Greenstorm's Journal

The other day Angus messaged me to say he'd biked past our old apartment and it looked exactly the same. That night I dreamed about him and woke up with a fragment humming in my mind:

I dreamed of you so hard
My love
It did my heart good
And it was almost enough.

On the weekend mom came up. She's farmsitting while I'm gone doing pagany and pottery things and visiting Tucker. I had rested pretty much solid the two days before and was going to clean up on the day she arrived -- it's a 12-hour drive so I thought I'd have plenty of time to tidy up the house. Turns out she left at 4am, so she arrived when things were still chaos (I'd got about halfway through and then taken a nap, thinking I'd have time).

It's actually quite a nice visit but despite having told her about my weird body stuff lately I haven't been able to actually rest while she's here. I'm pushing through, and that just means I go through the heirarchy of symptoms: tired, then dizzy, then can't breathe, then headache, and then the next seems to be that my muscles alternately are too tight and too loose and my joints hurt. I could say, "hey, I'm going to go lie down for a bit" and she does that so it's not like there's not precedent, but I don't. The feeling of being a prey animal growing up is embedded so deep. The feeling of not being supported emotionally goes so deep.

That said, mom asked some questions when I was telling her about stuff, especially PMDD, and she seemed curious about diagnosis and supportive. I know she had some pretty intense cycle issues through her life, though I suspect they were mostly physical (?). Not sure she'd mention it if they weren't. It all comes from somewhere.

I'm worn out and I want to go somewhere safe and quiet and curl up in the dark and feel my feelings and be loved. And it's not-- it's just a wound and I can't imagine my life without it, nor what healing it would look like. I love mom so much but there's a level where we don't know how to be family to each other, or maybe don't know how to speak to each other about it. I don't feel like she doesn't love me. I see the things she does in her own love language, cleaning and coming up to farmsit and doing conversation with me and for so long trying to get me to exercise with her. I just don't know how to be parented by anyone other than myself, maybe.

And I don't know how to be someone's kid. This maybe hits one of those wells of shame around PDA I carry around: I'm not consistent, I can't do what I'm supposed to do, and I know that to mean that most people don't believe that I love them and can't feel that I care. I withdrew from my brothers more or less completely because I didn't want them to depend on me and then for me to not be there when they really needed me. Part of this is based on an old unhealthy understanding of what support looks like -- no one person really can be there all the time, and that's ok. Part of it is that I really can't be there in the same ways that most people can. And, yeah, I carry shame for that.

Anyhow, it's overcast and I'm sad today and my emotions are feeling tender and I'm at work looking like a normal person for all I'm worth. I'll spend time being tired.

Am I human-adjacent?

Haha, you are one of the folks that i may include in such a group, yep. Dragons and dryads and things of that ilk. Trying to include everyone 🙂

❤ It's funny the things that make me feel loved nowadays.
I think the more space the world makes for me the more I feel its lack everywhere else though

That makes sense

Yeah, but it's hella inconvenient. Means things will get worse before they get better.

That is a vibe that my work has really worked into me.
At the best of times

I guess everyone else has had their turn down there anyhow, and now it's mine.

The huge temperature upswing has lifted everyone's mood. Everyone wanted to go outside and frolic in the sunshine. I wanted to skip around and chase my tail. Instead I snowblew and dug a path to the greenhouse through hip-deep snow and carried hay for the birds.

The piglets are out now, running around with the bigger pigs. They're shorter than the pig-trails through the snow.

I slept late and dreamed of Angus, who was just as sweet in the dream as he is in real life, but in the dream he had an airborne wheat allergy. It was scary. I miss him.

It's a little cooler today, and windy, but still relatively warm.

I ordered some seeds yesterday. It was light already when I left home this morning. Soon I'll be getting home by sunset after work.

There's still a lot of winter to get through but spring seems like it will come. I'm coming to love these seasons so deeply. It's not reasonable but it's true. This land is getting in my bones so much faster than I ever imagined.

This warmth reminded me of this poem I posted in 2007. On reread, I realise it's about masculinity.

