megan's blog

N.B. Eric! This is entirely about how I'm continuing to process our break up. I don't say anything bad about you at all, but it's more than I would ever say to you in person. If you’re okay with reading that, fill your boots.

Truthfully, I'd been rather dreading Eric's return from Berlin. He left early April, I think, and oh, but it was a sore relief. I stopped shaking every time I saw a green parka. I went into Bridgehead without doing a surreptitious survey of the computer tables through the steamed up windows. I walked around the neighbourhood with impunity, as relaxed as one can be in early spring layers.

So that I'm sitting here in the umi cafe, an hour after I thought we were supposed to meet, and not steaming fucking mad? Pretty damn good. I must admit my first thought was, "You're fucking kidding me - he's late for the first time we have coffee plans? You are. Fucking. Kidding." But then I remembered a couple weeks back, answering the door in my cat hair yoga pants and thought, meh, probably just a mistake.

Feels much better.

I saw him a couple days ago too, at the Chateau Tabernac for a Canada Day barbeque. Chateau Tabernac is owned by people I met through him - I'd always called them Eric's friends. But I ran into A. a couple weeks ago, and he invited me to the C.Day festivities, warmly, genuinely. I ran into B. and D. a week after that, and they invited me too, same sentiment. On the day of, I walked in the door and D. gave me a huge hug; M. kissed my cheek and nearly squeezed the breath out of me.

"Wow," I said. "I'm a lucky girl. That's quite a greeting!"
"We're just happy you're here," D. replied, her gentle smile.

Their house is huge, so Eric and I didn't spend much time around each other. The times we did share space were awkward, I think for everyone present. But no more so than expected. He didn't seem to know where to put himself, what to do with his hands. I barrelled through it, the awkward pauses, my shifting stances, asking him brightly about his new job, making sure I was smiling big and not shaking.

The weird thing was that I didn't really feel like shaking.

It didn't feel like normal to see him. Not the normal we'd had, anyway. But he did seem like just a guy. These past months, over the tiniest-Megan winter, he was bigger than big, looming around every thought, in the nano-gaps between every pulse sending yet another wave of rusty blood through my busted heart.

And then there he was on the back balcony, the sun too bright in his eyes: his regular size. Not the guy who had flattened me, not the guy I'd felt had written me a cheque on an empty account. Just a handsome, clever boy in possession of a nice voice and cool way with words.

++

At the end of that last paragraph, I looked up, out the big windows, up Percy. He was standing in front of the Tang Coin, looking sheepish. I waved. He waved. He came in. He’d just gotten my email asking if he’d gotten the wrong day. He had. He was apologetic, I said –no worries, if I’d finished my coffee, I wouldn’t be here, ‘sall good. I showed him pictures of my house, he told me stories full of longing for Berlin.

Neither of us mentioned dating, each other or other people. He knows already, he keeps up here. I don’t really know, but I don’t feel the need to. It’s fine, either way. Eventually it'll come up, we'll have another few awkward moments, I'll probably well up a little. And then normal will be that he has a girlfriend who is not me, and I will still be dating my house.

I don’t know that we’ll ever be good friends. Maybe. He's not one for making himself vulnerable, and besides laughing, that's what all my strongest friendships are built on - taking care in those moments. But I like him a big whole bunch, and I feel better about that now, with both of us in our right size skins.

That's what she said to me, my new doctor, after she'd poked around in my throat and ears and nose with various instruments and lighted probes.

She stood back a couple feet and gave me a once over. "I'm just not seeing anything. I know we don't know each other or anything, but you look viral to me. I feel like if I met you when you were feeling better, you're eyes would be brighter than this."

"Yeah," I said. "I don't feel so hot."

"Yeah, you don't look-" she said. And then turned a little red and laughed. She's really quite lovely, so I smiled.

And came home and napped.

Today I'm feeling much better. Better enough that I'm going to go to a Canada Day Brunch, better enough that I *will* make and drink the mango sangria on the front porch with Jennifer, as I have been looking forward to doing for about 5 days now, even though I know it isn't good for me. Better enough to bike to our first delivery of vegetables from the Santa Farmer. Better enough that I'm going to go see my friends' band play in their own living room early this eve.

Not so much better that there won't be a big nap somewhere in there, and it's a pretty safe bet that I'll be appreciating the fireworks aurally, from the comfort of my bed.

It's 2:35 am. I woke up about an hour ago in excruciating pain.

Now that it's subsided a bit and I seem to be finished crying, now that I'm off the phone with a brusque but reasonable nurse from Telehealth Ontario, who told me, among other things, that I didn't need to go to the emergency room, but that I needed to see my doctor tomorrow morning, now that I'm waiting for the magic blue pills to sweep their gelcap love through me, I am distracting myself from crying, from shaking my head to try to loosen the barnacle of pain on it, by writing to you.

Here's a question that stresses me out: On a scale of 1 to 10, how painful is it?

