October 2019

I always loved the idea of this.
Danger outside, shelter inside.
Tired? Weary? (did it take you long to find me)
Come in and rest.

All of these traits and skills I have been learning and honing for years are finally making sense.

Its so fucking cool!!!

This encompasses the book, this blog and my Facebook page.

Better part of a decade at the farm getting cheated on.

The years I spent with someone else’s man in my bed.

Moving here and the shedding of all my things, including my magic.

The years in Milton alone, learning how to love solitude.

And even moving to Hamilton, to my tiny third floor apartment with crooked floors and crown molding.

Once upon a tiny apartment…

Did I ever tell you the whole story of Hot Neighbor?

I know I told you all of how I would see this boy around my neighborhood, I was always a mess or in a rush or both. And he still looked at me with lusty eyes. And I him. He was strawberry blond, freckled and looked chiseled almost, all perfect curves and sharp angles.

Did I tell you my son came upstairs one day and said “Ma, I got a job roofing.” And my belly dropped a bit, dangerous, shitty work but I was still proud. I will always be proud.

Did I tell you he asked if he could bring a coworker up to smoke pot after work one night and “I said sure honey, I am not home anyways.”

Did I tell you when said coworker walked in the door, he looked around at my little gypsy nest and immediately asked my son who he lived with.

“My mom.”

“Does she have long dark hair and a lot of tattoos?”

“Ya, that’s her, don’t worry, she thinks you’re hot too.”

Coworker was Hot Neighbor.

He walked into my house and knew it was mine, without even knowing my name.

“This place looks like you look and feels like I thought you might feel. Warm, welcoming, safe and strange.”

He came back with wine and pie as offerings and my door stayed open to him until we moved.

Scorpios have always been better at explaining the inexplicable than most.

They just know things. I have learned from them.

Young un the First was a Scorpio too, Halloween baby.

He walked into the Milton house and declared it sanctuary, then revised his original statement when he realized it wasn’t the bricks and mortar. It was me. He was the first one to say it.

You carry this feeling of home wherever you go. Bless him.

I am learning what it means.

In its entirety.

It is one thing to be a beacon, a guiding light.
Stella Polaris (told you I would give you a star).

I am also a safe place, I know this. I am the archives and the temple.
I am a conduit, I know what to say, how to fix and soothe.

When the world is too much, come here boo, I gotchu.

And for a long time that was enough.

But what about when I was lost?

I learned to self soothe. Mostly. Sometimes I’d cry out loud enough that my ghosts would rally. A select few I can call on to help me with this conundrum or other. But when the work is finished, they go back from whence they came and I would tend to the bones alone.

Do I deserve what I give?

Have I earned it?

Is it even something that must be earned or is it a birthright or karma, or all three of these things.

This path of mine has not been easy. I admit a lot of that is my own doing, making the harder or stranger choices. I have reconciled this. My pain has not made me hard, doesn’t make me feel justified in violence. The opposite really. Anything I have endured I shield others from.

Maybe I do deserve it. A taste of my own medicine. Physician, heal thyself.

Deserve.

What a strange word.

Do I deserve to be happy? 

You believe I do.

You message me every morning. 

You kiss my forehead whenever I present it to you.

You listen when I’m scared or excited.

You know by doing these things you are contributing to my happiness. 

Please take that leap and realize I feel the same about you. 

Please also take the leap and realize that the things that please wolves are much too carnal for the sheep.

He thinks I am giving him gifts, this Wolf of mine.
Trust, liberation, libations, debauchery, all of me really.

Sanctuary.

The core of what I am.

Just so happens I am not a pious church full of ridiculous rules and a judgmental god.

We don’t sacrifice here. Only rejoice.

I am a temple to honor the old ones.

Every fuck a prayer and an offering.

They are very pleased.

I understand fully what it means to hold space for someone.
And finally what it feels like to have them hold space for me.

To him I am his princess, he is the castle and the wolf who guards it.

He is my long sought after safe haven and I his.

Me: I’m shaking and smiling and tearing up bit.
        I’m not even overwhelmed.
        This is relief. Absolute pure relief.

Him: I feel the same way. Fucking relief, I can’t explain it any other way…

Amen

This is gonna be a twofer and I have no idea how to transition, but transition I will.

Okay so.

Got it.

2 quotes of the night.

1. I feel you like a fever breaks.

(We will get back to that.)

