Disorientation

I woke disoriented today. From a dream like a horror movie, in a bed not my own. In the dream people around me were being inhabited by ghosts. Some of them carried on as normal, slightly dazed, quiescent. Others turned malicious. I was sorting through a ring bind folder where all the pages were out of order. I was sorting them back into their place, looking for what did not belong; clues to explain why some spirits turned nasty. Some of them attacked me even as I worked to unravel the mystery. For a person who avoids that kind of entertainment, even in fiction, my dreams are often surprisingly violent.

Over breakfast with my friend of over two decades, I find myself talking about my ambivalence about the ever present question of children, the ever more ethereal idea of finding a life partner. She shares for the nth time how she thought we would have the opposite lives: I'd be married with kids, while she never expected to "settle down". I tell both of us that I'm too late to take that turn, that I've been alone too long, that I couldn't cope with it anyway.  The logic is sound enough, but it's tinged with a faint disappointment, a sensation that sits uncomfortably in my gut. Decisions that cut off possible futures have always been difficult for me to make wholeheartedly.

     disorientation
     dɪsɔːrɪɛnˈteɪʃ(ə)n/
     noun
         - the condition of having lost one's sense of direction

Visiting this place usually gives me a sense of groundedness that is less present at home. Slotting myself into the dailiness of life with 2 children; the loving chaos early in the morning; thinking about what to cook for dinner as breakfast is finishing; the school run; the tantrums paired with moments of tenderness. I usually leave with a hollow longing in the pit of my belly; a quiet sense of loss not only at leaving behind 3 people I love: also for the path my life didn't take.

There's a lot of love threaded into this life. Although I don't doubt there is as much in my own, I question whether it is made of the same substance. And nothing here has really changed - it's me that feels more lost this time.

Later, I'm sitting in a bowling alley flanked by a boy's carefully-handmade birthday cake and a pair of arcade games blaring dramatic music, gunshots, grunts, and the name of the game repeated in a deep, masculine voice. A man in a pale blue shirt with sunglasses wedged up on his head walks in. He catches my eye as I'm rearranging my legs and knee-length skirt and smiles at me widely.

I'm reminded instantly of my first lover. He's married now, with a chubby baby and life running predictably along the tracks of the 5-year plan he spoke of when I met him. We wouldn't have fit together, I am sure of it. Yet there it is again, a passing twist in the belly, the drifting question. What would my life be now if I'd chosen different doors? If I'd wanted that other life more?

I know that to a large extent I have the power to choose the kind of existence I want. If I don't want to live in the city any more, I can leave. I can change careers (I've made that transition in the last year without any kind of masterplan). I can choose my friends, how I prefer to relate to people. So much control, and yet none at all. In some moments I feel like a tumbleweed. In others, a chess player orchestrating an entire game.

Today I'm more tumbleweed than mistress of anything, peering at the landscape around me. Although I can see back to where I've come from, I'm not sure if I'm just blowing away from my past choices or moving towards something else.

On holidays from growth

On the weekend I went to a women's circle, where one of the rituals was to speak our desires for the year out loud. We were asked the question 3 times, in different ways.

The first one was easy, for the mind: "what do you want?". I heard words like love and dancing and creativity and exuberance exiting my mouth. Talking about how I already had so much. The woman who was witnessing me pushed a little: "so do you want a partner?" I admitted I was a little afraid to ask for that. When I'd finished (or rather run out of time), her reflection was "wow, you want everything".

The second question was for the heart, and made me feel a little uncomfortable to begin with: "how do you want to serve?"  This time I was witnessed by a different woman, a radiant friend. My answer: I want to bring beauty into the world. I spoke of wanting to balance out all the pain I've observed, of being a mirror. Of knowing that words are my gift, of naming the unspeakable. Of letting out all the fierceness that paces, caged in my chest.

