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It’s important to me to document this—

I am very at home in disentegration right now.

for examples I was going to list what I’ve been listening to;

flickering debris- Lanark Artefax

aver- Klara Lewis

vli - Skee Mask

but maybe a better example is how necessary it seemed to revisit Havana,

and I did

for three days we walked streets with potholes, or drove in cars with missing parts

the buildings though were my medicine

what do you have when everything around you is in fall?

most everything, it turns out, that you actually need

o so this is what being ready to go back to school feels like

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right but it’s such a trope, she says, the older man and his much younger love interest. in my experience this dynamic has never turned out to be anything but romantic.

after parting our last time he messaged me,

tu es douce, intriguante. j’ai hâte de te revoir.

Definitely if somebody closer to my age had said that I would take it romantically. But it might just be like.. like a teacher’s appraisal of his pupil, an avuncular sentiment.

he’s with somebody, I say. He refers to her as his conjointe. He told me that he’d told her this summer that she would one day have to let him leave. But you know, even with all that, he may have just told me because we’ve developed a really intimate friendship.

He’s propositioning you, she says.

Maybe. But it’s really not a lack of self-esteem or anything like that that makes me unsure. It just actually is unclear. Anyway I’ve sent him a couple of emails and every time that I do immediately I think that I’ve overstepped a boundary. That I’ll have said something that reminds him of her, of his fidelity

like the last one I asked him for his personal email so that I could send him an album via itunes. I didn’t know why it was taking so long for him to respond and then I decided it was because probably his personal email is one that he shares with her.

When he did respond it had nothing to do with that. He told me he was just getting in from a concert (in a church in dublin) and that he doesn’t have itunes; he still buys cds.

But it was too much. Every time to worry about her. So in my last email I wished him and her a good holiday— they’re on some island in greece.

that’s interesting that you made the fear manifest in order to stop worrying about it, she says.

yes, but now it’s out there. Now whatever will come out of this friendship or romance will be truer. And I really feel that mentioning her in my email may have sabotaged something between us. Like maybe now he will tell her about me, a work friend, and I’ll be invited over for dinner at their place. Which would still be nice but, you know, a disappointment.

*

it was actually an act of bad faith. Manifesting the fear to be done with it, to be able to finally move on from it is always an act of bad faith. It tells you it’s in good faith, it says: the exercise here is to trust that whatever may come after the fear has been manifested will be right. Or in the very least, you will be alright. And moreover. whatever you are left with after this potential sabotage is what you deserve, and is what you are allotted to build something out of.

Good faith would have been to have not meddled at all— to have not manifested the fear, and to just follow our inspirations holding the possibility that he might at any moment rekindle a romance with her but also holding the possibility that a romance between us will bud (and everything in between. faith is of the infinite fabric). It’s not true that whatever will come of us now will be truer.

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the blood did come

with the moon out i walked the letter to a post box, not the nearest one

in westmount

slow, slow, against the dropping temperature bracing myself against the ~draft, is what it feels

and against myself, the chills of this fever

and with the pain in my stomach and between my legs

and weak from not having eaten much today, just a half mamoul

a journey through the underworld, there was a tunnel

how do you want things for yourself? purely?

this was the drumming around the fire burning inside of me

allow yourself to want this,

allow yourself to want what you do,

allow yourself to embody these desires,

allow your actions to be expressions of these desires (but without too much thought or efforting),

allow yourself to burn the beliefs and habits which counter,

“these desires”: —

name these desires. allow yourself to savour the taste of the name in your mouth,

allow yourself transformation

and to be taken there in good faith

without needing to know; without deciding by what path or to which ends.

I posted the letter and wished for what was right to come next, whatever that may be (in good faith)

and had to take an uber back

in so much pain and now feeling like i might throw up, half a mind on not throwing up

the other half on this young man’s vitality. business school, he says,

but really, commercial real estate.

He says his mother just bought a pharmacy, that if he could have been her broker he’d have made 125k in that one deal.

My child, I think.

and because this is not his mother’s feeling toward him re this.

I come straight to bed, and even with the lights on and street clothes curl into a tight ball

ok coco? maya says

everything hurts

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August bloodletting, on the 16th calendar day

I wrote

I do things on my period that would probably scare you, wild things. Of course it isn’t the gesture that would scare you but the sincerity with which it’s being offered

—

yesterday under the egg moon, on the 20th calendar day

I feel my womb. I think through my womb’s connection to the moon about my dearest women friends, and I invite the blood. At the same time I ask it to hold off a couple of more days for the full moon.

fevered at 1 when I wake

I think

I am on fire. Maybe it really is the flu,

anyway it feels right. I trust the fire to preserve what is necessary,

everything else, cinders.

