Love love love

I wrote this a month or so ago when I was in a much different headspace (I am cycling through depression right now). But I still want the same for this relationship. 

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I think about you all the time. After my first heartbreak I thought I’d never love anyone as much again. But this love makes that young love pale in comparison. This morning when I came home and saw you lying in our bed you looked so wrapped up and so small, so fragile. I thought: my whole world is somehow contained in that body. How can something so vast and so mysterious be in something so ordinary-seeming as flesh and blood? But there you are, your eyes like oceans I could fall into and drift in forever, your hair like a forest my fingers get blissfully lost in. The hills, valleys, caves and cliffs of your body. I could wander forever.

I’ve never really been happy before. Oh, maybe some fleeting pleasure. But I’ve never been able to be “patient, kind, balanced, fine.” Not fully, as you know. But I’ve learned so much. I’m starting to trust you and myself more. I understand now there are things we can’t give each other. But now I want to know how we can help each other find them.

Let’s stay happy together. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s be patient. I want to make this last forever. I want to beat the odds with you.

A Polite Desire

For most anyone else, it would be a bittersweet film about a relationship that couldn’t last but nevertheless made each person better for knowing the other.

For me, it’s about the impossible longing to go back to the moment where everything could have been changed. To correct the trajectory that was a fraction of a degree off course at the launching, a tiny mistake that became larger and larger and more irrevocable the farther we went.

“Here’s to hoping that our friendship can go where our love could not.” – A., 2015

I only found that note months after the last time I ever saw her.

The French Conditional Mood: The verb “aimer” is used to express a polite desire, sometimes one that cannot be fulfilled. 

J’aimerais que si j’avais été un peu plus âgés. J’aimerais que si j’avais plus patient. Si j’avais été mieux. Si, si, si… 

Not because I’m not happy now. But because I needlessly wasted so many good things before I got here.

Nothing but wordless images now –

an open window, a moment of panic, before I saw her perched on the ledge, smoking and listening to a sad song. a body against my back, fingers suddenly harsh and unfriendly on my throat. a low voice. peeling the backing off a fever cooling patch, patting it down on her hot forehead. being manic then, I didn’t need much sleep, so I would go into the kitchen and watch movies and eat cookies with milk while she slept on the mattress on the floor. we made so many plans and there was never enough time or money. a subdivision guard knocking on the steamed-up car window, looming in the darkness outside. a christmas party with all her closest friends, giving her a box full of our history, as well as I could document it. The musty room filled with musty objects, the four walls within which we had to contain our love. a lighted river, a moment of uncertainty. fingers on my cheeks, wiping away my tears. poems. poems and poems and poems, flitting back and forth between us like birds singing the sweetest notes.

I don’t think about the endings though, all the good reasons why, all the good reasons to forget. My mind doesn’t wander down there. I still don’t really know why.

The path I walk now, and the one who walks with me, is  just as sweet – and often sweeter, in its way – but the long journey here was so needlessly bitter

Persona Identity Shift

“Where do we draw the line between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves? What if this character does not know who she is? Can she make the story true by telling it?” – autowin

“They all struggle to reconcile who they are with the quasi-real persona they construct.” – Chuck Klosterman

I wrote this last night:

It’s been a while since I’ve been naked here – or let my blood, whatever metaphor you like for showing overt and unapologetic emotionality. This is a problem, I think, because the truth can only be revealed so much outlining the facts (which I’ve already done). 

It’s late at night and I’m writing for my blog, but I’m doing it in a notebook while lying next to my girlfriend. That’s what’s happening. And I’m hoping some truth will emerge. 

That last time that I thought she and I would not work out, I was also becoming afraid of the fact that I was almost completely alone in my life. So I sat in bed and cried. In the midst of my crying, my kitten started meowing, so I went to see what she wanted. What she wanted was to lie on my chest. Accuse me of anthropomorphising, but in the short time we had been together, she’d decided that I was her mother and that all protection and food would come from me – so it’s not such a long shot to say that she realized I was in distress and was seeking to comfort me…

TLP says that story is the only way we all make sense of our own lives. The story I’ve been using for a while now is Kill Bill. I don’t want to go on an aside about how it’s a misunderstood literary masterpiece, so I’ll get right into it. Beatrix Kiddo is an orphan, and like most orphans in literature, is an exceptional person of extraordinary abilities and an overwhelming emotional isolation. Like Superman. (There was an actual deconstruction and comparison within the movie.) Those two qualities combined result in a life of loneliness. “Otherness,” some people call it – whatever it is, she’s different from everyone else. 

The crux of her character and her motivations are revealed in the final conversation with Bill at the end of the movie. In that, he asks her: “Did you really think that your life as a normal wife and mother was going to work?” And she replies, almost sobbing: “No! But I would have had my baby.” 

I was going to finish with some point about how Kill Bill is the story I use to explain my life because I also feel like I’m an orphan and that motherhood would be the sublimation of all my life’s suffering and that my kitten is practice for a baby, but at that point my girlfriend stirred and I put my writing aside to talk with her.

Which is exactly as it was supposed to happen, I think.

And it’s all very different from what I’m used to, where art trumps reality in terms of importance and passion (drama) is more valuable than loyalty and devotion.

It’s strange and wonderful.

Now that I’m not an artist anymore, it’s time to try and find something else to be. Today I found a blog by a man, so matter-of-fact about his life of creation and excitement that his formatting was fantastically bad (so I won’t link to it) but his blogs contained such sentences as: “We found out that playing with a dummy knife in the parking lot of an airport earns you a free trip in a police car,” and “The peacocks were a spur-of-the-moment Mother’s Day gift, so we didn’t have a house for them yet.” And then he’d tell you all about how beautiful the day was when they got the dummy knives, and how they built a house for the peacocks. I would love to have that life – just an endless process of creation, taking joy in every project and in every step of every project.

Where to start?