not the shape in my mind

It's strange, living in a new country. Everything is exactly the same: I still want grapes for breakfast and I still have to blow my nose when I first wake up and my hair still gets frizzy when it rains. It's the sameness that gets to me, the things that are so perfectly like to the way things have always been, and it feels wrong, as though everything is somehow mis-aligned, that these things should have changed along with everything else, that would be easier, to see everything change all at once and get used to the new order of things. But to have to examine each article, each item, each moment of my day as it occurs, every instant, everything, to compare whether it's familiar or suddenly morphed into a new, still recognizable but indisputably changed moment ... M doesn't seem to mind, to notice how many millions of things are different; indeed, he thrives on the change; wild foreignness and disappointingly familiar; like the same cookies in foreign packaging, made from materials in Trenton; packaged in Saskatchewan.

The skies begin to clear, and I'm at rest.

I lost my motivation long ago. Looking back, fighting the haze of memory, I remember being mildly surprised but unconcerned that first, crucial year. I told myself that I wanted to want to care. Was it true? Did I really want to care, after I had fought so long and hard and been so terribly betrayed? Yes, betrayed. That is the word that has taken me eight years to write.

The garbage truck empties the dumpster outside my window, reminding me where I am, and when. It has been years since those first months of clouded judgment, self-destructiveness fueled by intense self-hatred, stemming from years of quelched anger. Oh, how angry I was. How angry I still am. I moved through my teens with the same intensity a teenage girl cuts herself, ripping the skin apart hoping to put a picture to her rage, screaming through her silence.

It surprises me, to write this. In the shower, still nursing the hangover from two nights ago, I recited Hemmingway's (or was it King's?) dictate over in my mind: one true thing. If you can find one true thing to put on the page, then you have something to write about. Just write one true thing, one thing you know is absolutely real. Now I know two true things: I lost my motivation long ago, and, with it, my self worth.