the last burnt sienna crayon

How is it, that we learn things, yet so easily forget? How is it that something becomes a part of us, how we think, how we grow, what we believe, what we feel, how we live. . . and yet, we forget? Does it happen at the point of some trauma, that we throw out all of that which has gone before? Or is it simply carelessness, the dropping of our manifesto into the crowds and busyness of daily life?

And am I just assuming that it happens to more than just myself? Is this collective “we” accurate, or is it just me who is the forgetful one?

Recently I saw that an old friend had posted a quote, something written by Rilke, and something in me leaped. “You know Rilke!” I said to him, excited to find that my old friend shared some kind of sensibility of mine.

“Yes,” he replied, “You were the one who introduced me to him.”

Oh. I had forgotten. So many years ago. How could I have forgotten? There was a time when I was practically evangelistic about the German language poet/author. I carried a pocket sized copy of Letters to a Young Poet with me everywhere like a tract or a Bible for several years. I discovered his Letters first (where anyone should start with Rilke) and reading them felt like the first time anyone had ever truly understood me. For the first time, someone was telling me what to do, how to live, in a way that seemed strangely comforting, helpful and relevant. (Does it reflect badly on me that that was something I felt that I could gain from a dead Bohemian poet and not from the Church or from my own parents?)

I moved on from his Letters to his other (dense, but beautiful) prose, then his poetry (both certainly a development in the relationship), and even though I have to admit to struggling through the density of reading German in English translation (and in various levels of success of the translations), for the first time I felt that I had encountered another human being who felt things quite like I did, as strongly, as intensely, a bit of an alien in this world, and who struggled through his life because of it.

It felt like being understood.

The encouragement, was that he always said that life was worth it. Difficulties, and particularly the difficulty of solitude (which at the time I felt that I knew so well), were to be sought out instead of avoided. There was something I could accept in that. I heard him say:

“It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”

and I took comfort. I was told:

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things”

and I believed him enough to get onto an airplane and leave my country and look for life. In all that confused me about my life I heard:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions”

and I no longer cared for security. In those days, I lived, I mean I really lived. Because someone who felt and failed and hurt like I did told me that it was still worth it.

Any easiness in life was worth risking, for the attempt at something better. Life was worth living at all, because of its wealth and intensity. But I’ve forgotten. My fear and pains smothered that hope and joy, my failures crawled on top of me and wrenched the manifesto out of my hands.

Like Leonard said, “We’ve got to remind them how good it is.” Wouldn’t it be nice, to try to remember again? Difficult. . . but perhaps worth it.

So I walked away from the pharmacy clutching my little red pills, dubious that something so simple could metamorphose the ruptured life that I had so carefully placed on my shelf for safe keeping, storage and dust collection into a new jumping, singing and dancing life that would get up, hop down and make itself known.

Day 1 — I knew it wouldn’t work. What do I do now?
Day 2 — hmm. . . then again. . .
Day 5 — this isn’t my life! OHMYGOSH I have a new life!!!

Each day, I seemed to gain a new feature. At first I was ecstatic! All my old life ever did since it got dropped was sit on that shelf and get dusty. My old life was a constant disappointment to myself and to others, never living up to the manufacturer’s grand claims of what it would be able to do. But this new thing. . . this new person I seemed to be becoming. . . well, it just worked. It got up and moved almost like it was supposed to. And oh, the freedom of leaving the house! Oh, the places beyond my front step! I was shaky on my new legs, but learning to walk quite quickly.

And I was loving it!

But by Day 10, the post transplant confusion had begun to set in. Waking up one day and finding that you’re in a different body after having spent so long in the old one creates a bit of whiplash. Everything happened so quickly. Everything had changed, in such a short time, but the memory was still in tact. I still had the old memories and the old experiences, but they no longer fit the new person and I didn’t know what to do with them.

I began to suspect that I might have noticed a few unwanted aspects to this new life, but decided to ignore them. I was probably just overreacting, and besides, it was better to have a working and fully functional life with a few unwanted characteristics than it was to simply be broken. . .

. . . wasn’t it?

(to be continued. . . )

Who am I?

You tell me, because I’m not sure anymore.

I’ve tried to collect together all of the things which I’ve known myself by over the years, but it just doesn’t seem to make a coherent whole. It doesn’t make any sense. And then I try to collect together all of the things that have influenced or even directly caused those things which I have known myself by and I realise that for a large percentage of my life, I have come up with some excuse or other for “not being myself today/this week/month/year/decade/etc”. And if percentage wise I’m spending more time making excuses than actually ‘being myself’, then how can I really claim that the me that I am less of the time is the ‘real’ me?

