Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
It has been colder in New Orleans the past few days than in Reykjavík Iceland. I don’t have central air, my window unit broke earlier in the week and when I plugged in the floor heaters my landlord gave me they short-circuited my room.
I said goodbye to someone I care deeply for. This person also cares for me deeply, but is not in a place to give me what I need in a relationship. I have gotten this person through many things personal and political in the past few months and they have done the same for me. I feel cast loose, unsure where to place my feet. Nodus Tollens.
Mardi Gras season is starting. I have a trip to Belize booked and paid for the week after Fat Tuesday. My family is happy and healthy, my dog is getting a little fat and my friends, as always, have stepped up, impressing me over and over again with their love, kindness, and generosity. I have been working out a lot. Listening to the new Run the Jewels album and Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition on loop. I started a new knitting project. Caught up with a very good old friend who just got back into town.
What is it that anchors us? What makes up the story of our lives? Is it the people in it? Is it the actions we perform? The things we consume? How do you reorient when your Person in a Lead Supporting Role bows out? I find myself feeling jealousy, feeling spite, and wanting to inflict pain where once I had only wanted to nurture. This is the part I hate the most when relationships end. I hate the negative energy. I hate the petty, low-minded person it can turn each one of us into. These are feelings I work to expel from my everyday life and yet here I am, in the midst of them.
We both said things we will come to regret. Things that were not true, or only partly true, amputated from context and said with the intention to cause pain. I wish I could take a deep breath and expel these feelings, yet I wake up with them in the morning in my apartment without heat and sleep with them at night. I know they will go away with time. Like so many other phases in my life, this too shall pass. Nodus Tollens: the destruction that makes space for a new plot to begin.
