December 2020

My Viking witch from Colorado that reads my cards and holds my hand when I fall apart messaged me at the beginning of 2020 and said,
“Buckle up buttercup the retrogrades this year are overlapping and intense”.

It isn’t like I didn’t believe her, I did, but how could anything go wrong?

I had met the love of my life, I had a grand plan, I had moved away from perdition, I was writing a book, I had a cute little attic space to hold me and my things when I wasn’t visiting here or there, I found a great place to work where I was 2 weeks on 2 weeks off, so I could travel, how amazing is that? The future was laid out before me so beautifully.

It was a leap year, weren’t leap years good?

Well, 2016, but nothing could be quite so bad as that with losing Bowie, and the clowns, and the gorilla, and Prince and the election and and and 2012 wasn’t great either. Still dating the potato and struggling. 2008 I was still stuck in my marriage, okay, leap years are bad, historically they just are. I know this.

But this one felt different. Didn’t it?
My optimism is an idiot of epic proportions. Just clueless really.

But I had good reason at the beginning of the year to think things were going to be…good.

I saw my man in January and again in February, the price of plane tickets dropped dramatically in March, so I got to go to Arizona and then go see him again for 5 days.

I had been sequestered on an island of ‘not quite right’ working every day for 2 years, never really going anywhere but work and home then work and back home. Dating dudes but not really dating, trying to get sober but never really staying that way. Living the same day over and over for 2 years and pretending it was a life.

I escaped, albeit on a whim, with some good luck and help from a dear friend.

It was time for me to fly, right?

I knew about the virus, my roommate owns a business in China, we’d been following the news since December, but I had lived through SARS in Toronto, much ado about very little, surely this would be that. Zika, MERS, Ebola, this is just how the world is now right? Tiny little outbreaks far away and the world spins madly on.

That didn’t happen this time. But we persevered, this is what we do. This is what I do.

Destroy the middle it’s a waste of time, from the perfect start to the finish line. Youth, Daughter

In the middle I kept getting sicker and sicker and not knowing why. My man and I split briefly after a disaster trip to see him in June (mid retrograde, what was I thinking). Then quickly reconciled. I went back to perdition for 80 days. Collected the rest of my things, fixed my car and made peace with the past and then I drove home in immeasurable pain. I left just in time for my work here to shut down, I could have turned around and gone back but I didn’t, and I am wondering if I made the right decision.
Then I came here just to have all of that fall apart again.

As it stands, when I looked at the previous trips on and off the island, the 3 days in the car, it never hurt like that before. Pulling over every few hours, crying so hard I’d puke. I went to the doctor, and a month later I was diagnosed with Lyme disease, then undiagnosed and they finally found the rupture in my implant that I knew was there. And a not so metaphorical hardening of my heart which is now also metaphorical.

I see clearly that needed to go back, and I needed to leave, and I needed that push to go to the doctor and get this figured out.
Just like I needed to leave in January and be in the safe space of my attic as the world got weird.

My life was getting stolen by the silicone migrating around my body, but because of lockdown I didn’t even realize. Almost a full year lost to sickness, my own and this virus.

But I kept living and trying.

And now we are 25 days to the end.

I thought I was going to get a cosmic do-over. My optimism somehow made it through the worst of all this.
Until now.

All the things I wanted to do at the beginning of 2020, the life I saw for myself not gone, just delayed.

Right?

Universe says no. Tarot cards say no. Eclipses say no. What was the point of surviving all those retrogrades and all this chaos just to get to the end and have that taken away too?

I suppose I will just have to keep going to find out.
My optimism has taken a back seat to stubbornness.

If I don’t know where to go, I’ll get there ~ Reality Bites

That life I thought was just delayed ain’t happening either. Creeping deadlines come and gone, replaced with other (more urgent) deadlines. Surgery, eviction. My hetero life partner in crime tucked into a very good relationship 1000 miles away from where we were going to live. And I am happy for her, I am.

My relationship has dissolved into nothing. My son turned the key on his very first apartment of his very own. He has a union job, and he is happy. I am officially unencumbered, and I am truly alone. I am still adjusting.

