A Benediction

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.