Thoughtful. A quality I am told I possess, and certainly one I seek out in others. My default synonym for it is not so much “considerate” or “compassionate” as “thinking.” A person of action who thinks before she acts is even better. I personally tend more toward thinking than action, and work to balance the two out. Right now, spring into summer into fall, is the best time for me to do that.

Provided that, you know, we get any actual summer over here. My friend Rosa recently remarked that summer had fallen on a [4th of July] weekend in Boston this year, but I hold out hope that we’ll see some summer yet. Meanwhile, when it’s not raining, it’s perfect biking weather.

Changes. Sometimes they’re like stray kittens that start tagging along on the street, whether you want them to or not, follow you home and settle down there. Sometimes they tear your house apart, and you wish you’d never met them. Other times you look at them and see possibilities that might, in other circumstances, not have occurred at all.

Two of the three biggest changes in my life—emigration, life partnership, and then divorce—were not of my making. Some changes have happened to me, and then it’s a matter of managing my own reactions to them. Other changes, though, I have effected myself—to be clear, usually with the help of others. I like changes. They’re exhilarating, they terrify me, they shake me out of the everyday. Changing the course of my graduate education; sharing my home with people I hardly knew at the beginning, several times over the years; falling in love after falling down hard, and before the healing was over, letting my guard down and gambling and winning at lovers. So far the big changes have been a net gain.

Some changes require more courage than others. Some changes require more energy than others.

I also look for stability in some aspects of my life. For some things to be unchanging. For gravity to continue working, for my beloveds to keep flying with me on the wings of our own creation, for people I can feed with food I cook, for a home from which I don’t move for a good long while. But the changes, they keep coming, they don’t stop; and so mostly the stability I seek is an internal, core thing.

Rest. That thing I don’t get enough of. I’ve stopped making as many social plans as I’d like, in an effort to get alone time. To read, to cook, to sleep. It doesn’t happen every day, but it’s getting better. Energy reserves still mostly depleted, but rest droplets are re-filling the backup vessel little by little.

Reserved. I am, when I need it so I can rest. My heart’s energy is, mostly for those who give back. My respect is, for people who make things happen in the world, and also for people who keep their word.

Moving. Moving forward, which I do on purpose every day. Moving on, which I can’t do because the universe decided to throw a big protracted lesson in learned helplessness in my path, and I spend some time most days fighting to protect my integrity. Getting a move on in the morning, which always takes more time than I think it will and can be gloriously slow because I get up early enough to allow that to happen. Moving aside so as to not get in my own way. Moving out of And/Or and into SCD in pursuit of a life I want. Moving with the rhythm of my surroundings, sometimes adding my own drumline to it. Allowing myself to be moved by breathtaking beauty, kindness, light.

An occasionally resurgent meme has been going around on LiveJournal: “comment on this post, and I’ll give you five words that I associate with you. Then you write about them.” I asked, and I received, and so here they are.

Home. Ooh, this is a good one. I’ve been looking for that for a while. Thought I’d found it with Ethan, but that turns out not to be the case. I miss the home we had [in|with] each other in the first year and a half or so of our relationship. This is somewhat, though not even close to entirely, balanced by not missing the relationship in the months leading to its rather abrupt (for me) end.

When I stayed in Boston after graduating from BU, and commuted to Providence for grad school, initially I lived with Colleen. And other people too, but emotionally it was mostly with her When in late 1997 I abruptly needed to move from where I was living and posted about it to the Moxy Früvous newsgroup, a fellow Fruhead told me she was moving up to Boston in the next five months, and maybe we should think about getting a place together? Five months seemed like a long time, but we did meet at a Früvous show in December with the specific intention of finding out whether this was a good idea, and then wrote each other 300Kb of emails a month or something crazy like that, and in February of 1998 we moved in together. With some geographically and head-spatially induced ebbs and flows, Cee has been one of my closest people for longer than anyone who isn’t my immediate family (brother, sister-in-law, nephew, and mom).

(I have the hardest time calling Jo Ann my sister-in-law. It sounds so… remote. Usually I refer to her and my brother collectively as my siblings.)

In many ways, and up until very recently, that was a unique occurrence in my life. We weren’t related but were quite close, without being romantically involved. It was the quintessential Boston marriage. We seemed to have similar ideas of what we wanted out of a living arrangement, or in some cases we worked it out then. Cee had romantic relationships, and I did too, and eventually, when our adorable quirky 210-year-old house got sold, we moved apart because I wanted to move in with my then-boyfriend. I’ve wondered how differently shaped my life might be had we moved somewhere else together, but ultimately it might’ve been good for our relationship at that particular time. I certainly don’t regret the experiences I did have as a result of that move, either: namely, moving in with a boyfriend who didn’t turn all evil on me in three months’ time, being proposed to and accepting, living together for a while, deciding together that getting married wasn’t a good idea, and eventually deciding together that we didn’t want to be involved, and had in fact grown apart.

All of the time I lived with Chris was hugely educational in that almost completely non-traumatic way, but it wasn’t home in the way that it had been with Cee. We gave it a good try, but ultimately it just didn’t work. I think that one of the reasons for that is my desire to live with other people in community. After some years of living with him, I moved to London to live with my siblings and help raise my nephew for a year, as I was applying for the special-studies PhD program at Brown. That was nostalgic in many ways, I missed my people in Boston, but it was in no way lonely. That was another unique experience in that we bonded, the nephew and I, ooh boy, we did. And I’d lived with Zhenya and Jo before, and we knew we all liked it, and frankly, if circumstances were right (which isn’t likely), I’d live with them again in a heartbeat.

Then I lived alone in Providence for a year and a half. That was perfect, some of my favorite time. I definitely had a home then. Found my feet in that way that’s only possible when you live alone, found my professional feet doing the now-approved PhD in humanities computing, found that having Talan living just downstairs was a good reminder of what it was that I liked about living with other people, without actually living together.