The third time, a question for the belly: "what do you want to receive?" This time witnessed by a different friend, one who shares my sensitivity to the world. And this answer, slowest to come, least expected, with a crack in the voice: I want rest. And comfort. Then, through shared tears: love where there has been fear. Peace where there has been battle.

And now that my body has spoken, I can feel how tired I am. How everything from my heavy eyelids in the morning to the dull heaviness in my chest and the uncharacteristic ache of my left knee... all asking for rest.

I have been busy, so very busy, for two whole years. Feeling unfelt feelings; learning to inhabit my body; crying myself to sleep; making connections; relating in unfamiliar ways; excavating habits; understanding truths; loving uninhibitedly; letting go; crying until I grew tired of it; loving carefully. Grieving, grieving. Healing furiously.

I'm exhausted, truthfully. From all the intensity. From first having to find reasons for and then explaining my heaviness; my tears; the not showing up; the too much or too little of one thing or another. From conversations where I am trying to prove to that I am interesting and interested. Puzzling over why someone's words can be so enthusiastic and their actions so absent. From all the self improvement, exploration, trying to be better. The peculiar pressure to be self-aware and accepting and mindful.

All the wants I can articulate are true enough, but they are not what I need. Which is to cocoon. To wrap myself up in restful friendships, quiet sensations, gentle dreaming and the kind of calm and steadiness that can't co-exist with constant growth. Doesn't fit with stretching my boundaries. Clashes with "putting myself out there".

So, halfway through summer, I am hunkering down as if it were winter. What a relief, to step away from all that intensity, all those agendas. In its place, quiet. More writing and reading. Creating and soaking up art. Dancing without intention and focus, for the mere pleasure of it. Lounging. Cat naps. Picnics under trees. Floating on water. Rest.

Still the girl

This week three men wanted me. My year turned on the hinge of their desire.

This is a language I understand. How it begins is how it ends.

My answer, three times.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl on the beach with thighs twelve years too large, flesh bulging against the chicken-wire gaze of her father and uncle? My bicycle dubbed the gate to acceptability, to shrinking those meaty fillets down to a size that might make me invisible to scorn.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl, fifteen with billboard breasts proclaiming the ripeness of my sex to every man that passed. Before I had learned how to open the long library vault of my mouth. How everyone in a foreign country thought I was my father's wife, in that daisy dress made for a church I no longer believed in?

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl in the warehouse, far from home. Seventeen so green, not a colour a person should ever be. His twice-my-age fingers moved like vine tendrils, brushing my waist, tucking in the tag of my shirt. Into my body a tree trunk, like my sapling self had always belonged to him. Curled in my grandmother's shower with shame.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I am still the girl, twenty-one and never kissed. The first time, my teeth were bars and I did not want to unlock them. His kisses tasted like ash and held a key to the library he would never enter.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl twenty and eight, when moan was just a word and pleasure an idea. Whose virginity became a trophy she was tired of carrying, fox-weary of the steeplechase, the sniffing hounds. So threw it to a pale-fleshed creature who did not understand how twinned desire and fear can be.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl whose no turned limp, fell like a body in a waterfall when he pushed and pushed again. Drowned when he said it was my fault. Two years gone and I'm breathing again but the timber of my belly is still waterlogged.

I am not for you.

Don't they know, I'm still the girl with a canyon named father in her chest? With a trickle, a creek called love in that chasm signed man. With a bear in the belly of that canyon. She roars at all the strangers stumbling in. There is no haven in this body, this tree trunk is not home.

I am not for you.

To the men that wanted me this week, and the ones that are waiting for me next week and the ones after that.

You can't fill in my canyons with the soil of your masculinity. There isn't enough of you to make it solid ground again. Didn't anyone teach you how earthquakes work?

When it rains, sometimes the creek floods. Sometimes the canyon is full and love washes the stone ledges clean. There are always traces of earth left behind. Maybe we can plant a garden in the crevices together, grow something that hasn't been here before.

