I’ve been ruminating for a while over my writing or lack thereof over the past few weeks. time keeps passing and I am just calmly watching it pass, without any of my usual frettings and flappings over having to record events and analyze outcomes and commit thoughts to paper (virtual or otherwise). And after reading a long email from a good friend, a realisation came over me.

I am waiting.

This is now, and it deserves my attention because it’s not going to last much longer, this particular now. and at the same time there is a big THEN approaching. well, several of them. and they’re all biggies. so I’m hovering, like that moment at the very top of the drop of doom in west edmonton mall, when you hear the mechanism click and you roll forwards and read the sign that tells you exactly how many stories you are going to freefall in how many seconds. There is something very exhilerating about to happen, but in that now, the moment just before it happens, nothing is happening.

I feel like I’m really struggling to convey this idea.

We went to see a play staged on the train to cobh on wednesday night, and on the way back tom & I sat together and watched the suburbs of cork pass by. We glided past old stone churches, picturesque colourfully painted pubs, old men lined up on the quays with their fishing lines and cigarettes. We soared alongside cork harbour and into the city, past the backs of old, half-dilapidated houses with their walls and gardens right up against the railway line. Slates hung crookedly off the wooden beams of rotting roofs, brick chimneys rose in neat lines up above the crazy mismatched angles of back garden walls and laundry lines. And I remembered riding into london on the heathrow express after our manic last day and night in Edmonton. Tom and I had sat together on the train and I looked out on rows and rows of terraced english houses, with their old brick chimneys all lined up straight and I thought – I’m living here now. I’m not going home in two weeks when vacation is over. And the difference between the familiar north american suburbia and these seemingly infinite stretches of brick chimneys was totally overwhelming.

After a while, though, and I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, gradually I stopped being so overwhelmed by the differences. I stopped converting currency in my head. I stopped noticing every stone ruin along the side of the road. I started to understand what the gangs of youth were shouting when they passed me on Patrick Street. I started to consider the moss and snails and misty wet days as totally normal.

After many moves I’m starting to recognise the process my mind goes through during the leadup to the decision. There is a lot of romanticising that goes on, both of how life could be in this new place, in which it’s always summer and I have piles of free time to do things like sit outdoors at cafes reading books and such, and of how great life is in the current place, in which I have a comfortable home, friends to go out with, where I know how to go about getting things done and where the best place for a croissant is. I alternate the romanticising with the fear, the fear of getting stuck in one place forever, the fear of having to make new friends all over again, of having to stumble through trying to get things done, of missing opportunities and making mistakes and learning from them and feeling like I’ve regressed in my ability to successfully live life. What if it’s horrible? What if I don’t make any new friends? What if we get stuck living in a horrible house? What if we don’t move and miss out on something great?

When I know that I’m going to move, there is another process that is set in motion, in which my mind attempts to absorb and preserve as many memories of that life as possible, while simultaneously detaching from it.

So I wait. And I romanticise about chimneys and pubs and stone ruins, and I start to notice the traditional fiddle music that is playing in the foyer of the supermarket instead of tuning it out. And I absorb and encode and preserve it all in my mind, ruminating on the romantic and the anxiety-provoking, because somehow writing it down takes me away from the now-ness of it all, and I feel like I can’t miss anything right now.

I don’t know when to expect it to change into then.

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