Dear Memory: the Farmers' Path

I turn to this blog again for the moment, in order to speak as I would to Eoin, if I were free to speak to him. Writing to a memory, in a diary left open for anyone to read, if they find it, if they care.

Dear memory...

I return to my schoolwork with some diligence, some gratitude for the occupation, and mostly an air of restless boredom, as of waiting for a bus or a flight during my travels; a long space of time I must endure, and so I do, occupying myself as I can, or sitting still and watchful, tired; my mind flitting forward to where I am going, the processes of getting there; flitting back to the places from which I've come, and resting for brief moments on the experience of waiting, the in-between state, the present with its burdens and fatigue and expectations, a trial long but not difficult; I have little doubt of doing well in my courses, so long as I put in the time. Voldemort slowly stirring a cauldron, perhaps.

-----

The other night, I ran a D&D game that I had put many of my hours into designing during the strike; a project while I had little other structure, a way to engage with friends, perhaps make a few new ones. Provide some measure of entertainment, support some kind of community, take some measure of fulfillment for my need to be of use to someone.

The first adventure space was intentionally simple, but still, we played five hours or so, into the morning, to finish a big fight even though most of us had grown very tired. The tone was more joking than I had hoped, a bit; I can seek to moderate it to a more serious tone in the future if I put my mind to it. I think all the players had fun, although one was a stranger and did not talk much, in the face of much familiar chattering between the rest of us who knew one another already. I saw in retrospect that I had not been applying cover rules where I should have been. However, the party did get their impressive victory surviving a tough fight, uncovered clues toward their goal, and established the first themes of inter-character interactions. I worked with a player to level up a character, having gained a level faster than his companions due to starting a bit behind.

I didn't mind all that much in the grand scheme of things that I missed classes the next day, having forgotten to take my phone off silent so it could wake me up.

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I had a test today, covering the various uses of Excel one of my classes has focused on. I forgot that it was today, and did not find it notable except as another thing I submit to because it is to be done, with neither any particular anxiety nor a great deal of interest. It is part of the waiting to me.

Last week, I went to speak to a counselor, as I had planned. I spoke of my feelings about you, dear memory. The surrender of the resolution I found that I had made. I asked her to check me if she saw any sign that my intent was reckless or foolish. No; she could see that I was deeply affected, that my eyes shone and glittered with emotion when I spoke of what you meant to me, and in that light, she could understand my resolution to make my way back to Ireland, marked that I intended to take my care and ensure my means carried me there steadily.

I say surrender. This may seem like a strange word to give to resolution. I say surrender, because I was at war within myself, and that conflict had been bad for me; war always scars the territory on which it rages. In order to bring the constant drain of the fight to peace, I would have to surrender on one side or on the other. Sacrifice myself to myself, for wisdom and power, like the legend of Odin.

So I surrender, and accept that this is how my story must go, for the time being; for fey glamour, the essential element of fairy stories, that strange vividness beside which any colour is faded and grayed, the stirring resonance without which life is merely existence, that force which renders any move aimless unless steered by the pull of its particular compass...
I have always been prone to feel this way, a strange impossible wistfulness for something so nebulous that I might not even have ever had this unknown thing, I may not know the shape of it, but there is a wounded place in me where it is missing. Perhaps this is part of the reason I always loved fairy stories, which captured that sense so well.

And for this particular chapter of my life, the glamour is upon you, dear memory. It whispers your name, your smile, your voice, and all the things we have done together. I never really wanted to turn away from what my heart demands; those things you said that gave me the uncertain and fearful impression that you would rather I leave you behind are no longer said to me, I can begin to forget them.

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Today, my mind wandered back to one place in particular. The farm roads I showed you that forked through the bands of trees and between the fields. Wooded enough to soothe some of my desire for the deep forests of my youth; open and soft enough to stretch and learn your art beside you, take stance and step and instruction. Secluded enough to sing without shyness, and long enough to walk for hours.

I remembered sitting for a while on the rocks where the stream came under the path, and listening to you speak of your grandparents and their stories, and the places familiar to your youth.

I remembered again the magnificent mystery of the destroyed car we found there, the delight of finding every clue; the melted glass, the ash, the metal bent out by impact and by blasts of heat, the marks of how far it may have been dragged off to clear the path, the shell cases in the bushes nearby. It was a great and joyful thing to me, sharing that investigation with you, seeing you just as fascinated, someone who did not tire and bore of it much before I did. Someone with whom I could share the joy and discovery and the patient work of unraveling a real riddle.

I remember navigating past those deep mud puddles, and talking of the past. There were things I told you along that road, with eyes glancing to and away with uncertainty and embarrassment, parts of my story that are so personal to me that I do not think I ever shared them here. A sort of experience I didn't expect you to have much respect for, more superstitious than you are or care to be. But you did not pass judgement then.

I remain convinced that in all my memories of the time I spent with you, although I was sometimes stiff and intolerant in some conviction, and sometimes so wild and desperate with pain and isolation that I could not let you reach me, the only time you ever seemed to judge me or show any disappointment was when I let my pain run over into spite.

