Has the thought of a person ever felt like a physical object that you can’t quite put down? I’ve been trying to put down, let this go for so long, and yet each time I let it back in, indeed, I seek it out – approval, attention, the slightest bit of acknowledgement so that the warmth of the glow spreads. Like an addiction.
Today I was standing in the kitchen, munching on some carrots and hummus and thinking about how I want to experience a whirlwind, intense love, the kind that you know even at its height that the flame is fast burning to its end. And then I caught myself: this has to be a kind of self sabotage, a self-hatred so deep that I don’t think I deserve secure love?
But security is something that I’ve been running from, as if saying “fuck you” to it will release me from needing it, needing it so desperately that I will do anything but admit it to my sick, tired, self.
I mean! I was going to move to Ottawa, I was going to find a small studio and go to school and look for work at a cafe or a bookstore or in retail, and when the time came I was going to do a co-op for the federal government that would transition to good, steady, stable work: I made a promise to myself to stop chasing, to stop striving, to live quietly, to erase myself from the performance that I’ve carefully cultivated.
And yet. And yet, as soon as I left home I ran to a city overrun with exactly the kind of people I need to avoid: artists, the young and hungry. And I am going to California in a time that California is burning, in a time where travel should be limited, indeed, it is our civic duty, it is our duty as humans that care about other humans and this earth that we Do. Not. Travel.
In my mania, in the sudden de-stabilization of being kicked out of home, I said “fuck you” to security, any kind of security, and accepted a client in California. I’ll be there for a week, then I’ll be back in Montreal for the rest of the month, then I’ll be living in Paris, in an apartment I rented just outside the Arc de Triomphe, as if I have anything to be triumphant about other than the fact that I very likely have an undiagnosed mood disorder in which I make big big big decisions, then live with the consequences for the rest of my life. A heavy stone weighing in my heart.
I know the way the love I’m trying to let go of feels like an actual object in my body is the manifestation of a mood disorder that tends to hyperfixate and make larger than life the emotions that I go through and yet I wish I could rip it out and toss it away, but in the meanwhile what I do have are my legs, and what my legs can do is run.
So I run. I try to get my grad school stuff under control and I run. I try to organize my finances and I run. I do all of the things that marks me as a high-functioning member of society because the fear of being cold, of being in the rain, of ending up with no warm bed to sleep on is the only thing that outstrips my need to run, so the two balance each other out. I run but I find a bed to lay down to rest. Even then I don’t stop running, because sleep is its own escape.
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