the last chapter

The weekend was a train wreck.

We'd come all this way, but not journeyed an inch of distance.




And I knew that my life, what I expected, what I accepted - needed to drastically change.


"Learn the alchemy true human beings know. The moment you accept what troubles you've been given, the door will open." — Rumi



Top photo is by Alex Prager.... bottom photo is by me... the palms of Los Angeles, mid-summer.

you & me

Michelle Williams stared at me in the night-quiet of a Brooklyn apartment. Lifted from a coffee table, she was shorn and reduced to 10 questions within Time's red and black oil-slick pages. One question - the obligatory question du jour - What helped you prepare for Blue Valentine? - was sourced from an anonymous John of Montana (Ryan Gosling once compared Michelle to Montana. She's like Montana were his exact words - did you know?)

Her answer: it was a performance bled out of poetry and song. She stitched together the character's outline with banjo notes; reached her bone-thin arm, like a needle through the ice, into the words of Galway Kinnell to fish out its soul; a paper doll stuffed entirely from the wrist and pulse skating atop Kinnell's white pages.

"There's a line in one of his poems, 'Being forever in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.' [...] The poem is called "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight." Go find it."

Go find it she said. So I did.

And after I found it, I also found Galway's take on finding love:

"It takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems — the ones that make you truly who you are — that we’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, 'This is the problem I want to have.'"

I sat in bed chewing on this. I wondered if I'd grown into my wrongness fully enough yet - or if I still needed to wrangle my deepest demons to the ground in my very awareness of them. How well did I know the topography of my darkest and most unsolvable problems? Enough to know the shade and silhouette of the right wrong person I ought to be on the lookout for? Perhaps there was still living I needed to traverse to know who I was, which would explain everything - my singleness... the fact that I was alone, awake at night, contemplating such things.

When then, of course, he texted. He who has (self-confessed) run to and from me for a very long time.

"You should write alongside me," he said.

I'd been anticipating his text - not this text, but a text from him - it's always only ever a matter of time. I even had a planned response - the gist of which was to be something like, "I'm sick of this - If you can't run to me without running so long and so far from me - Please don't come back."

But I was feeling particularly melancholy - wondering about my wrongness, you see - so it was well-timed (boys always know), and this opener was also a little outside the scope of the usual pattern - it had different tone, was striking at a slightly different chord... but also (probably especially) because I knew what he meant, as a would-be writer himself he wasn't merely proposing that I write alongside him in the sense of 'you do your thing & i'll do mine,' but that we might be something more simpatico...

So instead of an eternal sayonara, I responded, "Shall I...."

For when it comes down to it, right or wrong, my imagined picturesque future has always consisted of a house or a cabin or a room with another writer in it. A person I sense is there, but who is quiet, as we spend our days tapping, thinking, spinning impossible threads naked to the mortal eye - reconvening at a regular time near dusk to murmur about what we didn't accomplish, or what we hope we did - saying "and what do you think of this?" with a bizarre sort of wild delight I think only a person with one foot in their imagination and one foot on this planet who is constantly trying to merge the two can.

But is this - or he - the right problem for me? Writers as a species are notoriously neurotic, self-absorbed, off.... And when it comes to him in particular, I may never know since I'm not sure there's a chance we'll ever get past his see-saw of approach and retreat long enough to have a real shot. But still - it's a question in my heart.

Particularly since so much of the reason I began speaking to him again some time ago can be ascribed to a coincidence related to Blue Valentine - a theme that now seems to be recurring. In the film, Michelle Williams' grandmother says, in essence, how you much you owe it to yourself to trust that the person you choose to fall in love with is worth it for you..for all it will cost. Which makes me doubly wonder when I see such blue flags.... what they mean... and how they relate to the problem I ought want to have.


Photo is by Henri Cartier-Bresson

attention: this is a live performance

"Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for — for another time?
There are no other times.
There is only now.
Right now."
— George Balanchine

Lives are changed because of silences. Because of words unspoken. Requests, desires, feelings, never articulated. We think that our actions are what shapes our future, but it is the void, the things not done, the scope of the unspeakable, unknowable ether is what weighs down upon us more than we know.

