Reciprocity. I Get Around To It Eventually.

Or... the snow is not melting quite so much as the news would have you believe.

Last year, during her trip, Vanessa sent a 'gift' (seen below), which, I can only assume, was meant to engender terrible jealousy.



Now, I reciprocate.

But, I doubt I'm prompting jealousy.


24 hours later? Looks almost exactly the same. I just can't escape that girl.



In other news, because I am so boring lately.... it's a game of Guess the Boy!

Hmph, no one wanted to play, hey?

On a Slightly Less ...Vicious... Note

A quick and dirty video of my 'new' apartment - that I've been in since July but only lived in since September...

It's Here.

LOVE. IT.

Play A Little Tune

God, I love this picture.


My sister, such a little monkey.

Remembrance

I swore into the Reserves last year on November 10th. According to the 'rules', I'm not allowed to have my Distinctive Environmental Uniform (or DEU's), in other words, my dress uniform, until after one year of service.

Apart from the shock that I've been around a year today, it's been very disheartening to know that the rules will not be 'bent' to have allowed me to have my dress uniform before Remembrance Day. I will go to my second Remembrance Day ceremony as a Reservist without being able to participate. That I will be there as a bystander, again.

Especially this year, when I understand so much more what it really means and in some ways, how it feels to be a part of this group of people.

Past, present and future. My future.

Last night I went out for a jog and when I came home, there was a black garbage bag on my front step.

I thought it was the long jacket that my stepmother was lending me and lifting it I thought, "Shit, did the woman give me her whole wardrobe?"

Tossing it on the bed I opened it up to find it was full of dress uniform pieces, representing 22 years of service, begged for me from a retiring woman by one of the girls at the unit.

I get the feeling that the pieces that actually fit me are the ones from the beginning of this woman's career but regardless, after a day of hemming, ironing and lint-brushing, Carla stopped by with all the trade specific buttons and pins, as well as a pair of her boyfriend's gloves, that I needed to complete a full uniform.

Tomorrow, I will be marching as part of the unit at the cenotaph our unit is attached to. It was built in 1920 to honor the soldiers of WWI.

I don't have the words to tell you how proud I am to be able to.

A Fog That's Creeping Into The Rooms of This Heart

What seems like a lifetime ago, and maybe it was, I used to write poetry.

The tortured poetry of a teenager.

One of the best birthday presents I ever had was when my friend Todd took a couple of my poems and wrote music to them and sang them to me on my birthday.

That would have been sometime in the early 90's. When I was in my early 20's.

Later on, a year or three later, my friend Rob went to the Persian Gulf and I would send him the poems I'd written.

He kept every one of them. To this day, I'm embarrassed as hell that someone has evidence of them.

He treasures them.

And, he tells me, one of them became a part of the DND (military) Stop Smoking Program (oh yeah, like I'm a poster girl for that).

I understand why. And I'm honored. But that poem writing girl is gone.

In fact, I'm not sure that the writer-girl even exists anymore. In any form. But, regardless....

These days? I write poetry not at all. I write what I think of as my 'essays' almost even less. It hurts.

I look back even at the titles I used to write back on RG and I hate that she seems to be gone, that witty girl.

Tonight, I can't write about the hospital. I can't tell you how some of the things I see there affect me. Maybe tomorrow.

But, I can give you a poem - the first poem I'd written in at least ten years and probably the last poem I will ever write - from RG, that I wrote for Matt, on a ferry.. moving away from him after the second time we'd been together.

That sometimes feels so close I could reach out and touch it all, again, before realizing that I never will. I miss it. I miss the feeling. I miss him, because he's the only one who's ever made me feel that way, in all of these years.

(aside: I can hear, in the bathroom, my watch alarm going off. The watch I wore in Basic this summer. It's 2:24 am here. Yes. And I remember what I have learned about life, about myself, about others, but still... I miss him and I am disappointed in myself - and him - still.)

Matt didn't really 'get' poetry.

I know I don't need to say it, but thank you so much for the last few days. Awesome. You fucker. It wasn't quite so easy walking away this time. What am I thinking? Feeling? I don't know, I think I need a few days to reflect, but I'm already looking forward to talking again.

I read the blog. I didn't quite get it, but that doesn't matter....although I was wondering what "one hot sentence" meant (is that bad etiquete to ask? You don't have to answer....not that you need me to tell you that).

You rock my world Jen. Thanks for being you.

