It's time to look back. Usually, we are doing a review at the end of the year, in December. But finally, June, and in particular the summer solstice, is also a time when it's interesting to take a look in the rear-view mirror.
Over a year ago, I was running the BMO race with great hope and hindsight. I had gained a sense of perspective that allowed me to give myself fully to the moment and to being part of a whole. Since then, this unity has been put to the test, and unfortunately, my attention has been refocused on my internal struggles.
Since then, an alternation of happy events, such as the arrival of my brother (the very first person to visit me in Vancouver in the 4 years I've lived here), and less cheerful ones (which I can't go into now), has made me lose track of where I am and where I'm going. I try to hold on to the precious and beautiful moments of the past, but they seem to fade in my memory to the point where I have to go back over my past life and look at photos to tell myself that I really did live that life. For the first time in my adult life, I have the same address over a very long period for me: 4 years. The average has been from one to a maximum of a year and a half for most of my wanderings away from home.
Once again, I feel like I'm creating myself ex nihilo. I try in vain to connect cars, to find hyphens in my identity, to create them as one tries to capture a mist to make a sculpture. I don't even try to create anymore; I feel the source has dried up, I have no time, I have no energy.
For several months now, I've felt like a golem with malfunctions; I take shape, try to accomplish the ordered task, then disintegrate, before reforming and disintegrating again.
Health problems come and go like the tide, endless administrative waits torment me like harpies, cracks opened up by therapy (but you have to have them to heal in the long term) sometimes open up the earth beneath my feet, and a thousand difficulties in maintaining a decent sports routine (whereas last year, everything was perfectly oiled and constant) leave me in despair.
However, in this terrible maelstrom, I'm lucky to have the constancy of my partner, always there to support me.
But now I've lost the taste, as they say. Before, the spark came right away, like a match you strike. Today, I'm alone with this sound of abrasion, of lost magic, without fire in a frozen solitude. I can no longer find the joy of having helped a stranger, of having held a door, of helping others without expecting anything in return. I don't expect anything, I don't want to be in a transactional relationship, but I simply deplore the fact that I no longer have that magic of abandonment (there's a gift in abandonment).
I'm afraid of existential amnesia; of no longer remembering who I am, what I've done, and of wandering the world, like the gentleman I used to look after, a stroke victim, who had lived a rich life but had fallen into the total present, with only yellowed postcards in his apartment. Perhaps this encounter was a harbinger of things to come for me today, of this slope towards memory loss. I no longer have people physically around me to remind me of what I've been through, people with whom I've shared these moments and adventures. In a way, I've already passed into another world, that of the spectres, with my identity and memory fading.
But I try not to forget the taste of resilience. It seems to me like a gourd in the desert; I used to be able to savor this fresh water in my difficult crossings, letting only a few drops moisten my lips dried by a wind of distress. But do I have any water left today?