i came home this afternoon to find a card from my friend jo lying with the post on the floor. inside she wrote that she’s having another baby in november. which means she’s 4 months pregnant already.

i tried grasping at happiness, tried to react the way a good friend should when someone shares joyous news… but my heart just sank. the gulf that is not the atlantic between us has widened just a little further – a distance measured not in miles or years, but trajectory. as in einstein’s theory of relativity, it’s hard to know who is moving away, and who is standing still, and if it even matters when the person you love gets smaller every time you look over your shoulder.

i have spent some time mourning the friendships i left behind in the u.s., but it took me a long while to realise they were dying. i didn’t know then that by leaving them, i was letting go of them. forfeiting by default. i didn’t know. nobody told me that would happen, or nobody made me believe it anyway, and i’m not sure that if i knew, i would have gone.

i’m also not sure i wouldn’t have. i’ve often traded the known for the unknown, without knowing why. a deep-seated impulse defying examination or explanation. maybe the defiance *is* the impulse. or the explanation.

and i know, too, holding fast with both fists is not an act of preservation. the world spins on in spite of me, and perhaps i was always on a different course anyway – like a boat tacking through the eye of a wind, a pivotal turn or decision setting me in an unforseen direction, the only real question: will i be forcibly pushed or allow myself to be carried? there is a difference. even staying put, nothing stays still.

the shift has been infinitesimally incremental, and the same time seismic. tectonic plates drifting past each other towards opposite sides of the world. me in my boat of defiance, helpless to get back to where we were, when things were aligned and we were both looking in the same direction. we’re victims of the little earthquakes that change our internal landscape, and in doing so, change everything.

or maybe it’s just me.

and so i try to recalibrate, adjust. point the compass north again towards the only thing i know to be true: i could not be anyone else, anywhere else. still – i feel so lost when i see my familiars receding into pinpricks on a horizon an ocean away. i’m lost and losing and tearful of salty sadness.

awash and at sea and alone.

the weakerthans – left and leaving

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