What is important is not to meddle.

On the equinox I’ll mail the letter.

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sunday, saskatoon so early to toronto then montreal, rain jul is still in the city So I tell him that I will nap and maybe when I wake we can meet up. It has the feeling of a new day when I wake such was the depth of sleep. I want to go to September to see if they have the photograph of my parents— I’d been using as a bookmark in Lispector’s Chandelier. They are young, holding hands, my father moustached as he is still, on stick legs, they are so straight and skinny-strong. My parents are going to become what they are now, it’s clear, but there is the romance and innocence of unmanifested potential. It’s raining? jul says yes, I say that’s too bad. I understand this to mean he won’t join me for coffee, but we make plans later to go to art gang, a dj show. I am absorbed in my writing a letter to J and tired so I don’t see Ro sitting there or Ro entering. It’s still unclear who was there first. It had been more than a month but not just that. It had been since feeling our undisclosed ending, I’d sent him a message, come over later , yess (spiritual tic-tac) Spiritual tic-tac is borrowed from the film Match. The emoji I use for it is mac’s cordless mouse. I’d told him once that was what it meant. Maybe he remembers. I had made my peace, in fact loved that: yess (spiritual tic-tac) would be our last exchange. I could move, I could die, fall in love with somebody new, change my name. It was complete. Not resolved, in fact unresolved. I could vanish. It belonged to the same thread as my drinking red wine in the wardroom; specifically to the time that I had run into j, smoking outside and he suggests going elsewhere. of course, of course I want this. But don’t I want to go in and finish my glass of wine? this is exactly what I don’t want. It’s thrilling to me that this unattended half glass of wine stand in for me. It’s a stamp or an impression onto the room. Complete and unresolved the yess (spiritual tic-tac) gives me the same satisfying thrilling peace. Ro leaves September. This is when I see him, except the way that I see him is like seeing somebody that you think looks like somebody you know and wish it were them. Even if another part of me was fairly certain it was him, I just look. When it starts to rain harder he turns around and comes back into September and comes to sit beside me directly. How long have I been sitting here? I tuck the letter I’d been writing into the Chandelier and close it. I really couldn’t say. Time is slow to pick up momentum and does so in reverse. I tell him nervously about coming to see if they have the photograph. All these years of living in femininity and now that I’m older, now that it’s unbecoming, I have developed a certain shyness around crushes. I am mumbling about anything whatsoever as a way to distract myself from acknowledging the pink and ascension into my face to lessen the blush. He says that he has to go to the states. To pick up earphones, I guess? As a matter of fact yes. He says none of his friends want to go with him. He asks if I want to go with him. I see the moment the idea occurs to him. Yes, I say easily simply. I can’t tell if you’re being serious. I am. I say. When? Now, I’m just waiting for an uber to pick me up so I can go home to get my car. He says that I can wait with him, go and get his car and then pick up whatever I need from home, passport. I don’t want to see his apartment this way. If I am going to see it it’s important to me that I am invited over, that I am brought there by his wanting me there, not by convenience or efficiency. So I get up and leave, turn back to look at him. He is looking at his phone. It’s impossible that he doesn’t feel my looking but he doesn’t look up from his phone. I will guess not looking is somehow empowering to him, and gives him the upperhand. But it is also empowering for me to look, to look and in unconstraint linger in my gaze for as long as is beautiful. It gives me the upperhand to look and not have my look want anything in return. And then I walk home in the rain and wash the airplane smell in the shower, shave my legs. I tell jul I can’t go to the show tonight anymore. In the car I tell Ro what I’d been considering on the plane, thoughts about will power. How Roman it seems to consider willpower a virtue— it’s misguided, I try on for size— if you’re employing willpower it’s because you want something and you want its opposite— you want to not have it too. Am I talking about him now? us? There’s a lot of green, greener from it being overcast. Under rain like this life is permitted to glow from inside itself. Mostly I play classical music, Glass, and Einaudi, and other contemporaries. He has his hand on my thigh and interrupts me when we are ten minutes from the border. They are going to ask why we are going to the states, we need to come up with a reason. They might ask if we’re together. In my head I seriously doubt this. What do you think? Are we together? he says sure, I say and then get back to the Romans, to how willpower might have been different for the Greeks. Let’s say we’re not together, he interrupts again. Together, not together, it doesn’t matter what we say because the fact of us is that we are in the car driving to the states and then who knows what after. Always there is an ending. Sometimes we call it, sometimes it’s just felt (spiritual tic-tac) and in these words and feelings is the intention to secure the fact of it: Over. But always thoughts of him come into my mind as something to be received. And not always but very often there is us finding ourselves together again, alone and and apart from the natural order of our lives, to culminate in sex and another parting. So what does it matter what we answer. We get the earphones and he asks if I want to drive back to Montreal or stay in the States. I need to eat something I realize. We drive to Plattsburgh. Nearly all the restaurants are closed not that any of them are appealing, so we get pizza. He calls the concierge service of his credit card to find us a cabin for the night and in the meantime we are on airbnb. These concierges are very nice but mostly useless, he says. We find a house in the country, it’s an auto-book so we don’t need confirmation to stay. We stop at a pharmacy so that I can get contact solution and I remember to get condoms. When we get to the house in Jericho there are no lights. We park as per the instructions on airbnb. We lift the painted rock by the front door but there is no key. We knock but there is no answer. When Ro tries the door it’s unlocked so we let ourselves in. We are looking around, to match what we are seeing to the photos and for a note from the host or something else to welcome us. If something happens to you the newspapers will say that the mexican kidnaped you. Even if I die too, he says. I smile. That’s true. It feels wrong to have just entered the house and set my purse down in the bedroom but the payment had gone through and maybe the hosts aren’t even around. And then from upstairs we hear a man say, “Who’s in my house?!” It gets sorted. We don’t get shot, which we joked about after but was an actual worry for him, I think. When we are alone Ro says, Take off your clothes we’re going to shower. No, I say, Yes. No I don’t want to shower. But I’d already complied. Before disagreeing, even, and against some part of myself I’d already complied.

