Further incoherence

NOTE: This post was composed two weeks ago, when I lacked the confidence to post it, or anything else; but it remains a useful statementt of my perpetual borderline status hereabouts. (1/20/09}


I doubt my thoughts are capable of ordering.

I find myself in a blind alley without an exit strategy. In preparation for the worst, f3 has gone well out of her accustomed way to be supportive and helpful, to the extent of proposing adjacent living spaces during the time I'm undergoing chemo; she whom a year ago didn’t want me to know where she was living, and only a couple of weeks ago snapped that her reasons for keeping our lives as remote as possible would not be discussed. That provoked a break in the relationship (on my initiative) that lasted a week or so.
Since then she’s begun to be cautiously more open. She even visited me early on New Year’s Eve for a couple of hours.
And I have been amicable as all get-out. Thus we have been edging slowly towards a kinder, gentler friendship. She in fact spoke this morning of a plateau with the implication that we may hope to shore up and move beyond present gains sooner rather than later. It has seemed as if her preference for deviousness was beginning to dissolve. So she visits, seldom speaking at length, and it appears that a more trustworthy friendship is being promised.

I am at the same time mindful of the pleasures, hers by right, that have driven me into more deeply shadowed regions of her mind. That what for me was a high point in my sexual experience is to her yesterday’s faded hand-me-down of a memory. I envy those with whom she has shared her sexual happiness. (It may be many, it may be one or two. But either way, I envy them.)

Early this evening I was urged to come see the newly ordered spaces. When I entered, f3 was on her cell phone, talking excitedly and, I thought, suggestively. It was obviously an invitation to something outrageously pleasing. (I am counting “I’m not even going to go there”, speaking of a train of thought, uttered while laughing excitedly, as a suggestive remark.)
This inclines me to depression, which presents a conundrum. Do I keep my mouth shut and hope to reap rewards in the future? Or do I protest and likely drive her well and truly far behind the fence she’s erected? And will this depression be reinforced as I silently witness her evident pleasure responding to people and events entirely, by design, elsewhere, thus countering any healthful benefits of her lovely presence?

further downstream

It can be said that much has changed
And it can be said it hasn’t.

F3 has stepped into new territory. Early last evening she came by with the puppy and stayed for a couple of hours, talking and showing me bits from YouTube of her latest fave comic. Then she was tired and went back to her place (and implying she was not subsequently going out), later, I’m sure, to emerge for the evening’s main event.
She sat next to me on the couch and allowed our elbows to touch, an unprecedentedly intimate gesture in the context of the last few years.

It will likely all evaporate if the biopsy declares me clean of cancer, though while possible it seems unlikely.
She said she was sorry but she was glad I have cancer, because it allowed her to explain and forgive behaviours she found offensive.
So here’s to cancer, though only in this singular corner of the Universe.
I too am glad I have cancer if it creates the possibility of a finer, more whole-hearted friendship between us. Though such a thing remains well outside the domain of likelihood.

Test result should be coming through early next week. Then one way or another things will change quickly, or should. If I’m slated for radiation and chemo, my essentials (bed, table, computer, telephone) are supposed to go to the second floor, just below f3. If not I will continue to improve my little loft, and f3 can be expected to remain distant, and rapidly grow more so.

Feast of the Incarnation

All hail, and peace on earth to those of good will.

My reader may suppose, correctly that I have come to an impasse, a failure of will. Nor can I put a finger on why it should be so. Acedia will have something to do with it, the loss of a conviction that there is any point to the exercise. As well, my sense of prosodic composition leaves me dissatisfied with what I write; beyond that, a sort of element of clumsy diatribe has wormed its way in, graceless and bitter.
So I am at least for the time being at a loss to sustain the effort.

Part of the issue has to do, I’m sure, with a now near certainty of cancer, though of a different sort than was tentatively diagnosed before. This time it’s a stomach lymphoma, which the surgeon, describing my gastroscopy, called ‘a big, ugly mass’. The lab results won’t be in for a week or so, but barring another surprise, I can expect to begin radiation and chemo soon after that— The surgeon is notably averse to superfluous cutting.

So trials await. It seems unlikely to prove unprecedentedly difficult after what I’ve been through the last couple of months; and I have heard from more than one source that clinical depression is comparable, and I’m an old hand there.