Is 10 the most pain I've ever been in? Or the most pain I can imagine? Because I've been pretty lucky and have an active imagination, so there's a pretty wide gap between the two.

I split the difference and said 7.

So I've been re-reading Anal Pleasure & Health by Jack Morin. It's been quite a while since I last perused it, and while I remembered it being chock-a-block with great information, I'd forgotten how unintentionally funny it is.

He recommends, among other things, keeping an ass journal.

Of course, that this makes me giggle is part of the reason people get fucked up about ass play in the first place. There's no good reason that an ass journal is more inherently hilarious than a food diary. But it is, and there you go.

No ass journal for me.

What a great book though. If you're interested in anal play and shying away because of whatever, this book will go a long way towards getting you over that whatever. Compared to other books on the market, his writing is rather formal and professorial, but in the main, he just comes across like such a nice, kind, smart man.

This post, however, is not actually either about that book or ass fucking.

In one of the sections, one I scanned Friday night, he talks about the fact that many people keep their chronic tension in their ass. So I'm reading along, I've been doing some of the exercises anyway, I take a moment and communicate with my anus.

-Hi anus, you tense?
-No ma'am, we're loose as a goose down here.

Sad that I don't have an ass journal, no?

Now then, since I'm pretty sure I'm not stress free, if I'm not keeping my tension in my ass, where might it currently reside? I do a scan of typical places: shoulders, neck, jaw. Aha. Right. My brain scan is telling me it's knotted and tight, my fingers pressing the back of my ear and my along my jawline confirm this fact.

When you discover that your ass is tight, Morin writes, first you just acknowledge that it's tight. You accept it. Many people will find that once they've noticed and accepted, they'll start actually hurting, because they're finally feeling what the muscles are holding. This is the first step.

My god, those poor people.

If my ass hurt as much as my jaw does right now, I'd be frantic. Crawling the walls, in the emergency room, frantic. It fucking kills: the pain is in my throat; it's crawling tendrils up between my skull and scalp; it's a burning star 1 cm in from the corner of my right mandible, the rays shooting up and across the back of my ear.

Could maybe be something else, but my glands aren't really swollen and I don't have the brain fog that comes with a migraine. And it started about 12 hours after I read that passage and completed step one.

What does my body want to do with all this pain? Well, you guessed it. It wants to truss my jaw up tighter than Christmas fowl. I have muttered the word "relax" to myself more times in the past 2 days than I have in the past 2 years combined.

Let's hope the second step starts soon.

It’s simple. A soft bed, on my back, legs spread, arms stretched up and braced against the headboard. You’re on top, your biceps and shoulders tensing and releasing in time with your thrusts. The lamplight is sticky and golden between our sweaty bodies. I clench my thighs around your hips, my heels digging into your ass, urging you on, and deeper.

I should preface this by saying I had no real reason to cry through the last half of my yoga class tonight.

By most measures, this has been a bang up week. It started with a lovely kgrf visit that involved many hugs. Continued with getting started on quite a few of the things I needed to do for the move. Had a great visit and dinner with Shelley on Wednesday. Bought new pants. Bought tickets for J. and I to go see Wolf Parade.* Met that Mae for beer and backgammon and man, am I ever happy with how that worked out; she fucking rocks and her gay gay haircut is also hot hot. Got home to a fabulously dirty email from CT. Have a date with a Mysterious Person to look forward to on Monday.

What in god's name could I be upset about?

It started with my body. While I know that I'm about 10 times more flexible than I was two and a half years ago, and probably in much better overall shape, it still pains me to sit cross-legged for more than 2 minutes, and full forward bends will be forever out of my reach.

This, of course, is not supposed to matter.

Mostly it doesn't. Tonight it did. Trying to do Prasarita Padottanasana pinged every tight muscle in my legs, which is every muscle in my legs, and I caved, let my knees go knocked, hung there. I'd just had it. I was sick of being tight and sore and it's not fair that other people can do it, lookit, their head just on the floor, just like that, and why should I have to choose between running and biking and walking everywhere and having relaxed leg muscles.

Yeah. Blah blah fucking blah. But still there. And strong enough to make my throat all tight and full of tears.

This happens occasionally while I'm practising yoga. I start welling up because my body won't do what I want it to do, what I think it's supposed to do. And every time I get upset enough about that to start welling, it is never about my body. My body is just a convenient and obvious repository.

I gave up on being calm and started going through the list. Was it the few emails Eric and I have exchanged since he came back from Berlin? No. A little twingey maybe, but still no. Was it that the new pants I bought still make me feel a bit sausage-like? Twingey. PMS? Contributing factor, but, as is always the case with me, not the actual factor; PMS just thins the veil between me and my emotional world. Moving organization type stress? No. Moving-

Big fat tears started rolling down my cheeks. I left quietly and bawled in the bathroom for a long time.

I am grieving the loss of my apartment.

