Sunday, August 18, 2013

growth.

It's House music and pre-dinner lollipops. The nights are getting longer and colder, but the greenhouse bursts with life: dark-leafed Basil, sweet peas in pods, the carrots- oh, the carrots! Every time I bite into one I think this tastes like grace and I don't quite know what that even means except that they are so full of life and sweetness. My foot is sore all the time and it's the end-of-the-season doubt and uncertainty mixed with boredom and routine but I run once a week and hobble afterward and there are still moments of humour and fun and joy at work, lots of moments. It's taken a while to find that joy.

See, there was love once, and then we broke it and it sucked. We had to learn to live together and work together far away from home and a lot of the time in the first couple of months I thought that I was living through the heaviest kind of karmic retribution for all the shitty things I did to get this love in the first place. There were a lot of tears. The kind you cry alone in your room until you're not even sure you can stop anymore. Puffy face and sore red eyes. Even then, joy and laughter in friendships, in rehearsals, in performance, but also this lurking sadness which would break into full-fledged misery quite a lot. But it got better, slowly. The other night I made dinner in the beautiful home where I am currently a house-sitter (trying not to break the dishwasher and keep the floors clean and the herbs harvested) and we ate together and watched a movie and then we hugged goodnight and he rode home on his bike and it was totally okay. Completely. Today someone took me to lunch (I am so blessed with new friends this year!) and then I was able to make one of my cast-members laugh a little bit in the four o'clock show and the sore foot and the end-of-the-season doubt didn't matter one little bit.

I am crocheting a shawl right now. Sometimes on stage, where a little bit gets done every day, but mostly backstage and at home. It was going to be a pointy triangular shawl but I started it very wide and didn't taper it enough so now it's a wrap and it will be done when I decide it's done and not necessarily when it comes to a point. It may not be exactly what I planned but it will make me happy and look good and I will have learned some things by the end of it. Which is kind of a metaphor for this summer of heartbreak and renewal, if I wanted to get precious about things.