how am I?

I was in London yesterday, talking to a friend who I last saw when I was in London in June before everything fell apart. We've been in touch throughout the summer and autumn-emails, phone calls- but when someone ask you face-to-face, how you are doing and really means it... well, that doesn't exist over phone lines or the ether.

She was waiting, her question hanging in the air between us, twirling like a wind chime. And I didn't know what to say. Shrugging and saying "I have no idea," summed it up pretty well, and she's a good enough friend to understand both the weight and and ephemeralness.

The truth is that I don't really want to discuss, on a deep level, how I am doing. People who have grieved understand the fear that, if I lift the rug to see what's fermenting underneath, I will be swept away-back five months to being a zombie with no memory.

Come to think of it, I am still a zombie with no memory. Only I've kind of mastered the art of 'pulling it together' and so, like the classic little-type-A that I am, I seem to be doing fine. F.I.N.E.

A wise woman, whose words I read regularly had this to say yesterday:

As an adult I often feel like I have put my feelings away quickly, that I haven't got a right to love or hate or grieve or celebrate for as long as I feel each of those things. That my emotions are somehow not polite to have, particularly when they relate to other people, or when, upon occasion, they show as sloppy as a slip hem trailing or a run in my stocking. My adult life is littered with emotional fallout from trying to make important things small and falsely insignificant, from trying to be a grown up who gets on with it, over it, lets it go because that's what maturity does.

I don't think it is. And I want to know where and how I lost the freedom to feel whatever I feel as long and as exactly as I feel it. Why do I, why do so many of us, think that there is no point to uncomfortable emotion if the root cause is beyond our influencing?

Dirty Laundry...

...should be washed at home. (sorry mum, this might make you cry) But despite our herculean protestant efforts, the family dirty laundry is about to be washed very publicly.

An eviction is never pleasant. And when the evictor and evictee are family, no matter how estranged, a peculiar kind of horror descends upon the proceedings.

Today, after three months of warnings, negotiations and court proceedings, the bailiffs and locksmith arrive.

The awfulness of the eviction is bearable only because the alternative is worse. There is a kind of freedom in slicing the threads that attach us to each other. Though, in this case, the threads are more like fraying twine, and the slicing closer to sawing with a butter knife. And I don't know what colour this freedom is. The velvety close-to-black green of a hillside of pine trees? Gut wrenching scarlet?

I am grieving for two little boys with blonde crew-cuts and seersucker shorts, digging in the Departure Bay sand. The one who dug the frere and me Gabriola sandcastles at low tide- who is gone. And the one who is tall and gaunt and who is getting cut off today. Set adrift for perhaps the first time in his life.