For a large percentage of the time, I have always felt that my life has taken ‘time outs’ and I, the ‘real me’, was just sitting in waiting for whatever influencing factor that was masking me to go away, or for me to finally achieve the back to the real me’ state.

But I must have been mistaken. Because the mask never comes off. It only seems to change. It changes from day to day and year by year. And saying that makes it sound like it really must just be that ‘changing thing’ that we’re all supposed to do as we go through life anyway, but for some reason it doesn’t quite feel like that. It doesn’t quite feel authentic. It doesn’t feel like a natural evolution.

My striving has always been to be my most authentic and honest self, like some mythical, unblemished, Platonic Form or something, to all and particularly to me. However, whereas I used to think I knew who or what that authentic Form was and what she liked and how she thought and how she acted, I’m just not so sure anymore. When do the blemishes become no longer something to sweep away and make excuse for, but become the thing itself? What if all my blemishes aren’t something added to cover up me, but are actually now me?

If you start with a table and break off one of it’s legs, you can probably fix it back on, with the right glue and nails. No harm done in the end, it’s still a table. But once you start to take a chisel to the table and gouge out some big gaping holes, it starts to become something a bit different. And you no longer wait for it to be fixed back to its ideal state, you have to accept that it is now either a sculpture or junk, and not useful as a table any longer.

And lately I’m starting to feel a bit like that chiseled table, starting to accept that there is no ideal Form for me to become anymore. And I’m wondering how much I get to control what the finished sculpture of me will look like. Or do I simply call it junk, throw it all out and start from scratch? But if that were the case, what do I do with all the stuff left over, from everything that has gone before, the thought patterns, the beliefs, the dis/likes, the behaviours?

I think in the end I just have to keep chiseling. But without my Platonic Form to model myself after, how do I know what my eventual goal is anymore?

And I have known them all already, known them all. . .
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all _
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawlling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

It’s days like today that make me feel like I perhaps should have never come here, and then I would never have to wrestle with the question of going back. Can one ever go back?

Days like today that are filled with memories, happy ones, important ones, trivial ones. It wasn’t always wonderful, but it always happened, and could be relied on. Days like today are filled with traditions, that perhaps mean nothing in and of themselves, but mean everything in the observation. Days like today used to be filled with people who are no more. People who weren’t always easy, but they were reliable, but now will never be again.

Memories and traditions and people. that I now feel that I have thrown away. That had been my intention, wasn’t it? Starting over can’t be done half heartedly.

And I didn’t do it half heartedly. It’s only that some days it just hurts a little more than others.

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. Believe me, I am thankful.

Well, the orange/yellow leaves have mostly blown off of the trees across the street now and the view out my window gets decidedly darker earlier and earlier in the day now. The view will hold considerably less interest very soon, so i turn to sounds instead. The purring cat beside me, the whir of a motor, the fireworks popping in the distance, my daughter laughing. Now is the time for hibernation, the time to burrow down and pull up the covers and clasp a mug of hot chocolate between my cold hands.

I used to be more hardened in this kind of weather and would simply wrap up and go outside anyway. But now, more things start to go wrong in my body at this time of year, not big things, just more things, and I’ve learned that any energy spent unnecessarily is energy wasted. I’m tired and fatigued, I do less, I enjoy less, I smile less. The seasons of my life are changing and I realise how unappreciative I have been of the time past that I shall have no more.

Of course along with that knowledge comes the knowledge that I am not appreciating my time here at the moment either, and that I will soon look back and wish I had spent it and cared for it better. It all seems such a hopeless cycle from this stage in the year. Unrelenting cold and dark and the endless replay of the same themes again and again. All I can do from this point in the year, is keep warm and wait for spring. I always do, and spring always comes. . . but it looks such a long way to there from the beginning of the winter.

Yes, I realise that winter is not really here until mid December, and now we are only beginning November. But in my chosenland, as I have said so often before, I feel as if I have been robbed of my seasons. They blend together for me now because of where I came from. What was once four, for me, is now only two. And both of them grey and rainy. Only one is colder. And I know you will find my viewpoint a bit unkind and unforgiving, but the truth of it is how I feel and how I see it. And I can’t be any more honest than that.

