I went looking for the entry below, which I had unblogged as it turns out, I don't remember why, maybe trying to erase some of the damage done me by the final picture wherein my ovaries were kicking out 4-8 eggs per a month and exploding when I wrote it, when actually I became too sick to remake that trip. I just booked it again finally, which is why it's on my mind.

I didn't take the trip insurance this time.

_____________________
3/5/2012:
redux

That pic was taken by me, alone in a palatial hotel suite in Boston at the American Literature Association. It was half gambit, that trip. By half, I wanted and needed to attend the conference, to begin again to think academically, to write ... the other half was John, who seemed when I booked the trip months earlier to be finally willing to try to function, drive in a car together, stuff like that, and who by the time I needed the ride was long gone (again, and amazingly enough, finally). I took that pic to mark the time, my alone time, staring at ceiling and doing nothing but thinking. About all that I was missing in my life, which was not John actually. And I thought of all the people who had partnered and how I would not; I thought about Aaron, in Mexico that weekend, for instance. I thought about how the fact of not partnering was not, in itself, overly troubling to me. It was reception I was missing, an interlocutor .. I had lost the will and ability to build meaning on my own for everything, to tell the story of myself to myself alone, to decide everything and set the value for everything. I was not suffering from "o woe is me, I shall grow old alone", I was suffering from writing such a thing either as a joke or serious fear depending on TO WHOM I WAS WRITING, which had become, well, nobody. I mean, maybe someone is reading this, but nobody immediately implicated in the content or outcome. If I set my hair on fire, your pillow won't scorch. I don't need an audience so much as someone to wrestle with, to write for not just at. Otherwise, I can't keep from going to/too quiet. Now, Aaron does not read this blog, the writing I do for him I prefer to be in midair (alive). Does that count? (Am I writing?)

I am going back to Boston. Same conference. Only this time, I will have a partner with me and I will be giving a paper. I will have someone listening with interest to a paper I'm going to give about the concept of mating versus marriage, in literature ostensibly, my favorite author to whom I return for solace endlessly, whom I reread (this) again last night. I have yet to write that paper, I don't know what it will say, I don't know what it will matter that Aaron exits vis a vis what I will say, what I'll decide I think. I don't know more than I do know about many things. I don't know how it will turn out. What will my intellect do with Aaron with me there? How will that not matter, also? Everything has changed inside me since the last time I wrote and read aloud a 'treatise'. On this subject in particular, how mating and the spirit are entwined and at odds, every single cell in body has turned over since I left a husband who tried to kill me, passed through years with a lover whose indifference and chronic absence was infinitely gentle by comparison, and now to this place I am now, with much more that I cannot say (that I cannot write about at all, at least not yet) than I can in words I've found.

I have a pile of books in front of me right now. I'm looking at them, anxious not to be speechless.




redux (internal view)