25 days to the end. Sitting on my girlfriend’s couch while the rest of the household sleeps off a drunken night at a cowboy bar, drinking mediocre coffee in my bestie’s boyfriend’s sweatpants. Not ideal, but not the worst either. He said I could keep the pants.

I don’t really believe the universe adheres to the Gregorian calendar, but as someone on this earth and stubbornly clinging to this mortal coil, I kinda gotta.

I supposed I should be grateful to be entering the new year free of attachments and obligations.

And I truly am grateful for all the things I have, the things I have lost and the things I have learned.

This was a year of rest and recovery; I have more rest and recovery waiting on the other side of surgery. I will start feeling human again approximately a calendar year from when the world shut down.

And, yes, there are a lot of unknowns.

Where will I live. Where will I work. Will my tits be better or worse. Am I really going to start feeling better after surgery or is this just the one head of the Hydra and two more monsters will grow in it’s stead. What if I do feel better and I am still not capable of accomplishing anything. Then what.

So many then what’s, where’s and what if’s and so few answers.

I think I am going to cocoon for the next little while. I have no ‘have to’s’ until my consultation and subsequent surgery.

I remember one new years when I was hold up at my girlfriend Anna’s house, with intermittent Wi Fi, mid break up with ex hubby. Her house was so full of cat hair and despair. I’d bet money it was a leap year. I cried so hard I puked for 3 days and in between I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and decided to keep living. I know the plural of apocalypse, I have survived many.
That was about my lowest point on this earth.
If I made it through that, this coming one on the ocean should be a cakewalk.

I’ll sit quietly through the eclipse and the great conjunction on the solstice. Welcome 2021 down at the ocean just letting everything go to make room for the new.

I have built myself up from nothing before and I know I can do it again.

Damn, y’all are toxic.

Let me rephrase and qualify that.

Probably not the people on my page who take an active interest and have the wherewithal to actually click on the link to come to the blog instead of just commenting on the meme I use for the featured image.

Most of you are okay, if not amazeballs.

But jesus fucking christ some of these other ones.

Toxic as fuuuuuck.

I guess I am lucky and must exist in a bubble, or I choose to ignore or cut out certain ‘types’ of people in my real life. Whatever it is, I was shocked and appalled at the reactions to this meme I posted.

And this lady.

This is a verbatim comment on my page on this particular post

Sounds like a “sex worker” seeking customers to me. If your definition of pleasure’s got nothing to do with anything sex outside a good & healthy relationship,i’ve got no issue with my lover hanging out with he’s friends. This post kinda sound like a add for sex workers to me,besides, if my man’s happy in our relationship,he ain’t gonna have much time for ppl out there cuz he’ll be too busy having fun with me. Again,am not saying he can’t hang out with he’s buddy’s which includes female friends. There’s no way on earth am gonna be in a relationship that i’ve got to share my man sexually,nope,i don’t want no damn STD’s sister   . LZG

Sis, who hurt you and why can’t you let it go?

And why is sex worker in quotes, are we imaginary?

I feel bad for her man, I truly do. I will bet money she won’t ‘let’ him watch porn.

Out of the 700 posts I have posted on ye olde blog I would hazard a guess that a good portion have contained something about ‘if you really love someone, you let them be themselves’ or ‘relationships are not tantamount to slave ownership.’

We all know I was married, we all know he cheated, we all know that I attained a state of stubbornness and crazy that I allowed the mistress to move in at one point. If memory serves, and sometimes it doesn’t, especially around then, it lasted February to September. I got caught cheating and was forcibly removed.

I started cheating in earnest in May of that year. Kicker was, I wasn’t technically ‘allowed’. There was no goose gander agreement. And while I technically agreed to the fine print, it wasn’t working for me. How could it. There was no room for renegotiation so I cheated.

He had spent years making damn sure I had no meaningful relationships outside of ours. I lost friends like a tree loses leaves in the fall for 7 years. Not entirely his fault, but still.

I was technically dependent, and he liked it that way.

Except it backfired, because I am me and I am likeable.

He still fusses that he can’t go here or there around where we lived because people judge him for how he treated me.

