I haven’t written here for a while…
somewhat preoccupied, fairly busy. Walking through what feels like several lives at once: the university (with various changes in upper-level policy – an annoying time for British universities, as upper-level business savages try to extend control over non-business systems), my analysands (and another new one, and new chairs for them, so professional!), the HIV patient group’s expanding activities (and I finally seem to be letting go of control), questions over HCV treatment (deferred until April, perhaps; but I am not worried, as I was), a cluster of impending conferences and collections (including some surprising gestures of respect, as though I am considered a known figure), a film series to introduce…
And, in October, there was a long burst of passionate feeling: for some weeks I was fascinated with some men, and (more than usually acutely) imagined living with someone again. At that time when people notice that winter is coming, and instinctively, or rationally, decide that they might want to settle down with someone.
Which didn’t happen for me, but which didn’t feel utterly impossible either.
One day in that period, I stood and spoke to a handsome Irish bear working at the Apple store. Everyone else was with customers, but relaxed, and things were quieting down toward late evening; and it seemed as though he wanted to talk specifically to me, to hear what I was like, what I wanted to say. I thought – and I know, I may have been imagining things – does this mean he likes me?... who knows.
•••
Another day in that period, I wrote:
Pleasant/melancholy: at the corner store a hand taps me on the back, someone says how are you? A charmingly good- and intelligent-looking man with glasses and a shaved head, it takes me a minute to remember that he's my former doctor, who moved to another practice. He looks even more like someone you would want to live with for the rest of your life now, standing casually and smiling, than he did sitting behind his desk then. We talk about the book I suggested to him at our last appointment, Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man, which he has bought but not gotten to read yet, which is about a remarkable doctor who, like him, pays attention to the details of his patient's lives and behavior in interpreting their symptoms. It is pleasant to talk to him, despite being somewhat distracted by thinking how very much I like this man. We say good to see you, take care, I walk home... feeling a bit lonelier than usual, wondering if his obvious pleasure at seeing me means anything, wishing....
•••
One day a train to Sheffield, the next a train to York. No rain, quiet journeys.
It’s a (bit of a) shame I haven’t written about it all. There are indeed some interesting fragments among my dreams and notes from analysis, as well as some journal entries and (possibly overly personal) Facebook posts. But it would be hard to put together a coherent story out of the past two months… which implies it’s not a particularly coherent time (which is reflected in analysis, where we have spent a lot of time wandering around the fragmentary, the incoherent, the multi-linked – and around memories I’d forgotten that I’d forgotten).
One thing that does seem true: although I have bursts of anxiety about not finishing things, about projects, about sleeping too long, about some intermittent disjunctions/disconnections between sleeping and waking over the past few weeks…
nevertheless, these all seem – well – not particularly important. I was thinking today: there are indeed the familiar anxieties and problems, but somehow they feel shallower – the pool of worries has an odd quality, as though the bottom is only two or three inches deep.
As though my anxieties and losses, my bursts of concern about HCV treatment, my embarrassment last month when I was too irritable in the HIV group meetings (how could they forgive me? though I know that these things are rarely as bad in the real world as they are in the projected one) – as though all of these things are just... a couple of inches of water.
And I walk through the water, my shoes getting slightly wet, mildly annoyed by that – but feeling something so far from any experience of deep worry, of shattering anxiety…
•••
During last week's discussion in analysis, that same image kept coming to mind: of a circular pool, a few feet in width, dark water that shines with reflective light; occasionally drops of water falling onto it, or ripples… but clearly shallow, only a few inches deep…
An unexpected online clash with the gentle R. one Saturday that left me incredibly unhappy – and which was my fault; we shared various back and forth comments over perhaps five or six hours, ending in a healed relationship. My analyst points out the implicitly relative shallowness of my anger in this – only a tenuous connection to the young boy I once was, walking around and round the damaged pine with its bleeding, wounded bark, arguing and gesticulating in a theater of rage and frustration.…
•••
A dream, from 2 November:
I live in an apartment, small and dilapidated, in a large low apartment building that is old and worn – old paint, peeling in places; not in disastrous shape, but it looks as though poverty has left walls dull, bluish, slightly dirty.
