Red Cedar

Last week was a weird few days, culminating in drinking too much and having a bit of a freak out. I know – me – freaking out – can you believe it? Anyhow, I’m better now. Still having weird dreams and some annoying obsessive compulsive behaviour but feeling much more grounded overall. And productive. And not so afraid.

I would like to blame it all on the hearings, you know, aftermath etc. But that would be dishonest. It’s not that. It’s not even mostly that. The hearings are just the most convenient and recent focal point for the tarry muck that runs in place of my blood, a pin prick and it oozes forth. But in a year there will be something else. And another after that. Such is trauma – original and then compounded, rolled flat and picked off in pieces like a scab. And mine likes to be fed. Greedy thing that it is, always hungry. And as much as I want it to go away, I can’t imagine being without it – a parasite so changing its host that to lose it is to risk diminishment. Isn’t that why we hold onto our sufferings so? Because we do not know how to be without them frustrating and comforting both.

When I am well and balanced. In high spirits as I am today, I can not understand my madness one whit (for this is, you know, a small madness). Can not understand why I want it so, or allow it to veil the world and mute its colour. And as certain as I am that everybody has this in them, I am equally certain that everybody does not.

I am thankful at least that I get long reprieves and function well. I wonder if I can keep this balance forever or if I must one day make a choice.

It certainly feels like Monday, what with the rain and all, but according to Environment Canada the weather is looking up and up as of this evening or tomorrow. Sunny skies, warmer temperatures, and I’ve got my car back so I can get out of town this weekend. Not that I’m going anywhere particularly grand, but I am due for a trip to the island to see friends and family. I figure I should be going often this summer as come fall I will be primarily traveling other places.

And I find myself eager for this – the trips east and north and south in the not-distant future – and wondering. Knowing when I am on the road all the time it is awfully hard on my nervous system, but somehow preferring it to week-in/week-out in the same place. Though when I really explore that, I suspect it is more a frustration with coming into the office and my appointed cube every day that I dislike. When I am home and ambling, I do not feel quite so stuck and needing to leave. Perhaps it really is just the beige walls closing in on me and nothing more.

Looking at my calendar, I am heartened to note that I am out of the office almost the whole last two weeks of August between union meetings and vacation. I still find it hard to believe that I’ve got 10 days booked off for the Marble Mountains (7 days of which will be spent hiking), plus another trip to the Walbran scheduled.

This week is full of work that I am dreading, resentful of and feel stuck about. Mainly union hearings to prepare for and bureaucratic paperwork for my employer (not to mention a whole day of interviews on Wednesday). I really look forward to stepping down as union stewart entirely for awhile (once I start traveling in September I will be bowing out of that role entirely and with plausible excuse), as I’ve gotten a bit burnt out from it lately. But until then, I just have to buckle down to it. On the bright side, I expect that once this week is done I will feel awfully accomplished.

For the record (and this is not poetic in the slightest).

I am tired of always doing the right thing. I wish I was meaner, or less empathic. I want to be harder and able to turn away. I am exhausted by my own internal conflict. I want to shed this need to struggle on behalf of others.

So how come it feels like this is just my work anyways? There’s no escaping it when it finds me in every aspect of my life. Damn. It finds me when I’m just walking down the street. Which says something about my ego-needs really, because I respond to it. I respond to it every time.

But today, okay. Just for today. I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like going to bat for anyone. I don’t feel like making this phone call and having a conflict on behalf of someone else’s complaint. I don’t feel like mediating this situation anymore. Or anyone’s. Just for today.

Some weeks I have so much to say that I can’t help but spill line after line, an unbroken textual flow onto paper and screen. And then there are other times where I feel the enclosure around my heart go rigid, the snaking wire that binds my lips held fast against the truth escaped. An appearance of placid silence hides the flung anxiety of someone who has not quite got over it. Who is, in her darker moments, never getting over it.

I am reminded in large and small ways that I am not yet sufficiently distant from what has happened. Twenty months and counting, and I am still anxious. Stopped dead in my tracks, paranoid or crying if one of the ghosts should slip into a space still left void. Each time almost free, there another reminder to my fear. There another reminder to loss. There another reminder to hurt.

It is less lately, I acknowledge. But still it feels as though this obsidian fear has come to live in me permanently, though it may flake away bit by bit. How deeply this sits. How foolish I feel for it. And angry with myself for not controlling the heart better in the first place. For letting it be taken from me as though it were not mine after all.

Though perhaps it is not really a solo affair, this heart, but joined and a part of everything. How then do I wall it away? Secret it into a safer place? Not real I suppose, this fantasy of isolation. Not real for me in my need to be understood, to be heard. A sucker to the warm red that livens my lips and my fingertips. Shuffling my feet and grinning ever so slightly as I try to explain the way I make myself break just so.

And then she finds herself again, writing poetic and wondering who cut away the wire. Both hands free, palms tilted towards the sky.

Perhaps it’s hormones. Perhaps it’s the return of the rain. Whatever it is, I am grey today. Flat, grey, weathered. I feel trapped in the city without a car and I need to get the fuck out of it soon. I think the last 3 weeks is the longest period I’ve spent here without going anywhere in over a year. Not good. Not good at all. I wish Jess was returning with my car sooner.

Meh. Whine. This will pass shortly, I am highly aware.