prodigal

i would say "i'm baaaaack" and grin, if it wasn't such a tired story and so overdone. not to mention self-evident. suffice to say that sustaining is not the thing i'm best at in the world. but i am back, ass in seat, fingers at keyboard, resolving to be better at this, at keeping in touch. resolving to be better at showing up for so many things i've let slip away from me.

i'm just back from chicago - a subsidized trip since j had to be in town for the AGM of the journal she works for, and i could freeload on the cost of those very expensive sheraton sheets. but i feel a bit like i'm back, or that i've come home, in more ways than flying into pearson from o'hare, more ways than the comfort of the stair that creaks so reliably, the dripping faucet, the shape of the cat taking up way more than her fair share of our small double bed. i feel like i've begun stitching some disparate bits of my life back together again. like i'm starting on some path towards making whole.

in chicago, i sat in a theatre at the old town folk music centre, in a room full of people trying hard to listen to the person inside of them who calls themselves a writer. i sat there with a white plastic table in front of me, a binder of looseleaf paper, a handful of pens, and tried to make stories happen. i sat there, with lynda barry at the front of the room - MARLYS! - all flesh and 3D and committed to pulling pictures out of each of the hopeful minds in front of her. one guy came all the way from florida, i heard him say when he checked in. it seems far to come, though maybe it seems far to come from canada too, since i had to travel with a passport, could shop at the duty free. and i sat there in that room, in that other city, in that other country, and tried to make some space for myself.

making space is no small feat. i knew this, of course, before i showed up there. but i came to know it more over the course of those days in chicago. i came to know it, not only from the writing, from the conjuring of images, from the hard work of shutting down the inner critic - but i came to know it too from sitting in that room next to my friend k. k who i haven't laid eyes on in seven years. k who, more than anyone i have ever known in the world, has helped me become aware of my own shape in the world. it's not always been pretty - we both know this well. it's not easy to confront the contours of self dripping with self-pity or pushed up against anger, making that face in the mirror so impossibly foreign, so unmistakeably you.

but we sat next to each other for two days. went for beer after. played pool, and it was exactly as i remember it being those years ago in buffalo. and it was easy on that first day. harder on the second. k said "it feels like we're moving too fast." i'm not sure i got what she meant, exactly. but to me it felt like a wish for more time. a wish for all of this to be more ordinary. less overdetermined.

but going away for a long time does that to a body. we make strange with each other, with ourselves in relation to the other. we thrill to the reunion, feel the stab of separation well before the plane is in the air again. and the question becomes, for me anyway, how to stay connected. how to keep the channel open. how to make the space to conjure those images, those stories, that love, this friendship.

and in that room, with k to my left and all these marked up quarter-perfect pages in front of me, lynda barry stood up and said simply, "don't try." and you know, i think she's probably right.


bright eyes - i must belong somewhere