It's been a busy and mostly unpleasant two weeks. These were mostly related to the breakup of a few months ago - some things came to light that I've had troubles processing. Now that the dust has hopefully settled, I'm sitting down to look at the weaving bits of my life and how it fits together, where the threads cross, and where the holes and rough spots in the pattern are.
There are a lot more of these spots in places I didn't expect. It's a hard thing to realize, for example, that people you thought were friends and part of a support network - an honest support network - aren't. It's harder, in some ways, having seen that, to accept that other people are friends, that they won't suddenly do the same thing. Some of those people (thanks, k_d, thanks mordel), have been really patient with me.
But there's been some really tightly-knit spots in that weaving, too. Places where I can find support and straight talk. Friends who remind me of who I am and where I'm getting off track or into the weeds. There's been a lot of those popping up out of nowhere, just as I was curling myself up into a small, isolated ball of hurt and trying to avoid getting hurt again - and try, I suppose, in some ways, to protect that hurt, as if it were an injured house cat as opposed to an angry, sulking wolverine.
Letting go of the wolverine has been good. Accepting my new routine, and recognizing it, along with the more natural variations, has been good. The return of the rain is good - it tells me winter is coming soon, a time where I can finish healing and deciding if and when I want to move on from this city I've found myself in.
Yesterday, as the rain started to drop three inches on Portland, I went out with a new friend. We drank cider, and then, we walked through a warehouse filled with salvaged parts of torn down houses and offices. Through rows of doors, iron tubs, sinks on pedestals, spare light fixtures, and the lumber yard in the back. There was work, weaving itself in an unusually urgent thread through the day, there was cider, there was poutine on Alberta and sour beer on Belmont. There was a friend, and waking up lazily in a warm bed, rolling over, and curling back asleep.
Life, like the rain, finds its ways to where it's run before, or to the newer paths and gullies eroded into stone or dirt. The tapestry of my life weaves its way on with new patterns and old.
And next week, the dark man is here from the Bay.
Patterns. I'm becoming very content with them.