Well ya, what did you think was gonna happen? I am a good person, people like me.

Sounds like a lot of not my problem. I was a good farm neighbor, I helped when helping needed to be done. I was nice to people, I worked at the gas station and was pleasant to my co workers and customers. Not my fault they didn’t see his failed attempt at totalitarian Mormonism the way he wanted them too.

But that is narcissism 101. And has nothing to do with going forward.

From the things I post, and a few pages I share, I have noticed that I have amassed a small following of polyamorous people on my page. And I love them.

“I am too polyamorous for this comment section.” -Amy

Me too sis, me too.

I didn’t start out this way, see above where I was married, and he cheated*. I hated it; I didn’t want to share.

*Cheating is not polyamory. Polyamory is honesty and a custom agreement between the people in the polyamorous relationship.

But as all that water has gone under that bridge that I napalmed into oblivion, one of the first things I realized is that it wasn’t the sex that bothered me, it was the dishonesty and the ensuing, unending drama. So much drama.

The man I cheated on my husband with was polyamorous. The way he explained it and his honesty about his expectations and limitations from the beginning, plus the fact that he held me in the elevated regard and made sure I was emotionally okay all of the time made the whole polyamory thing make sense to me. He was a good partner, his extracurricular activities never affected me, he made sure of it.  He stated he tried being monogamous a few times and he was fundamentally unhappy. I accept this.

Everyone has different needs and if you want a healthy relationship you should probably figure out what those needs are and make sure they are compatible with yours.

It is literally just accepting your partner for who they are.

The end.

He was 6’3”, blond, blue eyes and not monogamous.

He couldn’t change who he was anymore than he could grow or shrink a few inches.

Just is.

I doubt in my lifetime I will ever see the death of this traditional prison everyone calls marriage.

And I am sure I have said this before but literally every other contract has terms and conditions and escape clauses. There should be a renewal clause. Every 5 to 10 years a renegotiation. People change and grow apart. The 7 year itch is real and has merit. The divorce rate is over 50%, normalize not staying somewhere you are unhappy be it a job, a relationship, a city anything. We are not built to live the same year over and over until we die, unless you are and that’s fine too.

If I ever did get married damn skippy I would be checking in every so often to make sure they still wanted to be married to me. Who am I kidding? I’d know if it wasn’t working and I would leave gracefully. I will always leave a party before I am asked to.

It is unrealistic and downright disturbing for an adult to rely on another singular adult for everything until you die. That ain’t love, that’s dependence.

Yes love is grand and wonderful, and even though the term bae bugs me a bit, I do like what it stands for ‘before anyone else’. That doesn’t negate the need for ‘anyone else’ but it denotes respect and a hierarchy of sorts, that to me is perfectly acceptable.

I am taking back bae.

Yep.

Mrs. Klukach grade 7.

It’s not really her fault, not really. I always wanted to be a writer.

I won an award that year for a collection of short stories, horror stories. She was the one who submitted it. It was a really big award. I was an all Canadian finalist, I think. Not bad for a pre-teen kid in a tiny village.
I was a weird kid man, I read It by Stephen King 2 years before (I was 10, bad idea) and although I still have nightmares about it and it brought back my dormant stutter for a while, it changed me. It made me want to write. So really it’s Stephen King’s fault.

I was 12 and I think I came in 3^rd in all of Ontario. My memory is a bit fuzzy, it was 34 years ago after all. I remember the basic layout of the classroom, I remember where I sat, second row from the door, 4 seats back. We could see trees out the window, I had a purple pen that smelled like grape bubblegum and I won a writing award. I don’t think my parents really cared that much, but like I said, those memories are muddy.

I saw Mrs. Klukach the summer after grade 9, she came to see me on purpose to ask me what the fuck happened to me. Second time ever I had heard a teacher swear I think and it jolted me. I was such a good student, I had such potential etc. and I was failing, badly. She was visibly upset, and I didn’t understand why she cared about the nothing that was me. I don’t remember the answers I gave her, but I am still that girl, standing in the driveway of the house my parents rented while our other house was getting built. Feeling intense shame about letting down an adult who believed in me so much that she came to my house to try and stop my self-destruction. I couldn’t figure out why I mattered to her, but it seems as though I did.

