Last on your dial; first in your heart

I've been having crying jags since I got home. I feel guilty about my food. I feel guilty about my money. I feel guilty about my wide open spaces and for ever thinking my neighbour's house was too close to mine. I feel guilty about the lack of balance in the world.

I don't recognize myself in the mirror. My skin is so dark. My hair, bleached out by the sun, looks white. (Maybe it's just turning grey.) My arms are muscular. I have never had any muscles - not even when I used to spend two hours at the gym every day. And my eyes, looking back at me, look like someone else's. I want to tap the face in the mirror. Hello? Lisa? Is that you?

I never thought it would be like this.

***

We went to dinner tonight and I cried over the plate of food, ducking my head and trying not to draw attention to our table. I think that if someone had looked over at us they would have thought that Shawn was some nice young man taking a poor old crazy bag lady out for a meal to help her out. I just needed a sweatsuit and a tiara.

The movie theatre was better because it was dark and I could let the tears flow. I was crying for the little girl who wanted to be a beauty queen and was going to be judged-judged-judged by hairsprayed ladies who thought she was fat and plain in her glasses. I was crying for the colour-blind boy who couldn't grow up to fly a jet plane, and for the pain of a disappointment, and a death and lost love..... It all seemed so painful that it was almost real. And I was crying for what is real, and for the unfairness, the wrongness, of being able to float in and out of that reality, from the dark of a movie theatre to the real world half a world away.

***

Shawn, while I was away, did not update my blog nor post the things I wanted him to, and yet he managed to finish and send, in my name, one of my half-finished stories to some lady to ask her to publish it. If I hadn't missed him so much every day that I sometimes wanted to die, I think I might kill him now. As it is, I haven't the inclination quite yet. He's being too sweet, passing me wads of Kleenex as I cry for no reason.


***

I had a dream this afternoon, napping on the couch, that I was touring a house with a real estate agent who bought me a black coffee in hopes it would seal a deal. And each room, as we entered it, morphed and bent itself into something different. When I looked away, and then looked back, the room changed shape and size.


***

I threw my written diary into the garbage can the minute I walked into the house. I took it from my backpack and threw it away, not because it says anything it shouldn't say. Just because I don't need it anymore.

I used to be a packrat. In my underdeveloped childhood sense of empathy, I somehow developed an oversensitivity to the plight of inanimate objects. I felt certain that banana peels lay sobbing in the trash can, emotionally brutalized by that callous treatment. And so, as a result, I kept everything. I saved scraps of paper and elastic bands and empty containers and paperclips bent into rings. Because I knew they'd be hurt if I threw them away.

By all rights it was entirely possible that I could have ended up like those crazy cat ladies living in condemned buildings.

But some time in 1997, the first time I lived in a new city away from my friends and family, I realised I had to remove ~ from my heart-burden because it was all getting too heavy to carry. Back then I wasn't strong enough to empty the contents of a cardboard box into a garbage can without carefully combing through its contents. I needed to open up each one of his letters, and reread it. And remember the letter I had written in response. And then carefully fold each letter back up and replace it in its envelope before I could throw it in the garbage. But that night the literal cleanup served as an emotional cleanup too, and I could finally stop carrying him with me into every new experience. He wasn't gone from my heart but he wasn't heavy anymore.

From then on, when I needed to throw something away, I remembered that night in the apartment, folding his letters in half neatly and putting them in the garbage over and over and over again until they were all gone. It wasn't an act of aggression. It was a peaceful experience to let go of something that was weighing me down and colouring my perceptions.

When I came in the door carrying the travel-diary I felt the same way about it, in a strange way. It was heavy with depressing observations and sad stories and my homesickness and sadness. And I knew I didn't need it anymore to remember the trip and to get what I needed to get from it. I'm getting better at holding onto what's important and letting what's not important go without as much of a struggle.


***

Aging and changing is more painful a process than I believed it would be when I was young. Time doesn't move at an even pace; it leaps and lags. And things don't happen in the chronological order they are supposed to.

There are pieces of me I had meant to sort out long before now... and there are things I figured out sooner than I thought possible.