Collage

Days become one, I am who I was.

"I must have been taught, or somehow learned early in my life to break easily away from intimacy. When Massi and I split, no matter what pain there was, I did not fight back. We parted almost too casually. So that long after my relationship with her ended, but still within the spin and eddy of it, I found myself searching for something to explain or excuse it. I stripped everything down to what I thought was the essential truth. But of course it was only a partial truth. Massi said that sometimes, when things overwhelmed me, there was a trick or habit I had: I turned myself into something that did not belong anywhere. I trusted nothing I was told, not even what I witnessed.

It was, she said, as if I had grown up believing that everything was perilous. A deceit must have done that. 'So you give your friendship, your intimacy only to those distant from you...'

'your goddamn cautious heart. Who did you love that did this to you?'
'I loved you...'
'yeah loved, you're leaving my life, aren't you?'

In this way, valid or not, we burned the few good things remaining between us."
~Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table