Because I remember younger days in the homeland over summertime nights, in green country fields with friends, lying on our backs, the fresh fragrance of hay and grasses in my nose, looking up at the stars in a pitch black sky and watching meteor showers, listening to crickets and watching fireflies. I remember winter snow days off from school, building snow forts and tobogganing down the steep hill behind the cemetery by my friend’s house, and trudging back up again, knee deep in crisp white snow that would last for days. I remember mountainsides hemming in the river valley, completely covered with autumn colored trees, a delicious quilted carpet of red and orange and yellow and brown. I remember the spring flowers, the sweet smell of lilacs most of all, and my mother’s crocus that would greet me by the front door in March and tell me that things were moving on and it was time.

Moving on was exciting to me then. And now I resist it, I push back and bolt the door to keep it out, along with the cold of a new season. I don’t look for new seasons now, in the trees and in my life both. And I can see myself sitting here wrapped in this warm fluffy blanket with this hot mug of chocolate for quite some time, and not noticing the crocuses when they reach out of the ground to point me where I am to go next. Maybe I missed them already?

The fireworks sound louder through my curtained window, and I realise that I left my attic window viewpoint too soon. . . It’s too late now to see them. By the time you hear the bang, the pretty sparks are gone.

I found out this morning that my friend’s dad died.

When did my father die? I can’t remember anymore. Was it the 3rd or the 9th of October? I remember the year, at least, 1997. Twelve years ago, not quite 2 months after my wedding, which he couldn’t attend.

It’s all a blur. The wedding, the new house and the landlord’s cat, dad’s death, visas, immigration, the funeral and the three months living with my mother, sister and husband all together afterwards, the unemployment, the lost university course, the relapses, the wheelchair, the steroids and anti-depressants, the generous gift from an anonymous stranger so I could get afford my visa and return to my new home. It all seems so distant and like it happened to somebody else. And the strongest memory of the day that he died is is not of the phone call but of our friends M and J buying us fish and chips so we didn’t have to cook.

I think he had already died to me, when his brain became too damaged to know anyone, remember or understand anything. He wouldn’t have known if I had managed to fly back before he died. I tried, but I didn’t make it. And he wouldn’t have known. The last time I had seen him was at the airport nearly a year before when I had to turn my back and walk away from him, wondering if that was the last time. I hardly knew how soon.

I walked myself down the aisle when I married. He wasn’t there, he was too ill, though I barely knew how ill. I had always said that it was either both my parents or me alone. So as it was, it was me alone, sobbing to Pachelbel’s Canon, part because at that stage of my new illness I was overwhelmed to be walking at all, and part because of an immigrant’s overwhelming experience of the simultaneous experiences of the joy of marital gain and the grief of homeland loss. And I knew he would die. . . though not so quickly. I knew I was leaving and losing everybody for good. . . though not that it would become so irreversible and sealed by so many deaths and changes. So I sobbed the whole way, clumsily knocking pew ends off with my massive bouquet of sunflowers.

I never really held the anniversary of his death, and so I don’t remember the date. I’m sure it was early October. I have a feeling he died on the 3rd and the funeral was the 9th. The time that reminds me of his death every year is not October, but actually in June when all of the shops start advertising for Father’s Day. People in the country where I now live scoff at the holiday as a fake capitalist construct by Hallmark, but it meant something to my dad. It took me many years to pass a shop in early June and stop thinking “Oh, I need to get a card for dad. Oh, I can’t.”

He just missed his 80th birthday, and his 25th wedding anniversary with my mom. That was 12 years ago, so that means that this month, had he lived, he would have been 92. wow. His birthday was at the end of October, either on Halloween or the day before, I never remembered. I just knew how much he hated Halloween. Not because of his birthday or for any principle or religious reason. . . it was just one of the many things in life that annoyed him.

Like the NASDAQ. He just hated the sound of it. He was obsessed with the news, but complained each and every time he heard a financial report, because he hated the pronunciation and the sound of the NASDAQ. Which I only mention at all to demonstrate that he was a strange man with many quirks. I inherited many of his quirks. I am bound by so many of them. We are so subject to what our parents give us, for good or for ill.

Dad was born in 1917. Which meant I had a somewhat different kind of upbringing for someone born in the mid 70s. The early 20th century in my home country (any country), was a very different world to the one I was born into, and he struggled to parent a child in the late 20th century. He saw so much. His brothers fought in WWII (one died in the Philippines), he was medically discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (or at least I was told once). He was in the army air corps, he ran his own garage, he kept and remodeled classic cars, he drag raced other drivers on the highway, he snored loudly, he was in a country band that played on the radio in the 1930s, he got thrown out of university for walking a girl home and standing on her porch, he was reinstated and became an engineer, he started his own gym/training centre in his 70s, he had been electrocuted so many times that when he tried to teach me to use a compass, the needle would point to him, not north, he would come looking for me at 3 am when I was 18 and out with my boyfriend, telling me to come home, or else, and when that little girl of his came home a few years later from a foreign land and could no longer walk or pick things up or write or see and could not even lie in bed at night for the raw, heavy pain of the sheets on her legs, he stayed up all night and let her cry. So much happened to and around him. I can hardly blame him for the things he got wrong.

