Greenstorm's Journal

Note: the bottom part of this post is important to me. If you don't want to read th ewhole thing, I recommend going from the ninth paragraph down or so, rather than from the top

It's been a very odd week, all told. Shifts in my lifestyle are a-happenin'. Some of the changes I like, some I don't like, but I think they're probably all related, pushing each other along in a ball of consequences. These are the changes I initiated in the move to Tillie's.

Before last night, I'd slept at home for something like four nights in a row. I may well have not done that for just over a year and a half. It's an odd thing to think about, because right now I'm sharing the little one-bedroom apartment with Tillie, all my stuff is packed, it's the time I could realistically be expected to be away a lot. Instead I make choices which involve me staying at home rather than, say, going to Graham's or Juggler's overnight so often.

Part of this choice stems from a bit of a pickup in the stuff I need to do in my four-day work-week. Things have become more cleanly compressed into those days, so they're very busy, and I need to get so sleep and wake up early on them-- not prime date evenings, and close to pointless with Juggler sometimes because of how late he gets home from work. So, it just makes sense to stay at home and get the sleep I need.

Part of it comes from my attempts to eat more reasonably-- home is where the not-eating-out food is.

Part of it is because of assorted rat stuff-- I want to see my babies more, because I love them, and I also need to do more rat maintenance for the whole allergy situation.

All of the above is compounded by the fact that I can get home every day, so I end up there to do that stuff, and I also go through and feel homey there and choose, often, to cancel things and stay in.

I'm not sure I like some of the consequences-- namely, I'm really not getting much time to slow down and talk to Juggler or Graham. Hopefully this is a temporary thing, caused by Graham's allergies, my weirdness to scheduling, and my busy work-week instead of some sort of "the habit has been broken so it ain't happening anymore" sort of thing. I figure, in two weeks I'll worry a bit, and more after the move, if I still need to worry.

Anyways, this whole thing looks like it's turning into the reason I moved: I want to spend more time at home with my babies I said, and now, after an adjustment period, I am. It's good. It's definite change. It's a shift in th elifestyle I've had for a very, very long time. If it keeps shifting this way, I might be breaking ten-year records. If it keeps shifting this way, I might throw out the phrase distributed living and be some sort of a normal person in this regard.

On an intensely related but hard to link verbally note, I spent a lot of yesterday with Bevan. We walked around downtown and Stanley Park in the rain, getting wet, while I was dressed like a rock start and wearing my contacts. We talked. We then headed back to his place. Now, Bevan is the oldest of four boys. I have three younger brothers who are in approximately the same age range (mine are about two years younger than his). They live in a graciously laid-out house with a dog who is very like the dog I grew up with, and two parents.

I have trouble conveying the way this felt properly. We sat at the big wooden kitchen table by the windows (it's always a big wooden kitchen table, they're harder to destroy) and I drank tea to warm my fingers. Boys thudded down the staircase, thumpthumpthump as they jumped the landings. Bevan did this too. They drifted through the kitchen moodily or grandstanded through as the case may be and chatted. They spoke in brother-speak to each other, where no words were mistaken because these people has learned language together and had so much shared background. His mom made me tea. His dad showed him how to put pizza in the oven.

I remember that for a lot of my life I lived in this, and it was love. Dad wasn't always crazy, mom wasn't always depressed, there were days and times like this when I felt held to the world as if by the thickest glue and I never wanted to struggle. At one point I said to Bevan, if this were my home I'd be sitting here with a book. Do you know how many times I did that, going up and sitting at the big wooden table and reading when supper was being prepared, and the boys would congregate as they got hungry, and the dogs would be under the table, and there was just that sense of people who belonged there? I usually read during dinner, or dad would tell me to put the book away and I'd do it reluctantly for the first five minutes. Our stairs were better than Bevan's, the landings were spaced so you could jump from landing to landing and never touch the stairs once. We had two dogs with nails to click on the floor.

And right now I just sit here typing with my eyes blurred and try to fit words to the situation, and I feel this overwhelming urge to violence, to shoving these memories into your head so that you'll understand, because they're too real and too big and too intense to convey any other way. I don't want to delicately choose words to evoke. I want you to have been there.

Because of this, because of yesterday, an enormous part of my life has been given back to me. Kynnin, I don't know if you read this, but you're the only person outside my family who remembers what my home was like, and that was only after the divorce when we rattled around like peas in that huge house. My own family has burned it out, the bad parts tainting our memoried so that we never go back there and we lose the memories in the shunning.

Bevan's been very good for me in this way twice now. He reminds me a lot of Kynnin, intellectually and physically, and I've rediscovered my enjoyment of abstract talk with him without being too shadowed by memories. Now there's my family.

I'm feeling intensely grateful right now for all the people in my life. I think I have a Big Six now instead of a Big Four: Bevan (as above), Tillie (take the bedroom tonight), Juggler (OMFG a trustworthy boy), Trevor (just liking someone is enough for years and years of friendship), CrazyChris (ironically, reminding me how to be sane with the emotions I'm given), and Graham (for emotional entanglement baybee).

These people are my friends, and also the edges of my soul; they're responsible for my being a part of that vast(ly cliched but real and true) current of humanity.

So there.

Love y'all.

Most of you probably already know I'm an alien. I dress like a crazy person, or a model. I laugh at the wrong things when I'm not thinking. I like plants, on the whole, better than people. In fact, it's shrubbery and trees I check out, walking down the street, not boys and girls. I read at mostly inhuman speed, generally have a half-dozen mental states available to me without the use of external chemicals, and have an actual addiction to the internet (
less than two hits a day and I get the shakes). I would rather kiss most rats than most people, am both alarmingly sensitive and appallingly indifferent to suffering, and love a dozen people deeply.

