on closure

it's been a strange sort of week, or at least a strange sort of weekend. thought about posting this sooner, but wanted to sit with it for a couple of days, think on its significance. way back in october 05 i had tracked down someone from my past and written about it. linked to her blog. noted, i thought in passing, that we had nothing to say to each other, that the past was ancient history, questioned the wisdom of getting in touch. so i didn't get in touch. in fact, i didn't come back to this blog for over a year. and shortly after i had written, she found me (courtesy of the bits and pieces of ourselves we unknowingly shed over the internet - a scent trail? the forensic traces of cyberworld), left a comment. made an entry about it on her own corner of the universe. and i didn't see it until she had traveled the world and come back. until i had jumped my own ship and was making a go of swimming to shore. or out to sea. i'm afraid i'm a bit lacking in direction. but that's not the story.

the story is that i finally saw the comment and wasn't sure what to do with it. how to make amends, where that 19-year-old me, and that 19-year-old her, fit in the story of who i have become. and what would it mean to reach out? what would there be to say apart from hello how are you and i'm sorry and i'm different now i swear? what's the measure of across the ocean and 15 years in a friendship that lived for a few months in that time of so much becoming? as i wrote back when i first tracked her down, what, now after all these years, would there be to say to each other?

but on a whim, or in a fit of self-confidence, or maybe desire to connect, a couple of weeks after i had seen the comment, i sent her an email. wanted to say, at least, that i saw that she had been here. and she wrote back, with a lot of kindness and a lot of honesty. and i wrote back to that. and i don't know if we'll keep corresponding, but i think it kind of doesn't matter anymore, though if this chance collision strikes up a friendship with two people who used to know each other, so much the better. but what mattered, i realize, is not what there was to say to each other. it was that we said anything at all. there's some closure in that, and some small weight that comes off, and some sense that in this big opaque world, you never know what might happen. so if we never connect again, i wish you happiness. and i thank you for writing. it's been a good surprise.


Everything's Okay

And the sun with spin on it now, with hover. Lower over
the light industrial west end, shot back by windowed towers
of the Big Three, it blinds you coming

and going, something smart with your name on it. Spring
walks all over us on sharp heels. Spring chants its way
through the playoffs. Things, being things,

have never been better. Here on the grid, you have reason
to appreciate urban planning more than anything
your parents ever taught you, as Lake Ontario sleeps

with its freighted eye open under sky like a smoker's
bedclothes. Say Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus
until you mean it, say Roncesvalles until you buy that bit

about beauty in ugliness, under oath as you are to living
for the moment, uncut, blow by blow. A woman sings
karaoke in a third floor flat, while below, an engine grinds,

trying to turn over. Behind café glass, a man leans
to his companion as though he loves her. You believe one idea,
and then another. That is, in the instant, at the time.

-- Karen Solie


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box: gould - goldberg variations