I have not been to his grave since the day of his funeral (now that was a strange experience! The service was run jointly between my mother’s Evangelical minister, my sister’s high Anglo-Catholic, gay priest and a an old friend of my father’s, a man who had spent time in jail for militia involvement and tax evasion as he believed the money belonged to God and not Cesar!). My mother has moved on and can’t go back. I wanted to go there when I recently travelled to the homeland, but there was no one to take me, and I never dared ask anyone. There were too many memories to drag anyone through.

Dad didn’t want me to go, but he knew he couldn’t/shouldn’t stop me. And now, just as I never knew my grandfather, my daughter will never know hers. I wonder if he had lived, if I would have stayed here, in my chosenland quite as long.

I wonder what a person is willing to give up for their family. He gave up so much. Family was everything. It was the only thing.

And I still left. Sorry dad.

So why did I post that poem?

It had been posted a time ago on somebody else’s blog (because they actually liked it), but I had it taken down and thought that it made more sense to have it on my own, but more than that, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about vulnerability.

An old friend (we met at university when I was still living in the Homeland about 15 years ago) called me the other evening. We hadn’t actually spoken (other than e-mails) in a long time, hadn’t seen each other in about 5 years, so we talked for an hour and a half. . . internationally. We talked about some difficult things, and it surprised me how easy it was to confide. When I hung up I briefly worried that I shouldn’t have been so honest, I mean, at least here on the blog, I know that if people didn’t want to know, then they wouldn’t bother clicking, but on the phone. . . well, you know how the ‘worst case scenario’ thought process works.

But my concerns were soon alleviated when I quickly received an e-mail from my friend saying that it had been good to talk and a very kind and empathetic comment on some things I had said. Acceptance from my friend, and relief from me.

I don’t lose friends easily or lightly.

You see, a very long time ago (shortly before I met my friend who phoned me, actually) I had another friend, this time from as far back as childhood, who I had thought would ’stick around’. But when our lives travelled different paths, the communication stopped, though I tried to reestablish it many times. No responses. None. I had thought that whereas you could ‘dump’ a boy/girlfriend, that you couldn’t dump a ‘friend.’

I was wrong.

I had, in the distant past, confided many things to this childhood friend, but when life changed, when we suddenly were no longer children or even ‘youth’, those confidences didn’t seem to matter anymore. Perhaps he needed to sweep the past away. Perhaps I have been unfair to not understand my old friend’s side.

I saw this earlier friend when I recently travelled back to the homeland. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in over 15 years and it surprised me how easily we slipped back into conversation. We talked for 3 hours over lunch about many things, about music, about our marriages, about mutual friends, about the old days. Almost like neither of us had ever left home or lost touch. . . but I have had no communication or replies since, and again I have tried.

No contact. None.

I heard or was told somewhere along the line that there can be no true communication between two people, no real friendship, no love, familial or otherwise, no meaningful interaction with God, and no honesty without mutual vulnerability that stems from trust.

On the whole, I agree with that. You, reader, of all people, if you visit here regularly, know that I can be quick to risk vulnerability, and I’m sure I do it for that reason. And generally I have trusted you with that vulnerability, though I may not even know you. Perhaps too quick to trust in strangers, too quick to establish impossible relationships between writer and reader. But for the most part I have found that in doing so, I have been greatly rewarded with the friendships that I have both reinforced and have found. By friends that see my blemishes, and ’stick around’. I’d rather show those blemishes, as I’ve never been any good at hiding. I’m always found out.

But where there is trust, there is vulnerability and where there is vulnerability there is a risk of rejection, like with my earlier friend, and where there is rejection, there is hurt. I guess I got my hopes up after the reconnection.

There’s a part of me, actually, that doesn’t mind being rejected, as long as it’s early on in getting to know someone, as long as it happens before I have made myself too fragile in the face of the prospect of that rejection. If I say “this is who I really am” and you reject me, before I have a chance to lose too much, that’s ok. I can accept that. But if I spend years establishing a friendship, I will feel like my vulnerability has been trampled on under foot if they suddenly turn and walk the other way. (Thus an old, perhaps bitter, poem, written to an old friend, who didn’t ’stick around’.)