[effleuree]

my friend says are you still in an open relationship with r? no no, we’re not in any relationship, I say,  we haven’t spoken in a while.  (that isn’t the whole truth: he’d messaged me while I was in st johns last night it’s really not the best time to talk savannah,  can i call you back in a week or so when it will be ok for me?

) but it’s the pertinent truth, I can feel.  I don’t ask why, in fact I don’t want to know why he’s asking about the relationship, but to prove to myself and to the world that I am fine I don’t stop him from saying: ok good because I saw him with another woman while you were away.

I don’t say anything.  I wasn’t going to not tell you, he says, you know that we’re friends, I wasn’t going to hide that. it’s fine, I say, we’re not seeing each other, it’s not anything anymore.

because if you were serious you know i’d kill him. tha’s uh very nice of you, thanks yam.  you know, I don’t really need to know these things though.  I mean I’d rather not know, I say.

now that that’s settled he gets up to use the washroom

and I am forced to sit there alone under the spotlight of that image.

I really thought that I was over him or nearly. I didn’t know there were more cords to cut, didn’t know that when I killed us I’d saved one fantasy: me taking a long escalator up  in the metro and him standing at the top, waiting (when it comes to romance my imagination steals shamelessly from the movies)

I wonder what other cords tie me to the hope of him and what event will force me to acknowledge them. 

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The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: cf. the Upanishads, the Taoists, and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.

Simone Weil from Gravity and Grace

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Petra Cortright (American, b. 1986), Deep URL Submission, 2014. Digital painting on aluminum, 149.9 x 199.4 cm.

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september 3rd 2017 montreal ~ metro berri

I normally hold the idea of sex in my sacral, heart and crown chakras here it is now in my solar plexus and making me feel like I have to throw up. It would be best for me to not [have sex] now. to return to interests. on the metro the thought makes my eyes well. It’s the wrong place for it, I think, it feels both tight and too much air. sex in the solar plexus. It was just a dream that Y had said “maybe when you are here [in Paris] you should go to the opera, maybe it would be good for you to spend some time alone here”

I’m sure I’d dreamt it because of the caption I’d read under a photo he’d posted

I think of his girlfriend

Don’t play with her, don’t be dishonest Still not understanding this logic

I saw it and felt like it was inadvertently about us. the her in his caption is his girlfriend. then i thought, he always puts dramatic captions under his photographs and you’re flattering yourself thinking it has something to do with you. I was still uneasy about it when I went to sleep though.