The Beginning of April

I feel terribly strong today
it's like the time I arm-wrestled a friend
and beat him so badly I sprained his wrist
or when I made a woman who was really beautiful
love me when she didn't want to
it must be the warm weather
I think
I could smash bricks with my bare hands
or screw
until I was half out of my mind

the only trouble
jesus the only trouble
is I keep thinking about a kid I saw starving on television
las night from biafra he was unbearably fragile
his stomach puffed up arms and legs sticks eyes distorted
what if I touched somebody like that when I was this way?
I can feel him going stiff under my hands
I can feel his belly bulging ready to pop
his pale hair disengaging from its roots like something awful and alive
please

I won't hurt you I want you in my arms
I want to make something for you to eat like warm soup
look I'll chew the meat for you first
in case your teeth ache
I'll keep everybody away if you're sleeping
and hold you next to me like a little brother when we go out
I'm so cold now
what are we going to do with all this?
I promise I won't feel myself like this ever again
it's just the spring it doesn't mean anything please

C.K. Williams

This is going to be a hard couple of weeks. Unsurprising, because when something like this happens the interim always is. Except for late at night my mind can ice itself down, all frozen stone, but my concentration and motivation are still not good. Some assignments that should be relatively easy for school are a struggle.

At night I feel bereft.

I have decisions to make: do I give notice? How can I afford everything?

Spring is coming hard. Buds are opening. I'd like to go for a bike ride and be happy. I'd like to hole up alone in my house and not see anyone except for the folks at school. People take care of me sometimes.

Right now, this moment, I wish I didn't love anyone.

Angus keeps talking about how he screwed up so badly I can't forgive him, or something. At one point I had enough energy to try to tell him that wasn't the point, that I could forgive him anything if he could just godfuckingdamn take the fuck care of himself, if he could work even half as hard to make his life a decent place for him to live as he did at bearing misery. He doesn't understand.

He's angry at me as well, understandably.

The world would be a better place if fewer people bore their misery well. Self-sacrifice is pointed in the wrong directions. It should be used to make things better, not to maintain a bad status quo.

The first green leaves are out on my apple trees on the porch. Enough years of love and it will produce fruit for me. What do you say to that?

I haven't yet begun to feel like a failure for this. I haven't given myself time to think. Life has helped me not to think.

Well. Nothing more to say right now.

I finish these weeks pretty worn out. At the end of every Friday class I have this touch of panic, and an emotional drop-- I don't want to go back to the real world for the weekend, and there it waits for me. I've been in a world without physical touch, without a second's spare time, since Monday night and then everything gets dumped on its head. I'll have a couple of hours of homework, maybe a little more; I'll have likely a date with Michael that involves snuggling, some Burn Notice time planned with Andrew, and a bunch of homey type stuff with Angus. I'm not great at bridging that gap, and the transitions are a little rough. Luckily it seems to be more or less my term pattern. When changes like that are embedded in routine it becomes easier for me to deal with them: the thing has happened before a million times and no one died, so why should I worry now? Last night it only bothered me for a couple of hours.

Oh, look at this. Pretty snazzy, mm? That's me.

Soon the school portion will end Saturday early evening and begun Monday morning. There won't be much of a transition at all because there won't be much to transition to. Those will be very full six-day weeks, plus homework and likely work on the Sunday too. Honestly I can't wait for longer days that will allow me to work later; one ten or twelve hour day per weekend would make a big difference both to how much I need to cram into a week and also to my paycheque.

Work still loves me. I still have this weird sense of inadequacy there, like at some point they'll find me out and stop liking me. The last guy or three they had in my position were pretty awful, so since I've been working there the guys' stress levels have gone way down, apparently. I get all the work that needs to be done, always, no matter what-- sometimes I flex it, sometimes i take a longer lunch one day and skip lunch the next, sometimes things bleed over from one day to the next, some days I'm very thorough and some days I squeak through pretty quickly. Those things make me feel guilty, I guess, but there's both tacit and overt approval from my bosses, and I guess as long as everything gets done and they don't ever need to worry about it that's what I'm paid for. There's always more work to do to make things perfect than I have done, though. I would like everything to always be perfect.