Do you?

weak with longing
the hand moves above
the center of the flesh

trembles
and
descends

the entire world settles in,
the hand moves
smooths

delicious ease in every motion,
small secret smiles
against my neck

laying still,
I try to be empty, for once,
of words.

buffeted by the wind
I pick up the pen and touch my throat
I put it down again

I am thinking of you
listen
listen

A few words
A gift
One hot sentence

...and again.

A Visit To A Past Dimension

Blogspot is closing down my tons o' free hosted space (which allows me to link to simple html pages without this page template) and in thinking about how to reconfigure the Vault's contents to fit in here better... well, I've just been thinking.

I haven't quite worked out how to get it to display properly on it's own page and this particular one was set up this way for a reason. Bear with me, hey?

For now, it should ask you if you want to open it. Say yes.

It's called One.

Looking Behind Me.

I don't talk about Matt anymore. Have you noticed that? It's been a long time...since October and the trip to Aus, I guess.

Every day, I want to call him and tell him to come home. Still. Even though I think I wouldn't want him here anymore. Even though I wish he was. Even though I think he may want to be. Even though I think he wouldn't want to be.

Vanessa, who is right about SO many things, was right when she said that I would have to learn how to carry this. And I have.

Learning how to carry being loved like that, once, sadly doesn't make the burden of the carrying any less.

I have two things to say about this. One is actually Herself's words and not my own and the other? well, the other began with Herself's words and a reflection of my trip to Australia but, in the end, has nothing really to do with Matt at all (even though, convolutedly, it does.)

And everything to do with life.

It hurt so much that I couldn't look at it, at first.

The first week, I couldn't even think, really. Automaton. Repetitious exercises that feign interaction.

And no sleep.

A thought become physical in its own predawn, before it ever had been a thought. The pain of what had happened was so far from being realised that it was not yet a part of me. It was a red hot parcel that hissed and passed from hand to hand, while wondering what to do with it, how to choose the ways I'd let it burn me.

Then I tried wondering / abstracted delineation of the problem. How big is this thing? How much would it hurt me? How deep would it be likely to go?

Not daring to think the thoughts or experience the feelings - more a determined distance. Boxing up and wrapping a pain I hadn't begun to allow myself to feel. Ginger estimates of what I should avoid, of how carefullly I would have to tread.

It took awhile to be able to hold any of it in my head and feel the scald of remembering, and even then I couldn't let it through.

A thai massage, a brutal thumping and twisting of parts, a manipulation, a passive use of punishment as a means to restore. At the space between each thump, that was the size of what I allowed myself to remember.

Finite. Localised pain. Made violent, made physical.
Thump. That was when he --
Thump. That was not ever --
Thump. That was because I --
Thump. That was the silence --

Seventy five minutes of it to feel cleansed, to feel like the worst excesses of raw feeling had been beaten from heavy limbs. First time I slept in weeks. And slept. And slept. And grew sick.

And slept.

And gingerly thumbed through the nothing that lies in thge way of memory, in the after of raw pain.

When I can bear it, I will myself to recover, inside. Scabs. I try to make scabs.

Occasionally, I wouldn't have a choice - some chance careless interaction, some demand or apology or dismissal blooms cancerous in my email inbox, pixel-grin. Evil call to open me, open me, see what I have for you this time.

I have already protected myself, the core. Forty eight hours of feeling like the earth slipped, and bam I decide I am able to handle it. Decide I have to be able to handle it. Decide to decide this.

No choice. It destroys you, or you destroy it. And I have never yet surrendered.

A month in, I start layering on the defences, arming myself. Another email. He asks me for truth, for vulnerability, and it's like a knife wielding psychotic asking you to hold still and sit quiet while he sharpens the blade.

Suddenly it's other people who have the power to cut me. The guy who sends me flowers. The one who compliments. That guy, showing an interest. Forget it, I want to say. I never want that kind of interaction again.

And I get sick again. Real sick.

Kimo and J-- save mankind's reputation for me. They cut through his blisteringly aggressive silence, they show some actual concern.

As if I'm human. Or as if someone gives a shit, without wanting something back. Without the titfortat fake ownership of friendship.

And in the sickness, I get centred. I can't call it anything else. My world, out here in the bad, wide world, gets smaller and smaller, and the least of things grows more important. I become satisfied with less. I quiet down.

And after this, in the slow recuperative stages where I look up life, oblivious life in surprise, and wonder, because I smelt that, I heard that, I tasted that, and it had felt like I might never do so again.

It's only at night there's any problem.

With not sleeping. With writing long, accusatory explanations, on imaginary paper, in emotional ink, letters I will please god never send.

In the morning, my pillow's twisted and beaten and I don't remember anything but the gist ... the ghost ... the guesses ...