That book I wrote got thrown in the fire after we moved, and I didn’t write another word for years. I ran away and dropped out of school shortly thereafter.

So at least this is my excuse for the last 10 months but how about the 396 months between getting that award or the 372 months between her and the driveway and March 13^th 2020 when the world shut down.

In no way in my entire life have I ever lived up to my potential.

Law of averages states I am a little over halfway through this particular lifetime. Maybe another 396 months if I am lucky. Probably less if my heart breaks.

I could run through the gambit of excuses for why I am the way I am. I have a deformity, I left home at a young age, I had a child young, I never really felt supported, had testing been around when I was school aged I might have been diagnosed ADHD or something like it. I struggled financially my whole life really until I turned 39 and dumped the last of the leeching boyfriends. I could lay the blame at the feet of literally all of my exes if I wanted to. From the one who knocked me up, to the ones who took advantage of me stripping and virtually pimped me out and wrung me dry. To the ones who weren’t ‘readers’ and couldn’t figure out why I wanted to spend half my days with my face in a notebook or my laptop and thieved my time making their supper or washing their dirty drawers.

But it’s really no one’s fault.

Lots of people who had it worse than me made something of themselves. And here I sit, on borrowed time in an overpriced Airbnb talking to you fine folks about how I wasted my life. And all of it boils down to my choices.

I wanted to be loved so badly that it encompassed my life, all of it. I searched and settled and searched again, and in between I survived. Never really thriving.

I am writing yet another book, at least I am stubborn about one thing, it’s quite good, little rambling in bits, but considering the state of the world as is, and the post-apocalyptic landscape I created in the fantasy world I am writing about, I just want to make sure everyone is crystal clear on why the world ended, greedy men and the alt right christian patriarchy.

Even then, I started it mid-March 2020 and have had all the time in the pandemic world to work on it and I go weeks and months without looking at it. Even this last little trip when I decided this is it, it’s time, I can do this, I have barely done this. 3 weeks and maybe 6000 words. Not even enough for a novella. I am failing.

I couldn’t sleep the night before last, couldn’t eat either, my stomach in knots and my brain spinning. So I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t eat, I just wrote, a few blog posts that will be posted eventually and a few just to take my pain from out of me and into somewhere where it can’t hurt me. And I made some headway on the book. One of the secondary characters is getting his backstory. I wrote the life he wanted instead of the one he chose. It’s the least I can do.

I find it funny too, for a girl who has always pined for love, I still write these powerful, witchy, sassy awesome female characters, loosely based on me, and they always live alone. 2 published works, and it’s still ‘her’ apartment. At least this book I live with other witches, but it’s still my magical house built into a yew tree.

Maybe I am creating my own destiny, both through crippling fear of failure and the resulting inaction and the inability to fucking focus on one thing and through these fantasy worlds I have the gift of creating in my head and sometimes on paper. Writing my destiny to always want something but never have it.

I am thinking too that I may actually have some kind of chemical imbalance that makes it harder for me to focus than your average Joe, plus a little mystical magical karmic interference. And the irrefutable fact that I have honestly never felt good enough, even when one of my favorite teachers was standing in my driveway (verbally) shaking me and telling me that I was.

Before I really started writing again as an adult and just kept a diary of sorts, and scribbled bits of magnetic poetic genius (they were pretty cool snippets really) I wrote 2 things.

As always, she is a prisoner of her ghosts

And

I’m afraid I am scared of my potential.

I threw those diaries and notebooks and collections of other people’s quotes away 4 or 5 moves ago but I still haven’t fully escaped that girl I was, pining for a love that would transform me, trapped by the negativity of myself and others and scared of my potential.

Those two things are just as true in this moment as they were when they appeared on my refrigerator half my life ago, as they were in the driveway of that rental house and I don’t know how to stop it.

Humans tend to take the easy way out. ~W

It’s not like I am even being easy on myself, just hard on myself in all the wrong ways.