2. Me: we aren’t together anymore but I am not gonna go running around fucking his friends.
Him: I respect that. Plus I am pretty scared of him to be honest.
Me: everyone is.

There it is.

Let it be the finale of seem.

Final Boss was the actual finale. I can’t be with anyone here anymore even if I wanted to. And I don’t.

I got epiphanies to the left of me, omens to the right. Here I am stuck in the middle of the ocean without you.

I read something today, read it before.

He doesn’t love you
He just loves the feeling
of being loved by you.
Arch Hades

We call that a nutshell ‘round here.

Fuuuuuuuck me runnin’, that’s astute.

I have spent YEARS perfecting how I love. It’s beautiful. Like a stained-glass window. Colorful pieces of what I have gleaned gleaming when the light hits just right. Held together with anchors and veins of leaden what not to do. Weights and lightness in perfect mosaic.

I messaged Giant the other day. I needed to know what it felt like to be loved by me.

He said “Like a warm, reassuring figure behind me.”

Good answer babe.

I can tell you the moment it stopped. When romantic love for Final Boss just became phipila. Concerned but detached. I don’t want anything bad to happen to him, but I do not want to participate in the good.

He called after weeks of radio silence and asked me “who do I gotta hit”. No hello, no how are you. Just concern and action.

It was 4am, I had been drinking. I couldn’t wrap my head around what he was saying or why he was saying it.

Turns out he had read a Facebook post about me having a stalker. That doesn’t happen here, I posted it more out of shock than for attention. I said I was fine. The creep had flown away and was in Ontario somewhere as far as I knew. I wasn’t worried. He said he would fly to Toronto. My first thought was ‘awwwww’. Second was, why did you leave me here if you give a shit.
(this was internal dialogue. I would never cuss him to his face.)

He closed the conversation by saying ‘take care of that pussy for me’.

And then promptly hung up.

There is a god. I didn’t get a chance to drunkenly blurt the truth.
That’s a sober conversation. He deserves that much.

I tossed and turned during the night. None of that sat well with me.

Not yours anymore. Not yours. Not yours.

things I held sacred that I dropped
Audioslave

I have been dropped a lot. I land on my feet.

If you wanted me and my precious pussy safe you would be here making sure we are. If you were sooooo worried about me and my pussy, well…you had an all access pass and you got on a plane and flew away. Discounting the 4.5 months he was unable. And that’s another thing. Why I have I heard from him less now than I did then when he was in prison.

I know all the answers. I don’t need to go over them again. The end result is the same.

And I let go.

My fortune cookie today said “to love is to forgive”.

Already done.

Nothing to forgive. It was fun, then it was awful, then it was fun, then it was over.

I already know the why of him. I had to stay a little longer and he kept me tethered.
And he’s really good fuckboy repellent, so there’s that then.
He is still keeping me safe in absentia, I am grateful for that.

So that takes care of quote number 2.

I must have tricked myself at some point into thinking I couldn’t have physical and metaphysical safety together in one person.

I suppose if I had never experienced such a thing, how would I know?

I forgot the cardinal rule. If I believe it I will see it.

Funny story.

And probably our bumpy transition paragraph.

I once wrote letters to Final Boss in prison. He didn’t read them. He had no idea what I wanted or how I felt when he got out. I once wrote him a paragraph summation. He didn’t read that either. At least he admitted it. It explains a lot.

I’m not a reader, he said.

I am a fucking writer.

What was I thinking?

I suppose there is some safety there for me. It’s scary having my guts spilled out and on display. The world, as a collective whole, loves to judge women like me. I think I come off rather clumsy and slutty most of the time. I regret using certain nicknames and phrases early on. But I have to forgive myself for not knowing before I knew.

How could I?

I feel you like a fever breaks.

Same baby.

Like waking up from a dream of prolonged mediocrity and stumbling into paradise.

Paradise is in your eyes. I miss them.

Who even talks like this?

I do.

Wolf does.

He is a Viking with a vocabulary.

Came across the ocean to ravage and pillage my body, and did that oh so well. Then laid in bed with me and spoke of quantum entanglements and deciphering messages from the ether.

Never have I ever been able to speak or fuck so freely.

I suppose if I exist, there must be others.

I always told the young ones they would find someone like me, eventually.

Said it was a blessing that they knew what was possible. Don’t settle my darlings.

I didn’t think about me, or what I was missing.

Until I met the culmination of every Pornhub search, every prayer I sent to the gods, everything I am but couldn’t find in another, all wrapped up in a beautiful package. Labeled very clearly with wolves and words, so I couldn’t mistake he was for me.

