Time, Warped.

A fall day in 2018.

I sit drinking my coffee, listening to the guy playing the fiddle in the square below as the tourists pass him by. His repertoire is seemingly limited. Or maybe he only plays what "works" for his audience of vacationers. Whatever his reason, this guy plays non-stop traditional-Québéçois-sounding fiddle tunes. The next guy who will take over that corner after him plays piano. Last week, it was non-stop Pachebel's Canon. The fiddle stops, and a kid is screaming.

Eight floors above, I take another sip of my coffee and type, still somewhat drowsy. I woke up at 11:36 a.m. The bedroom is dark with the blackout curtain closed; it's easy to lose all sense of time.

Most of the way through Q1.

So far 2015 has included some of the busiest months I have ever had. But this time has been good, mostly because in all the busyness, winter has gone by with me often in a survival-auto-pilot state. That might sound negative, but not having time to think too much in the depths of winter has actually been a relief. Supposedly February was the coldest in over a hundred years, but I was so busy going from one job to another that I hardly noticed. In fact, I was often loosening my scarf or removing one mitten because I was warm from jogging to try to catch the next bus so I wouldn't have to wait 6 or so minutes for another one.

5 Years.

Five years ago today I moved to Québec.

What my life is like now is nothing like what I thought it would be on that day I crossed the border and moved to Canada. I came here to be with the person I loved, and once I left my country, he became my home. It wasn't a conscious decision; it just happened in my heart when I displaced myself for him and we got married.

When that exploded and the ground beneath me finally stopped shaking, I realized that I would need to gently dust myself off and redefine "home" for myself. I had to figure out a path forward.

Death and resurrection.

Where I grew up, Easter Sunday was important. There was usually a new Easter dress and sometimes there were hats, but there was always an abundance of pastel-clad people. And green plastic tinsel grass inside bright cheery-colored Easter baskets with chocolate, Paas-dyed eggs and jelly beans.

Until this year, I didn't really have much experience with death. And it turns out, resurrection feels pastel-colored only if you don't know what it's like to go through some sort of death.

Winter stuck like molasses.

Things improved after my last post, and just when I relaxed into a new, pretty positive state, those same disappointments have boomeranged around again.

Winter. I don't see any magic in it right now. Winter is looking out my kitchen window onto my part of the snow-covered balcony and seeing lots of piles of poop from the neighbor's dog, along with some yellow snow for good measure.

At least it is sunny today. And I made some cinnamon rolls. (And I am happy to know that I can make brown sugar by adding molasses to regular white sugar. I often can't use up brown sugar before it goes as hard as a rock, so my new plan is to do this from now on, every time I need brown sugar. Did everyone except me know this?)

I know I can recover from these disappointments; I've already survived the worst. (And Booboo is here for a while visiting, and he's being particularly sweet right now so that really helps.)

No going back no going home.

I got home from my holiday travel three days after my return flight was originally scheduled. The domino-effect delays and cancellations caused by the recent snowstorms led to my Thursday flight being cancelled and rescheduled for Friday. Then that Friday flight was cancelled. After lots of time on hold yet again, I was told the next flight I could get was for Monday. I later called back and managed to get a flight for Sunday, but then that one too was cancelled. More time on hold and the feeling I would never make it home led to looking for flights out of a nearby city an hour and a half away. I managed to get a a flight out of that city for Sunday. I was told that if I didn't make that flight, my next option from either city would be the following Wednesday. Both legs of that Sunday flight ended up being delayed, but I eventually got home at 2 a.m. or so Monday morning.

Darkness and light and the belly of the whale.

I've been thinking a lot about darkness and light, death and rebirth, and the journey into the belly of the whale.

In writing about the monomyth, Joseph Campbell described three overarching stages of the journey: departure, initiation and return. The last step of the departure stage is the journey into the belly of the whale, where the hero seems to be swallowed up by death.

The boots are on.

Crisis: Dead-End or Transformation

This was in my neighbors' mail outside their door. I took it as extra motivation to fight my way through to the other side of this experience. I recently watched Under the Tuscan Sun, and it's just like when Patti says to Frances (whose husband left her for another woman):  

"You know when you come across one of those empty shell people, and you think 'What the hell happened to you?' Well there came a time in each one of those lives where they are standing at a crossroads... someplace where they had to decide whether to turn left or right. This is no time to be a chicken-shit, Frances."