So why do I put myself out there? I guess, because I think that if I do, put myself out there, warts and all, and you keep coming back to read, or to speak to me, or to waste/spend your time with me, then perhaps you won’t reject me. But there’s always a chance with friends who aren’t honest with each other that the secret of warts will be found out and the rejection is sure to follow. That kind of rejection hurts because it is never expected. So, I guess I’d rather show my warts. Because I know they’ll be found out anyway.

I write all of that because I was reassured by my university friend after our phone call the other evening, that my warts aren’t so repugnant and there would be no rejection today. I write this, not to mourn a lost friendship, but to celebrate a good one. When I wrote that poem so many years ago, a rejection was fresh and raw, and I was still willing to reestablish a friendship. But after talking to and being reassured by my other friend, it has reinforced the idea that I think I’ll just concentrate on the friends who ’stick around’.

—————————————————-
“Time it was and what a time it was it was,
A time of innocence a time of confidences.

Long ago it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they’re all thats left you.”

it’s a strange thing.

it’s a strange thing to wake up one morning after twelve years in a practical drug induced coma and find that nothing hurts anymore. Just that quickly.

No, not a coma, because there was still life there, just an altered one. More of a zombie, than a coma. It’s a complex explanation, what I mean by that, but it doesn’t feel that urgent to elucidate right now. Suddenly, I don’t feel that I have to.

My friends haven’t even relised. People are still acting towards me as if I worry, as if I’m anxious or sad. They say “oh don’t worry… blah blah blah” and pass on pieces of advice to help me through the crisis. . . when I’m no longer actually in one. They mean well. But’s it’s clear that my old state of anxiety made others anxious, and I am sorry to have been a burden. I don’t know who I am yet, myself, so I don’t say anything and I smile and nod. . . and wait until either I’m better at explaining or anybody wants to know enough to ask me something about it.

I have very little memory other than things that I have written either on my blogs or in my journals, and I don’t necessarily currently want to review.

Recently, after I woke up, I got curious as to what had happened, so I went to my doctor and asked to be made a print out of every perscription drug that I had been perscribed since 1997 and the date ranges that I was on each. This is a small charge, but my right to ask for under the Data Protection Act.

The print out came to 50 pages.

450 individual perscriptions, some repeated for years, some one offs.

I counted 38 oral medications, 22 topical skin allergy treatments, 20 individual perscriptions for 7 different antibiotics and 6 different anti depressants perscribed over 12 years (one of which, I had been on for several years and at several different times, but is now removed from the market, because patients started dying of liver failure while being on it).

Some of the drugs were as benign as moisturising lotion and ibuprofen, others as strong as pethidine, immunosupressants, an anti-narcoleptic and 3 different antipsychotics (percribed to me not for mental health reasons, but because they were known to have helped in various MS symptom treatment, like pain and virtigo. And no, they didn’t help me.) just to name a few.

Plus the list did not include any medication that I had been given during my 4 or 5 lengthy stays in hospital or scripts written directly by my consultants.

I have researched the side effects of each one and looked at the number of various ‘drug cocktails’ I was on and also tried to align what I was taking when different things happened in my life, and the pattern is shocking. I feel like I can be less hard on myself for having achieved so little over that time. I am aware that several of the things that I was on, and combinations thereof, nearly killed me. Litteraly, not figuratively. It feels a bit traumatising to realise that, and I’m not fully able to think about that yet.

This morning I sneezed and took an anti-histamine and my daily multivitamin. That was all I took. I’m ‘clean’.

I’ve weaned off of everything else, even the self injections.

It’s all out of my system and my brain and body has now got used to making and using it’s own chemicals again. (brains stop doing it for themselves after having it done for them after awhile.)

I feel good.

I haven’t had a panic attack since 18th of July, and I’m not even anxious about possibly having one anymore. I barely remember what it feels like. That doesn’t sound like a long time. But the difference is amazing!

I can pray again for the first time in a very long time. I won’t get into the spiritual side of all of this right now, but there is one. I don’t recognise myself, but I’m happy to wait… because for the first time in 12 years, I’m calm enough to do that. I’m hoping that I actually have another 12 to wait in.

It will be good to meet you all. . . again.

A friend charged me recently with being cryptic in this blog. I know that his accusation was just, and thus the grin to myself as I recall it. So why should I write at all, if I’m not going to tell the whole story?