Early in the dream I meet a handsome young man, intense, with pale skin, dark hair and eyes, spare muscles and tattoos, who has just moved in towards the east side of the building with his girlfriend; we are immediately comfortable with each other and become friends. He looks like someone who may have grown up poor, because of the wiriness of his frame, but seems healthy and strong, attractive to look at.
I work in the same large building, which has many apartments, and which looks back toward another large old building across the street. It all has a New York or Chicago feel, or some place that has always been industrial or poor.
I come back to my apartment during a break or lunch, and the door of the single-room apartment next door is open – and he is there. Alone, he has moved his things in, with no explanation. We talk, not referring to his girlfriend – perhaps they are no longer together. I say I’m happy he is there, and he says he is happy to be there.
Beyond his one-room apartment, toward the north beyond a window, is another apartment that seems to have been closed off, and is unused – a single room with a high ceiling, abandoned, and some high structure in the middle. We both wonder why it is unused, and wonder whether we can get into it, whether it can be added to his apartment. I see his tattooed arm next to mine; I stand and say I have to get back to work, and go, happy that he is here, happy that he is around.
•••
Since that dream, I have only remember fragments of other dreams – it is three weeks now: I sleep long and deep, I know that I am dreaming, but I don't remember, except in incoherent bits. My analyst and I aren't worried about this... there is an easy rapid flow to our sessions....
•••
Today, I had only one thing to bring to analysis – not a dream, but a flash, a vision:
Just before bed, in a combination of figuring out how to do some things and worrying about them and being elated that they were going well, and that the psychic pressure of tasks seems so much lower since the book crisis – a fragmentary vision while emailing M.: of visiting him somewhere warm, taking a nap – I am clearly older, more wrinkled, but happy – and dying in my sleep in the afternoon sun. M. comes to call me to dinner, and finds my body…
When I tell my analyst this, he is silent for a few moments. We talk for a while about its simplicity, its calm quality. I point out that in the past two days I've done two public presentation/discussions on AIDS – the one on Monday for the clinical psychology students at the RVI, and then today in my class on musicals, to talk about Rent and other musicals related to the crisis. And about how easy they were... a sense of lightness...
He says: is there really not any more to say about it? I say: I'm not avoiding things – it just seems that it is in itself light, clear. Any more interpretation seems... heavy.
•••
There is in the past weeks a quality of release from weight I've held on to since I was three years old – and in fact (I have a flash of articulate, highly complex insight, and try to explain it to him in a rush) there are only a few times in my life when the weight lifted: in high school, from the time I suddenly felt handsome to the collapse of not getting into the university I wanted; in the garden San Francisco apartment, during the time when Adam would visit, and I was happy; in darker Berlin, during the days when Hans-Rainer would appear at my door, and we would be in bed for days; and that first year in Hong Kong – I can remember that first night of torrential summer rain, when I left my bed naked, walked onto the twentieth-story balcony overlooking the sea, and exulted in the rain, amazed and drenched....
But those were different states than this feeling is, now: they were releases through anticipation, through excitement, through passion. Now, things are calm and not unusual, and I am merely released back into my own everyday life, which is not terribly exciting or passionate, at least at the moment – but which is nevertheless not weighed down, either –
I think of an older dream and try to explain it; can't remember how it ends, and so open my computer and look for it – the one in the jungle, sitting and talking to a woman in ruined huts underneath trees dripping with rain: it is from January 2010, several years ago now. A dream early in analysis, a dream like a promise, a dream like a vision of something I could perhaps someday reach. But I remember it, and its intensity: in that dream small animals, not cute but gaunt, scruffy, who have been living in the wild, gradually, slowly come to trust me. A kitten curls up under my arm, a small green snake rests next to it....
My analyst is smiling. What else is there to say, then. I think we're done for today.