I remember, sometimes, that I used to write.

And I hate it. I hate that I can't anymore. I hate that these posts are so ...bad... compared to RG, compared to that passionate, ecstatic, articulate girl.

I vow to get back there. I do. Every day.

So I can tell you how I feel, in real words. So that I don't have to use other people's words to tell you how I feel. Sometimes, it seems like that's all I do lately.

It lessens me. It disappoints me.

Is it the familiarity of this place? Should I hide the things I write and then maybe they'll become real again? Did the simple act of coming online dwindle my ability somehow over the last two years or is the fundamental change in me?

I'm not sure I want to know the answer.

Regardless, onwards...

The post. You'll have to go there if you want to read the whole thing. Below, a comment I left, and the reply...

Jen&herboat | 09.06.06 | 10:38 pm

"But if life is spinning past you, if you´re all keyed and excited, if ... you don´t have space to digest it ... that´s not entirely living either."

That's a lot how the last four months feels like. And I want the time to sit and reflect and write the stories that are already fading so fast but, life and the need to continue those sad necessary things like ... getting paid... interfere. Always.

- Vanessa | 09.06.06 | 11:46 pm

Jen: Those stories won't fade, you know. They'll grow. Your story reminds me of a brilliant friend who explained to me something about her visit to India, before I went there. She said that she had thought she was visiting for a month or two, but actually India was still happening to her, several months after she returned. Anything which makes you question things, see them differently, works on your psyche long after the events have appeared to cease, I believe. (anything worth doing, in my mind, too) You're going to be processing and readjusting from all that's happened to you this summer for an age yet. If I know anything about you, I know that's true.

You ain't out of basic by a mile, in those terms ....

.. and: welcome back. The girl done :more: than good, as we say back home.

Then, days later, I start to understand that she's right. But she's wrong.

My trip to Australia last year? Not still happening. It wasn't even happening while I was there.

I may have been around, experiencing all kinds of pain, but I was never, ever there.

I learned nothing. I experienced nothing. I didn't question anything.

Was it worth doing? Should I have done it, then?

Yes.

Did it solve anything? Did it change anything?

No.

It only made me less.

In Carroll's Wonderland, Alice could smallify herself by sipping from a tube of something that said "DRINK ME", but in real life, when you do that, you only shrink inside.

That is the legacy of that trip.

It may be that I had to turn the pieces over and see if something glinted and sparkled under there and yes, some of it did.

His life. His friends. His existence. That existence that I should have had my place in. To see it? To experience it? After I had believed in it for so long.

I couldn't describe it then. I can't describe it now. Like a birthright cruelly and inexplicably denied. Now finally seen and felt but taken away from me without ever having had it. Unattainable. Perfect.

My time with Matt, now, is nothing but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me.

The trip, afterwards, carried me no distance at all - I've come to truly understand what it means when travellers say that no journey carries one very far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.

Basic training and all it involved took me an equal, if not farther, distance within.

Matt? The only place within to go, I'd already gone, that Matt was just perfect for everyone he was ever with. That he felt nothing while seeming like he felt everything.

How are you special within that framework? How do you carry the understanding that the only person you ever felt so deeply about was, fundamentally, a liar?

How?

There's a part of me that thinks that, if you really fall in love, you lose your own identity to some degree. You peg your life to someone who might at any time leave you. No matter how you make yourself seperate. If at the start you can live without them, and one day you find that you can't, hasn't that decreased you rather than increased you?

How do you work that out?

Thoreau suggested that longing may be the stirrings of remorse that we are not living up to our potential.

"We do not commonly live our life out and full; we do not fill all our pores with our blood; we do not inspire and expire fully and entirely enough... we live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion?"

I make the best effort I can to live. LIVE. Fully.

Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I fail.

My life is not a race.

My life is not something I am running from.

My life is not something I am yearning fruitlessly to define.

It's not something I'm running TO.

This time two weeks ago I knew who I was and what I was doing with my life. I knew what I believed in and what my morals were. My entire existence was neatly packaged in a lattice that was at once phenomenally strong and alarmingly delicate.

Much like the human body itself.

And then a member of my unit describes what really happened to him in Afghanistan.

What really happened.

And then I think about what Vanessa has said.

And then.

Matt spoiled me. It's what you do with yourself after you realize you've been spoiled that matters.

It's the life you make in the ruins.

It's what you do with yourself when you admit that you may never find that again.

And then.

So many things.

So many questions.

So many choices.

And then.

This is life.

I believe the route we choose each morning is of fatal importance.

And yet, every day, I need to invent my next step.