Memory is fickle and understanding is unreliable. If these memories read as a fiction to you, then I look forward to the day that they will also look so to me.

This chapter to my story is coming, perhaps even has come, to a close, yet my naivety is not grand enough to be fooled into thinking that the book will be shelved and forgotten for all time. That is not how the book of life works, but then, I know now that I never did know how life works.

At all.

I have discovered fatal flaws in the memories that I had once believed that I had. And strange to find that I’m not that bothered to have been wrong. For when everything had looked so bleak, to have the slate wiped clean can be a relief.

I had not known that the bags I had been carrying had never been mine to carry, and that I had never been meant to lift them onto my shoulders.

It is all a bit lighter now. And starting the journey over, though daunting, is ok.

I feel like i’ve been gone a long time. I feel that I have not spoken to you in an age, dear reader, though it has been only days, not even a week. Though when so much can happen in one afternoon (not today, nor yesterday, but not long ago), it feels that you have not seen others in a long, long time. if ever before. and it will require new eyes, in both directions, to see at all.

I think that I have been gone longer than anyone could have known. For 17 years, I have been gone, but just as the wrongly accused is released from prison late in life, one can not walk free as the same person who was arrested in their youth.

It is good to be back, to be here. . . and to know the place for the first time.

. . . through the unknown remembered gate
when the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning. . .

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.”

t.s. eliot

Have been reading curiously through an old journal from 1997. What a facinating journey! Have just read:

Monday, January 13, 1997
As I was standing at the pier watching the waves on the rocks, I looked up and saw M and A standing a way off. I know that A saw me, but he said something to M and they both turned and walked the opposite direction. I think I would have turned and walked away too had I been them. The ‘me’ they knew was a strange creature. . . problem is that she is no longer me. So I do not mind having been snubbed by them, for I know they only snubbed the person they thought they saw standing there. . . not me.

How shockingly gracious of me!

I stood on the old whitewashed, wooden, wrap around porch with the two squeeky porch swings and the chimes blowing gently in the breeze and felt something well up in my throat. And the ancient general store next door where I used to run my fingers through vats of nails, bolts and washers as a child, as so many generations of children did before me, stood empty with a large “For Sale” sign in the window. The soda fountain, deserted.

The place, the old towering Victorian mansion, I had so often played there as a little girl. Just as I had on the farm accross the river, with the acres of cornfields and rusted, antique machinery, the hummingbird feeder and the stray cats, the dog lead, belonging to collies long dead, lying limp on the gravel.

And the family. The family were always there. The family were always there, and difficult.

The women collecting in the kitchen, to swap gossip, coupons and recipes. The men in the livingroom by the wood fire arguing politics and religion, with a freshly piqued anger that could strip the wood panelling with their curses, determined to win their battles at all costs. When nobody won, the misery of failing health and old age was always a comfortable armchair to retreat to. The children looking for cats and dogs and playing hide and seek in the barn, blissfully unaware of consequences of the battles that were being engaged in in the liiving room. The women pretending that their lives were not engulfed in the wars fought by elderly men and their slightly younger apprentices in these matters, who looked to the faltering wisdom of years to guide them as they clung to their Budweisers and foul mouths for ammunition. The children just accepted and ignored. Until they were older. I left. Most didn’t.

Both places were void of human life on that day that I returned, but the ghosts came in their cavelries to trample the unfaithful heart who had left them so many years before. I never had said good bye. And now there was no one to say good bye to. No one was at home that day, and I stood breathing the memories with dry and silent tears invisible on my cheeks. I held it back, partly for the sake of myself, partly for the sake of the woman who uncomfortably journied with me that day.

I don’t quite know why it overwhelmed me that day, but something happened. Something changed. I think I said good bye.

I had a leaving party before I left on my recent trip. It was kind of a strange thing to do, as I was coming back, and I knew it at the time, but I still felt like I had to do it. I knew that there was a good bye in this trip somewhere, but to feel it so soon, before I had even stepped on a plane, was odd and confusing. It was decisive. It felt as large as the final battle.

I didn’t understand it at the time, and was aware that I was acting strangely to everyone; the party, saying good byes, hugging people, sitting on my own in the park, looking whistfully at the ducks and feeling so sad, like i would never come back. It felt like I was leaving, like the little death that I had to die to come here to begin with. I had a return ticket and my travel plans and knew that realisticly and sensibly, it was rediculous, but still it felt somehow like i was leaving, like what I had done so carelessly before.

