About Me

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I am mundane and magical, Silly and serious. I am an underachiever who suspects that someday in the eternities I may yet blossom and even fruit. I am a collector of spirits and essences, a studier of mood and nuance.I have many many faults and yet I've always been loved. I am a good friend, but I will let you go if you so desire. I believe in Somewhen. I laugh easily and cannot often cry, which I know is a Flaw. Like You, I am a work in progess.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Before I Don't Say Goodbye

This isn't intended as a polished post. Not that I am a particularly polished writer in any case. This is a vent, one of several that I am fomenting. The oldest, deepest, most painful one. so if it sounds raw and childish, well it is certainly filtered through a raw child. I am not going to send it TO you, what would be the point? But I am impelled to try to express some of what I've been thinking and feeling.


From the first day I met you, you always registered off the scale of my interest. I am not sure why this is so, apparently enduringly true, but it is a fact of my life. However i gave my heart to you it has stuck as a promise. I know I prayed and prayed for forever with you back when I had much more trust in prayer. If there is a God, I find it most amusing that God should have chosen to grant that particular request, being that God would know the disparity of the desires and feelings involved. Believe me, this one simple incident has truly affected my beliefs about the nature of God. Anyway, when I ascertained the disparity and set you free, which for me was the hardest and most painful act I have or will ever perform in this life I know it was not the same experience for me and for you.

At 21 I was convinced i would never love again. I did not so much as hold a man's hand for 15 years after that breakup. I am betting you were getting laid within the week. Likely, BEFORE the breakup. Your enduring lesson to me, and I have never forgotten it, is that my heart is disposable. I have never believed i was worthy of a forever love after you, though I always craved that. In some moods, this is so amusing, in others it is so sad.

I spent years and years feeling you. I will swear this is so. And i never expected any contact with you again. Every important person in my life, who knows of you asked what i would do if you "came back" I never, after those 15 longing years I mean, even considered it as a possibility. And what would "back" mean anyway? Well, I will get to that.

We live in such an age of wonder! The internet makes many things possible and so easy that may have been possible but certainly would have required effort before. When Classmates came out i signed up for it primarily wondering what it might be like to communicate with you, to learn how you remembered me, to hear what you had done with your life and if you were happy. You did not contact me for a very long time. I thought that might actually be for the best because i realize that in relation to you I am something of a crazy person. And that is counter to most of the rest of my personality. I don't mind being a spontaneous person or many other elements of what some people typify as crazy, but to be obsessed with someone I understood never valued me that deeply to begin with is a part of crazy I don't much care for. How do I make that evaluation? Well, for one example there was the fact that you left. And while I was losing the love of my life and my dearest friend I guess you must have missed me somewhat as a friend and confidant, because you wrote to me, telling me with much satisfaction that you felt you had learned to love. How sensitive of you! Once you did contact me all those years later and we were making tentative forays to getting to know about one another's lives I heard so much in your attitudes that told me exactly what i had NOT meant to you. Things like... "I think I remember that picture" I remember your face and your pictures very well. I remember individual kisses and conversations and the way you smelled and tasted. I remember your expressions. Then there was, "I give you about as much time as I do any of my old high school friends" I don't think I was begging for your time, but really? I am one of your old high school friends? it actually shocked me to learn that.

Meanwhile i was coming to grips with the fact that you were in a relationship with a woman who bore your child. I had such a mix of emotions! I realize that i am speaking to a lot of poisonous thought and very hurt feelings here, but there are truths that I am not telling. Something about you makes me STILL crave to know you. I am so happy for your experience of fatherhood. I respect a lot of your values. I just hate looking for you first thing of a morning and you being my last thought of my days when the converse is just not true.

So I am disappointed. But I guess there are no further adventures to share between us, nothing I can give you of any great value. I am tired of feeling like a stalker in your life hoping to glean a little bit about who you've become. I cannot stop the What Is about you that has tied me to you for my whole life, but i can sure as hell sublimate it. And I can pray that God, if any, will be merciful and end this obsession with my life. I really do expect a thought of you to be the last thing that flashes through my dying mind, but if there are other lives, I hope I retain enough sense of the pain you are in my life to turn the other way at first sight. Or perhaps I wouldn't be so tempted again. Who knows.

Anyway, we have the smallest thread of a connection in "the real world" and I am going to give myself a week but then I plan to sever it. I don't think you will feel anything though I do think you will notice. The feeling, again will be mine.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Brought Back to the Human Condition From An Observer's Coolness

Bruce and I were watching Revenge the other day. It was a Bruce pick. I enjoyed seeing Anthony Quinn and wondered a bit why he seemed always fated to play that tough powerful guy with the marshmallow heart who nevertheless is too proud to avoid causing devastating pain to the people he thinks he loves who have wronged him. (I think that was a spoiler, but the movie came out in 1990 and if you haven't seen it by now, too bad so sad)

There was a scene in which Kevin Costner and Madeleine Stowe were tenderly exploring each other's nearly perfect bodies with kisses, and for me this was the heart of the movie. I experienced that scene as if I were an alien to the species and watched with ennuied amusement trying to guess at the purpose of this venture. It truly seemed a strange rite and one that was not only unlikely, but of little value when you factored in time and the probablity of danger.  I was thinking it is so peculiar that in our culture many many intimacies between men and women are perfectly acceptable, we can share our deepest thoughts, we can share day to day lives or mind altering indulgences or a thousand things but this one rite, and a physical one, is the one deemed to be sacred to one relationship (for married people) Trangressions here will cause such anguish. And it seemed so weird to me.

So, of course God had to intervene that night with a dream to dealienate me a bit. I dreamed of who I always dream of and there were achingly sweet proximities and then those brushing hesitant but greedy kisses and the fiery dazzling Swirl and I could touch his hair and smell him and every detail was rich with meaning. And he touched me once intimately then said he had to go, but would return. I woke up humbled and sad and remembering that there was a time i did know passion.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

How It Should Have Gone

"Hello" she said across an ache of years, across events unshared and a yearn that was never fulfilled but could not die. "Hi", he said. "I'm sorry I haven't written much, but I give you about as much time as I do my other old high school friends." "Oh, pardon me", she breathed, and silently, Polaris was extinguished from the night sky.