This is the last time I used this blog to say anything remotely personal. It’s over two months old, and that feels strange. I’ve had a personal blog for so long that when I don’t write confessionally in a public space I start to get an itch, and the last couple of months I’ve been noticing it’s there, while doing nothing about it. What I get from that is a faint, background discomfort - never so bad that I do something about it, but still there.

So here I am. Scratching the itch.

The last two weeks saw the arrival and departure of my sister, Nicola. I hadn’t seen her in a year, though that doesn’t necessarily feel relevant; I probably spent more time with her over the course of two weeks than I did for the entire year preceding my departure for the US. I was quite withdrawn as I geared up to leave, back in 2013. Maybe I was creating a shell so that I wouldn’t be quite so emotionally bruised when I landed here. Whatever it was, it’s recognisable in hindsight but something that developed unconsciously at the time.

She’s doing well, I think - she has a decent graduate job, and prospects, and an idea of where she wants the future to take her. We’ve grown in quite different directions (though we were never the kind of siblings who act like peas in a pod, anyway). My parents are coming to visit in July, and with that will come a host of different feelings.

There’s a hump you get when you emigrate, often months after you leave, where you’re consumed by thoughts of the past, of ways your life could have gone differently, of local haunts you spent your formative years, of high school bullies and trains into the city and friends and lovers whose appearance you’d probably get wrong if you were to sit down and sketch them from memory now. It’s not nostalgia, exactly, but more of a crisis of imagination; the place you live in now is already there, and it’s overwhelming and hard to take in as your new reality, so you escape inward, trying to return to something you once saw as normal as some way of coping with the sensory overload of living and working in a completely different country.

And I think I got over this recently. There was no dramatic cut-off, but I am learning to accept and understand the contours of this new life. Maybe it would have come faster if I hadn’t moved here for love - love is wonderful, but also powerful, and it can muddy the waters if there are other things to figure out. The love hasn’t gone away - it’s still just as strong as it always was - but it’s consistently strong, and the ripples are uniform enough now that I can see things more clearly.

This doesn’t mean that I have a lease on a new apartment (I don’t), or a job that pays me above the poverty line (I so, so don’t), or even a car (working on it), but it puts me in a place where I can approach this stuff without feeling like someone’s grabbed my shoulders and spun me around half a dozen times. There are a series of constants in my life, and I’m figuring out how to hold on to them for dear life.

Postscripts:

As my about page will soon reflect, I’m shelving the plans to write a novel for now and returning to the short story format. More on this in a separate post as I develop ideas, but the crux of it is that I’m not sure I have the mental discipline to write a novel right now (and also I have a justifiable excuse to self-publish short stories, because very few publishers actually considers publishing a collection of short stories from a new writer.)
Media-related things you won’t see me post about, because there’s either no end point or not enough to say: I’ve been playing a lot of the weird fiction-inspired MMORPG The Secret World lately, as well as listening to the remastered and re-recorded Grim Fandango soundtrack.
I’ve been using Twitter a bit more lately - come find me over there!