Speed Trials

Now that I work on *this* side of the canal, I don’t often head down to the Market.

That is, until I signed up for my weekly basket of organic fruit and vegetables from my local market store. Every Thursday I head down to the Byward Fruit Market, canvas tote in hand, to collect my weekly gems. The produce varies from week to week, depending on availability and season. I know how new-age hippy that makes me, but I can’t help it, I love it. The dudes who dole out the goods are super into their produce, and they make a point of naming and relating some anecdote on every single item in the basket before they lovingly place it in my bag.

Angelo is skeptical because he thought we’d end up throwing out quite a bit of it. I’m not giving up on it yet. It’s true, last weekend we ended up with a bag of kiwi that I have no idea what to do with, but this week’s basket was so lovely and colourful, I just fell in love with the whole thing all over again.

The other thing to note is the absolute amazingness of organic produce. I had NO idea how much better it tastes, compared to its non-organic counterparts, and how much longer it lasts in the crisper or fruit bowl. There’s definitely something to be said for it, and I’m a bit of a convert. I’m also hoping it will inspire me to cook more, using the ingredients I have on hand, and stop relying on whatever’s on sale at the corner Giant Tiger (do you know they sell Soy Milk??).

So far we’ve only made a few stirfries and a soup, and some ill-fated attempt at a stew in the slow-cooker. (Oh man, I don’t know what happened, but when I came home that evening after the pot had been simmering all day, the WHOLE apartment smelled awful, and we ended up composting the whole thing!!). I want to be more adventurous in the kitchen, but something always staunches my best efforts. It’s strange, I used to cook marginally well when I was a meat-eater. I knew a little more instinctively how to do things. But now, I don’t know, I can’t seem to follow a recipe to save my life, and I can’t quite get the delicate balance of ingredients to make my palate sing. Sigh. In the meantime, I’ll just keep looking at my beautiful fresh produce and sigh, but this time in utter admiration!

But more importantly, I added shelves to the kitchen, and cleaned the whole apartment from top to bottom. It was very cathartic for me. I’ve been a nester my whole life, really (the only trait of mine that isn’t classically Sagittarian). I like my house to be just so, often rearranging the furniture for optimum nestness (ah, see, THERE’s the Sagittarius!). But ever since I moved in with Angelo, I don’t know, that little part of me has died somewhat. I thought it was because of the house itself (we did move into a flip – not super conducive to feeling like a home) but now that we’ve been a few months into our apartment, well, I should have been back to my old self. But I wasn’t. The mundane routine of doing the dishes, and little else around the house made me a stranger in my own home. But with Angelo gone for five whole days, well… I got to know the old Wellington place a little better.

But then, of course, Angelo came home… And please, don’t get me wrong, I DID miss him like crazy, still, it seemed a little strange having him back in the apartment. It didn’t seem like it was mine anymore. And then… Well, I stopped sleeping. For two nights I slept very little, and on the third, when I woke up after only 4 hours of sleep, well, I freaked out. I lay there in bed, wide awake, very aware of the hot body next to me, and I gaped in horror at the realization that I would have to move out to ever feel at home again. The very idea made my whole body limp, and tense at the same time, a sort of heaviness. I thought about how to break up, the separation, the moving, finding a new place, leaving everything behind and starting again. Maybe that’s what I’m really addicted to – that purposefullness of starting from scratch after having built and shaped a life for a couple of years. If so, gross. Anyway, I thought about all of that peripheral stuff, and then I thought about living without Angelo in my life, and everything went blank. Like, it wasn’t something I could even fathom. And then it was time to get up and it seemed like a good time to put all of those thoughts away and deal with the lack of sleep that would surely cloud my work that day.

End of story, right? Well… Then my work had an office party. And drinks were cheap. And I took advantage. I ended up going home, and getting into it with Angelo. Starting fights whilst drunk is like a little game we play ALL the time. I told him, in my drunken haze, that I wanted to move out.

The next morning, I woke up pretty early and I was so uneasy. I was still kinda drunk, I’m sure, but just really anxious. I woke up Angelo, and he said that I was talking about moving out and I said to him: “it’s just that I got a little freaked out because I really enjoyed my time alone last week. And then I you came back and I couldn’t sleep for two nights and I got REALLY freaked out.” Then he said Okay, and that we’d talk about it when he got up. I left the apartment (I had to do something because I felt like jumping out of my own skin) to do laundry at my parents’ house. somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd load, I looked into my purse and saw that my camera was gone. I flipped out. I must’ve left it at the party. I tried to remember what the hell had happened, and where I could’ve lost it, and then I got so upset that my amazing, thoughtful, wonderful birthday gift was gone, and that I had been so careless and thoughtless to just loose it. I started to cry and I wanted to be anyone else in the whole world but me. I called Angelo, and he answered, and I told him, and I told him I was so sorry, and I was crying. He said to calm down, and said we’d go see if it was still at the hall, and then he walked into the kitchen and said it was on the table. I was relieved, but I told him that I hated myself, and I hated what I had done last night. He said he was coming over right away.

So he came over, and he brought croissants, and we ate, and then he sat me down, and he said ALL the right things. He said he knows that he takes up too much space in my life, and that he wants me to put up shelves when I want to, and that he’s going to make an effort to give me more space. What was the best about it was that he never once even considered us separating. That’s what really hit me, it was more than forgiving me being a drunken drama queen, it was willing to work at making me feel better in a situation that he has some control over. I said that I would make the effort to feel comfortable in my apartment with him, and all that stuff.