You can't fuck my history out of me, can't rescue me from fires that razed long before you arrived. I have not been waiting safe in a tower for you and your steed. I have not been waiting. I have not been safe.

Forests always grow back after fires.

We can't dance if you are always stepping forward. If you move in the only place I can breathe is away. Don't chase me into the canyon.

I am still the girl that dances on the Sabbath day. Dances at midnight. Twirls in her skirts and howls at the sickle moon.

This is a language I understand. How it begins is how it ends.

If I am for you, remember the girl. Learn her too. I am the bear and the canyon and the flood and still the girl.

When a man tells you...

When a man tells you your mouth was made for his
It's okay to get weak all the way down to your knees, even your toes
You should swoon and let him kiss you more, and again
Just remember your mouth is the cave
and he has not yet met your blind words
Flying out of the darkness to meet the twilight outside

When a man says that your bodies were made to fit
You are allowed to believe him, to measure
the intersections of your limbs. To mould
your yielding flesh to his questing hands
First, make sure he has heard you howl
That he sees the strength in your bones
the vastness of your hungry mind
the crone looking out from your eyes

When a man says that he wants to love you
You can want him to. You can yield
surrender to the roar in your chest
But learn first what keeps your precious
fires burning, and steady. The difference between
"I don't want to lose you" and "I want to keep you"

He believes you are moths to each other's  flame
But yours is the fire of the stars

'Moth and flame' by Dynasthai

A minute in the life of a HSP: nightclub

A man may throw his arm around me in a nightclub, and I will be paralysed with indecision for a few moments. There is so much to observe in those few seconds, and it takes time to process.

There will be the way he smells, and not just the dominant scent he's chosen to spritz himself with... there are so many to notice with that kind of proximity to another person. His cologne will probably be first, the smell of his drink on his breath, and cigarettes if he smokes them (no matter how much gum he has chewed to try to cover it up – I can smell that too). Then an undertone of sweat, a trace of his shampoo, his underlying body odour. What he washes his clothes with, what he has had on his hands during the day. And then for each scent that I catalogue, reactions that I cannot catch, human chemistry doing what it does. At best I can perhaps note whether I like it or not.

Then there's the pressure and warmth of his arm, where he chooses to place his hand (does he flop it over the top of my arm, or curl it around towards my breast? What is he trying to communicate?).  Whether his armpit connects with my shoulder or not, what my shirt will smell like when he moves away, whether any part of his arm is touching my bare skin.

My body reacting to being touched – usually for the first time in quite a while. It usually startles me. The sensation of my heartbeat accelerating, the quiver in my stomach, the warm twitch in my groin, my posture softening to accommodate the weight of another body, my skin crawling or raising goosebumps or warming under his flesh.

The feeling of the intention behind the touch. The differences between I-want-to-take-you-away-and-plunge-myself-into-your-body and I-am-touching-you-because-I-think-you-were-asking-for-it-with-the-way-you-dance. Or I'm-just-drunk-and-have-lost-my-sense-of-appropriate-personal-boundaries. All very different to excuse-me-you're-in-my-way-stop-dancing-for-a-second-and-let-me-through. 

The reactions of the people around me. The friends wondering why I'm still standing there with this man draped over me when they can clearly see he's a waste of time. The other men waiting to see how I'll react so they know how they can approach me when they have a go.

And all of this sometimes before I've even seen him, before I've had a chance to take in anything about this person. Before I've seen his face. Before I've been able to make the choice about whether I want this person to touch me, and then whether I want to do anything about it. And then what it means, not just for me, but the meaning this stranger will attribute to my choice, my behaviour.

The quiet question of danger, of whether I'll be able to convince him that I mean no, of whether he might try to take something from me that I don't want to give. The constant feeling of being prey, of the only choice being to accept or reject what is offered to me. That my choice is to be here and to subject myself to this peculiar intimacy with people I don't know, and to learn the myriad unspoken rules as best I can... or to go home, to not dance, to not raise my eyes to the twirling lights on the ceiling, to not spend time trying to fit my social oddities into the rituals of others.

