"I'm melting!" On change, fluidity, and the rigors of the riverbank

I fell in love once, with breathless abandon, in my thirties. I was heedless and I don’t regret it. The relationship crashed a few years later because we both had troubled histories and impenetrable walls we didn’t even know were there.

I’m in my sixties now. I have been dating my partner John for a year, slowly and mindfully. He’s an old friend, so I’m comfortable saying, “I need some time,” or “I’m scared.” Miraculously, he’s comfortable saying that, too.

Several times, we’ve had magical weekends together, and one or the other of us – sometimes both! – goes home and two days later is ambushed by fear. We note it, watch it, tend to it, let it move through. And then we pick up where we left off. No hurry.

Being intimate with another human and letting the process make us into partners is terrifying. It’s not falling, because my feet remain on the ground. It’s more like my old boundaries are giving way and I’m uncertain of the new terrain.

It’s also meltingly delicious.

Share

Cutaway, the summer exhibition curated by Olivia Baldwin at Brandeis Women’s Studies Center’s Kniznick Gallery, is, in essence, a show about opening to and resisting change, and about the boundaries we negotiate. “In the divots and recesses, these works direct us to the tensions inherent in both structures that support and distances that offer protection. Cutaway withholds as it reveals,” reads the show’s central wall text.

Hai-Wen Lin’s thrilling kite piece October 8^th 2:56-3:56pm, Wicker Park; a picnic together// we probably shouldn’t feed the sparrows is a lot like falling in love – or flying in love.