I got out of bed at 1:30pm as I was up until 4am, scared to sleep in my new dark now that Mom has left. What a terrible day yesterday was. I felt like Mom had left this world and I was completely unanchored of it as a result. I knew it was coming, but it was harder to hold myself together throughout the day, including when she was here, than I thought. On the bus to the way to the airport she saw my eyes fill with tears and she had to double check that I was, indeed, capable of crying. And I cried the day through, from the bus ride home, to the walk home, to the flat floor. In the living room I had a raging but fleeting feeling of destroying the furniture, because it didn’t belong to me. I didn’t belong anywhere in this country, to anyone, or anything, and it killed me.
I had an inkling of a panic attack and felt my skin tingling as if it were ever so slightly stretching away from me, like I was leaving my own body, like a cat’s spine raised. I smushed it and pushed it down; I couldn’t afford to lose control more than I already was.
All this made me ponder on whether stability was an illusion. Isn’t it true that at anytime our lives can be uprooted from our everyday comforts, including the comfort of other people? Can’t they leave us – whether by choice, or not – at any moment? Stability is trust in the future, and the future is unknown. So how can we trust that which is unknown? What is unknown encompasses both good and bad. So, I believe that stability is not trusting the future – because who would ever trust someone as fickle as the future, when time and time again, they – it – has shown you that it can take as much as it can give – but trusting we are strong enough to swim in the ever-changing tides that come our way, when least expected.
Or, perhaps stability to the ability to revisit one’s own internal language, therefore shaping and reshaping own’s perception of the world and themselves in it, on a need-to-define basis, to survive.
I decided to read some books today that I am judging for an award. I headed to Blackwell’s in Oxford on Broad Street, and that was a good idea. I didn’t feel lonely there. I bought Lifescapes by Ann Wroe and I can’t wait to read it, although it will have to wait, unfortunately, until I am finished reading the award submissions. I got through 6 today, which is great.
After I headed to New Ground Coffee. Their coffee is the best in Oxford, and they offer free sparkling water to cleanse the palette before taking another dreamy sip. I overheard two French men in their late thirties talk about film, teaching and the gay scene in London. That’s one thing about trying to read outside of the house; there’s just too much world to wonder at. I got through two books there, and left.
I am doing better than yesterday, and feel like the next few months will be quiet, introspective ones. I am focusing on my health and next novel and reveling in the beauty that is the Oxford summer. I had a good thought I’ll try to put into the novel: how rich I am to live within a forest in the city and have a view of the river, which is like a painting that changes everyday. I thought that someday the differences are so minute from the previous day that I might not even notice what the difference is. But it’s there, changing and shifting until suddenly, as if by drastic measures, it’s another season. But it’s never so drastic, the change. Perhaps the recognition of it, yes, but not the change. That creeps into my days, minute by minute, shedding and regrowing, until one day like the forest I’m saying to myself, “I hadn’t noticed the leaves turned orange.”
I miss J everyday. Even as I type that my eyes swell with tears. I miss holding him. I’ve had dreams of him. In the most recent one, we were at a water resort and he wanted to spend time with his friend, who was a girl, rather than me. He ran from me. And I yelled and screamed at him, calling him a coward, so that everyone could hear. Sometimes I wonder if there’s someone else in his life. Sometimes I wonder if my body or my clothes contributed to the breakup. I look at pictures of him still. I try not to, but not very well.
But today was a better day than yesterday. There was quiet. There was birdsong, greenery, lakes tremoring with the wind’s ripples, young couples blushing with the summer, books, coffee, chocolate, and speaking to Mom.
I realised after she left that my roots are in her. My home is in her. And I am not so much settling in any country, than always visiting, until I leave this life.