Agent of Distraction

Tales from the Crypt:

After my father died, I spent a long long time being very angry. Because he'd left and I missed him. Because he'd left and I had to cope all by myself.

And now I feel like I'm finally at a place where I am fully at peace with his death (it's only taken 16 years) and I forgive him for leaving. I understand why he died. I understand he was torn up in his life, and conflicted, and sad and I know that for him the world he moved on into was a more peaceful one. He's at peace and that's important. And I needed to let go, which was important too.

It's taken a long long time to look back past the pain and recognize what my father's death did for me. How it was a re-birth of a sort, how it pushed me out into the world and gave me the opportunity to find myself and have a life. A good life at that.

Nowadays, when I feel my father's presence I don't run from it. He is there on the outskirts of my being, and we can communicate. Images and thoughts and feelings flow through me. I know I am not forsaken but cherished and loved. And I think of this time between us similarly to Z's absence when he goes to work and we part with knowing that even though we can't see or touch each other we can still talk, and that soon we will be together again.

I believe this. That when I die, he will be there beyond the gate and that together we will live the promise of a life neverending.

I'm reading Home With God by Neale Donald Walsh and it's apt. My foster mother is dying pretty much as I write this. She's in a coma, and she will likely just slip away now, ever deeper, ever further until she's gone. A gentle ending as much as can be, to a vile disease. I saw her not long ago. I said what I needed to say. We said goodbye, as much as people can, without ever using those words.

I am not sad that she is dying, because I'm glad her pain is at an end. I'm sorry she had cancer though, and I'm sorry for those of her family who will be left behind, but I don't begrudge her her release.

A memory, a fragment of a memory from childhood - what I wish for her now. Long shafts of moonlight and the scent of wind from the sea. My father sitting at the edge of my bed, singing me to sleep. Sleep now. And then a long kiss goodnight.

but that suffers a sea-change, into something rich and strange

A few days ago, had he been alive, my father would have turned 60 years old. It is an odd thought - the image of him as a young, fit man is tattood firmly into my brain and I almost cannot imagine him aging. When I do think of him as older it's simply a visual process of adding grey hair, wrinkles, lines. It's harder to picture in any way how he would have changed as a person, what he'd be like now if he was alive (presumably if he'd survived the apoplexy of my pierced navel! pierced nose! string of boyfriends! and other lifestyle choices constrict the flow of blood to the parental head).

Sometimes when I think about him memories, fragments of memories surface for me.
An image of a visit to the cemetery some 15 years or so ago, when my mum and I came to lay fresh flowers because it was Dad's birthday and we ran into my little half-brother with his mum. He was three years old, and all dressed up in neat little outfit completed with a little red bow-tie. He reminded me so much of a teddy bear in his toddlerhood my brother - he was all wide-blue-eyed and open-smiled and utterly, incorrigibly huggable. He was so sweet-tempered, so trusting, so ready to take your hand and follow you home that it constricts my heart to remember it. *

There are other memories, more torturous. Like the memories of my stepdad trying really hard to cheer me up with presents and a trip to the circus. My stepdad who was always courteous and dignified bringing me small gifts of various kinds of stationery (pink pens, I remember, a tiny notebook festooned with white hearts, and a little cardboard box shaped like a house whose roof lifted up)**; knowing in that moment that this was a man who would work hard on being part of my life and that I would need for my part to work on loving him, even though back then I wasn't ready to love anyone again and I just wanted to unexist.

Remembering my stepdad (in suit, and tie, and polished shoes - a man dignified to a fault) coming to take me to the circus where we sat on roughhewn benches, with our feet on a popcorn-sprinkled sawdust floor). We sat side by side in this awkwardness of him trying very hard to make me happy and me knowing he was making this huge effort and wanting to make an effort ot be happy for him - the whole thing made ever more painful by the presence of the spectre that followed me always and shared the bench with us - the wormhole , the odd-shaped hole that held The Absence of Father In the known Universe.

* Hahaha, please note the extensive use of the past sense in that sentence - he is actually pretty sweet-tempered still for a badass, bitch! young man (I judge him not for I know not to what extremes the enforced wearing of red bow ties in childhood would have driven me.)

**Can I remember where I put my keys? No. Can I remember down to the last detail images of stationery from 20 years ago? Why yes, naturally.

And I tell the man I'm with about the other life I've lived

Today the Smallest Cutest Colleague and I were talking about her desire to up sticks and trade the English country for a warmer one and I began lamenting my unlived life in which I would have been living on Borneo working on the conservation of orangutangs*.

And it got me thinking really about all the ramifications of what marriage will mean beyond needing somewhere to hire a marquee from. All about how when presented with various options of What To Do When I Grow Up I chose to let go of my wild dreams and picked the option of what had the likelihood of being the most real, the most immediate thing. I chose the life I knew I could have, rather than one that seemed appealing in dreamscape. But sometimes all those what ifs choose to come back and haunt me, to remind me of how I gave up gay aspirations/flings/free-spirited solitude and a bunch of other things I've loved and sometimes still intensely long for.