I do not know whether I ever thanked you properly for that. I cannot say enough how I love you, and I love you for checking me when I crossed that line as much as I love you for forgiving me everything else up to it with such easy grace. You had the conviction to hold me to my own values when I fall apart so much that I begin to forget them. I want that in a companion.

Forgiving Mentors, Relentless Longing

It is the second day of classes resuming, and much of the miserable doubt and worry of the empty time during the faculty strike is lifting surely as our professors reassure us, cut out small pieces of the courses, and focus the first week largely on review. Every gesture shows understanding and mediation for the difficulties of resuming after such a long interruption. My intermediate accounting professor, having read an email I sent him telling him that my morale and confidence had been very low trying to navigate his online course with the textbook alone, thanked me for my refreshingly candid words and invited me to sit in on classes in person. It is all a soothing balm to my troubles.

Sadly, the professors themselves may have had little relief from theirs. The strike's disputes were not resolved, and there is some worry that this might all repeat in another four years, after the new contracts expire again, and they must meet to agree on terms of renewal again.

My spirits are higher, and I look forward to moving into a very nice house directly across from the campus, the nicest I have lived in... Looking back, and looking back further, it may be fair to say that it is the nicest looking and most modernly appointed house I have ever lived in in Canada. My parents' houses were a welcome home to me, but simple. My new room will have an ensuite bathroom, and the kitchen has a central island and two big fridges to accomodate I think five female tenants.

Through all that, though, my thoughts remain restlessly and inexorably drawn back to Eoin and distant Éire. It feels to me as though the memory of him stands always behind my shoulder. When my mind wanders, it wanders to dreams of return, and meeting with him again, with much tear and hope and fear, desperate to know what his answer will be...

It has been three weeks since our last goodbye, and since the law of silence has been set between us. These last few days have tested my will to adhere to that law. I felt that I was doing fair well, for a little while, at looking to my own life alone, although it was a miserably empty stretch of life indeed with neither love nor work nor school to sustain me. I took up to make a game to run for friends, which I have nicknamed the SCDP game, a Super Casual Drop-in Pick-up game of Pathfinder such that I can run it and invite people to play it without a set group or a set schedule. I finally finished writing all the stats for available player characters to the website I'll be using just a day or two before the return to classes, and I have not played it yet. I am not certain I will even get the chance, but the project was something with which I might hope to enjoy the social attentions of friends.

At some point, perhaps a week ago... I lost track of the empty days for a while, so I am not sure... I was re-watching a bunch of video reviews, and one of them ambushed me with the high, haunting and familiar voice of Loreena McKennitt and the sweet melancholy violins of Irish tradition behind her. I knew the song, The Old Ways, I had heard it and loved it and felt magnificently drawn by it from my early youth. It hit me like a hammer blow, and broke open yet again any thought that I could deny my desperate want to go back there, back over the bounding waves to the distant shore of a land I have always loved, in music and legend, and the man I loved who lives there.

Eoin could not promise me any answer. It has been three weeks since I last heard his voice, and now at last doubt begins to creep back, and I begin to worry and wonder. We knew each other scant three months, and it is already past that long ago. Even if I do make my way back to that great isle, and see his face again... If it is a year, if it is several, how could I expect him to look on me as other than a sad and obsessed woman whose storms and ferocity he may have been glad to be rid of?

But. I know with enough confidence to say that I know... whatever may happen in the coming years, at the time three weeks ago when he bid me leave him be, Eoin was yet undecided. If he had in his mind any certain answer, I know with confidence he is too good and honest a man not to have given it. When last he spoke to me, there was love enough in him, and perhaps also longing of his own, that he was not set against seeing me again someday. He was not sure what he would feel. If it had been more honest to tell me he would rather never see me again, for all the pain it may have cost him, I am sure he would have said it anyway.

So. What his answer will be, I cannot know until I have heard it from his own lips. I cannot hear it until I go there, for until I am there, he cannot know himself whether he will be willing to bring me close again. As I walk out from my house into the cold, bare young-winter, gazing up at the steely light where the sun shines through the thinnest parts of the grey clouds, returning at long last to my studies with the weight of my work things at my back... As I walk the cold and formal halls of my college, which now seems too large and too impersonal... I know that Eoin is not the only or the first man for whom I have felt this utter determination, the deep and aching sense that I would be willing to do nearly anything to see him smile at me again. I feel rather as though I will set my determination to heading there, but do it all with a sheepish apology to him, and hope he will not feel my devotion cheap because he has not been the only one to inspire it.

I know my will, though mighty, is shifting. I know I may look back on these words with embarrassment and a shake of the head that I was so caught up in love and grief. Still, from here, as of now, I am determined by all the madness of my heart and a relentless longing in my bones to go back to Ireland, to distant Éire, and find out what his answer will be. I know that to do any different while I feel as I do would be to rend apart my nature, to bury my desire and smash my compass, and live as someone I am not. It would not be a story worth telling. Better to go, full of all my courage and wild strength, and profess myself to him as simply and as gently as I can, even if the answer I find is to be turned away as a nuisance, and go back to the rocky path of lonesomeness, to stalk on like a restless ghost and seek on anew for someone who will at long last stand and travel by my side.