I have left many many places in my past, but as I explained to a friend the other day, the likelihood that I would have stayed put in any one of those locales had someone, the right someone, sat me down, taken me by the hand, looked me in the eye and said, "I wish you wouldn't go. Please don't. Please stay right here for a little while," is frighteningly grand.

Granted, I come across as pig-headed, as unswayable, as confident and unwavering and devil-may-care - to the point that perhaps it is my own fault that nobody ever had the guts or the grist to get in the way of one my decisions and request a serious reconsideration and reversal. Nonetheless, my life's trajectory has largely been shaped by drastic exits simply because nobody ever put up a good case, often any case, for otherwise.

Which brings me to an recent experience of a friend of mine (no, this is not a veiled tale about me). There is a person in this friend's life who was planning a move - a major one - across an ocean. My friend did not want this person to go.

Me: "Have you asked them to stay?"

Friend: "No. But isn't that a huge request? An unaskable request? Something that signifies neediness on my end. Insults them by implying I think they'd consider such a sacrifice, a redirection of their life, on my behalf?"

Me: "Maybe, but sometimes, the only reason I've left, is because nobody told me not to go."

So my friend asked. Imagine it. A life was asked to be changed. And guess what? The person in question is staying put - for a bit longer anyway.

I am not surprised.

We are so afraid of showing our need; showing our affection; our depth of care for fear of frightening away those whom we feel those things toward. But that is the true irony. For really, isn't that the grand quest we're all on anyway? Finding a person, place and thing who can furnish us with exactly that sort of unrestricted devotion.

This prevalent hesitancy and the potentially life-altering wrongness of this hesitancy reminds me of another of my favourite quotes:

"Say "I love you" to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all."
- George Eliot

Ahh... the eternal silence. Which brings me back to my airplane theme that you've seen recently, together with the girls in dresses and the quotes from choreographers (above).

I've been taking a lot of risks lately (those of you who know me may say, 'but you always take risks' - true, but these are perhaps more directed, more *calculated* risks than usual). Risks of the heart and the deep deep soul. Taking plane rides and grand leaps of faith. Some have worked. Some not so well.

But a novel is being written (there are dancers in it - I feel eerily in sync with the zeitgeist and all the Black Swan buzz) and a venture is being formed. And if I don't hold back - well, actually, the *if* of that is almost irrelevant as I've reached a point where I don't feel I *can* hold back anymore... a sensation that makes me feel as if I've backed myself onto the right gang plank (diving board?)... a place of such overwhelming surrender because there simply is no choice.

In effect, to appropriately end with another Balanchine quote:

"I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance."
— George Balanchine

And if you have to dance, dancing then, is what you must do; the very abandon of your existence is fulfilled through the act of dance itself.



Photo is by the similarly-minded Rodney Smith, who (if you read his blog) rarely loves exactly how his photos turn out, but the process, the elements that make up the vocation of photography, is his reward.

he's a scorpio, i'm an aries... hmmm...

“Yes, but we’ve always had different taste in art and living. I assume that won’t be a problem?” - me


Illustration is by the wonderful Nicoletta Cecooli.

writing the script as i live along

"Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department."
- Holly Golightly from Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's

I'm clearly the sort of person who can't just imagine what it must feel like to be dazed by an electric fence, nor do I buy into the conventional wisdom that messing with high voltage is a potentially bad idea... oh no, when I get it into my head that I want to tamper with sparking matter, I waltz past all the 'achtung' signs, and despite knowing what's possibly in store, grab the wires with both hands, just so I can feel the charge convulse through my system before, sufficiently stupefied and singed, I can finally let go and say, "ahhhh... so *that's* what it feels like. Well, now I know and can describe it with acccuracy."

Don't worry, someday it will all go into the novel, which will aptly be titled, The Seagull, I think... or some variation thereof...

Fabulous illustration is by Nicoletta Ceccoli.

ready or not

"what woman having ten silver coins,
if she loses one of them,
does not light a lamp, sweep the house,
and search carefully until she finds it?
When she has found it, she call together
her friends and neighbours, saying,
'Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin
that I had lost.'"
-Luke 15:8-9

and uh, wish me luck...


Image is one of Rob Ryan's delightful silhouette creations.

Less Naive

"Naive comrades, there are evil men on the Earth."