I know now that I was just feeling, experiencing, what I was always going there to do, but would not be allowed to express while there. I know now, that I did leave here for the last time, because now I am somehow different.

You see, the first time I left the homeland, I never said good bye. I just got on a plane and left. I never looked back. I convinced myself for practically a generation that it had never exsisted. Now that I’ve been back there and have felt the ghosts, recognised their monuments and paid hommage to their memories, I can no longer deny any part they have in my own history, the part they played in making me.

The soldiers in that war have almost all died. But those places, those battlefields remain. They’re where I came from. And I’ve finally begun to say a propper good bye.

haven’t been able to write much today. lots to say, three entries begun, just can’t seem to complete them right now.

I run to where you will not be
Amongst the shelves of poetry
The dusty worn out libraries
That live inside my mind

I’m here but hope you will not see
I hide from you and look for me
Where silence and the voice agree
For once I understand

Have been scouring my old writing books, notepads and journals, and the journey has been facinating. Perhaps I’ll find a starting point? Perhaps I kept them to begin with because I used to think that there was something there worth not throwing out. I’ve thrown so much out.

I don’t mind looking back. Sometimes I find it more hopeful than looking forward.

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest, and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” — Marcel Proust – Rememberance of Things Past

I returned to my homeland to find, to my surprise, that strange things, small things, unimportant things, were suddenly strange, big, important, distant and annoying things to me.

Friendliness. Speaking. I hated being approached in a shop. Something that my chosenland has taught me. We do/should not engage in conversation with others unless we want or need something from them, and therefore should generally avoid making too much contact with the outside. There are people who speak a lot. . . and we’re not meant to like or trust them.

“Hello! Can I help you?” I felt violated.

“Those are two for one today, by the way.” I was certain I would be exploited.

“Isn’t it hot today? I can’t believe these temperatures in April!” No, I’m not going to buy whatever it is you want me to in order to make me cooler!

Why had I become so suspicious, so skittish, so warry, so paranoid, so certain that friendliness was only a mask to cover manipulation? Did I act like this most of the time now? I do. I don’t speak to anyone unless they are ‘approved’, ‘vetted’, ‘ok’. How did did friendliness for friendliness’s sake become “hello my name is… what do you do? weather’s terrible isn’t it? well, mustn’t grumble.” Certain of the worst. And so used to mistrusting people that I even suspect the worst from vetted friends now.

what a way to live.

by the middle of my second week in the homeland, i began to fall easily back into my old way of acting, of being friendly. i began to realise that random conversation was no more than random conversation, and we all have to make it through the day in some way, and being friendly sure beats being stand-offish.

and i began to chat back. no one asked me to buy anything.
“ok, just let me know if you need any help.”

I got chatting to the lady in the candle shop and told her that I was only visiting, told her where I came from and where I live now. More information than some people I’ve known for months or years know. I told her: “I don’t need to have ‘things’ from my home country around my house, I don’t need to speak the language or eat the food. I just want it to smell like home.”

And I do, I realised, I want the smell of hazelnut coffee and scented candles and cinnamon and apples and lilacs and books in the air when I walk through the door. Those smells have more power to strike a chord with my heart than any story or even photographs.

I bought some candles from her. And she never once asked me to.

well, i’ve been back in the homeland for nearly two weeks now. it has been the most overwhelming trip, and i will need some time alone before i can attempt to think about or describe it. i will return to the chosen land in just a couple days now, and it will be interesting to see what ‘changes’ (in how many ways) may come about because of my time here.

memory can be difficult to understand or explain, but let me tell you, it’s palpable to experience.

i broke somebody’s heart once.

at least it was broken for a short while. i broke it and passed it on to someone else to fix, which admidtedly was a fairly irresponsible thing to do, not gluing up after myself and all. but i was young, and young people do this. you’ve probably done it too. it’s not an unusual occurance of the human condition.

there was nothing acrimonious about it. i didn’t throw it accross the floor at him, or at least that was never my intention to do so. it was just that, well, like i said, we were young. and people do this. people learn in childhood how to do jigsaws, and by the time we are young adults we generally have a pretty good idea which pieces fit and which ones don’t. we try some pieces, but of course sometimes they simply don’t fit.