So every day, whether I resist it or not, my thoughts wander back again when I am not looking, and I imagine living in love with him again; or I imagine troubles there might be in trying to get in touch after I land; or I imagine cautiously studying his eyes when he first sees me again, asking how things have changed, what shape his life has taken, and trying to learn whether there is room for me in it; Or of being greeted with a kiss and falling into desperate tears, begging to know if he meant by it that I would be given a chance to stay this time. Sometimes I imagine talking to a border guard of my intent to immigrate. Sometimes I imagine talking to a representative of an accounting firm for which I intend to work in Ireland in an interview about my reasons for coming. But it is always something, and it always pulls my view East, across the ocean, with the call of the bounding sea.

Drifting in Snow; The Season of the Scavenger

Eoin weighed particularly heavy on my mind today. I went walking in the first snow of the year that I have seen. It was beautiful, and I was happy to stay out in the cold until some areas of my skin began to feel slightly numb.
I had wanted to send him pictures when the real snows came.
Pictures of winter as it is in Canada.

There was a particular street, where streetlamps positioned between pairs of trees offered a gorgeous image that I felt, if I had the materials, I should like to paint. The bare, arching branches curled over the top of the sidewalk, giving it the beautiful natural-tunnel look of paths between trees, but the light cast the trees against one another in alternating light and shadow; the light in front of every second tree so that its part was cast in beige, and behind the others, so that their trunks and branches were dark silhouettes, and layered like that; light, dark, light, dark, light... Giving the path's length gorgeous texture in contrast.

A friend asked me what was my favourite part of winter.

I don't think I have a favourite part, per se. I prefer cooler temperatures, and so I appreciate that winter is a season in which I am not likely to feel overheated. I often tend to see seasons, much as I see other things, in the things they symbolise. Winter is endings, death and rebirth, rest and repose, the elegance of the lifeless and the dangerous beauty of unforgiving forces of nature, such as ice and snow.
It may also stand for austerity, the time when nothing grows being a natural time of scarcity, but humankind in this country is now divorced from such things.
I suppose I see it as the difficult season, and that appeals to my need to be challenged and face adventure.
In much the same way, spring represents birth and renewal, autumn represents change and shares the motif of endings with winter, and the motif of plenty and harvest with late summer.
Spiritual symbolism. I do it.

Winter speaks to me of wandering, which touches me more and seems to me less obvious.
But it is an ancestral symbol, too. When nothing grows, predators hunt and prowl, wandering farther from their homes to find sustenance.
Humankind are predators, and do so as well.
It is the time when scarcity may force conflict, and unwelcomeness shows its ugliest face; some may be cast out to freeze or starve if they cannot make their own way.
For both of these reasons, perhaps, it feels like the season of the wanderer and the outsider, that one who must always seek and cannot be satisfied for long with what it finds, for even as today's hunger is satisfied, there is always again tomorrow's empty belly to fill as well.
Of course, this time of difficulty is marked with revelry and defiance once we make it through a significant enough chunk to feel we have some measure of victory.
Hardship brings joy at overcoming it.

I certainly identify with the symbols of the wanderer and the scavenger, so in a way I feel that this is my season. The cold is a welcome discomfort to me, a connection to the sense that this cold North land is my home, and a little challenge which makes weathering it more satisfying...
There is nothing quite like coming in out of a harsh cold.

To Love Left Behind

My perspective, the shape of my life in the context of memory and priority, bends around you like a center of gravity.
The time before I met you takes on the aspect of a prologue, the content of the story a few short and treasured chapters I wish I could relive.
When I lay down in my bed, and am not thoroughly exhausted, I am disappointed by your inevitable absence, and accompanied by your memory.
However, the ghosts have grown more peaceful. I will not say they haunt me. In reflection...
My heart is sore, but it is a pain I can live with and appreciate, like the ache of muscles after exertion.
I am okay.

I remember your face, contorted in judgement and revulsion; not at me, but at the wounds in my mind which have hobbled me. Yes, that is one of the memories that stays with me. I cherish that understanding, seeing you sickened by that which stunted my growth; that you saw it as an awful thing is a tender and cherished measure of your respect for me.

I also remember your face smiling, as I so often saw it, and the context that gave this so much beautiful light. No, you told me, you were not someone who smiled a lot. But you often did when you were looking at me.

There was so very much that you did for me, and now...
You are a memory, to me, and a distant unknown actor. Somewhere, you are something, and it is not for me to know what.
Laying in bed, not quite exhausted, and keenly aware of the empty spaces under my blankets, the silence in my ears, the empty in my hand where I wish your hand would be... And I don't regret a thing.
Only perhaps, that it may take a lot of searching to find someone to fill those empty spaces now, after your legacy.

If by some chance you wind up reading this... Yes, it was probably the right thing to do. I have been recovering much more cleanly of late.
I am sad, and I miss you, and I can live with it.
You left me far healthier than you found me, old friend.

The Sun-in-Rags has its tribute for now. I am distant, I burn, I am not as I was.
I continue along my path, moving more slowly for a while.