as it should be: In a world where everything dies, death should not be unwelcoming.) There is bitterness here too, though, all biting brown earth under moldering leaves. It makes me think of grief, perhaps; shocking at the start, but strangely lovely when it grows familiar (an acquired taste, like olives or coffee). We carry that smell with us, too, under our layer of years, and it surrounds us in illness and old age. Is that terrible to say? It’s distasteful, but it’s true. It’s the thing old ladies try to cover with peppermint and lavender. My grandfather smelled like that in the hospital, and the old man, Alex, who used to live across my alley. I remember catching the scent of it on my mother’s skin and it sickened me, but only because I knew what it was and the loss meant more. There are days I begin to sense it in myself – though only in idea, not yet in fact. When my heart feels weak or lonely it makes me helpless, but mostly it is a reminder to love harder, to breathe more. It does no good to struggle and rail, to set defenses. I will see and smell and touch and taste – and I will feel no matter how it hurts me until I am a soft, low note in someone else’s perfume. Consequence be damned.

Good lord. The air is suddenly hot and the birds are in some kind of self-induced panic. When did everything get so noisy and bright?

I feel like I’ve just woken up.