I'm traveling through my past. In a country that used to be mine. I am nation-fluid, barely able though to grasp culture on either end of the spectrum. Hard for me to wrap my head around all these alternative arrangements. I guess we all become entrenched in our eccentricities. Sinking deeper into our own difficulties and strangeness, estranged. Fertility, motherhood, failure, loneliness, desire, longing -- all throwing wrenches in the way we used to relate. In the way I understood myself in these friendships in the past. It's no easy thing to try to move between and among friendships, histories, identities. At some point it seems we all have to choose a place and stay there. And then sink deeper into ourselves, or stay and rise up out of whatever drags us down. New York to Boston to Providence, a trail of friendships and lifetimes, a range of happiness and fear. No better or worse than anyone else's life.
A friend from Ireland wrote to me a description of this feeling of liminality:
"After a few months things all become so intangible and you don't know which world you lived in and which one you are living in now. Things are functional and practical and life propels you on without hesitation or comprehension a lot of the time and then all of a sudden it can feel like you don't understand anything you are experiencing and you never have but at the same time things are normal and make sense."
A friend from Ireland wrote to me a description of this feeling of liminality:
"After a few months things all become so intangible and you don't know which world you lived in and which one you are living in now. Things are functional and practical and life propels you on without hesitation or comprehension a lot of the time and then all of a sudden it can feel like you don't understand anything you are experiencing and you never have but at the same time things are normal and make sense."