Today my ex moved his stuff out.

Things Not to Say.

When someone tells you that their husband/wife/partner left them for someone else suddenly without any warning signs at all, here are some things it's probably best not to say out loud to that person.

"C'est la vie." 

Digging before the ground freezes.

"It doesn’t go away, the importance you put on one single person, the value that he had for you, the assumption that you would lie beside him forever; the hope you had for your union is so great that the loss of it doesn’t go away. To move forward you have to dig an internal grave and intentionally put that hope to rest. People will try to help you, but you must do it yourself. You bury it like a body in the earth and pray that whatever it was for you will give life to something else—like a tree—and hope that with every year that new life will become bigger, stronger, and more beautiful. But that loss doesn’t ever go away, not entirely."
-Isabel Gillies, A Year and Six Seconds: A Love Story (p. 32)

So we signed the divorce paperwork. It was the saddest thing I have ever done in my life.

4.

We got married four years ago today. Last year when we celebrated our anniversary and exchanged our annual anniversary letters to each other, I didn't know we wouldn't have a lifetime of anniversaries to share.

I thought we would one day be a little old couple walking down the street holding hands. I never ever imagined the possibility that any of this could ever happen. Ever. Let alone before our fourth wedding anniversary.

3 months.

It's been three months since my husband left me for another woman. Completely out of the blue. In those first stunned weeks, I couldn't see how I would survive. I felt like I was dying. I am certain that I've cried more tears since July than I've cried during my entire life before that. Which is really weird because this was the surprise ending to the most wonderful and happy five-and-a-half years of my entire life. (The time I was with my husband, during our dating and marriage...up until the day he came home from that trip where he fell in love with her.) It's mind-boggling. And devastating. And I just don't have the ability to get my head around it. Time hasn't really helped yet with that.

With that I think I will just list some thoughts as they occur because that's about all I can muster right now:

• Last weekend I went to a free open house two-hour life drawing session. It's something I've wanted to do for over two and a half years. I used to do visual art in high school, and have only done it sporadically since getting into theatre. It was fun. I want to draw and paint more.
  

Detangling.

I've only been to an actual grocery store twice since S left. Even in normal times, going to the grocery store is not my favorite chore. I think most of my dislike has to do with the process of hauling all the groceries out of the store to the car and from the car up to the apartment. I particularly disliked it in my single days, but it became fun when S and I did it together because I was with my favorite person in the world. We would often stop for poutines for dinner just before so neither of us would get hangry.

But that day in mid-July I found myself at the Fruiterie 440 holding a package of mushrooms and trying not to cry.

Digging in.

This is my second year to choose a verb as a theme for the year, inspired by my blogger friend, Fiona. In January, after thinking about my artistic goals and dreams, I chose "dig in" for 2013. I had been trying to pursue my dreams here in Quebec these past couple of years I've lived here. But on New Year's Day, after another grant rejection letter, I realized that this was the year I needed to really work to try to make my dreams happen. Even harder than the hard work I had already been doing throughout 2012 and before that. I knew that more determination and persistence were called for if I wanted a crack at the life I envisioned. And I knew that if I didn't give it my absolute best effort, I would regret it forever.

Dig in.

So I made choices to do just that. I stopped some part-time work I did on the side (that I was doing in addition to my main day job) so that I could focus my energy and time on the artistic pursuits. And wouldn't you know, somehow I got a few paid artistic gigs that balanced out the financial side of having stopped the other non-artistic work. In June, I looked at the past half-year and felt good about my progress and excited to see where the rest of the year would lead.

Then July happened. Overnight, my life became a landslide.

I have spent the last two months holding on so that I won't be washed away by it all. Or, much more accurately, it's my friends and family that have been firmly holding onto me. Abandonned and stunned, all I had enough sense to do was reach out. And they grabbed me and held me tight as the debris thundered by and the rain beat down.

Three haiku.

1.

My world exploded.

I am left here surrounded

by sharp shards. Alone.

2.

That day in July,

time stopped. But the pain keeps on

reverberating.

3.

The path obscured by

broken promises and dreams:

winter came early.