This morning, still not remembering the dream but feeling generally off about him, sex, relationships, he says that he’s made it a resolution to not call anymore. I’ve got a hand of spades and hearts: maybe it’s to be considerate– to let me sleep he’d always call before seven but I chose instead to read it in the context of feeling off (it was a choice. you’d have to have an air moon to understand) and later, after remembering the dream, I read it as a continuation of what he’d said maybe it would be good for you to spend some time alone here It was just a dream, I think, but my eyes well anyway. And anyway I don’t want to be touched. Anyway it would be good for me to return to other interests. M is in Toronto because of a psychotic break (her words) And F is in Toronto recovering from one, or at least still in its aftermath. I feel the threads connecting us, I feel how inside our dynamic is a bermuda triangle. I am supporting them. I feel myself present and strong for them and I think that whatever has gotten to them cannot get to me. And I wonder if it could. And if it did what it would look like. Yesterday my roommates announced they were moving out. This morning M called to see if we could live together.

In spite of all those shadows it feels right, so right. I remember M saying we might live together again. I think she’d even said Montreal. I said, yes, maybe. But I didn’t believe it.

September 7th 2017 Montreal It was just a dream and yet I hadn’t heard from Y in two days. I put my name in the books for voluntary extension at work and after yoga yesterday saw that crew scheduling had called. I didn’t call back because I felt it was for Paris. I felt that if I took it, Y really would say what he did in the dream, that it might be best if I spent that layover alone, went to the opera. he would make it sound like it was best for me, he might even make it sound like it was as much my idea as his. So I don’t call back. I ride the yoga high. If I don’t go to Paris, he can’t tell me that, I think. This morning though in my telling him my whirlwind– roommates, m, f, he listens, he’s kind and helpful but also slips in: I don’t know, I’m trying to take some distance from you recently and talking to you about this makes me realize how close we became in such a short time.

I don’t respond to that, the conversation continues as if that wasn’t said. he continues being really kind and helpful, meanwhile emotions come at me– the emotions of past things too that never had the chance to be fully expressed riding the coattails of this new rejection I leave the cafe with urgency and make it inside my apartment I was trying to beat the onset of this breakdown this unstoppable breakdown I open the door and a man I don’t know is there taking off his shoes my roommate’s friend i turn to pl and look at him and my eyes well he says hi he’s about to introduce me to his friend then he notices and his noticing is what breaks the barrier i cry into his tender hug o my god, he keeps saying o my god, savannah, what’s wrong then: were you attacked? no no, I say. his worry forces me to answer.

it’s nothing, I’m being dramatic

and let go of his holding me, I go to the bathroom the lights are at half-lit and in the mirror I see myself my nausea my sad eyes all your body wants is to throw up, I think, it will feel so much better after you do

I let myself, it’s a special circumstance, I think it’s about getting the sex out of my solar plexus, relieving the pressure in the top of my stomach and chest, letting things surface, feelings purging purifying at the same time not at the same time making myself empty making myself the emptiness I feel I want to call M or F about this but they’re not there I don’t want to be dramatic about this, I don’t do it “all the way” as I would have explained it to a psychologist. There was more to throw up, I mean. I’m not sure that going all the way would have rid me of this nausea anyway

this fucking nausea

I thought it was motion sickness but I’ve been three days on the ground

it makes it hard to eat hard to digest

what are you having trouble digesting, savannah? there’s always a metaphysical cause

all these endings, all these feelings around endings

y says maybe it has to do with the solar eclipse of course it does, I say he says, It’s a period of time, everything will go back to its right place. And I believe this new era will be very interesting

clinking champagne flutes

It’s a hand of hearts and spades, I know he means well; it seems an innocent enough comment– I don’t think that he knows that he’s writing himself out of my life. freeing himself, how easily you can slip out of somebody’s life when they’re the ones entering a new era. No Damage Done.

I send him clinking champagne flutes, too. Nothing more is said. the lines from Sharon Old’s Stag’s Leap come to mind:

When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, I am half on the side of the leaver.

I give my full weight to my bed and do nothing to stop the tears.