I question my own motives. I will wonder if I really am here just to dance and spend time with people I am trying to make my friends. Or, if I know the nature of these places, the nature of what happens here, and I go in willingly, am I inviting it? Am I placing myself in the path of temptation? Do I enjoy the attention more than it repulses me?

Eventually I will push him away, pick up my drink and settle my nerves again. I'll return to dancing with my elbows swinging around me or huddle closer to my companions. And no-one will be the wiser about what has happened in that one chaotic minute.

In the night, I dreamed of impossible choices

I dreamed that I was getting married to a man I'd never met.  It was arranged by 'Aunt and Uncle', two archetypal characters in the Mauritian clan which is my father's side of the family (there are no such characters in the waking world, to my knowledge).

I was okay with it, with walking down the aisle to commit myself to a stranger, but everyone around me was shocked.  Not so much about the marriage, but that I, of all people, would agree to such a thing for myself.  This surprised me a little, for those that were the most vocally shocked were those that know me least (cousins, aunts, others with unspecified relationships).  The closer members of my family were present but smudged, slightly faded into the background.

The man I was to marry was unremarkable: neither good looking nor unattractive; dark-skinned, perhaps Indian, perhaps part Mauritian; a little overweight (as am I), a bit rounded in the middle; he had a pleasant smile; seemed kind but not excessively so.  To the audience, he expressed his satisfaction with the match: he knew it was a good one because he desired me (i.e. I was attractive to him).  My waking, roaringly-feminist self would be outraged by such a proclamation (as if that were my most important characteristic... of all the things to say at a wedding, to the woman he was to marry... hiss! glare!) My dream self smiled benignly.

The ceremony passed by without incident: the dream meandered into snippets of my new life with my husband.  I felt pleasantly placid; accepting; unperturbed; calm with a faint overlay of disbelief (as I dreamed I still had some awareness that this was completely out of character with my waking self).

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

My own musings on the dream yielded little by way of meaning.  It wasn't connected to any movies I'd watched, or books read, or conversations.  I mentioned it casually to my mother, dismissed it as just a strange dream.  I still didn't understand it.  As the week went on it sank into my place of forgetting, crowded out by daily life.

Tonight my best friend told me of a dream where she rode on a lion's back.  The lion killed one of her pet rabbits, but she saved the other one.  I consulted my books, searched the internet.  I remembered my own dream suddenly, sought out its meaning while doing the same for hers.

• Am I feeling forced to do something I do not want, reluctantly moving to a new stage of life?  My dream self didn't feel forced.  Perhaps the peculiar calm was born of relief: being relieved of the burden of making such a monumental decision as choosing a life partner.  There's so much to get wrong...
• An unknown man in a woman's dream is a part of her personality which is not recognised.  My  dream self was making an unrecognisable decision to marry a stranger.  That sort of change, the scale of it, is a little terrifying.  What would it take to bring about such a thing in me?  Or is it merely the union of the masculine and feminine aspects of personality?
• Members of the extended family typify the many discernible parts of ourselves. So the discernable parts of me, the known parts, the elements I have nurtured up until now, are shocked by the decisions of my true self?  Do I know myself far less well than I have thought?  
• "To dream of a wedding or marriage can often give an indication as tohow the dreamer feels about relationships".  Then this: weddings reflect how you feel about commitment to other people.  To dream of an arranged marriage means "your approach to commitment needs to be questioned".  Ahh, the sting, the squirm of being forced into honesty with oneself.  I am afraid, vastly, of commitment to a relationship with a man, even if my reasons for it are large and valid and historically accurate.

My contrary dream remains contrary.  I can't settle on one explanation, or even form a constellation of them all.  But some have the flavour of truth, of the beginning of a deep insight I may have not reached in my usual ways.  I can feel the foundations shifting, the knell of change.  Who will I be when the dust settles?