💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2022 › 12-31.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 16:53:28. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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A hoarfrosty day at the edge of the city. -10 C: cold, but seasonal.
Took the dogs for a good walk. Started practicing again on my viola. Planning out some writing in my head. The small break is winding down, and I'm starting to think about work. Putting it to the side as much as I can.
My partner and I chilled most of the afternoon. 90s mix on the Sonos. Two games of crib (a split). Crokinole (I eked out a win). Soup and soda bread for supper. No plans for New Year's Eve. We'll stay in, watch some hockey. I'll sit on the couch with my notebook. Work on some unpublishable poems. Look up when the announcer's voice gets excited.
When I was younger I wanted to travel; I wanted my life impossible and romantic and on fire. I thought I'd be a professor, having carved out a niche in some corner of my discipline, working to make it as exciting for my students as it was for me. I wanted to write, too, fearlessly posting my juvenalia to my website, which seemed to attract like-minded people. I still have a fragment of an email saved from 24 years ago; in it, a girl (signing off, "yours loquaciously") wrote flowingly to me about her imagined writing life: the coast, a foreign country, her days gazing at the clouds, her nights writing and writing and writing. _I'm very curious about you indeed._
She won't read this, of course. But if she does (if you do), I hope it's from a cottage somewhere in the south of France, mid-evening, a pot of coffee percolating on the stove as the hours ahead begin.
As I've grown older I've come to realize that solid and dependable is best: no, I won't leave everything behind and make a life with someone in a faraway country, and I'll never be a professor either, having dropped out of my Ph.D. after my first year, my coursework completed, my comps abandoned. But I'm blessed to navigate the day to day, exciting or not, with someone smarter and more grounded than me. Someone who takes an interest in my writing, but certainly doesn't read all of it, or even most of it; someone impossibly lovely, who hasn't aged a day since we started dating twenty years ago. Every morning I wake up and I'm grateful I get to spend it with her.
I'm not living where I expected. I left my province, but not my country. I still live on the prairies. No ocean but flax. I don't have an unsustainable and raging fire, but in its place is something better, something steady, something, if I'm lucky, that will always smoulder and burn.