Seamlessly not.
Jan. 6th, 2011 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
parasitegirl“Returning to a familiar bed, country and schedule has a way of temporarily negating all you have done and felt and leaves you feeling like there is something very important you have forgotten.”
It was 7AM, January 4th, 2011, when I thought this in preparation of the occurrence of it. I thought this in a small Car2go, the zipcar/smartcar brand in Austin. I thought it before the sun rose. I composed it as D drove me to the airport, holding my left hand in his right hand.
We said nothing.
What could be said then? We’d said the important things when we could. Even if we had had the coffee needed to say things before the sun rose it would have only served to shatter us. I have boarded enough airplanes in tears. I am not a big fan of sniffling through security…and airport security has grown increasingly less sympathetic about emotional outbursts since I first started crying in transit.
Although, if I am to be honest, in the past I was frequently leaving people…or being pushed to do so…or being put on a plane…or leaving without knowing the full story. D is different. I’ll go back for him. He’ll visit. We’re figuring out what it will take and how to transition to a different life. I suspect, deep down, that he will be as there for me and as strong as me as I can be for him…and I can barely remember the last time I thought that of someone I was with.
It’s not that he is intrinsically better than what I have left before…or what has not been there for me…I deeply love some of those I am no longer with and will not play ranking games that disrespect them. It is not that that I am better than the ghosts of his past. It is just that we’ve both had the sorts of formative experiences that have changed us enough to hope for something different this time and to be rather in awe of the fact that we still have such strong hopes. We are better prepared as people for it to perhaps happen.
We first met in college and know, without doubt, that had we ever acted on these impulses back then it would have been an intense tragedy.
We have no surprise scars. We have been tossing our past issues at each other with reckless abandon since we started chatting back and forth in the summer. We’ve inflated our foilbles the like grotesque balloons in the Macy’s Parade of Shit That Scares Saner People Off from day one of re-introduction…and then we’ve watched the other laugh in fond recognition.
What I am saying is that our scars, and we have many, are understood. He doesn’t document his scars the same public way I do, and that is probably for the best, but he is not unexamined.I have no scar I won’t discuss…you know that. Yet now I can say that I have no scar I feel so defined by that I will allow it to interfere with my potential happiness. Being able to say this has meant saying goodbye to much of what I have been falsely identifying myself by, like that bit about being the girl who is always going away.
That wasn’t easy. Redefinition never is.
Part of not letting myself be defines by my scars or to proudly identify myself by them has meant realizing that web of intimacy with certain limits that I have been living off of for so long has not made me as happy as I can be…although it has made me happy enough to continue for a very long time and I do not regret it…but there is more out there for me than what I have been enjoying up until D.
Saying nothing, but remembering everything, I sat in the passenger seat and thought of words to describe this all…as I knew I would eventually need to.
Our goodbye at the airport would not pass scrutiny. It was nothing. A false event. A placeholder. We’d gone through the words and the tears a little earlier in the timeline when other people were asleep.
Leaving D, I knew my next morning would be infinitely easier than his. I would wake up in Japan, in a small bed where he had never been, to no familiar scent but my own. I would enter a kitchen he had never stood in, passing by no forgotten socks or underwear. I would shower with only my own salves and soaps. After making a pot of coffee and eating natto and rice, I would go to work.
D would awake in a large bed that still smelled aggressively of us. He would see spaces I had stood in various states of clothing and moods. He would shower alongside the shampoo I bought at CVS…enter the kitchen and see the foods we had not finished…and those things alone would be more work than my job.
This morning I woke at 4:30 AM from unsettling dreams, the hallmark of travel/jetlag/sleeping pills. Much like Gregor Samsa I awoke and found myself changed…but unlike Gregor mine was not a clear metamorphosis. I used the bathroom. I figured out the feeling of displacement was due to flying back to Japan. I had been elsewhere. I smelled nothing that was not my own sweat. I returned to my bed. I slept until 6:15.
At 8AM I was at work.
Returning to one’s familiar life is never a seamless journey but I think we as adults have learned to downplay it. We’ve had enough childhood, college, life adventures to know that the place we return to has usually continued, unfettered by our absence. We learn that very few people will know how we have been changed by where we have gone and what we have done…and that even fewer really want to know. We learn that blathering on too long about what we did without them/ our formative adventure/ our changes is often unenjoyed by others. Our personal adventures are more interesting than our unsettling dreams but you still have to be really good at telling a story for people to give a shit about either of them.
At age 35 I don’t feel the same desire to shout “How can I feel so different while nothing seems to be out of place here?” upon returning home that I did, say, when I came home from summer camp as a teen…but the feeling hasn’t 100% evaporated.
The transition isn’t seamless. The fabric of your time away folds in on itself and gets stitched closed. The invisible zipper. The hidden pocket. The closure that isn’t. It is there and you can feel it, if not clearly see it.
My own stitches are coming undone or I am slipping into the pocket….a more rested me wouldn’t mix metaphors but a more rested me might not be able to capture the feeling as well in flawed words.
My current reality has not fully set. I walked back to my desk, returning from lunch, and as I looked up the stairs I felt my head tilt backward, backward onto the pillows. City hall under my feet, my back against an over-sized bed, my breathing ragged. I breathed deeply. It was gone. I climbed the stairs, stepping carefully over the uninvited but not unwelcome memory.
I am back in Japan….and thinking of moving to America in the spring of 2012.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 10:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 05:16 pm (UTC)I love this entry. This is why people read you.
"Macy’s Parade of Shit That Scares Saner People Off" makes me lol. And you know I'm not the lol-type.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 11:25 pm (UTC)We are better prepared as people for it to perhaps happen.
That's been key to my current experience, and oh my what a big difference it makes.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-08 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-08 11:39 pm (UTC)I'd also like a year of teaching dance here so I can have that in my side-job wheelhouse. I know there is a possible student base and interest in Austin base on those I met and the reactions to my performance, dance skills, and general personality.
Oh!
Date: 2011-01-11 07:33 pm (UTC)Best of luck!
Ariadne
(A student dancer who enjoys your blog.)