I have my grow lights up in my house! I know I've said that before, but my mahoganies, which were languishing, are now thriving. I need to get decent pots for them, in fact. There's so much gardening I need/want to do. I guess the thing about grow lights in my house is, I've wanted them since I was 8 or so, and at 8 they were way beyond my allowance money. Since then I've been unstable, haven't had space-- but now here I am, with them over my computer. I could start tomatoes by my computer! I need to look up when Seedy Saturday is.

Angus has a fairly solid commitment for a barback-type job weekend evenings again, which means means wondrous things. For one, though he always had rent, I was carrying or worrying about a lot of our food budget and that can back off somewhat and let me resume tuition saving (I hope). For another, it means that even if I spend one night a week with Michael, I'll have an evening to myself in my home. This is... pretty exciting, to be honest. I'm also pretty damn impressed with the way Angus went about it: I'd been offering to help him with his resume, but was busy the day he started, so I gave him the communications book from school, which has a resume section, and told him to see how far he could go. He turned out a pretty snazzy product that fits the far thing well, and I didn't have to do anything. So, yay on that front.

Likewise paid and unpaid work is trickling in for Michael, things he loves doing, not quite enough to make a living on but closer; the total drought of money is clearing up some. I'm so glad. He's happier, and there's no way to complain about that.

For that matter, even Graydon is happier than he used to be; he moved, he was a zombie for, well, a long time, and now his shell's cracking open in my presence. Some people have moved further away from me in the last several weeks, but it seems people are also moving closer, and-- I can accept that. I'm not kicking against it.

Last night I watched Kingdom of Heaven and it's given me a serious yearning to rerererererereread the Elenium and Tamuli series by David Eddings. I might do that; I haven't been reading at all lately. There's also a book called Where the Wild Asparagus Grows or something like that which should be on my list. It would be nice to actually read again. It's escapist as all hell for me, almost to pathological levels, but it's calming.

The ring I have worn since Spring Mysteries last year, that reminded me to be at peace with change in all its facets, is starting to feel uncomfortable on my finger. It's not that my fingers are larger or smaller; it's just a presence that makes itself known where for so long I didn't think about it. Early Bird registration for the festival is up. It'll be interesting to see what happens this year.

Mmm. Nice to be conversational on here again. Talk to you soon.

The day's over and I'm still standing.

Well, okay, it's not over, and I'm sitting on the bed in the livingroom, but allow me my rhetoric; this is an achievement beyond what I might have expected of myself. I am playing Santeria over and over, occasionally alternated with Perfect Blue Buildings, and when my cohabitor looks around the half-wall from the kitchen at me I act like a human being, more-or-less.

My mom used to give laundry lists of all the stuff she had to do as a way of silencing us kids. I do that sometimes, but this time I won't.

I tell stories. Let me tell you my story.

I have a ...process assigned to me. I don't know what it is, if it's sentient, any of that. I'd call it a character-building angel or a remarkably consistent twist of fate but that would lead you to believe I favour one over the other. I don't. I don't even favour the thought that it's unique to me over the thought that it's not. In my life, I have observed a process.

The process is attracted by certain words and turns of phrase. It's attracted, basically, by arrogance. Perhaps this is karma, the wheel turning on my intense arrogance and crushing it to dust.

...because, in a remarkably consistent and predictable way, this process crushes me to dust. There are two words that always call it, generally within a couple days but sometimes it lurks for up to two months before it powders me and all that's left is the dust of conviction blowing away in the wind. Those words are "always" and "never". All it takes is a sincere declaration: "I could never eat raw zucchini" or "I'll never leave you" or "I'll always be there for you".

I rarely slip up and use those words anymore. Sometimes I can get away with "always", when I think very hard of intentions rather than outcomes. I can often get away with "won't" or "will". It's the surety that the process takes note of.

Last night I got home. I'd made it through the day. I made it home too tired to figure out how to use the keys, but not tired enough to burst into tears as soon as I walked through the door. Within half an hour I was regenerating. I made some silly post or statement, and I was thinking, "I can handle this. I'm getting stronger, more capable, more able to deal with things. This can't conquor me."

Then today Angus basically lost his job. It's not a clean slice, he'll get some hours here and there, but-- he was/is going to school in three months. That was a change to our financial plan and the stuff around me going to school. I was going to do some loans. I still am. There is, however, no way in hell I can pay both of our rent.

