Blogging ... why blog ? ... why blog today ? ...blogging today because I've been meaning to for a week or so. Blogging because over the past few months particularly but also over years my blog acts as a notebook documenting what i'm doing, what is interesting me, what i am obsessing on, how i'm feeling, what i'm making, thinking, where i am, what flowers are growing in my garden and so on. It's a fairly unconscious witness to my life story since 2012 because it's written in immediate time and is generally unrevised apart from the odd word, or comma, in the hours after i make it a public document. 
What do i need to say to my blog today. After months of living in another world there are days now when i realise i have been living in another world. That other world is peopled with ghosts. My chief ghost is Jon but there are others too, some dead and some dead to me but likely still living. Some benign and some not so much. My old body has not yet absorbed Jon's death. I know he is dead but part of me is still in denial. I have not really accepted his death because i don't want it to be true. It is true, but i still half expect an email from him to pop up in my inbox.
A little while back I listened to an interview with Julian Barnes on the radio .. he said "everyone believes when they first fall in love that they begin at year zero" or something along those lines and that "it doesn't matter what age you are the experience of falling in love is always like that". But the actuality is that we carry our pre-lived life inside of us and that pre-lived life includes connections and schemas that affect how we respond to what is going on in the now (whether we are in love or not) and the future we look forward to.
The patterns and forms that we take are shaped by our history, and not just our own history but our parents, and our parent's parents, and their parents, and so on, back into long forgotten time. Our recall of that time becomes a detail within the fabric of our being, a bend in our bodies, a response so inborn it feels like nothing of note, often quite a fixed behaviour until we meet another whose response questions our response. Sometimes that question can be a good thing it can allow change to happen.
See here I am wondering what the hell i am doing with my life, and who the hell i am. My affair with Jon was seminal. He told me i was beautiful, he told me that he loved me. Now it is quite possible, and likely, that he said that to each and every woman that he bedded before and after me. But to be given that repeatedly even with the counterbalance of being called a useless whore changed the substance of me. He let me feel lovely and lovable and feeling lovely and lovable felt wonderful.
I am letting myself drift into nostalgia which is dangerous territory. My mind is still tracing the paths i took with Jon, mapping the time we spent together, recalling every moment of note as i search for understanding. My feeling is that in the end understanding is silent, but to pre-empt that silence is not hastening understanding but smothering knowledge. Words are slippery material, writing or speaking the words in my mind can be good and can be bad, once they are out they are out, cannot be unsaid, but laying down my letters, even if i repeat myself or take a wrong turn, is cartography of a kind. And I don't know if the silence will be easier, or just other, which is why I am annotating my thoughts as they rise to the surface because later i think i may forget and i don't want to forget. 
From the moment i picked up the email from Jon's sister-in-law telling me that Jon was dead I have been living in strange space. Here but not really here. Grief is new country. I loved him. He landmarked my life. He was a rock, he was a river, a field, a cliff path, a wood. He was buzzards keening, the scent of fennel on my hands. He was light streaming in through the pale thin curtains in his bedroom, and the wind buffeting the walls as i lay in his bed between his sheets in half-darkness, wrapped in the scent of him, he is the tadpoles in the little pond he dug in his garden that mix with the tadpoles in my grandparent's pond. 
Maybe I am spilling too much of myself on to the page, giving too much away. I am absorbing Jon as i knew him, my wandering mind is tracking him, following his ghost-paths, the stories he told me about his life before we knew each other and after we parted. I am on a quest for understanding. My tracking is aboriginal. I am an elephant touching and taking hold of the bones my ancestors gathering insight from those that went before me as I search for his bones, the bones of his being. 
Perhaps i seem peculiar when i talk like that. I have just a handful of friends i can talk to about Jon, people who knew us as two in love, two rowing, two parting and coming together, they know the distances we covered. And maybe grief when it hits hard is a road we tread alone because the relationship we have is one to one, no one can take the place of that other. I have met softer grief and it is softer because my ties have been weaker. I did not know how much of me still belonged to Jon until he died. It's funny who we give our hearts to isn't it ?