Right

Will I ever fall for the right person? In the right amount of time? At the right time and circumstances (in both our lives)? For the right reasons? With the right mix of perception and imagination? Without attending to their impressions of me the way a first-time gardener attends to weeds? With patience-felt commensurate with patience-presented, commensurate with a healthy degree of actual patience? With getting hooked to similar degrees at similar stages? With lots and lots of psychic space for both of us? With appropriate quantities of communication, both desiring and happening? Without fumbling and neglecting other tasks? Without saying dumb things? With thinking fewer than a million dumb things? Within a hundred mile of each other? Or how about ten? Or how about a thousand? With the correct duration of phone calls, and both of us satisfied with that duration? Without saying inappropriate or hurtful or confusing things? Without fear of getting hurt or hurting? Without avoiding hurt in dumb, contracted, cowardly ways?

Doesn't look like it.

Maybe I can muster more kindness than worry. More listening than guessing. More silly and less caution. More childlike and less childish. More giving and less wishing. More now and less forever. More trying and fewer tries. More her and less me.

Yes I can do that.

I let go of someone because she crossed a boundary.

I used to eschew boundaries. They're for the weak and fearful. Intersections and combinations, those are the alchemy of the creative, examined life. I want to go there, straddled, stretched.  But among the things I learn from relationships, among the lessons I'd rather not, I have seen my own boundaries come gradually into focus.

You don't get to impugn my honor for comfort or persuasion. You don't get to shut down a discussion forever. You don't get a part in my reform until you've demonstrated understanding what matters to me.

Each of these has a face. The vivid first person to cross, to defy, to deny. Or second or third.

Did I need to give words to these rules? I'm sure there are others. I dread discovering more of these whiny little bitches the hard way. I still suspect I have no real use for them. Even temporarily, for training, they may do no good. Maybe the people who would respect pointing them out are the same people who'd never come close to crossing them in the first place.

Besides, a well-articulated boundary is a cold, dead fucking consolation to the ghostly air where I used to pine warmly for a squirming, feeling she, whom I'd rather be holding and comforting right now and erasing all these lines between. It's not hubris to guess she hurts worse. It's not even news, I'm a man after all. Leprotic emotions are what we do.

There's more to say but this much is raw. You don't get to require an uplifting conclusion before I practice my rant.

Light Giving

I recently rediscovered this song Haunting You by Bird York (actress Kathleen York). It's about longing. It moved me in a few ways but here's one. In the second verse the longing intensifies, and seems as if it is about to demand fulfillment.

"You will hear me calling to you..."

Instead it gives something. Something meager and wan, but profound nonetheless.

"...saying, Don't be afraid of the dark."

I could guess many inspirations and interpretations for this turn in the song, but the message I get from it is that love is generous. To take, to crave, to seek and acquire, these are other forces. Love is only the witness of beauty and the hope for its happiness.

Letters from the Zombie Apocalypse

The saying "You can't choose who you love," is gaining popularity.  I heard it this week in the movie Numb.  (An excruciatingly authentic personal work, it explores the darker side of self-help.  It's well worth a watch for anyone who's felt stuck short at almost hero.) Prodigal Jon points out the saying's flaws and potential for abuse, which I believe are half the reasons for it's epidemic popularity.

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.

Chemistry

About this "chemistry" thing people talk about.  Either (a) I don't have any idea what it is or (b) I know exactly what it is and I have felt it with a few rare people.  If the latter, then it's nothing like I was led to believe (except by the people who said it's nothing like you've been led to believe).  It's a feeling like wow I'd be thrilled to do anything for that person.  They walk on air.  They just seem to be unusual beings who move about a little more carefully so their inner light doesn't hurt anyone.  But I don't know if it's ever been mutual, or if they ever had a clue how I felt.  Except I know there was something mutual, definitely, I just don't know if it's anywhere near as strong for them as it was for me.  They ooze charm, but they have also (for a time at least) oozed appreciation for me.  But here's the kicker.  It's such a terrible thing to burden someone you adore with the chore of telling you back they don't adore you as much.  Know what I mean?  I don't know if I could ever bring myself to do that to one of these creatures.  Anyway it's quite cliche but so far, when I have felt this way about someone it started within the first hour (or maybe minute) of knowing them.  And it never faded.  I don't know if these are reliable patterns.  Another pattern of uncertain reliability (P.O.U.R.), I've only felt it for people with whom my first communication was in person, live, introduced or brought together via a mutual friend.  And lastly it was a particularly close mutual friend, not a mere acquaintance.  One more P.O.U.R. is that these people were unusually unavailable.  I am skeptical of patterns.