I won't have to. He's a grownup and will figure something out. Still, scary, scary, scary.

I had dinner with a friend. I've calmed down a bunch. I can even look at this optimistically in some ways-- it's too much for me to type them out for you yet, but they can occur to me as thoughts at the least.

I'm scared, though, and the venom comes out. I badly want someone to talk to. I want to cry. I want to make scathing comments about pulling doubleshifts while both my people are pulling none, however premature or untrue that may be. I want to hide under a blanket and have someone nonjudgementally come in and bring me tea and hug me no matter how hostile my body language is. I want stories of how people did this same thing and came out fine. I want people to stay the fuck away from me and shut up.

But:

I work all this weekend. I have two midterms and one final next week on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I have a major assignment due tomorrow that's not done yet. I AM STILL TOO FUCKING STUBBORN TO LET THIS THING TAKE MY SCHOOL THE FUCK DOWN.

So I'll stop typing now and I'll get back to work. And I'll damn well stay there.

First mention of Angus (the 'friend with a radiant smile... and oddly I made conversation with him')

There are a lot of things I could be writing about, and this would be a post on starting a menu for the housewarming except that I've been... inspired, I guess. I've had some recent experiences, and read a poem on greatpoets this morning, and I feel called to perhaps echo a post I made quite some time ago but don't want to dig out right now.

Lately-- last couple of years, last couple of months --I've been playing with and learning about my body's capability for lust. It's not something I come to easily, so to speak, because in my experience lust involves slipping the body off its leash, or perhaps letting it pull the rest of me along. Lust is a pull entirely physical, a sexual demand, and let's face it: for me sex is bound up in some pretty strange stuff. For me to surrender to my lust enough to even know what precisely I want, let alone to know how to get it, I have to feel really safe. I don't mean safe as in soft-blankets padded-room safe; I mean I need to feel like if there are other people involved they won't freak out, they won't be broken, and they can handle what comes up or call a stop to it if they can't handle it.

I wonder if that hasn't been part of my ongoing attraction to people who are jerks, who keep me at arm's length, who have egos beside which I am a mere shadow, who are emotionally distant or unavailable... at least at first, or at least until I become so trustworthy and available and giving that they let down their defenses. Hm. I wonder if that explains some of my rotating-door syndrome? We already know I like breaking through shells. There are beautiful things inside. I suppose, though, that in a lot of way those shells make me feel safer.

Now I feel like a jerk, but I will persevere (I typoed that as 'perseverse' which is awesome) because I really wanted to nail this desire thing.

Lust is about me. It's about what my body wants, what I want. It's active, it's about an end.

Desire is about another person. It's about immersing myself in them, surrounding myself, it's about experiencing them as deeply and fully as possible. It's a loss of self, if you like, submersion in the other. A conversation can slake desire; you know those long winding conversations that lead down deep surprising paths and cement immovable intimacies in your soul and then leave you in a quiet safe place together as if two worlds hadn't just shifted? Touch does it; taste, sight, no other person can stand in, can satisfy that specific craving that is desire for another.

Now most of my experiences involve some aspect of both of these, and I would write more about it, but I'm a little shaken by my jerk epiphany up there and I can't concentrate. Furthermore Angus is having his second bad day in a row, and although he's not in the room I can feel the pain radiating from him. He's rarely cried openly and loudly outright when he hurts in the last several months; things have been perhaps not so bad too. He's not crying now. Still, you become attuned to a person and that little catch of breath, the smell of their body, the way their eyes move, the type of sounds that come through the wall when they shift position-- it's really hard for him right now.

It's really hard for me, generally. Going into this I was so idealistic, naive, I had never done this. The things I thought would be hard (there, it's eased up, he just came past and smiled at me) like him being in pain-- well, when he's hurting really badly I can deal with that. He wants to be held or left alone or go out and smoke, it's something I can do.

It's harder not being able to do things together sometimes.

It's hardest not being able to read whether he's unhappy with me or just hurting. I often read his signals-- hunching away, or a clenched jaw-- as his being angry or feeling beat down because of something I've done or some interaction we've had. If I ask him-- hey, what's up-- sometimes that helps clarify, but the truth is that I spend a lot of time with someone my gut and my subconscious read as displeased with me a fair chunk of the time. It comes and goes in waves. It's not bad lately.