- Herve Kempf

"Tis better to have loved and lost..." Yeah......? I think Tennyson was an idiot.

It's sort of a strange thing to announce a breakup over a blog... especially when you always told your now-ex boyfriend that the whole reason you never wrote about him was because you didn't want to have to explain his disappearance from the blog to an anonymous audience if you ever broke up. (Well that, plus he never read it anyway.) Ha. That's irony for you.

But there it is. I'm currently in post breakup. Have been for a week now - and it's sad... and depressing... and unreal. Especially since even though I technically ended it, I didn't particularly want it to end (Do we ever? Really? Truly?). It was more one of those things when you start out mildly unhappy about one thing and say, "Um, this has to change..." And they nod and smile, but don't take it too seriously. So a few weeks later you're back there again saying, "Okay, no, like really, you've got change this." Yet, for whatever reason, some men are just too-stubborn or oblivious or confident of the fact that they've got your love all sewn up to realize that "this" is a deal breaker for you... and they continue on with it, all the while professing their love... until you find yourself yelling at them with tears streaming down your face: "YOU'RE FORCING ME TO LEAVE YOU!"

Then, just like that, it's over. Quicker, and swifter, and much less drawn-out than you probably would have liked. Certainly than I would have liked. Because, as I said, it's not like I didn't adore him. Or consider him my best friend in London. Which he was.

And it hurts for that very reason. It's horrific to be here again, in this place where someone has disappeared from my life and the only person I really want to talk to about their disappearance is them. When quiet hours feel barren and I know there will be a long melancholic stretch without frequent calls or relaxed and comfortable kisses; an unsettling realization that I'll never hear anyone say "bA-by" to me in that same soft and endearing way again.

I know what they say. I've heard it all. That time heals. That there's someone else just around the bend. Blah, blah, blah. In reality, while time does numb, and yes, you meet other people... I sort of think everyone I've ever loved has carried off pieces of my heart that I've never gotten back. After hearing lots of disheartening stories about others' failed relationships through the years, I think it's true for most; to varying degrees we're all a bunch of unrequited lovelorns staggering around... even if some are a little more stalwart about it than others.

Call me jaded. I can take it. But better to have loved and lost? I have yet to be convinced. No, I think it is much better not to have loved than to have lost in the end. Even though I realize it's a perpetual Catch-22 if a person desires love at all. As Jean Anouilh wrote, (a quote I find I'm more in accord with than Tennyson's) "There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy."

(The Olbinski above is Pelleas et Melisande, the same name as a tragic opera about three [it's a love triangle] unrequited lovers.)

Expat Mischief: "Boo!"

I don't think the Brits really get the concept of Halloween. This is pretty apparent form the many Halloween-themed party adverts that read: "Halloween Celebration! October 22!" or "October 24th!" or my favourite, "November 1st!"

Umm, November 1st? All Saints Day? Seriously? Shouldn't all Halloween activities be, uh, dead and buried, so to say, by that date?

No, they're definitely a little lost when it comes to the ghoulish night and all the trappings that go with it. Of course, since this is a quasi-capitalistic system, the merchandisers are aiming for it to catch on here, so you'll find promotional displays here and there, but it all feels a little misguided - like the stores know they should be pushing this holiday for the purpose of profit, but haven't entirely grasped the overarching concept and how they could should be going about doing it. So while you may find obscure decorations and a smattering of foil-wrapped chocolate pumpkins, it pretty much ends there.

No matter. Just because the British are little clueless doesn't mean Kasey and I can't properly carry on with our own traditions. And with the definitive smell of fall in the air, and the darkening nights, we felt almost compelled to do so. It's just the sort of thing that must be done to usher in and welcome a new season.

So first we made a batch of warm candied popcorn to sustain us through the night's activities.


Then carved some pumpkins (much more difficult without all those intricate patterns and special tools that are now so en vogue in the States - we had to go back to more simplistic traditional designs... I ended up with a cat and Kasey, a toothsome Jack). And after we were done scooping out our endearing goblin-lanterns' insides, we even roasted their seeds.


Ta da! I guarantee we'll be the only ones in the building with glowing gourds on our balcony come Halloween. Happy (early) All Hallow's Eve!