An incredible fit of [catharsis].
Note: edited with some afterthought.
In an incredible fit of procrastination, I am preferring to write instead of studying for a post-structuralism exam coming up in the morning. And really, the meeting following the exam I’ll be having with my Japanese profs is of greater significance in the long run. I have to decide whether I am willing to hire a tutor, or whether I should just take the $4,000 hit. I just hope they arrive to the same conclusion I’ll be quietly thinking: hire the tutor, spend a little more, and build a new foundation from the pulverized shards of last week’s disaster. Three A marks and one F just doesn’t sit well with me. Not for my standards, and not for what I’m paying in tuition. And lost sleep.
Incredible fits of procrastination are amazing in that so much work gets done. Except that which was on the queue that is the target of said procrastination. Most of the time lost (or of being productive, depending on how I choose to parse it) went to computer-related matters: setting up a hand-me-down scanner (from
Also, a cathartic moment — well, hour, actually — in another incredbile fit of procrastination involved a walk up to the local Shoplifters Drug Mart to buy something for colouring my silvering hair. Since 2003, I have left my hair alone, and incrementally — especially so since I moved to Toronto — my hair has greyed.
This would have been just fine and a neutral issue entirely, had it not been for the spectre of my ex-girlfriend, Joan, who early in our friendship (which laid the groundwork for a warm, endearing relationship, now long dead and cold) noted how she found grey hair extremely attractive on people. If they were on her lovers, then it was a bonus physical attribute which just happened to arouse her.
Unlike my ex-mum, I don’t mind grey hair. She seemed to be phobic of it and, as consequence, dyed constantly. She’d have the gumption to tell people at age 45 (about when I last had contact with her) that she had no grey hair. Her brunette mane looked artificial, like a wig, since coarse, grey hair doesn’t resemble younger, naturally pigmented hair. Meanwhile, I’ve had grey hair since I was six, but after about age 18, one could pull out a couple of dozen hairs and still have more to pull. These days, about 40% of the hair I grow is grey.
But I coloured it. To most, it’s indistinguishable from my original hair colour. I wasn’t going after “hey, notice me” attention, such as when I had “ultra-violet” locks in early 2000. This was partly because I wanted to colour it for a long time (since August 2005, actually); partly because a house mate insisted that it would do well on me to have the grey not being so prominent; and partly because I wanted to make a clean emotional break from the baggage associated with an ex-girlfriend who not only has lived in the same city as I have for these last 15 months (well, I think she’s still around, but maybe she hauled off), but has also avoided communicating with me on a personal level from the very night she ended our relationship — despite her assertion that our friendship would continue so long as she had any part in it. Uh-huh.
That last reluctant embrace spoke volumes of doors closing forever, and that early, heavy summer dawn awaiting me outside her place signalled the break of something stark, cold and fantastically foreign.
So, my grey hair, like her, is gone. My hair, but for a spell. Her, probably forever. I’ll let the hair come back in time, but for now, having the change is welcomed and invites some craved reflection. It’s a small way to symbolically let me continue coping with that loss — a loss which I seem to understand didn’t really impact her all that much, given that she walled off that part of her life practically overnight, just as she (and with a small admission, I as well) has done (with other things and people) in the past. For me, the loss was monumental, catastrophic, but far from instantaneous. Rather, it has unfolded slowly, sometimes excruciatingly, where the self-flagellation gets very dark and persistent and my well-being is questioned by those now closest to me.
Because I’m sick of being afraid of her, afraid of running into her by accident in this big, but small enough city, I wanted to find any way I can to disempower an apparition from terrifying me like this. The associated nightmares are now old hat, and the fear of certain platforms and intersections are just wasting my time and attention away from better things. She isn’t here, is she, so why let her engineer such control? I don’t know. I keep thinking that I should have moved past the loss a long time ago, but I failed at that.
