Lion and Magic Boy

I’ve purposely avoided too much detail about my trip last month to Vancouver, and mostly because there simply weren’t words that could adequately express the profundity of the experience. From my perspective back in Pennsylvania, now alone, I even have to wonder if I somehow made it all up, if Matthew and Vancouver and my eleven days there with him weren’t just some elaborate, albeit wonderful, construct.

Well, no. I do have a few pictures. Not a hundredth of the ones I wish I had taken, but I have a few million more stored in my mind’s eye, snapshots of experience combined with emotion.

For instance (you don’t really want to hear about all this, do you? you do?) there were the meals. Matthew did all the cooking, and after a few days I got comfortable enough to do the washing-up. It was extremely freeing, this role-reversal combined with, what was it, a partnership? I enjoyed watching Matthew in the kitchen, taking note of his techniques, his efficiencies, slinging lettuce about or savoring an olive or thrusting a spoonful of luscious exotic dragon fruit at me.

I’ve talked before about my food issues. I’ve been anorexic in the past. There was a time for me that food was equated with entitlement, with deservingness, with love. Plus, culturally and historically, food is life. Some of those connections don’t fade easily, so the fact that here was a man creating life for me and presenting it to me was extremely soulful and loving. No one has cooked for me like that before.

Eating those meals was perhaps the most intimate thing I’ve ever done. We mostly ate silently, connected with a gaze that spoke more than mere words could have. I could feel ripples of connection to our distant human past move through me, quiet sleeping distant half-remembered memories of a time when food truly was life, when sharing food with someone meant you were linked with them forever.

And I ate things I always knew I didn’t like, yet now I love them. How can that be? I never said a word, simply accepted what was given me, and consumed green olives and eggplant and hardboiled eggs and oh, the salmon! All things I have never liked, yet now they are part of a different lexicon. And I eat them even now, choosing them for their own qualities as well as the connection they give me to that too-short time-slice.

I’ve mentioned the hiking. Or maybe I haven’t, but we did a lot of it. I’m not sure I truly have words yet for the feelings that were evoked from the connection with nature we made together. It’s what I’ve been denying myself for so long, yet the trees welcomed me back like an old friend. It was all so…familiar. So many of my internal snapshots are from views we shared, tiny pictures I can string together to create a panoramic view of the experience.

On the way back down from Whistler we stopped at the waterfall we didn’t see on the way up. Crossing a railroad bridge to the forbidden unofficial side of the falls, we went and stood directly over them. I could feel the incredible power of the water vibrating through the soles of my feet. It was intoxicating. I stepped down to a tree at the cliff’s edge and peered over for a better view of the water, but after a moment Matthew asked me if I didn’t have vertigo. I was pleased that for once the height thing wasn’t bothering me. Hey! Maybe four days in Whistler was so magical that I’ve completely cleared up my intense fear of heights! The one that keeps me off six-foot ladders and hotel balconies, the fear I’ve had since, ever! How about that!

We picked our way back over the railroad bridge to the official side of the falls and walked the easy paved trail down to the viewing site somewhat lower down than our precarious tree-perch. I was greeted by the view of the entire falls, including the bottom way, way down there, and the enormity of the risk I had taken dawned on me.

The last day I was there held a sense of foreboding. We both knew that the next day I’d be getting on a plane and going back to Pennsylvania, that aside from a planned meeting in Colorado nearly two months later, that’s anyway a work event for me as well, we didn’t know when we’d see one another again. All day I felt a sort of mute dread, and the unspoken words between us just hung like a pall in the air.

We walked on the beach, making our way down a long flight of steep wooden steps to greet the drummers who bring in the sunset every night there. The clouds obscured and diluted the sunset, and I felt cheated. Even nature was conspiring to wring this experience from me. Then we walked a bit in the university grounds nearby, as when we had driven past I was struck by a sudden sense of familiarity, realizing that some of the buildings there had figured in a dream from a year or two ago. The spell was broken by walking through it, though, and once again I felt the magic slipping from my grasp.

Again we entered the forest, yet this time the magic seemed to be elusive. I could feel the trees chanting “you’re leaving you’re leaving you’re leaving”. There was so much I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I felt pain and didn’t know what to do with it. Matthew began coughing, clearing his throat. It dawned on me that it might be related to his own apparent inability to speak, and he asked me what I felt in him. Not as a test, but with trust that I could see into him, could sense him somehow on an innermost level.

I told him simply that I thought he had words that were unsaid. That created a space where he could say them, and the tension abated and the mist cleared a bit.

Then it was my turn. Ever attempting to give me the freedom to be vulnerable, Matthew invited me to scream into the forest. I demurred. What if someone heard me? That’s the point. What do I do? Just scream into the trees. How should I do it? Like this. And he let out a yell, half-wild, half-delight, very alive.

So I tried it. But I couldn’t make a sound without basing it on the simmering emotions that seethed within me, all the pain at leaving, and anger at my situation and my lack of freedom, and my new-found joy in just being, all that lifted from me to the very tops of the trees in one anguished sound.

I was afraid the trees couldn’t withstand it, but they did. And I did.

Then we went home and clung to one another in joy and pain. Matthew couldn’t sleep and got up and went downstairs. I lay in his bed and listened to the gentle rain that had just begun, the rain that covered the tiny back garden where Zippy the cat mewed to come in, the rain that leaked my pain in tiny drops all over the city of Vancouver. There was no need for tears when we had the rain.

[tags]Vancouver, Whistler, hiking, rain, love, forest[/tags]