“And here is the shock – when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy.
You are unhappy. Things get worse.
It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded.
And then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so’.
In fact, they told you nothing.”
- Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
26 February 2012
13 February 2012
Separation
It’s been so long since I’ve written anything. I’ve eradicated all familiar points of reference and, as such, I’ve not given myself a great deal to write against, or towards.
When I moved to this country five years ago, I didn’t imagine that one day I’d remain here to orbit the uninhabitable planet of my old life, where my errant genes - my own heart that multiplied and grew around it an entire person - would need me to circulate for the foreseeable future. I am here for my son. On the margins of that relationship, I am building a life of my own out of new and untested materials, out of people and places and experiences born from my own, small initiative.
When I find that I’m plumping for a more substantial intersection between the old and the new, I remind myself that the union will take some time to resolve, that it will be one of substance over symmetry, of perspective rather than location.
My old life is a fishing rod cast into the sea of my day. As the hours tick over, I am reeled in by my heartstrings, and by dinnertime I am kissing and bathing my tiny boy. I’m putting him to bed and I’m slipping out the door into the dark matter of this new self who does none of these things, in a home that is, for the time being, insulated by objects instead of memories.
I used to worry that I would disappear without the props and settings and characters that helped to define who I was. Who wouldn’t be? But it was easily done, to put the book down and leave the room - frighteningly so. To walk like Gulliver through the landscapes of my history, brushing the clinging, miniature ghosts of identity from my arms and torso and thighs, until all that remained was myself.
All that ever remains is a self, and then one day, that self disperses, like a ghost, or like fog over an infinite, roiling sea, and is gone.
When I moved to this country five years ago, I didn’t imagine that one day I’d remain here to orbit the uninhabitable planet of my old life, where my errant genes - my own heart that multiplied and grew around it an entire person - would need me to circulate for the foreseeable future. I am here for my son. On the margins of that relationship, I am building a life of my own out of new and untested materials, out of people and places and experiences born from my own, small initiative.
When I find that I’m plumping for a more substantial intersection between the old and the new, I remind myself that the union will take some time to resolve, that it will be one of substance over symmetry, of perspective rather than location.
My old life is a fishing rod cast into the sea of my day. As the hours tick over, I am reeled in by my heartstrings, and by dinnertime I am kissing and bathing my tiny boy. I’m putting him to bed and I’m slipping out the door into the dark matter of this new self who does none of these things, in a home that is, for the time being, insulated by objects instead of memories.
I used to worry that I would disappear without the props and settings and characters that helped to define who I was. Who wouldn’t be? But it was easily done, to put the book down and leave the room - frighteningly so. To walk like Gulliver through the landscapes of my history, brushing the clinging, miniature ghosts of identity from my arms and torso and thighs, until all that remained was myself.
All that ever remains is a self, and then one day, that self disperses, like a ghost, or like fog over an infinite, roiling sea, and is gone.
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