Also hard is some stuff where some of our stuff interacts in such a way that it's difficult to sleep closely cuddled together. He night sweats when he's really sick; when he's really sick especially, my dermatographia/whatever it is totally freaks out when I come into contact with that sweat, even through an allergy pill or two.

And I never knew just how much time being sick took. I'm a really busy person, and I schedule and plan things to within an inch of my life. I try to schedule and plan other people in as part of this, so I know how I can and cannot rely on them. Angus has a huge swinging block of ;he may feel great and be productive, he may be sick and stuck in the bathroom all day' in which case I need to take up some slack. Don't get me wrong, he pushes through more than I could -- he's had practice -- but sometimes he can't. And sometimes he doesn't engage the discipline to do things when he's well-- perhaps because he spends so much time pushing himself when he's sick?

I dunno. This has been totally hijacked. As if to disprove any points I've made, he's doing dishes and smiling and being loving now. Maybe that is the point, though: the thing is unpredictable. Neither of us know whether he will be worse or better in an hour, a day, a year, in ten years or forty.

I can't cure him. I can't even make him go to doctors, try new treatments, go for different tests when the last set comes back negative. I can't make him take pills on time. All of that is his, with me waving a pom pom in the back when I can and calling out in a thin voice from the distance.

And in this context desire is a strange beast. His body is becoming his enemy, if it isn't already. There is always some degree of pain, more or less. There are areas-- stomach, ass --to be avoided except by the gentlest occasional touch, perhaps forever, when my hands wish to taste the skin there. And when desire for him surges up-- him, him, only him-- he might well be buried, not only absent from his body but left emotionally tattered by just coping.

I suppose everyone has complications like this to some degree or other: I come home, I cannot take my head out of work, I'm short and snappish and go straight to the computer and stare through it for an hour. I am working this weekend and volunteering next and out of the country the one after and have no days off in-between. I have not had time to sleep and am floating in a haze all week, somewhere else entirely. I suppose everyone has barriers.

I didn't grow up with a normal family, with a normal relationship between my parents, and I seldom went to see how other peoples' families interacted. There was always a locked door between mom and dad when they were in the house for six months of the marriage once and I didn't even notice. I don't know what's normal; I don't know what's acceptable; I don't know what's tolerable. I know mileage varies per person anyhow.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Something about my Writer, though, about how those barriers are different, clearer, not entangled up with coming home from work and emotional support and the whimsy of an unpredictable illness. Something about how when I bury my face in his hair the world recedes, and how that has stayed simple so far, and how I always go looking for complications and so I drag my guilt behind me like a bloody mangled piece of my own soul sometimes, and other times I can leave it alone.

It's late. I'm tired. Someone made me dinner and did the dishes and I'm doing something that sounds a lot like complaining. I need to sleep, I need rest so badly. I need to surrender up my ability to affect the world for eight hours or so-- more than four or five, at least. I need to let bed happen to me.

Ha. Talk about rambling. Talk about incoherent. It's definitely bedtime. Be well, y'all, and remember I'm not really unhappy-- I just need to rest, and then engage with the lovely challenge of coming up with five or six or seven tasty vegan wheat-free dishes for my housewarming that can feed a horde, that will be cheap, that will be super tasty, that don't need a table to eat at, and that won't use up all the dishes in the house to feed people. I fully expect to have a brilliant stroke of genius about a way to serve quinoa tabouleh salad, to plagarize mimi's bean dip, to come up with a brilliant riff on pizza, to go through some sort of inspired root veggie thing, to do marinated mushrooms come hell or high water, to do something involving our lovely-textured friend the avacado and maybe his sidekick the mango (sushi? booooring...?) and to do something involving risotto and/or that amazing wild-rice-pecan-maple-orange-stuffed squash I did at Avi's thanksgiving. I wonder if I can figure out a tofu recipe that actually tastes like heaven?

I can *so* do this.

And then there'll be desserts. I wonder how I can serve fried bananas in a non-messy way. Corn tortillas? Hmmm. And some kind of sugar cookie. And... and... and...

This post is gonna have the weirdest tags ever.

Y'know, I really like cooking for people.