Most alien, most pertinent right now, I have no real memories. I live too much in the past, the present, or the future to function well, but both the past and the future are stories I tell myself. The precious hoard of past I live in exists because I retell my stories to myself; more recently too it is because I look back in livejournal, and trade reminisces with my family. I retain a couple dozen images, a few movie clips, and no sound in my head from greater than a year ago. I am untethered by my real past in a way I think few are. I am a kite without that kind of string; I am a bird. I tether myself in other ways, I learn to record, and I am happy. Sometimes I slip into the present enough that I forget there can be a future or a past. Stuck as a set of eyes and immediate reactions (did you know it requires longer than 'now' to take a thought to vocalisation?), I am still happy.

Thusly, anticipation is the strongest of nectars for me. When I know a fairy castle might be in my future, I run to inhabit it at hthe first glimpse, and I live there until it passes me by. Disappointment is one of the strongest-feeling emotions I have; disappointment and anticipation. The phrase is 'two sides of the same coin'.

This is a long way of saying, I get to meet Graham at the bus station tonight.

I woke up next to him. His skin is intensely soft, slightly furry, with the copper of freckles I'm always reminded of peaches. The bed was warm. There was sunlight outside, and the air in the room was almost crispy-cool.

It was spring. I got up, he was still sleeping, and tried not to creak the cumputer chair loudly as I settled in. I dipped into the internet for an hour, two, and all the while I could turn around and watch him sleeping, if I wanted, at one point snoring slightly and covered in blankets with just one hand sticking out in a graceful arabesque dangling off the mattress. Sometimes I could see his face.

After about two hours I climbed back into bed, the outside of my skin cold from the morning rubbing up against it. He was warm, and it wasn't long before he was awake. That's what I wait for, every morning: I wait for someone to join me. There was conversation and snuggling for awhile, and since we're both sniffly I pulled us up into the shower in the hopes that steam would cute all. I washed him, he washed me, and we shared his towel to dry.

Then it was back to bed. These things start slowly, slightly awkward, because we haven't really known each other that long; the intense familiarity that comes with practice hasn't set in, and we learn about each other each time. There was cuddling, and touching, and biting, and squirming, and really nothing that couldn't strictly fall under those headings-- it's all ways of touching, I suppose. It's my own uncertainty that breaks my heart. I trust him not to follow the social supposed-tos of sex, and so there's nothing as simple here as hitting the right notes. It's all a learning, action and feedback, and all the while the sun was shining outside the window.

That was some more hours, and then another quick shower, and we were out in it. We were out in spring, characterised by light through the air like sun through the water in an aquarium, cool on the skin and yellow-green and alive with promise, alive with conception rather than the pregnancy of full spring yet. Still, spring. Still. And in the springtime we sat and ate sushi at a plastic table looking out at light-splashed concrete (light that was green and yellow with spring like water in an aquarium, alive with promise) and then we went back out into it like it wasn't water, we breathed it and it was there on our skin, and we went hand-in-hand up the road.

These streets we walked, these were streets where we used to live. This is the neighborhood Kynnin and I shared, and this spring sets off memories of so many other springs. Do you know there was a spring where I sat out on the south-facing deck with the faint stain of heat through the pale light in Abbotsford and waited for Jan to come? I vibrated with expectation, that spring. Do you know there were springs upon springs in Mission, and do you know that when I lived on the boat the spring came through the concrete of downtown Vancouver in a sweep of near-imperceptable expectancy even though there was no soft ground to lift the green into it? Do you know I had spent spring in that very neighborhood before, sitting at Fujiya in the morning?

Now it's a different we, and the same neighborhood, and we walked up the street and bought ice cream (gelatto, sorbetto, these are names for the thing that I mean). We bought ice cream, two scoops each, in little bright bowls with tiny plastic shovels, and we each bought a sweet/creamy and a citrus of different types. We sat there then, in the sunlight that was the pale yellow-green of water through a freshwater aquarium, and the flavour of spring came in through the sliding door to our table and warned of the way the forest would smell, if I were there, if I were in the middle of deep rotting leaved and bare-branched trees dripping with moss. That would smell like early spring, but in an ice cream parlour on commercial drive the air merely hinted.

We alternated tastes of ice cream communally and talked. A little of this, a little of that, such a difference in flavours it was that we inflicted that my brain gave out and all the flavours were just static, sensory overload, this and then that, lemon and then matcha, and both the ice cream and the air were cold but I, for once, wasn't. After this, another hour of ice cream after an hour of eating sushi, he walked me to my bus and I went to work.

I've been here before, in the late winter, in the spring. I've been here before, going up the hill with Kynnin in the morning to school through air this colour, lazing together until we were late. I've been here before, waiting for Jan and wandering down the hill to the cafe with him in air that snapped like this, air that felt like cool water on my skin. I've been here before, but of course, these steps don't, quite, feel the same. I feel the same. Spring feels the same. This time I know that I do not know what the future will hold, where always before I was certain I could anticipate it. This time I am older, more scarred, a little rougher, hopefully a little more generous and a little less nearsighted. This time I know what life is without him.

My happy posts are always the same, and I am almost always happy lately. This post is the same. But, the days are different, not different as in beads on a string but different as in seperate twists on a rope that, when you look around and around the rope, you discover are all one thing flowing one into the other but distinct from any given vantage.

Today was a spring day that I spent with Graham, and I want to remember it.