After the events in Farewell, Brion, my life settled into a long haul of raising an infant while finishing high school, in a program funded by welfare.  My main relief from it all was fiddling…busking.  I found I thoroughly enjoyed it, and found that busking with an infant in tow was a guarantee of mucho dinero in my fiddle case!  When Maya became a toddler, her impromptu step-dancing while I played ramped up the contributions.  Frankly…I think she was hopping around much of the time out of impatience to get going, but, who knew that!

Even now, many years later, I still like going out with the fiddle every so often.  I am not a great player, but, I can be engaging…just smile a lot, and wear flowing skirts and belly shirts!

Anyway.  Maya became a release from my loneliness, and my despair at ever seeing April again.  A bit unfair to load her with that.  I hope I have fixed that part of it.  

Maya is bright, and engaging herself.   And, busking, she has learned to be an outrageous flirt with daddy-looking men.  They are total suckers for her!  It is kind of cute.   So, it is in a way due to her, that I ended up with another man in my life, for a time.  A good time, if not a long one.  And nothing since, until today.          Names

With this, I come to the end of the second phase of my ‘life without April’, the first phase being the story of my leaving home, and setting myself up…the second, my first real sexual relationship.  The third phase was my brief, tho very sweet relationship with Rick, and the final phase, and the longest and least dramatic, over all,  ends in the present…as yet unwritten.

This is, as my title suggests, my farewell to Brion.  I never knew his last name, by the way, how crazy is that?  but, he was very good to me.  There is a part of me that is embarrassed at how I eventually exploited him.  That did not have to happen.  But, I am glad that it did, it has brought beauty into my life.  I hope, someday, to find some way of letting him know what he created, albeit unknowingly, with me.    Farewell, Brion

I am struggling to find a way to describe what has been happening to me, recently.  Changes I just could not have predicted.   Ain’t that the way!

So, I chicken out.  Rather than trying to talk about today, I will post a few more of the past.  Perhaps doing that will get me going.  I never thought I would be at a loss for words.  Will wonders never cease!  So, this one goes way back.

nicknames

I first wrote about my life as kind of essays to myself.  That was four years ago, and I wrote things, sporadically, over the next few years, right up to the present.  Sometimes details were hazy, but, I think I made reasonable choices.  I don’t think I have wronged anyone in what I have written.

I suddenly had the urge to post the very first one.  Looking over it, I am a little embarassed at some of the sentimentality, but, the truth, as I saw it then, is there.  As I publish these posts, I try to stay as true as I can to the way I felt when the events happened.

 

I say I ‘suddenly’ had the urge.  Not quite true.  Things have happened over the past holiday season, things I am not quite ready to record yet. 

 

So…here we go…this is me…about four years ago.   first attempt

Not really recitation.  This follows Waitress, in time.  I thought I should get some of the stuff from that period down.  Things are happening thick and fast, and I don’t want some part of the story to be mislaid. 

Brion was … is very special to me, as you might have guessed from Waitress.  I hope he is well, wherever he is.  He helped me more than he knew.

Remember, I was only eighteen plus, when the events described here happened.  I laboured under the delusion that because I had had a child, and that child was taken from me, that I knew something about life.  In fact, I only knew loss, and that, of course, is only part of life.  I hope, no, I know  I learned some of the rest in the following years.    Recitation

Two years past after I left home, two years pretty much a blank, as you will read in part of the following.  Life has those periods, something like traveling on a wide plain between mountain peaks, you know, when nothing of any drama happens, when the whole time seems to have passed in a haze, when you look back. This posting, though, is a sign that things would change for me, again.  Waitress

Twice every year, on her birthday, and near Christmas, I write to April.  I was looking over the stack, it being Christmas season, and came across this one.   These letters form another type of journal.

Dear April

I offer no excuses for the following.  It happens.  Every so often in life, you really blow it,  hopefully, just for yourself.  This post is necessary.  It provides a bridge between my leaving home, and what I consider the really interesting stuff that happened later.  what can I say?  I was sixteen.  April, when you read this, please know that it never happened again.  I shame myself

I don’t blame anyone for anything.  The ones who made it happen were too young to know what they were doing.  the ones who aggravated it, were too concerned with what they thought was my welfare.  They meant well.  Anyway.  I regret nothing.  But, here is the beginning of the beginning.  the fiddle