Then Ethan moved in from all the way across the country in Pullman, WA. Someday I’ll write about the arc of that as home, but today is not that day.

The day after I graduated in 2007, we moved to Somerville, a close neighbor of Boston that would be one of its boroughs, were this New York City. We were two humans and two cats in a house of seven humans and five cats (and a dog, and a bird). And/Or was and remains a great place, and was good to live in, but wasn’t that default, deep-down home unless I was actively working to keep my own rhythm aligned to the house’s. Ethan lived there for six months, and I stayed for two years; when I started thinking of how, some years from now, I’d like to be raising a child without a primary partner, And/Or didn’t feel like the right place for that.

So in May I moved to Something Completely Different. We’re experimenting, it’s too early to know, but for now it feels like it felt to live with Cee. People drop by and hang out, from the apartment upstairs and from the outside; a lot of cooking and significant communal eating goes on, insofar as our schedules permit it; there’s both a stated intent and an emotional sense of crafting a home. I’m comfortable here, and even if it doesn’t work, I’ll still have had this amazing reminder, in some ways maybe a crystallization, of knowing what I want in a home.

Heritage. I’m Russian by birth, grew up speaking Russian in a Soviet Republic capital where, like in all of the USSR, the predominant language was Russian. I also grew up in Moldova, where people speak Moldovan (pretty much Romanian) and have Moldovan culture and holidays and food and way of life—and all of that was alongside me, not part of my primary experience. So that’s weird. And it’s weird, too, that I am Jewish (ethnically if not religiously), but didn’t even know my dad spoke fluent Yiddish until I was thirteen and we went to visit his home village and his parents’ graves in the Ukraine before emigrating to the U.S. So I grew up with the Barry Sisters, but still don’t have most of the holidays straight, and don’t like gefilte fish. So that’s weird too.

I was never able to refer to myself as an American, though more than half my life (and therefore part of my heritage) has been spent here. It just didn’t feel like that’s what I was. Oddly, the entire last presidential election season changed that. Then again, I’m a fully vested citizen of the internet, so U.S. national boundaries are about as meaningful as other places in the world.

Dark. A place of introspection, and introversion. A season that’s difficult for me. A time when fun things happen. A time when, and I’m accepting this in stages, I need to take care of myself above most other things in order to remain functional. Also a time when having responsibilities to others (like small-girl-sitting once a week) gets me out of my head and supplies a kind of joy that’s unavailable elsewhere.

Curious. I am! Curious Vika is curious. This sort of gets me in trouble, though not in the way I’m making it sound. I ask people questions and listen to the answers more than I tell stories. In conversation, I tend more toward learning than toward teaching (unless I’m thinking my way through an issue by arguing, which can be great with the right conversation partner). There was just so damn much to learn from Ethan that I fell into this odd and stupid learned helplessness, looking to him for information when I should have relied on myself. When there’s stuff to be learned by talking to someone, I vastly prefer that to finding out on my own. It’s more fun. Unfortunately, it can get on a partner’s nerves.

These days I am re-discovering my curiosity, and pay more attention to balancing out asking questions and telling stories.

Joy. Something I feel quite frequently, in short intense bursts, usually unrelated to any one thing but being rather a confluence of thoughts coming together in my consciousness. Perfect moments, like sunshine and Davis Square and ice cream, or walking under the flame umbrella in pouring rain, singing along with the stuff in my headphones, feeling the air that smells of ocean. Or even snow shoveling during the quiet, voluminous snowfall, under the night streetlights. Or that rare occurrence of having hours on end to do with as I please.

To sleep… to sleep is a price too steep, must work, mold words, count-downing ten pages — downing a beer after allergy pill, a mistake in the making — mold words meekly, humbly tumbling tattered idea to tattered idea, just-do[ing]-it getting over it getting it over with, thought passing over and under and either side of computer, books, words, work, up and away to coffee or not-coffee, to still softness, still tentative, still — sleepy and still… movement come from within, building gilding the rose, rising welling up then dive, a well so cool then still

to be behind below beyond the chatter of Greimas grimacing from out his structurgrid grinning — to leave, to weave instead a bed of leaves or sheets or page, to think nought about wages, war, weakness, wage peace in stillness, movement minute, diluted further by soft smooth laughter out from the inside.

That is all.

Janus,

Two-faced, you speak looking up, bury a box looking down. Green exhumed upright dead old man gazes straight ahead, holding your gaze up and away from the inside of his burying box. You never see him down looking up, unless you take the whole frame and turn it sideways.

Horizontality is decay. Unused muscles, skin, bones decay. Upright existence requires integrity of body, so isn’t frightening to look at. But this here is death made vertical: and so, since decay is not an option, apply color. Green, like a tree. Brown roots underground; above-ground—green. Trees with their double-liminal, ambiliminal existence remind you of the dead; this frightens you, so you teach schoolchildren of the life trees bring.

Lest we forget that green death is all around us, grass grows where trees don’t. Liminal death’s reminder, a low dense green fog toeing the line between above and below.

We’re frightened, so we reaffirm the line. Asphalt is hard fastening the gap between us and deathl; we look down and see no green. We are supported—but stifled, deprived of oxygen in our self-imposed separation from death. Soles become burned and numb and tough like leather.

Until an earthquake, or time, or tree roots, break the asphalt, and the dead surface. Subliminal roots revolt, become superliminal, obvious. Only part pokes out, tangling the spiderweb-thin sticky divide between now and never again. Once tangled, there’s no returning to order, never a full separation. Re-asphalting will only repeat the cycle. Roots like crooked fingers tear at the blockage of memory

and feed the green death’s reminder that makes poison into life for us.