That this is rather a ridiculous thing to be sad about compounds the matter. I am moving into the ideal situation. Living with friends? Forever? In my own neighbourhood that I need like a vital organ? Holy fuck. Moving into a house that is well built, lovingly planned, solid, and, including the house I grew up in, hands down the nicest place I'll have ever lived? Holy mother fuck.

But oh. I love this apartment.

I love knowing its quirks so well they no longer register as quirky: that you can only enter the apartment if you turn the knob to the left, that the hot/cold taps are backwards in the tub but not the kitchen, that the 4th plank from the door in the lean-to is rotting, that you have to turn the knobs five times to have a shower. None of the floors are straight: walking down the hall during a drunk is living dangerously.

It's been almost three years since I've moved in here, out of a situation that was no longer emotionally tenable. Its stud-and-gyprock embrace has nursed me through 2 big hearbreaks I thought might leave me cracked open and pulsing raw forever. I've loved and fucked just as big. I learned how to keep fish. Started yoga. Ate my first kale. Had dinner parties and tea and beer with the people who are my chosen family.

I know that its new occupants will love this apartment too, but my heart is breaking a small break to leave a space that has taken such tender care of me when I needed it most and gone along for the ride when I seemed not to need it at all.

May these resilient walls be as good to Stella and BH as they have been to me.

*During the purchase of said tickets I was so excited I couldn't stop talking and gave the clerk a detailed description of why I thought WP weren't coming, and how relieved I was when some kind person told me they were, because I thought I was going to explode with sorrow if they didn't. And then listed the dates and places I have seen that band, and then gushed about how good Osheaga was after the clerk said he didn't like big festivals.

Me: Well, I don't want to be the only one crying. Is anyone else crying? I don't see anyone else crying. Goddamn. I hate it when things make me cry. Oh, wicked, Jennifer just wiped a tear away. I'm good. Wait, I don't have any tissue. They should hand it out with the program. I should mention this to that lovely David O'Meara. Why didn't they warn people? You know, like on the pro-

Me: What, like maybe calling it DISASTER?

I'm going to fuck the rules and botch this meme: List seven songs you are into right now.

You wanna know why?

1. Wolf
2. Parade's
3. New
4. Album,
5. At
6. Mount
7. Zoomer

While I was stealing it off the interwebs last night and listening to it on different ones, I was offering up my apologies to the music deities, promising that, right after I move, right after I buy my new record player, the first LP I buy will be this one, and the second one I will buy will be their first album.

When you've loved an album as much as I loved Apologies for the Queen Mary, you kind of worry that the next album won't live up. Second albums often don't. But on Myspace, when the first new song started up, my palms got all sweaty and I felt kind of nauseous, the kind of nauseous that only extreme pleasure and its crazy flood of hormones can make you feel.

But oh, they're trying to kill me. I'm hoping this is wrong wrong wrong, or at the very least, incomplete, but ack! Every tour listing, it goes a little something like this:

M: So guess where they're playing on August 3rd?
J: Umm, Ottawa?
M: No. Montreal. Guess where they're playing August 9th?
J: Ummm, Ottawa?
M: No. Toronto. Guess what they're doing in between the 3rd and the 9th?
J: Playing Ot-
M: FUCK ALL.

That's right. They've got 6 days between gigs in cities just to the left and right of us, and no show in Ottawa.* I mean, I realize that My Fake Ex-Boyfriend Spencer Krug must have been devastated when he got that memo from my secretary, but really, that was years ago. I really figured he would have been over it by now.

God, even fake dating a keyboard player gets me nothing but heartache.

*You're probably thinking, Butch, honey, do you not love them enough to travel for them? Why yes, you do! And I will say: August 3rd is five days after I move into my new house and I am old and I will be sore and tired and I will end up not enjoying the show. Why not August 9th? Well. I've got even better things to do.

+1+

Our new backyard was on the way home to my house from Timekode. Shelley and I snuck in and sat on the little bench and looked up at the surprising number of stars. We marvelled how private it was, how quiet, and how lucky we were that the trees surrounding us were in other people's yards. Well, maybe that last part was me.

The backyard is something I hadn't thought of appreciating. Dunno why. Just thought it was nice there was one and that there wasn't too much grass.

But sitting back there in the very dark, talking about barbecues and gardening and flowering bushes? It felt like my heart grew three sizes.

+2+

The next day we'd finagled another visit inside. I wanted to measure stuff, to judge how much cleaning I was going to have to do before moving in, how much painting after. Shelley, ditto, her house.

Funny thing - I'm moving from a one bedroom apartment to a two bedroom house, and I think I'm going to have to get rid of a fair amount of stuff. There's no room for a kitchen table, for instance, and my kitchen table is no shrinking violet of a kitchen table, willing to sit unobtrusively in a back corner.

The upshot of all this is that I felt re-energized for the Getting Shit Done Project. Spent some time with my financial spreadsheets this morning, some time with the fish tank this afternoon. Packed away some winter clothes and bedding. Spent some time in the basement, piles and other piles: wha?, garage sale, organize this later.