Now that I have returned to Vancouver my days are spent, again, tidying house and looking for further work. Selling things, making charity bags, writing cover letters. The details shift, move, and fade away, but the general thrust remains the same: find work, leave this place.
I was recently disrupted, though, by a simple thing; an old greeting card with a picture of a leopard-print rabbit that fell from between some books in my closet while I was struggling to put my suitcase away. It’s from a lover I was with in 2006, a man who was almost exactly twice my age at the time, who I still think of with affection when he comes to mind. We haven’t been in touch since January of 2012, when there was a brief flurry of five or six e-mail that died in his court.
Inside is a lovely little note, sweet, hopeful and warm, from a time when we still felt protected by each other, even after the close of our relationship. Time travel via information packet. Memory conjuring his voice, his toothy smile, how bright it was the day we walked in the fog by the water, how much I mourned when the silver and green amber brooch he gave me was stolen and lost. (There’s plenty of writing about him in this journal, actually, tucked under a code-name tag, just like everyone else I’ve shared my life with since 2003.) I do not think of him often, but when I do, I wonder where in the world he is, what lunatic art he is birthing, who he is currently inspiring. I hope his family has healed. I hope his head and heart have found peace and delight. I hope, as he inevitability swans through the world, (and swans, he does), elegant and full of light, he does so with gentleness, ferocity, and grace.
So I wrote him a letter, the contents not much different than what I’m sharing here, and I put the card up on the thread I have on the wall above my desk where I keep emotional reminders. It fit in nicely. Such good company on that length of string! Photographs of photographers, snippets from writers, postcards, and similar paper miscellany. All of it positive, but all of the people gone from my life or far away.
It was interesting to find myself writing again to someone I haven’t spoken to in so long. So many commingling layers of motivation! He was the center of my life, the vortex of everything spun around him, but I’m in my thirties now and I don’t think we’ve been in the same place since I was twenty-five. (Seven years is a fairy-tale number. Even with seven league boots, I’m still so far behind that it’s almost a fifth of my entire life.) It’s so peculiar, that such distance could come into play, that such distance is what became ordinary.
As I clear my life, hone it down like a knife, I wonder who else I will reach out to.