Shakespeare's 18th Sonnet ("Shall I compare thee to a summers day?") makes me think he felt that.  Here are some lines from a Martha Scanlan song that leads me to believe she felt it.

You're a slow ride down a country mile

You're the smell of apple pie to the blind

You're the last light on a July western sky

You're the center of the watermelon

You're a sweet, sweet smile

Isn't that something?  Yes I believe she had it bad.  Chokes me up dammit.  I know what that feels like.  I may wonder on my deathbed why I ever followed anything else.

So here's the solution to the above dilemma.  Clues are blatant in the above citations.  Focus on them.  Tell them how sincerely great they are (anyone can use that).  Forget what I think about them (they probably can't use that).

Ruined

You ruined it for me. If it weren't for you I'd enjoy a lot more sex. Better sex. Each woman who comes on to me, cast calling me into their unplayed dreams. Invitation to plant in their pocked yard. I could fulfill them if not for you. I could play into their illusions if you had left mine intact. The whole trouble starts when I recognize you looking at me through their eyes; I expect your courage.

Until I see how they think. Layers warm transparent in the heat of proximity, a few turn back, and I find out. They will choose fear over and over. In choosing what to think, what to feel, do, say. And that's when I realize how unlike you they have become. Then I can't even stand the reflection of your original. Sidewalk art goes beyond tacky to useless: who can bear to dishonor it by stepping on it? Or the greater dishonor to sidestep it? The real thing combined with the fake thing is doubly unbearable.

When did you do this? Were you someone I met when love seemed no more dangerous than blossoming friendship, bosom buddies, pals with boobies? And how far away are you now, a thousand breaths or a thousand lifes? Yeah I always saw you behind her eyes. That look women get. Adoring eyes more than bless the land, they are the mother's love itself, unearthed and reborn. Before fear's apple tempts anyway, that's the look. That look always felt like the way you looked at me. No mystery where the myth of Adam and Eve comes from. Every recapitulation disappoints in the same way. A woman's love taps all womanity, exhumes your fearless brilliance. And then the parade of choices made in fear reveal how far they've fallen from your grace.

Just like all men are Don Juan's sireling crossed with the feckless fathers of their deflowered daughters. The trappings of romantic abandon trapped inside lustful insatiable cowardice.

Just like all women combine the impossibly generous longing of mother earth with the terrified beasts of her abandoned daughters. Loving eye temptation into the desolation of tornadoed gardens. Bounty reaped too soon by fearful outrage, the crop passes from unripe to rotten without the chance to nourish. Before acceptance and understanding mature, friendship's harvest is called off by horrific anticipation. The blessings of all their mothers take me in. Then the rage of all their fathers stops them from accepting whole. The warmth of fire draws near, then destroys what it would have cleansed.

She seemed so bold alive that I could tell her anything. It was a trap. (Though hers, not mine.) As soon as I said something that reminded her of hurt, she began to punish and to reform. As if her job were to recognize evil early enough to fix or flee. To count death's coming by its red flags. In this way she greeted the coming of new life as its opposite. I'd be quite happy with her now if not for you, plowing under new ideas, burying them below where they'd never sprout. It would not feel like death to me.

Well That Just Happened

What would I write if I had no fear? What would I say to the infinitely curious?

It's as if a thirsty guest gaped at the painting on my well cover and gushed with interest. But removing the cover their eyes flowed down to the side where I lay it. Kneeling to look closer they implored me to speak of the time when the rich colors flowed with life. The sparkle from their upturned face contrasted with the other sparkle, which they could not see from their vantage. The restless inky gloom held no promise for them at all, not even an idea of quenching anything.

I fascinate people from time to time but it never seems to be for the hoped-for reasons. Is their attention wrong? Is my hope? Or am I lacking in some extent and realism of my arts?