Right and Wrong

According to most of the advice I've read or heard about blogging, I am going about this all wrong. There is no coherant thread - you can't rely on me to talk about steam trains or restaurants or TV or even the things I actually am passionately interested in, there are just too many. Also, I forget to add keywords. And I ramble.

I write in fragments, think outloud, do not save my posts to examine, edit and fine tune before posting - I probably should have called this blog something else whatever it is, it's wrong and raw.

Thinking about that as I did a little shopping this evening brought home another truth. It takes much longer to reclaim yourself after a relationship than people expect. Not to imply it is not a pleasurable experience, it is, but it's been a year since I first definitively left Jesse and pieces of me are still finding their way home.

People change us, they don't mean to but they do. All those people who tell say "you can't change a person" those people are dead wrong. We change people all the time, we just don't change them the way we intend.

I bought extra-virgin olive oil today, a decent bottle, not the economy size. I bought Italian coffee, artisanal bread, pancetta and a hefty chunk of parmesan - the good stuff. When I was with Jesse he would have found the best deals and we would have ended up with a gallon of olive oil and six bricks of coffee and who knows what else. I would have felt stressed and anxious and worried about how and what I bought, did I do it right? Did I get the best deal? And I would have felt small and grubby and very unsure of myself.

It was never his intention to do these things to me but people do, we can't help ourselves, our needs seem to reach out and hook into people sometimes and we just can't help it. I think it comes from forgetting to respect the person in favour of trying to get closer. And of course we deny it - and that makes it worse. There are better ways to be, I know there are but those ways require courage, they're not easy to take.

In most relationships the pressures we unconsciously apply to each other create divots and grooves even welts sometimes. We carve channels into the lives and hearts of the people we love. Whether we choose to is immaterial - we just do. Sometimes they are beautiful of course but anything that greedy, that unrestrained eventually pushes everything out of balance.

Maybe the best we can hope for is to find someone who wants what we are and doesn't feel the need to improve upon it. I know it sounds vain but I am thinner, prettier, more graceful and happier than I was with Jesse. I'm not blaming him and I don't doubt that he loved me and wanted me to be the way I am, the way I was when we met - confident, happy and relatively graceful. He just pressed so hard on me that I couldn't help be bruised by it. He was so bent on improving everything I did that he froze or helped me to break most of it. It's nice to have some of it back.

Ottawa is lovely tonight, cool and damp and clean. There is a kind of soft and sparkling mist in the air, it is refreshing, even sweet. The pavement shines under the streetlights and the lights themselves have their own coronas. The market was not crowded, the people who were walking in the streets were happy, many of them eating beaver tails. (It's that time already, the ice cream and maple sugar treats are gone, now it is all beaver tails and hot coffee.)

The huts on the canal are already in place even though it will be months before there is ice enough to skate on. We are right on the very rim of winter. Tonight I will have an Italian cabbage and white bean soup I made along with some very good bread and parmesan curls. There are perfectly ripe pears or maybe a cannolli for dessert, there is the view from my balcony, hand milled soap in the bathroom, clean and scented sheets on the bed and I don't have to justify any of it.

For the moment, that's enough for me.

Here (or rather at the top of this page) are some pictures of Victoria - to attach, sort of, to my last post. I'm still getting the hang of this and clearly I'm still getting it wrong but for me, that's alright. If you're reading this, I hope it's alright for you too.