Eventualities Collapsed

I know why I haven't posted in well over a year.

The foremost reason is that I had wanted to post more of what I had written for Eventualities Cordon. At first, I wasn't getting around to it. And then, the place where those writings were stored was deleted, and I irrevocably lost them.

While I don't think any of the lost fragments rivaled the introduction for poetic artistry, I was nevertheless very proud of them and for a long time... Perhaps I was hoping to eventually rewrite them, but didn't find the energy.

As to the year and a half or so it has been...

Glancing back at the 'Blessings' I was appreciating before the big silence... My mood is wry. The relationship I was giving up on then, I'm far from finished being angry and heartbroken about. The household of people who were doing a good job of not taking it out on me when we were in conflict? Well, first one and then another wound up blaming me in pretty awful terms for the way that I push for concrete answers a body is willing to admit to, that clear and steady "No" that I abhor to have to infer from cowardly implication. And I was asked to leave.

Eventualities Cordon's premise offered me an entire nutritious diet for thought. Exploring the question of what I would do, from where I was then in the real world, given the sudden power of particular types to exploit, gave me a powerful way to explore and examine what I want. Although I do not have the power that Something has, when I think of what that the transcendent and untouchable self would do with a real-world situation, it does tend at least to suggest a direction in which my own impression of justice and closure lies. It is not usually too difficult to think of lesser moves in a similar direction which might have some fruitful results. It makes it easier to forgive myself when I feel helpless, knowing what I wish I could do, but either cannot or dare not.

I startled myself to tears, seeing what directions my thoughts took, given the premise of power, without changing the context of my life otherwise. What problems I wished I could solve. I wished to heal my mother's cancer, and her mind. This was more apt than I realized at first. Seeing that desire for resolution, seeing by it that I was still able to find a compassion for her underneath the pain and bitterness, I found my way to visiting her in hospital. The trip taught me a lot, and one of the things it taught me was that although I had not properly realized it growing up, she was, and knew she was, cognitively impaired from brain damage, acquired in a car accident as a child. The effects were subtle. She was capable of being charming enough to get by in most social situations. But the solidity of a well-reasoned logical conclusion was often not within her grasp.

I wished to heal her mind, and learned that I had not realized how right I was about it being damaged.

Even just this changed the context of a lot for me. I heard some stories from her sister about what had really happened, those many years before I was even born - those things which were really far more of the cause of what I have suffered in my mother's treatment of me, rather than any sort of justice, or even any actual conclusion on her part that I deserved the way she treated me. Weakness, not malice. Although weakness of a kind that can look a lot like malice, when you don't know what you're seeing, being too young and inexperienced of the world to know what to look for.

While I was traveling to see my mother, I stopped in to see my father as well. It had been fifteen years, did I mention that? Perhaps more than fifteen years since I had seen either of them. They were so old now, heads growing threadbare and skeletal. Shrunken and warped, but unmistakably recognizable. A sort of diminished caricature of the faces I had known. It can be like that, when one does not see someone for years. If you age together with them, the changes come slow and subtle, but when it has been a long time, you see all of them aggregated together at once and the contrast jars.

My father, too, developed cancer. It took a turn for the terminal at about the same time I was asked to leave my rooming house approximately a year after my short visit, so I asked to go to him and live in the unfinished cabin he'd mostly built in the back woods, to be near him while there was still any time to spend. And so I did live there for four months or so. We played cards frequently. We were on better terms by the end of those few months than at the beginning, there's that much to credit at least. I injured my knees walking across the uneven ground. They are not recovered yet, but struck by weakness and the occasional twinge.

My father is dead now. He died while I was away to help my American friends with a move of house. I got on the phone to be in some vague sense virtually "present" at his dying-day. I could hear little, but I hope it was a comfort to have me there in this minimal sense, and to have had me there more substantially in the few months we had.

My father would semi-regularly have friends over to listen to playlists composed by a certain artist he enjoyed, and dance. I also assemble playlists. I take significant pride in them. He never listened to mine. They are not such easy listening, and I wanted to see him hearing them, see what impact they might have. We didn't find the time.

The month is August, but in another sense, it is a season of winter for me now. A time of endings and of barren places, of long and difficult cold. A time of numbing wounds and numbing distractions. A time of grim endurance. Of waiting to see what comes with the new wind. Of needing time for the seeds of potential to germinate under the soil of my subconscious before they dare put up shoots of new hopes, new paths, and show me what there is to want next.