[effleuree]

you’re not trusting me, he says and occasionally reminds me to breathe

by the end of the night we were dancing  cheek to cheek as it’s traditionally danced 

it made it easier

it made me feel for the first time its intimacy and i did trust him 

trust is a giving over of yourself

it felt nicely

not sexual

though

[effleuree]

imagine if i send c a picture of us kissing and then “oops that wasn’t meant for you” maya said we were at agrikol, the haitian rum bar in the window under the pink neon we laughed

but with the caption: whose bone will pay us, i said, and then oops that wasn’t meant for you

we were mort de rire falling over and into each other in fits

c is the art gallery owner in toronto whom she is high crushing on

a little straighter i look over to the man sitting at the bar who is so handsome a more handsome morgan freeman only if he takes it, i say

should we! she said

i hesitated for a second i hate hesitating especially over these small things and went over to him will you take our photo? i ask

he says that he’s terrible at taking photos but he offers the young and beautiful woman beside him take it for us his eyes are wise and kind and knew wildness once, embers in his eyes

maya and i kiss for the photo

he asks if he can have the photo to post to instagram his asking makes me assume that he’s the owner of the rum bar, that it’s the bar’s ig he is wants to post it to

we agree

he gets up and goes to find another woman who comes over with her phone to get the photo from us

she says,

you’re very beautiful

she means a beautiful couple

he thanks us and tells us not to worry, that his ig is private

i’ve no idea what will become of it then

i went to the washroom and he left but apparently he rested his hand gently on maya’s shoulder and said

à bientôt

[effleuree]

I decide to read again Didion’s Play It As Lays. Coincidence makes my eyes well. brilliantly it begins:

What makes Iago evil? Some people ask I never do.

i’ve reread those first pages more times than i’ve reread the book. i was itchy to remember what our professors had said about it in first year. this morning i finally pulled one of my notebooks from fyp off the shelf. i opened it on the Othello lecture. my notes begin:

Why does Iago do it?

my eyes sting with– and tears form and then recede back into my body. sting from what? something to do with bearing witness

an organization of objects and time and impulses that isn’t man made

the coincidence makes me sit on the edge of my bed. i notice the polaroïds that were taken the night of my party. i look for the one that is missing: the one of r. it isn’t there. i look for it around but mostly i keep looking through the pile of the ones that are. and then i think to check my bed and there it is. innocently there

did i wake in the night to bring it to bed with me?

he brought maya and i out for bubbles after my dinner party. we had agreed to only be friends. i had told him that it would still be nice if he attended. he walked into the restaurant and immediately the night felt more beautiful. at one point he touched me and my body recoiled slightly, i guess at a point in the night when i remembered that we were trying to just be friends. he noticed, he said even: o, she didn’t like that touch.

i think this is the first time the actuality of what it will mean to just be friends occurs to him. but then, i wonder if i’m just flattering myself.

i soften by his side though, and he does sit beside me. graciously he works the table. it takes off some of the pressure for me to host friends from so many different circles simultaneously. out of the corner of my eye i see him go around and make an effort with most of the people there i don’t want to help my adoring him for it

he drove maya home and then brought me back to mine slept over in the morning after many times trying to leave he put his hand on my back i was still laying but he was sitting up

what am i going to do with you, savannah that’s been the question from the beginning

/ i wasn’t sure where it left us

but i wasn’t burning to know either

i prefer waiting and seeing to talking things out

the next night he texted me that that was a very strange way to close things

i’m not hurt. i miss him. tremendously. my impulse is still to think in his direction.

to write to him

i’m not hurt it sounds like i’m trying to convince myself

but i dont think that i am: i want to keep hurt and missing separate

i want to be pure

[effleuree]

above the clouds i was mostly fine and then i stopped working went on break in the bunks thought a lot but more: replayed the same thought a lot which wasn't an emotion yet or a way to deal was just the fact of it a loop of the fact of it i shed a few tears then just listened to a song on repeat too i felt mostly fine by the time my break was done and went downstairs to begin the next service my first customer asked for coffee and when i asked how they took it it unraveled me this totally unrelated question i just started crying it caught me off guard its catching me off guard validated it: made me cry more a direct line between my heart and my eyes i didn't know what was going on or how to stop it (there was no thought) my colleague didn't ask what was wrong she only said that we would go as slow as i needed to and that we could take lots of breaks and her generosity was too much it let me unravel some more an hour or so before the eclipse i guess word got up front to the flight attendant in charge and she came to replace me on the bar cart and i tried to insist that i was fine but she insisted that i take some time alone up front i guess it wasn't the london weather it doesn't matter where you are in the world when you're above the clouds there's no confusing the rain with your broken heart, there is only clarity

[effleuree]

*i didn't think that we would but i still hoped that we would