So as life moves on, in time we all try to arrange ourselves into the chaotic jigsaw we call ‘life’, and generally we try to stay near to the other pieces that fit. pieces that fit into us, and us into them. and we generally lose track of those that never fit. all friends and lovers work this way, or at least i believe them to. even friendships sometimes don’t fit, always through all time, and we lose track.

we may not want to, but we do. and sometimes it makes me sad. along with jigsaws when i was a child, i was read books and was taught that all stories have a happy ending. in my childhood world, you could break someone’s heart, and if you said sorry and picked up the pieces and glued them back together, everybody could be friends and happy again.

and of course we know, that simply isn’t true. not every story does have a happy ending and everytime i am reminded of that it makes me a little sad, because that isn’t how i wanted my world to be.

i am returning to my home country next month for a visit. for the first time in nearly five years. I thought I would get to see him again for the first time in about 12 years, and maybe even say sorry, and i never meant to, and have a coffee and a laugh and a lets all be friends and happy because we’re not young and foolish anymore and we’ve found the right jigsaw pieces that fit together and we don’t have to worry anymore and isn’t it nice to be all grown up and everything (which i know, is an ironic thing to say to end such a childish and fantastical picture).

but i won’t get to. i found out this morning that he gets shipped out to afghanistan the day before i arrive. and i was a little sad.

i sit back and take a sip of my glass of merlot, click onto my favourite live radio stream from back home and look at the scattered mess of papers, books, laundry, phones, plates, camera lenses and blister packs of various tablets. i didn’t use to be this disorganised or this much a mess. the fatigue has hit an all time high (or is it low?) this year.

i relise now that i’m listening to the seemingly endless pleadings of a public radio fundraising drive, though the promise of it giving way to music is ever present yet never delivering. i switch it off

this is my first weekend completely alone since the Flower Child came to me in January. She and her dad have gone to Granny and BawPaw’s for the weekend leaving me to my own devices. my own devices tonight include a tub of ben and jerry’s, a laptop and the aforementioned glass of wine. yes, it sounds both decadant and pathetic at the same time, and to me as well. actually, the weekend also includes a trip to London and a trip to be seen by a private Dr who seems to be the only person in this country who will stick his neck out to perscribe a treatment that has been FDA approved since the mid 80s in America. . . but being British, we like our tick boxes. if a treatment doesn’t cost much, drug companies won’t fund research because there’s nothing in it for them or their stakeholders. if there’s no research, there’s no NICE approval. no NICE approval, no treatment.

the treatment i’m after (low dose naltrexone) has few side effects, has reams of anicdotal evidence (foul words in the NHS) is well known and an an approved treatment for MS in America and an approved treatment at higher doseages for other, unrelated problems in the UK. so the lack of British run drug trials doesn’t really concern me. my GP has even told me that if I can get the first perscription from this Dr. and I do well on it, she’ll perscribe it for me herself. but as it is, she won’t touch it with a 10 foot barge pole.

seeing the Dr. tomorrow may not be wrong, or risky, or even illegal. . . but it does feel nicely rebellious.

i keep telling myself not to get my hopes up. i keep telling myself not to focus on false hopes or the last three years of progression. i keep trying to remind myself that i accepted all of this a long time ago and that i finished that cycle of grieving and what’s the point of going back there now? but this isn’t a static disability. everyday i wake up to the same demands but with a continually fluctuating (and mostly waning) set of resources. you don’t usually notice the progression until one day you wake up to a lightning bolt. usually it starts with a memory, something you once did, places you used to go, things that used to be a part of you but are no longer. now when your friends go hiking, you sit in the pub with a book and wait for them to meet you afterwards. now when you go shopping you take the car into town rather than walk. you haven’t sat on a bike or walked a dog in years. now you hold books and letters closer to your eyes to read, and that’s just occasionally when the words aren’t moving all over the place. you can’t put your finger on it, but you feel different, older than you think you should feel. tired and weary and fatigued.

and you suddenly realise in that lightning bolt of memory. . . . . . it didn’t use to be like this.

i promise i’ll never be one who wastes her life waiting for ‘the cure’ that the majority of the MS community hangs their hat on. i’ll never adopt the old Society slogan of ‘Fight MS’ (i always said it would only mean fighting myself). but every now and then. . . someone breathes the hope of getting something back, just a little bit, and i guess i’m willing to take the risk of being disappointed. . . again.

the cat starts to scratch the wicker basket in the corner. i click the radio stream back on and thankfully hear music. jeff buckley sings cohen hauntingly to bring me back to myself and the mess of my bedroom. i pull myself back together, stop remembering or imagining or hoping, and start to gather together the laundry.

baby i’ve been here before
i’ve seen this room and i’ve walked this floor
i used to live alone before i knew you
i’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
but love is not a victory march
it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah

hallelujah…