Monday 21 August 2000

Pic of the day: The world as seen from my train window, travelling home.

Closure, of sorts

At 14 (2PM) I left the small station city outside Oslo where I have been since Thursday with SuperWoman and her family. SW drove me to the station, and we waited in the car for the train. Suddenly it was there, and I had to run. I wish there had been time for a hug at least, but I guess she was more comfortable with it the way it was. In a way, I feel that this week my dreams have been more real than my reports from the day. There are so many nuances, so many subtleties, so many unspoken words. It becomes so trivial in description, even when it was so full of meaning in doing.

I entered the train with unshed tears in my eyes and this feeling of change, of closure. Feeling that a large part of my life was suddenly over, was behind me forever.

She had said it was only 4 months till Christmas. "It's just a short time" she had said. "Just a short time" I had echoed. I did not believe it. I still don't. If we even meet again then, we will both be changed. Not least she. In a couple weeks she will be on her way to Tanzania, where she will work at a hospital in the middle of a famine. If she is unchanged by that, I have never truly known her at all.

***

And it is time for me to change too. For long now I have enjoyed a sort of closeness, such as rightly belongs in a family. Familiarity. Yet being best friend is not family, and particularly now when it is so clearly a one-way thing. SuperWoman is not my wife, nor my daughter, nor sister. Still there have been in my treatment of her a bit of them all, I guess. But it is time to face facts. Friends are not family; and in the long run one must accept reality. In the long run, one must accept closure even for dreams.

So, then: Familiarity without a family is not a sustainable position, though it may be an attractive one. There remains then the two possibilities: One, to reclaim my family of birth and childhood; that's really too late. I'm 41, I moved out when I was 15, and things have changed beyond recognition. As have I. The second option would be to found a new family. I honestly don't see that as realistic either, though there presumably are no laws of nature that absolutely forbids it.

So in short, any future must support the narrowing of perceived life experience. Familiarity, like sexuality before it, must be relocated into the realm of fiction. The day still has 24 hours, so there would presumably be more time for something else.

This has after all been my way before: To narrow life experience to give more room for what is actually there. One of my other "claims to fame" has always been not having a television in my home. But truly this was never an attempt on any "alternative" or "experimental" life style. Rather there was never the time (or for that matter money) to support this along with the other interests of my life.

I guess my relationship with the online journal community in general also reflects this: Life is not only short, it is also narrow; I have experiences that others have not, and the other way around, but they are not "out of this world". I can recognize in others who I could have been, and presumably so can you in me.

***

After this, I expect that my entries are going to change a bit. Not all of them and not completely. But I suspect there will be changes, because I suspect I will be changing. Then again, is that not life? There is hardly a cell in our body that is not at some time replaced or at least modified. Why then imagine our soul as this uniform unchanging crystal? Time changes all of creation. Though often so slowly that we cannot perceive it.

For now, though, I have one last tidbit from my friend family. Both the Great Earth Mother and the Clothes Designer Girl showed up today again, which I certainly took no discomfort in. The latter also supplied this wonderful piece of dialog:
Designer Girl: "Your perfume smells too strongly."
SuperWoman: "I'm not even wearing my perfume!"
Designer Girl: "I know. But I am."