Blank Space

I haven't wanted to write for what feels like a month. The main reason for the radio silence is that I've actually been feeling better. Anyway, the highlights:

The Riverhead: I've been taking classes in neurolinguistic programming (re-writing the code in my brain's operating system), both a foundations course and an advanced class--eight weeks altogether. The most significant realization is that, despite my previous perception of myself as being born of fear and peril, I may not have been doomed from the moment my cells started to multiply. An exercise in a practice session with another person in class shifted this rock-solid idea to the understanding that I was actually held in my mother's love from the moment I arrived. This not-s0-subtle reframe of my story has made a huge difference in how I've negotiated the past weeks: brighter, hopeful, a participant in my life.

Clear: Trey went to Germany to present at a conference, and then spent a week in Cadiz on the beach. I didn't hear from her the entire time she was away. Friends told me she just needed to take some time for herself and that she'd be in touch when she got back. Pictures of her travels and new friends basking in the small hour, northern latitude twilight on the rooftop of a German socialist castle populated her flickr page. During the 10 days she was away, I moved all of my stuff out of our flat--she had been panicky about my things in cabinets and on shelves that prevented her from actually living where we lived. As she had never, ever lived on her own (always with a man from the time she left boarding school), she was trying to live in her house now but was stunted by my things (photos, clothes, books, CDs, papers). So I boxed it all up and moved it all out--except for the stereo and my six-linear feet of vinyl, and the kitchen necessaries. I drove it across bridges on multiple trips all the while hoping I would be allowed to move it back when I had become an acceptable partner again. Or maybe, as a roommate in the spare room.

Substitution: I'm in Wyoming all this week, staying with my friend Sam who I know from my days as a bodyworker. It's been days of bike riding, archery, hiking, photography, and driving through farm country. I was reading my Twitter page this morning and read that Trey (who told me on Sunday when we went out that she didn't see herself as my fiancee any more) had just found a roommate for the spare room, a deal sealed over Burmese food and single malt scotch. A message that was sent to her thousands-strong readership before it was told to me. In a brief video call with her this morning, she clarified that this was a financial arrangement of sharing the rent and utilities with someone who would be in a room and cook meals for themselves and that was it. Not a romantic roommate. Of course, she heard my disappointment at not being chosen as her roommate and my embarrassment at having the news broadcast to her audience of followers and our mutual friends as an opportunity to burst into tears at how she had fucked up and should have done things differently and was helpless under the burden of having to pay the rent on her own. I tried to persuade her that I wasn't saying she fucked up, or should have done things differently, or needed her to be burdened by the rent in order to make me feel better. I just felt disappointed and embarrassed, and she could go off to the races on her own if she wanted.

It's a beautiful outside this morning. There's a white clapboard Baptist church boasting a 20-foot long banana split at its annual picnic this Saturday. Orioles and red wing blackbirds dive over crystal mountain streams. With no clouds in the sky to hold on to, I could just let go of the earth and float up and up.