Also, factoring the kinds of lengthy, continuing, intimate discussions shared between us for months and months — relating to the pleasurable minutiae of kitchen planning, our future home’s architectural considerations, bedroom and onsen bath planning, and even marriage (which incidentally at the time I would not agree to despite its recent legalization — if only for my independent stubbornness of getting to Canada under my own merit, which I later did, much in contrast to her expressed doubt) — this puts my “getting over it” process in a new category of life experiences which hasn’t happened to me before.
One core difference partitioning us was that I could function in this world without being intimately involved or connected with someone else; she, on the other hand, was seldom alone for long, and she alluded to such while we knew one another. Her situation may be different now for all I know, but really, I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter.
Ironically, however — and this will forever remain speculation — I do think she ended our affairs once she realized that this relationship was no longer one of those intangible “net romances” (with all the warm fuzziness that felt “real”, without any of the 6:30a morning breath mess, in a manner of speaking), and because of it, she would have had to alter how our relationship worked once we saw a lot more of one another in person. I do think she didn’t want me to be all that close to her once she recognized that I was finding my way without being dependent on her; further, the west coast was close enough for her fantasy to stay alive. I do also suspect that in her eyes, I would have been a liability to be seen beside her on a regular basis, and this was definitely incompatible with her particular life situation. I was, for all intents, the visceral reminder of those unresolved matters which she didn’t want to examine within herself — too much those “hot potato” issues. Such issues are far better to bury than to deal. Any closer I was to the Toronto CMA, and that theoretical fantasy of a relationship, mutated to reality, would have smothered her. So she ditched.
Granted, in no insignificant way, she gave me life, but it was the kind of gift which, at least to my complicated head, welcomed a stronger foundation upon which to forge an already potent, incredible, purportedly mutual relationship. I advanced carefully with that understanding, while she apparently went elsewhere (without telling me for most of the way, I later rudely learnt).
Is there a place in my heart for her? There is, I think. But as I wryly have commented when asked, it’s that part of my heart which went necrotic and had to be surgically excised to prevent it from affecting the remaining healthy tissue. And having less of a heart has, I believe, contributed to my being a colder, more difficult person to get to know. I haven’t been this reluctant to trust others since my heady, tumultuous days of age 18.
Whatever she chooses to do with her life, she will do well. She always has, even when she thinks she hasn’t. It’s part of her constitution, whether of her own spirit or beaten into her in one way or another. She accepted no less, and though that kind of exertion can wear most people down, I nevertheless find it admirable, if not attractive, when balanced with re-charge. She, however, did not do well with me. And that was my big turn-off. Then again, she suggested at least once or twice that she was attracted to people who interested her and from whom she could learn something new. I guess there was nothing left I could teach her.
But then, especially back in 2003 and 2004, there was this sense of noticing that she had been able to experience her life in ways I which had not with mine. I was comparing bay leaves to watermelons, apples to tangerines — which is pointless, really. I wondered, sometimes resentfully, why I couldn’t live my life fully and under my own terms, pushing my own limits in ways she noted herself as doing with respect to her own life. I just needed to re-orient myself first, I guess. The last three years of my life have centred around that.
It’s not really something with which I need to concern myself any longer, as clearly, there is never a dull moment around here. Much of it isn’t pretty, but staid it is not. Shame that she couldn’t be a part of it or, at the very least, be around peripherally to appreciate how I was doing so much better than when she ditched and parachuted.
So I have this grey hair, but it can’t be seen. Not for now. It’ll be out of the picture long enough for me to see what life is like without her silvered burden hanging its dead weight over my memory and on my head. The processing and fading will continue, but I don’t know when or if it will fade completely. Realistically, I doubt it can vanish entirely, just like my grey hair. She was the one who, as far as this short life goes, “got away” (in the romantic sense, in the sense of what a screenplay might tell as some kind of “universal” experience, even though no experience is universal) , but given the person she eventually revealed herself to be, maybe her self-engineered escape wasn’t such bad a thing after all.
And at last, at 2:00a, I can begin to end this incredible fit of procrastination.