what we feel most has no name

remember when I could write, like seven years ago? ~ "you must be somewhere in London, you must be loving your life in the rain."   At times, this has felt like my first winter. Your leaving made the cold sharper. My scarf hangs me in suspense, and there are words like Turkey on my tongue, Armenia, my belly curving and dipping like a corrie in the Scottish highlands. I become obsessed with all things foreign, and my irrelevance begins to haunt me. So I stand under a burnt sky, I hoard dictionaries. I try to find the right words for this feeling, but my translations are poor. There are days when everything else falls by the wayside. My dreams make us into the strangest history. I remember my last summer, when you chewed my shoulders like a teething child. I remember the heat of you, I stuck to you like a stamp. We could have gone anywhere. And now when I feel the cold I think of you. Your magician's smile, your immediate sleep. I wonder if your mouth is still a kiss waiting to happen. Whether your spine is still the loveliest knot, still made of hazelnuts.

mostly on my mind lately is panic, all forms of panic. I’m sure you know the list, that everyone has their own list. I don’t know how I’m so ruled by panic internally but so unmoved in this physical world, you know? a few weeks ago I finished reading Maggie Nelson’s “The Red Parts”, which it feels like I’ve been waiting all my life to read. I’m still processing this book and what it’s done to me, but importantly it has left me two additional panics to grapple with, or at least helped me identify them. my first panic is how Maggie talks about death, this passage where she reflects on the Buddhist idea of practising for death, how it’s a moment of opportunity, how she's terrified she might never learn in time. also her quoting of Eileen Myles: "need each other as much as you can bear. everywhere you go in the world." my second, related panic is slow creep homesickness, nostalgia, how panic is sometimes grief. how they both fall down on you like a house and it’s crushing and you can only take away one brick at a time and that is sometimes, never, fast enough. I don’t know where to go with either of these feelings, but they are so interlinked I don’t know how to think about one without the other anymore. you see, there’s nothing immediate or deliberate about your choice of where to live and who to surround yourself with if you’re not constantly anxious about death, losing people, wasting time while you live undecided. I will forever remember an article I read years ago that frames this for me: someone had calculated, if they were to live X more years, and their [insert loved one] lived X more years, and if they lived on the opposite side of the country and only visited, on average, twice a year, they would only see their [insert loved one here] X more times before on of them died. you can of course imagine that it wasn’t enough. would knowing X make it enough? could you work within your limits, be ok with what you have? I assume it’s never enough and that we are always stretching, or denying ourselves so that we are at peace, somehow, by never thinking about the inevitable. that like Maggie, I will never have practiced enough. I don’t know how to serve this panic better.

I don’t know what it is about being sick that makes me feel like I’m maybe low-grade sadder than I’ve ever felt before. The country is flooding and I feel sad about it but I just ask my dad about his backyard. I’m not going home for Easter this year, again, which is fine except the combination of distance and nostalgia are a particular kind of sadness I still don’t know how to navigate. A Thing that was going to happen for me at work is probably not going to happen anymore and everyone is angry for me but I don’t think I feel that sad about it. Is it too predictable to say that there’s maybe a part of me that expects for things not to turn out, or is relieved when they don’t because things just keep going as they’ve been going? On the weekend we found a vine that had literally choked a whole tree to death. I do feel sad about that.

I used to think I got all my sadness from my mother. her sadness was so obvious and affected me so early it seemed impossible to escape.  but Idk. there is so much of it everywhere. would I have been sad with or without her? my dad has his own sadness, quiet and calm. is sadness inherited or catching or both? 

Robbie is working late tonight and my night feels all thrown off. It’s so weird how one person becomes the thing by which you measure nearly everything else.

In the last few weeks, I have: seen my mother for the first time in 18 months, met her partner for the first time, welcomed him into my home, listened to Sufjan Stevens play almost the entirety of Carrie and Lowell, which is sick with loss, and talked to my sister about a lot of big, heavy family things. All this stuff – and all the good byes and leaving and distance, have meant a lot of reflecting, or more so than usual I guess. Talking to Robbie about patterns and similarities between me and my mother. Reading my GP’s assessment suggesting that, on top of generalised depression and anxiety, I had attachment disorder, which to me is a fancy and almost unnecessary term for just flat out not fucking coping with change. When I saw that psychiatrist last year, him saying that I had almost definitely developed attachment issues as a child because of my relationship with my mother – not because she ever abandoned me, or us (although there was threat, after threat), but because, in working through her own host of mental health issues, she wasn’t as present or as “adult” as I would have needed. How my being older might have shielded my sister from that, but how she, in turn, had to watch me navigate what I guess were very extreme emotions, and turned herself inwards instead. The repeated phone calls to my parents at sleep overs after the initial excitement wore off, because I couldn’t bear to be away from my own home. How my mother’s lost weekends in bed to her depression felt like a personal slight. The heavy, heavy blow of break ups because they meant someone had weighed up their options and decided that I was not worth sticking around for, even if (like it did happen, more than once) I had decided it wasn’t worth it either. How I was only really forced out of my childhood home by an interstate move. How every small disagreement with Robbie becomes, in my mind, the possibility of him leaving me. How I wasn’t surprised when, eventually, my mother did leave – even if it wasn’t because of me, even if she came back, even if in the end everything selfishly feels like it’s my fault anyway, even if it was, importantly, more of a returning, a resettling, a healing of her own. “Do you get enough love, my little dove, why do you cry?” – and it’s not that I didn’t, just that love was nearly always a threat, which also meant love was always bigger and, if such a thing is possible, more than it needed to be.

For all the difficult things about my mother (for all the difficult things about me), there are as many good things. How she encouraged me to read and be accepting. How she loves when I make her favourite cake. How she tells stories about me when I was younger, and how beautiful she is in the photo of us on my first birthday, which is maybe my favourite photo of us together, even now. How she wrote and illustrated her own stories for me and my sister, which I can still remember. How she stayed up with me when I would have what I now know were panic attacks, even though she had to work the next morning. How she went overboard at birthdays and Christmas because she wanted us to have what she never had. How she would call my boyfriends dickheads if they were dickheads. How she tried so hard even if it wasn’t always right. How all of this, and the hard stuff too, can exist in the same person, and how to make peace with that.