there have been a number of creative tails flying free since i arrived in italia: writing, poetry, art, jewellery design… finally i’m gathering them all up and tying them together.

Poetry

I completed april’s napowrimo and together with the one-poem-a-week-for-a-year challenge, along with the brick-heavy folder of poetry from uni days, I now have a pretty big body of poetic work and a relatively clear direction with which to head with them.

Novel

My lovely mamma has kindly translated my late grandmamma’s tales from her life in Germany [and thus the key to my research for my novel]. I’m in the early days of planning to make a foray to Germany in July for further research….

The writing group, and friendships

I may have mentioned I was very keen to be part of a writers group in Australia from my perch here in Toscana, via skype, email, facebook, by whatever means in this age of technology that – apparently – shrinks the world. While that’s true on a number of levels, distance and time remain relative facts: physically and mentally. Physically, things haven’t happened quickly here in terms of technology services [I’m still without adsl, which means I’m bound for another few months yet to the 3g dongle with whom I have a codependent lovehate relationship], and although email would seem like an ok method for a writing group, it’s not. Emails arrive, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they’re not answered but you’re not sure and should you follow up? Again? Well after a few tries [ok, >10] and a good while before I learned the group had been going on without me, I came to realise I was becoming one of those yappy ankle-biting terriers that won’t let go of the bone.

Grrrr

So I let go of the bone.

No sooner had I let it go than the fluttery idea some fellow expats and I had several months ago to start a writing group here bloomed.
Every Friday morning we meet and go from there. We have a decent library of resources and we we’re doing well so far: the first was productive in terms of freewriting exercises, the second one I forgot it was Friday, and the third [just past] we did tarot readings.
Hey, it’s all research.

I was intrigued by the tarot, as I’ve never done it before. I drew my three:  the no. 5 card [disappointment], the knight of disks [harvest] and the hanged man [looking at stuff from another angle]. Disappointment and hanged men…hmmm. But the reading that came with these cards and their placement told me, funnily enough, to “let go of the bone”!
With me, as with most folk I suppose, old patterns have a way of threading themselves in and knotting tight, and lingering disappointments, including the over-trying I mentioned above, and especially to do with the limbo of waning friendships – some of whom dissolved long, long ago, and more recent friendships that seem to have have flared and sputtered to silence. Well, these have been hardest to let go because of feeling vulnerable in this place that isn’t yet “home”, and a friendship’s twilight isn’t like a breakup, where there is [usually] a clear and defined end. Also, friends don’t tend to say, ‘y’know…i’m just not that into you anymore.’ Couple that with no inherent signal system that tells me when something is definitely finished and, well, bafflement abounds. I have a gut feeling, generally, but I’m a blinky optimist with virtually no inbuilt ability to put the hands up, smile and back away at the right moment – before the, ‘hmmm … what might i have done wrong’ spirals engulf.

In conjunction with tarot on Friday morning, my fellow writerly expats and I discussed the topic of friendships ghosting out. It happens to everyone, everywhere, we just feel it more keenly because we’re in a foreign land. Friendships blossom, fade, spark, sputter, endure or disappoint. Fact: they’re everchanging…and, aside from those that really do endure, they generally happen where you are, physically. When you – or they – are out of the picture [like I am, far, far away], life goes on, experience changes people and different rates in different ways, and if you or they are not physically present to share an experience, the friendship evolves differently. This made me think of something pretty profound my closest friend in Australia said, after she had cleared the last few of my belongings from the house of my ex-husband who wanted no further trace of me before he started dating again:

“It was strange; it was as though you had died.”

She nailed it from her perspective.

There is a haunting type of pain – plainly put, its grief by any other name – that nests in your heart when friendships geographically shift, or falter or die out and there is no delineated end.

Immediately after last Friday’s writerly tarot session I received a notification on my phone to say that a girl I’d been best friends with at highschool had made a friend request on facebook. A normal event, except that our friendship had done one of those cut-to-blacks 16 years ago after her awful husband had cornered me drunk and tried to grope me and on my protest and loud refusal he then told everyone that I had made a move on him. She believed him. This was one of the greatest gouges out of my life: to be accused of something I hadn’t done and to lose a friendship that seemed at the time to be the entire world, especially so soon after Ann had died, and then to have been cut off without ever having been heard. Even now she is someone who occasionally still appears in my dreams, where she hears my version of events and everything is ok between us.
In real life what would you say, 16 years on? what shape of friendship could you sketch out?

Curious about the request, I followed the link only to see the request was ‘no longer valid’. A slip of the finger on a smart phone whilst stalking.

Whoops.

And there, I guess, was my tarot message, loud as a yap, not two minutes after I’d left the writing group.