A man walks into a bar.

And suddenly, I am free.

You all know him as the Last One.

On a long enough timeline, names get named.

He emailed me this past week.

He got a new phone. Asked for my number, but said he’d understand if I didn’t want to give it to him.

Left me wondering if he was fresh out of the last relationship and not quite into the next. I am the empty space between his monkey bars. He hasn’t yet learned that serial monogamy is a slow death of who you could be, who you actually are, away from someone.

Normally I would muster my politeness and kindness. Message him back, reassure him that I am okay, make sure he was okay.

But I paused.

For a few days, I paused.

Never done that before.

He and I are on some discernable schedule, wherein I randomly pop into his head and he emails or texts. I can’t find a pattern to it, never looked at it very closely.
I text back, if he’s drunk it gets sexual. I stop it. Or it remains civil until it peters off until I once again pop into his head.

The timing of his checking in stopped me. It was the 2 year anniversary of the week we spent an amazing few days together. Consummated and labeled the relationship. I met his friends and family. We went to the quarry with my friends and made plans for the next weekend. But he never showed. Blocked me on everything and disappeared without a word.

I opened the email with fresh Facebook memories in my head. I mean I usually mark certain anniversaries in my head. The Christmas Eve I met Giant. Thanksgiving and Paddy’s day with the Hulk, those are easy to remember. But other days of personal significance are celebrated or mourned as well. But in this instance I was somehow gifted with the ability to pull way back, out of my own muddled head and see very clearly the timeline and decisions I made between then and now.

I am here because of him.

I sent him this instead of my number.

Unfinished Symphonies

I am prone to own every decision, every move I make, good or bad. Even if it isn’t me that ends things, I take my share of the responsibility plus a bit extra to be safe. And I do with this as well. Moving to a different time zone on a cold grey rock in the Atlantic is a pretty huge life choice to make over a break-up.

But that isn’t exactly it. I got on the plane to come here as a last-ditch effort to salvage my friendship with Panda. But it made it worse.
I got on a plane because the Ti-Cats lost that season so I had two weeks off. I got on a plane because a batch of beer wasn’t ready to be bottled at my other job and I had 2 weeks off.
I got on the plane to come here because I had become Bella in the second Twilight where the seasons changed outside her bedroom window but she didn’t move. Just wrote sad things and woke up in the night screaming in the bed they had shared. I think I watched a lot of Twilight that month as well.

I got on the plane because I couldn’t keep sleeping in the bed I had shared with him in the room I had set up for the two of us. Everything placed with him in mind. Room for the dog, bed up against the wall away from the window. Painted the prettiest most soothing teal. He was never in that house.

He messaged me on my second trip out here. Said he would be at that house with flowers the next morning. Wanted to take me out proper, start over. But I didn’t live there anymore. Just added an extra touch of what the actual fuck to the surrealness of driving through the Maritimes in the dark on the way into whatever this is.

What happened once I got here is not his fault, no more that you can blame any catapult for where exactly the rocks land, or if they get made into houses after they are thrown.

I am not who I was before the trauma of him. Or the ones that came before, and I am sure the next catacalysmic event that occurs will change me one more time. I am molten and moving. But at some point, from all of this pressure, I will become a diamond. Hard and cold and beautiful.

I sat at the bar on Tuesday, reminiscing with an old friend. We fight sometimes, go long periods without talking or seeing each other. Then on some magical nights, when the moon is just right, we talk, and laugh and enjoy each other’s company. On nights like those, and others (when the moon is full and blue), I am grateful.

There is one thing I am certain of in life. Well 2 really.

Everything is as it should be, because it is.

And at some point, just as crystal clear as the path that led me here appeared to me the other day, the reason for me being here will show itself too. Sooner than later if the portents are correct.

It has been a bizarre journey. Fraught with peril, sadness and fuckboys of epic proportions.

But all god does is watch us and kill us when we become boring. We must never ever be boring*.

I was talking to the Big Bad Wolf a few days ago. I am afraid and I am trying to reconcile my fear.

“I’m not entirely comfortable with how I feel at the moment but I am also someone who runs towards the inexplicable and overwhelming.”

This IS who I am and what I do.

So thank you my darling Trevor trebuchet, the rocks that were carelessly thrown have become a foundation for something that still has to play itself out.

At least I am not boring.

Chuck Palahniuk*