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quoththeravynIt’s been eight years.
It’s an anniversary whose date is uncertain. She chose the Tuesday after the long Labor Day weekend to move, because the movers were finished with moving college kids in and out of their apartments, and their rates went down. So the anniversary is either this Tuesday, or the 7th, depending on how you reckon.
Small wonder, then, that I find the long weekend a time when it’s impossible to write anything more substantial than this, a memoir of vague unease. Is this what grief becomes? I’ve tried all the kinds of solitude and aloneness I could reach. None of that matters; the fact of aloneness remains. How I think about it is not something anyone cares much about.
It may be that it’s a natural consequence of being genderqueer, able only for a short time to construct a persona with a recognizable gender. A long term relationship is, perhaps, impossible, because forever is a long time not to be yourself. Unless the partner thrives on the uncertainty, the fluid changes, approaching gendered things from all perspectives at once.
She was bi; she went with it for as long as she could. While we were together she lost her mother, way too young, and in the course of putting herself together again (with, I have to confess, a grief-illiterate partner), she decided she was, after all, a lesbian, and so I was written out of my own life.
She moved out eight years ago this week. There is still a pile of unused dish wrapping paper on the dining room floor.
And I returned to the outer darkness, to walk alone upon the paths of solitude. From pain for which I could find no words, to calling it ‘grief’, to watching it change. A sojourn, now and then, for a while, but always moving on. I’ve said in other contexts that I’m a nomad in the desert between gay and straight, between male and female, visiting the few oases, always just after someone else has left. We draw a little water for the next person when we move on.
And now, big changes are coming. I’m retiring, turning 65, moving back to Colorado where I grew up, into a retirement community. Selling the house (and the cat who owns it) to my ex. Next year’s anniversaries of move-out day will be under different management.
My plan is to keep busy telling the stories of the imaginary people in my head, each of whom experiences her life (or his) from one or another of my perspectives, working through how their genders and sexualities manifest in their lives. I have next to no hope people will want to read these books, beyond a few friends. The first installment sold a few hundred e-books and a few dozen paperbacks. But it doesn’t matter so much if people read; what matters is that I have to write.
It’s an anniversary whose date is uncertain. She chose the Tuesday after the long Labor Day weekend to move, because the movers were finished with moving college kids in and out of their apartments, and their rates went down. So the anniversary is either this Tuesday, or the 7th, depending on how you reckon.
Small wonder, then, that I find the long weekend a time when it’s impossible to write anything more substantial than this, a memoir of vague unease. Is this what grief becomes? I’ve tried all the kinds of solitude and aloneness I could reach. None of that matters; the fact of aloneness remains. How I think about it is not something anyone cares much about.
It may be that it’s a natural consequence of being genderqueer, able only for a short time to construct a persona with a recognizable gender. A long term relationship is, perhaps, impossible, because forever is a long time not to be yourself. Unless the partner thrives on the uncertainty, the fluid changes, approaching gendered things from all perspectives at once.
She was bi; she went with it for as long as she could. While we were together she lost her mother, way too young, and in the course of putting herself together again (with, I have to confess, a grief-illiterate partner), she decided she was, after all, a lesbian, and so I was written out of my own life.
She moved out eight years ago this week. There is still a pile of unused dish wrapping paper on the dining room floor.
And I returned to the outer darkness, to walk alone upon the paths of solitude. From pain for which I could find no words, to calling it ‘grief’, to watching it change. A sojourn, now and then, for a while, but always moving on. I’ve said in other contexts that I’m a nomad in the desert between gay and straight, between male and female, visiting the few oases, always just after someone else has left. We draw a little water for the next person when we move on.
And now, big changes are coming. I’m retiring, turning 65, moving back to Colorado where I grew up, into a retirement community. Selling the house (and the cat who owns it) to my ex. Next year’s anniversaries of move-out day will be under different management.
My plan is to keep busy telling the stories of the imaginary people in my head, each of whom experiences her life (or his) from one or another of my perspectives, working through how their genders and sexualities manifest in their lives. I have next to no hope people will want to read these books, beyond a few friends. The first installment sold a few hundred e-books and a few dozen paperbacks. But it doesn’t matter so much if people read; what matters is that I have to write.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-03 09:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-03 10:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-03 12:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-03 12:57 pm (UTC)