We are not meant to stay whole-we are meant to lose our leaves

I have lost three things this week. A boyfriend. My grandmother. The play we have worked 6 months to complete.

In a way seeing them laid out like that allows me to categorise them down into palletable bites. I always told myself a blog wasn't the place to write about other people, or intimate feelings. We have no right to account deep personal moments to that great public expanse of the internet. It is a display of ego. An unhealthy tendency that breeds those hoards of Jerry Springers and daytime Trishas. Perhaps when it comes down to it that is what blogs really are - inflated egos - writ large to make us feel as though our actions and experiences matter, to validate our existence. To include other people in blogs goes even further than this and can be seen as an invasion or a betrayal of the most intimate privacy of our relationships with others. Writing about them makes them feel exposed and laid bear without their consent. And I don't quite know how I allow myself to continue a blog despite all these apprehensions, and it is even more strange that I sit here in the darkness of a Sunday night writing about this awful heartbreaking week - here - in a forum that is potentially so unforgivingly open.

The only way I justify it to myself is that none of these things are so private that any friend - any person with the energy and the effort couldn't hear me talk about all of these straight out. If someone reads my blog they have made the effort, the energy, the time to try to know me. Even more so, this blog is written with two or three people in mind - friends - who I know care enough to keep checking back on this blog -- keeping track of me. I know that to them what has gone on this week touches them just through mere proximity and entangled connectedness.

Even more than ever this week has also made me realise that the false seperation I attempt to make in my blog between my feelings and the impact of others upon me is untrue. Humans do not live in isolated boxes. We rub alongside one another in a bitterly, tragically, funny set of connections. Either when someone dies (like my granny) or someone breaks up with you (like my boyfriend), or even when a group project ends (like Tempest) those connections are pulled up and cut short. They can never be the same. You can never be the same. You have lost threads of other people that had become so embedded into yourself that they were a part of you. In a silly way you are losing part of yourself. My whole inside feels emptied, sore from the end of things and connections that were beautiful and that now are over.

Somehow, the hardest of each of these to lose is my boyfriend; 12 hours after I'd heard my grandma was dead. The consciousness of a break-up can never quite be resolved in my head. To consciously end a connection. Not to let it drift apart. Not to let it naturally change. But to consciously cut it to an end. Those severed threads that linked you are torn more brutally and violently than 'the natural' end of a project or the death of an old lady. And it is hard to imagine how you can ever establish such connections again. It is marked by bitterness and utter sadness and mixed up admidst it all is a feeling that the 'friend' I thought I had in my boyfriend couldn't be there for me during a week in which I needed him so terribly. What the fuck is the use of a 'relationship' and 'love' and 'butterflies in your tummy' if when it comes down to it circumstances make a girlfriend inconvenient? ? I don't want to be unfair to him - my mind, my brain, the conscious intellect I possess gets it. Understands his decision. Grasps his dilemma. I know him to be an honest and good person, that's why I fell in love with him. But here, as I wait to leave Britain for Norway and the funeral and I feel so alone, I doubt whether the 'love' of a relationship is worth it. what does it stand for, except some long extended metaphor of a fair weather friend? My friendships stand strong it seems as my relationships crumble to loses.

I have had people who have been there for me this week. Friends who might not even have realised that the tears I had in my eyes backstage in the wings on Wednesday flew freer because of the massage they gave me before I went on stage. Friends who let me sit on their bed til 4 in the morning talking nonsense just so that I wouldn't have to sleep on my own. A friend who gave up his bed for me and slept in the coldness of his living room floor without a second thought. That same friend who made me laugh at myself as the sun rose and the birds broke their dawn chorus as we ended another late night talk and walk through Lade Braes at 5.30 on Thursday. Another, who brought me echinecea for my cold and Raki for my heart, never complaining that I was numb to reality for her whole trip up from Derby to visit me. I could write paragraph after detailed paragraph on the people who with their warm hats, bitter tasting Chinese herbal medicine, kind texts or gentle words have kept me going this week. Somehow though it is really only the one person that I wish could have been there. And he, along with my grandma and atleast for the forseeable future, the tempest is no longer a part of my life.