The other half, it seems to me, are its keen insights into love, that great gash of contradiction into the human experience with the disarmingly safe name. I refer to that mystical world from which all others are derivative, the vast story running within each of us on the other side of logic's firewall, where the primordial, proverbial heart reigns. I practice hiding that place, as any knowing grown-up will relate. It contains all that makes me beautiful, all that makes me vile, all that makes me loony. Each citizen's duty is shielding the rest of us from their personal storm. At least up to the one inevitable escape: because the choices made there trump any conscious decisions. The quotidian mind scrambles to fulfill the subconscious will. That understanding is in the saying. Also there is the futility in reasoning oneself into love with the right person, or out of love with the wrong one. The darkest insight of all is in there too, and I've been struggling with how to express it for some time. It has to do with unspoken love.
Among the voices weighing in on the decision not to tell certain people I love them, the wordless subconscience - the quickest and most confident voice within - finds the very idea reprehensible. (What you are about to read is my wordy, dutiful nattering to justify that emotion.) Now, I fancy a ripening superpower of mine is to distinguish acts of love from acts of fear. But this particular choice is opaque to me. I may be protecting a loved one's peace of mind. I may fear their rejection and separation.
The voice of reason says I must not put myself between her and honor. That if it were no longer an unspoken secret from her, and she sustained our comradeship, I would be dishonoring her twice: she would betray the one she's promised to, if only a little, and she'd risk prolonging my ghostly hopes. My ambiguity protects her integrity. While these voices come through loud and clear, the lone opposition whispers. It's as if those six monosyllables resolved nothing and everything.
One of those monosyllables is in there twice, and yet each "you" refers to an entirely different party. I bet you already understood this without translation: "your head can't choose who your heart loves." To keep these me's separate is to fracture my own integrity. I get it. To never tell her is doom to walking dead. I don't foresee my own redemption in this, that would break so many promises, I just acknowledge I'm still walking that way.
* * *
After the death of possibility comes the undone space echoing it. We who got close enough to some divine creature to be damned, we remember the laughter fluted with light, eyes the shy throat of a tornado. We who are daily tattooed by memories pressed into flesh that won't die. You may not realize this but we are most of who walk among you. Deadpan masks, levitated paces remembering never. Look closer and you may recognize us. We occasionally feast on the living, prey a slice of comfort from those loving no name and no face, as if we could sustain from their uninfected hope what remains of a chance to get savagely lucky again. That is to come back to life. Why haven't you heard from us, who are haunted by angels? Why don't we write? We are walking forever, partly somnambulant, dreaming of the one that got away and the life they took with them.