Beyond that, the circumstance has brought f3’s finer instincts to the fore. On the conviction that living in isolation, with a trudge through the snow-drifts to visit the bathroom, will not do for the sometimes debilitated state I can expect to find myself in, she has proposed that I move indoors, to the floor just below her bedroom. This, from she who strictly refused my right to, in her terms, transgress there. It will leave her open, willy-nilly, to my awareness of her comings and goings, the thing she seemed to fear above all else.
It’s an unprecedented, utter novelty among the twists and turns we’ve taken through Hell and Purgatory; and may indeed permit, even encourage, a growth in the substance of our friendship. Even now there are signs of her willingness to speak more openly that was ever possible before.
Should that turn out to be the case, and even if the treatment proves unsuccessful, I will be well content— or at least as I now imagine it. Certainly I can hope to die with a bit of closure, a definite plus.

So I will write when I am able and willing; but for now it appears that will not neccessarily be very often.

Merry Christmas!

Assay

The upshot, the outcome; as ever, properly, a matter of waiting, of time. I lack the means to reach any sort of reasoned judgment; to an essential degree, it’s a simple lack of knowledge, by her explicit design.

We seemed to be making headway, disciplined and productive, towards some sort of mutually trusting friendship. About that, I should have known better.
Something like two or three weeks ago, when I was still deep in convalescence, she came for a visit and we had a lively, entertaining time. Those moments, I have come to understand by long history of inevitable repetition, lead to retreat. On the level of some fundamental dislike or fear or anger it’s reasonable enough; in the fact that it signals the presence of some such hostility, it must always be a disappointment.
In this case it was immediately apparent, but mild as these things go. But her repeated, daily visits grew shorter and more limited in the satisfaction they offered. An abrasiveness, again, mild but significant, emerged in her manner.

Yet I kept my peace and maintained an uncompromised courtesy. There was a point at which I took the pup back to my room, feeling he’d been left alone much too long; In the course of fetching him I observed her proscription against my presence in her apartment by calling him down rather than going up to get him.I meant it as a gentle irony towards an absurdly restrictive injunction. When I told her of my observance she only expressed a gratitude, missing my hint of irony. But the proscription seemed silly to me, and I thought she could only have one sane reason. (Insane reasons sometimes seem thick on the ground hereabouts.)

Then I began having trouble with my wireless network signal, whose base station was in her private domain; it required her cooperation to attend to it. She had grown progressively more distant, while remaining helpful; but in this matter, as in a couple of other essential matters in preparing the area devoted to painting, she pretty much brushed me off. She said she had had no difficulty with the signal (while it now appears she had already switched from our shared ISP; and suggested she simply had no time. I began to grow impatient
It came down to a day when I felt her constraints were silly and unhelpful, and when she came by to drop off the dog for the day, I asked what could her reasoning be. Her face turned dark and fierce, and she said We Will Not Discuss That. I started to say the only sane reason I could come up with was— and she stormed out. Since then we’ve barely spoken, though she smiled in a couple of chance encounters; particularly odd given the events that followed her hasty departure.

(To be continued...)

Acknowledgment

With uncomprehending gratitude, an admission: you, my faithful friend (as I must imagine you to be) if yet anonymous, in Dallas, are my only regular reader. I know this from StatChecker.
I am taken aback by your continuing attention, even when I withdraw mine.
Thank you, and all honour.

Washout

By intention but a brief post illuminating my absence.
Toward the end of my night most miserable I transferred my bed of rest and computer upstairs to the loft I’d dressed out for Friend last July. Plans had been made to move myself up there, and finding no rest in my accustomed spot that night, I sought it here.
That was a week ago last Sunday, 4 in the morning. I quickly took to the idea and relished the opportunity to redefine the shape of my customary life, which was the all-embracing project launched by the shock-and-horror experience; broadly stated, to stop hurting myself.
Last Sunday night I was making a final trip from the studio to the loft laden with stuff appropriate to a new living space, the first trip unassisted by a flashlight, and stumbled, directly hitting a rib on the edge of what turned out to be a piece of drywall. Astonished by the irony and stunned by the pain, I crawled on up to my destination, and made for sleep.
Already appointed to take tests next to the Doctor’s office I dropped in, and she added rib x-rays to the tests.
Thus I learned yesterday that the rib was completely healed; news most welcome: and that I had broken another. So, more pain, more delicacy, more work deferred, limits prolonged.

‘Race’ in all its diversities

Intellectual excitement at bloggingheads tv.
Recasting categories, Recognizing the obvious concealed in the open.