She Was.

So we write about the nothingness of our lives, the daily and the mundane and the coffees drunk and the hand holding missed and we hope that if we are lucky, someone will see the pretty in the closeup, that the details painted in soft words will somehow, for someone, make up for the lack of story unfolding. That the everyday, that the walk to the shop to buy cigarettes, the time spent waiting for something to open, the cloud shine sky, the nightsky trees suddenly morning will eventually, if traced, lead to something more than dryscapes. These are not big picture lives. Not yours and mine. These are small steps to fro slowly and drip drip drip to fill the page. Nothing happens. We live in the repetition. We live in the crawl, chapters and chapters of description, waiting for the conclusion that, obviously, we don’t write – in the end.

I wrote that I wanted to be seen. And then I realised, that to be seen you have to show. So I did, and I was.  He doesn’t throw words around, like I do. He thinks about them. I imagine him hunched over his keyboard, typing with two fingers, frowning, concentrating . I think he hesitates over spelling and grammar, and chooses carefully, just what to say, and not to say. And he writes as though he were speaking to me, as if we were talking, together, alone and understood. I’m left with fragments of conversation, and I try and interpret what he might have been responding to, what I might have said, had we been talking, alone and understood. He uses words sparingly, self consciously, and I imagine that his handwriting would be tight and cramped if his words were written. It’s not the same, the text. I can’t tuck his notes into my pillow, fold them into my pockets and smooth their well read creases. But the words he chooses, the clumsy phrasing, it says more than my too many paragraphs of black and white. His words reveal more than mine, and so they leave me with more to wonder about, to pick over, to want. He tells me that the things I did are (I am) beautiful, in his halting manner, and I know that he has risked more than I have, that by showing, he lets me know that I am indeed seen.

There is this man, this bigger than me, solid man, and he feels less other and more of my own than any man I have ever known. He gives me, his words, give me, exactly what I need, exactly as I need it. His sadness, his need, reflects my own so closely that I am left stumbling wondering how it is that we speak so closely over one another. I know that when I see him, in a few days time, my hand will find itself in his, I will snake my arms around him and over his springy curls, and when he looks down at me it will feel a lot like love. It’s not. I will remind myself of this, and I will annoy myself with it, and all along I will whisper to myself, that it could be, it most definitely could be, if we let it. The truth of it is, my truth is, that I see this man, I feel him, like I have never felt any other person. And it feels like, it feels like just the beginning of this, overshadows everything that has gone before, and I am scared of both yes and no.

I feel so far from home. It’s exile, this is, and fuck him, fuck him, fuck him, for that. How a place, a people, a fog, a monument, a beat, an anger, a dance, can get so far below, leech into, move with, part of, become. There is a word, in a language richer than this one, it doesn’t translate. It signifies a feeling of longing, a sad kind of longing, that almost burns within you, a shroud-y melancholy that has you yearning for whatever it is that you feel it for or over. It doesn’t translate and it’s far more beautiful than my clumsy explanation. Kaimos. I’ve heard so many Greek immigrants use it over the years, when talking about home, about that fucking place. And now I lay claim to it too. Hearing her sing tonight, the songs of my mother’s 30’s, of my childhood, of my one big fat love lie. And to be here, home, and still, again, feel far from home. In many ways, this has been the worst part of this whole experience, I have no direction home, and no compass to point the way. I think that maybe, home is where you feel most you, most full of possibility, most full of accidental hope. I think, how lucky I’ve been to fall in love with a place, to really have loved a place so much so that it has become part of who I am. It’s not the kind of love you think about when it comes to great loves, but I dream of seeing her again. I remember her smell. Songs bring her back to me so strongly that I find myself eyes closed convinced that when I open them, I will see that lavender harbour, be walking those cracked pavements, breathing in that late autumn wind.  I miss that life. I miss that sense of anything could happen. I miss that place. I miss the me of that place.

And then there is here. Here, it is finally, finally, raining, and with the rain, my year of summer has ended.

I have been hit hard with the biggest dose of self pity. And I am going to blog about it because I’ve realised that I cannot control who sees what or who reads what or who thinks what. And that’s not just in the online journal blog world it’s in every part of my life. I cannot control what people think of me or about me. So if certain people want to think that I am a bitch to be avoided at all costs, well so be it. And if others want to see a scared run away don’t get close to me screw up, well they are more than welcome to keep thinking that. And this is precisely why I am self pitying, because I cannot make anyone see what I want them to see, what I think is right there visible, and so very fucking easy to read. I cannot show anyone what they do not want, are not ready to, are unwilling to see. Sometimes though, the not seeing, translates to something very akin to invisibility and I feel less like a superhero and more like Jane Doe. There are a few people, some, that I want to call, and scream, no whisper, I love you. I love you. I love you. Please remember that. Please notice. Please let it matter. I’m right here, and I love you. I won’t of course, because we don’t do things like that, and even though I think we should, I’m too self conscious to be brave and actually be the way that I am, even if the way that I am which is not the way that I really am is invisible. Sigh. I am too anonymous and unknown, and not anonymous enough all at the same time.

What started off as other (he), and became self (me), is now back to other again, and that hurt, that real world hurt loss, hurts. There is too much mirroring of an[other] self and that is what was missing and will be missing still. In a different way.

“The only way that you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

Margaret Atwood (via this is my heart. it is a good heart.)

Some of the things I want to write about here, I can’t. Perhaps to protect the guilty, or perhaps, to protect myself. Some of the things I want to write about here, I can’t. Because the story is unfinished and I don’t know how it ends. Some of the things I want to write about here, I can’t. Because I don’t know which voice to write them in. Or in what form.

What feels real for me, will almost certainly not feel real for you.

I feel real something that does not come easily. Real is something that I can understand. A set of choices, that I can rationalise. That beautifully flawed person, the flaws are ones that I can understand. Big small, I can see them and I can trace them back through skin and bone and crescent white moon scars, back to a place of origin, to a beginning of blank. It’s a link, an unbroken thread, a speaking that does not stop when everything else is still stagnant. There is a set of jaw and a footfall that I read hear. And there is a toss of hair, and a bitten lip, that is read heard in return. There is conflict of wills and a coming together of something more. We will all hurt one another. At some time in some moment under the star sky. We are built that way. That is the way that it is. But not by choice. I do not do that.

The thing that I hold onto, is that what you feel real, I do too. Plus, in return.

It’s me.

It’s not you.

It is me. I wake up every morning and my throat stings shut tight.

It’s not you.

It is me. There’s no one else it can be.

It’s not you.

Yeah, it is. I don’t know why I get stuck like this. It’s me.

It’s not you.

I should so know better. It is me.

It’s not you.

IT IS ME.

IT’S NOT YOU.

Oh, shut the fuck up. What would you know?

It’s not you.

It is me. I know it is. I’m telling you, it’s me.

It’s not you.           Now go to sleep.