And my unlived life waits for me on street corners and whispers things like: 'high heeled shoes'; 'orangutangs'; 'the Glass Bar'; 'long distance long term travels' and I grow increasingly restless for the idea of these alternate universes.

Those things fade quite a bit when I come home to Z and he makes me laugh and The Cat of Supreme Fluffyness manipulates me into giving it more food and I know why I made the choice I did and I feel its rightness. Where I am now is a nice, nice place - it's just greatly different to the place I thought I'd be. Because I never really planned on getting married, just as I never could have  planned the osmosis-like process through which Z infiltrated my life and crept beneath my skin. No chains that bind, none at all, only the galling knowledge of how much I'd miss him and the feline if I was living out my dreams without them in it.

And much as I like (and probably need) to pause by the side of the road and contemplate the map of alternate destinations, I'm very much enjoying this journey that I am on. For starters, he makes really really good pancakes. And when showcased next to Z's weirder passionate addictions (to cough syrup, heartburn medicine and teriyaki sauce to name but a few) my own devotion to the internet is seeming like a thing of mild interest.

*or you know, alternatively being a world famous author by now. I have many dreams. And if you don't think that my current relationship is affecting the state of my creativity then clearly you obviously haven't been enticed by The Cat of Fluffyness while trying to do Serious Work, like.

A post you should not read if offended by the word WEDDING

Well T-minus two months to the big day and I'm starting to get properly excited about it all because it's finally seeming more real, and by golly we might yet actually pull it all off.  At the moment there is still no guarantee we will be able to get married legally as well as spiritually (largely owing to the fact that Z's passport is still in the Belly of The Beast (by which I mean the Home Office) and it's a question of whether we'll be able to obtain the marriage licenses in time for the wedding.

I'm loving the fact that I'm the first person of the younger generation of my family to get married and so my family is very excited - a thing manifesting itself as them volunteering to help me do the catering and offering generous financial contributions for my married life. If we'd been getting hitched like in Old Testament times of oldest--- youngest, by the time it was my turn the relatives would have been all worn out and like: "that's nice. wish you happiness. as your wedding gift, here's a teacup."

I had my first wedding dream last night. I dream that Z and I were at the church but everything was going hideously wrong - my maid of honour was absent, the best man had absconded with the rings, we'd forgotten our CD with the music for the ceremony, I didn't have my hair done or my makeup on, Z's hair had the appearance of something electrocuted - and I managed to remain calm about it all up until the point when I looked in the mirror and realized that most of my teeth were either broken or had fallen out. A grim dental moment by the standards of any dream, and one which alarmed me into wakefulness even before the clock rang.

It was amazingly sunny outside - all this bright, foreign light streaming through the windows filling the cat with boundless bouncy bitey energy - and I instantly resolved to get up and accomplish an impressive list of bureacratic tasks of which I have done almost none since "Mutter sarcastic commentary to the Oprah Winfrey show was not something I had orginally planned to accomplish, as fulfilling as it is in its own right.

So far the wedding stuff has been remarkably stress free, but to counterbalance it trying to plan the honeymoon is proving to be a nightmare of the rotten/broken teeth calibre. To help me to find a destination spot that can unite in harmony a man who likes to explore and be active and a woman who likes to lie on the beach I turned to Smallest Cutest Colleague who seems to have travelled most of the globe making acquaintances of natural disasters, jail cells, revolutionaries and hijackers.

So when Smallest Cutest Colleague is applied to the map of the world, we end up with a screening test which rules out the following destinations:

Cuba (SCC had her passport taken away and was held in jail for no apparent reason. While I am sure that all that quality time in prison would be a powerful bonding experience for Z and I, it is still something I would rather avoid)

India & Bangladesh (SCC's bus was hijacked by persuns in opposition to the ruling political party)

Mexico (SCC's bus disabled by floods and hurricanes. Also the visible smog of Mexico City doesn't sound appealing)

Kenya & Tanzania (SCC and Funky Colleague report a lot of corruption and political unrest when they travelled through the region; The Constant Gardener deeply disturbing)

agent of distractio jr.

Z: Yesterday the cat would not let me work because it wanted cuddling. It just plonked itself on my keyboard and wouldn't let me type until I had given it sufficient attention.

I think it has learned that from you.

that shiny new blog smell

Oh life is an exciting, ever changing thing for I am doing a number of things wot I swore I would not do in my younger and more principled days.

In chronological order:

1)       Getting married

2)       Sending out people nice hand-made invitations to get them to attend said wedding

3)       Seriously considering bringing into this world one of those small screamy child things.

I don’t know why. Perhaps I am being taken over by hormones. Or the cat has Poisoned and Befuddled my brane with his fluffyness (such much fluffyness! It must be rubbed to be believed!).

Or it could be that my diminishing resistance to the cat’s soulfully eye and mew (now with added pathos) when he wants me to give him Whiskas has simply clouded me to the Right and Rational Path so much that I keep thinking (Ooooh, baby. Sleepless nights, torturous screaming, yeah, I could deal with that).

It’s like pizza. And Gap trousers made by tiny Asian slave children. It’s wrong. I know it’s wrong. And yet, and yet… it feels so compelling.

Now entering Perdition: distance to destination 30 miles.