Luna,
I purchased this watch while we were
dating as a belated birthday present.
Since the day was so soon after we met I did not want the small gesture to
appear forced or inauthentic. I
originally wanted to surprise you randomly with it. So, surprise!
I ordered it online and received it
after you announced your departure. You told me you liked watches and
presents. I hope you are laughing inside
at least a little bit.
I debated what to do with it, the
irony that I ran out of time so abruptly with a woman prone to change wrist
watches. I do not have hard
feelings. I was frustrated for a few days,
but I understand. I am glad I met you,
despite the fruition of what you forebode.
So after taking some time to think
about it, I still would like you to have the watch. Please accept it for what it is a physical
object I cannot return, which on either you or one of your friend’s wrists or a
drawer in your boudoir will fulfill its given purpose better than a shoebox in
mine.
I thought about whether to write
something to include with the parcel or not if I was even going to send it to
you. I succumbed to the idea that such
an epistle was probably inevitable. I
tried to see some kind of reason why the thought to order the timepiece came to
me. I guess I wanted to convey that what
you told me matters.
Some things are nothing, just
happen. Maybe so. The blue cogs kept ticking in the little
yellow box.
I set my thoughts away. I have been reading, dating, exercising,
planning a trip to San Francisco, writing, and putting my mental focus
forward. You left me with questions. I wanted to try to set them aside and revisit
them in my head after I got a bit of distance.
I wanted some space. I wanted to
find the time to write what I felt this letter as a testament to that
experience deserved.
I took some notes for myself as
thoughts crossed my mind or the Tom Waits albums played. I figured I would put them together if I
still felt like sending the watch after whatever length of midnights felt
right. Too many would turn up the volume
on awkward, because I get it, we’re done.
I know we were not dating long, but
it was a personal experience for me. The
magnitude was amplified by the poetry and the nature of our conversations. The amperage contained in the bandwidth of
the hours was exponentially greater than ice cream or a motion picture
show. The personal has me feeling like a
bitten lycanthrope. It changed me. What I felt right in front of my nostrils was
uncanny. It was very real to me. At the base of that is you.
You vexed me. For us to have such different reactions makes
me feel like my radar is broken. I saw
Sam Cooke. I saw Frida Kahlo. I saw Luna Lovegood with died black
locks. I saw Severus Snape telling his
secrets. I saw the Muir woods. I saw crab cakes in a mango salsa and avocado
emulsion and a lazy Sunday morning sleeping in.
This writing, this feeling in my guts is to try to understand how to
interpret while I transition.
Part of me knows communication in
any form is a bad idea. I know inside I
wish things with us had had a chance to progress longer, even if they ended in
us still going separate ways.
You set a boundary. I am not writing this to change your
mind. There is an openness I require to
date that you cannot offer and that is a deal breaker. I think in my soul I just want to be
known. I want to be seen and I wanted
you to see me.
I have never sought a savior in my
life, simply a witness to witness. I
want someone to see what I attempt to contribute to this universe and see my
flaws and struggles, little victories and glories. I want to find someone to stand with me and
do that for each other. If not that, a
human just looking a little bit feels like a breath of air before having to
dive back down again. It is just a human
thing, a basic human thing, but feeling heard, feeling seen, sometimes I feel
like Ahab chasing those.
My life has had a dearth of
feedback. In that moment in the folding
chairs across the levee in Algiers where you let out a few words of what you
said you could tell about me or thought meant a lot to me. It might not have seemed so much at the time,
I am not making out your intent in those words as anything other than cursory,
but to me recognition that I have been seen or heard and to be encouraged to
continue being so is a mighty wind.
The arena of details neither of us
is privy to in the annals of the other’s past is one I was hoping to reduce in
time. I did not expect to see our
opportunity for that spill all over the carpet.
I had high hopes to be able to sip from that glass get tipsy lay naked
and stare up at the stars for a while. I
attribute much of the solidity of your election to not pursue this relationship
as rooted in the side of the moon I do not see.
Adult life says there is nothing to
say. Chips go on the table; cards are
dealt; bets are made. Somebody goes home
with more, somebody with less. Poker faces
plant. Sometimes the cards are never
shown. Part of me just wants to see what
you were holding.
On my end, I felt the connection I
was forming with you stimulate many aspects at the core of my personality,
which I do not expect to get addressed in a relationship. Most women I have dated simply lack the
capacity which your interests in psychology, reading, and the internal project
as a component of your whole.
There was sweetness, a rough edge,
insomnia, an insurrectionist’s journey inside you that appeared to drive that
depth which I found attractive. I found
it attractive, not like a breast or politeness, but in one of those deep
compatibility ways that spoke to me for the way I know I am built and traveled
these years.
What I do not know is if what I
thought I saw was a distortion of my hope.
I do not know what the rest of that planet inside your heart is like to
maybe better interpret your choice.
Those questions tick in that watch like a tell-tale from inside my
nightstand.
I have wanted to push the sound away
knowing it is a dead man’s hand of ace’s and eight’s. You had me with a flush; I should not need to
know. I just wanted to keep playing a
while longer, but either way the game is over.
Writing this sort of feels like a
crime like I am asking you to read something or look at me make a sad-sight
fool in a parking lot. It makes me want
to delete this right now like every character is a drop of respect leaking oil
smearing on my cheeks like a drooling drunk at a bar. The tender said, “Go home, you’re cut
off!” So this is the bulimia that came
out.
Despite recognizing the Sisyphean
nature of words that will inevitably incorporate a manner of wincing
redundancy, I would like to share for the purpose of growth for me as I go my way
and you go yours. This is primarily a
spiritual letter. I know whatever my
brain produces here it risks the cloud of a polemic arguing a cause or
bartering. It is not intended as
such.
The letter is as much for me as it
is intended as a clay offering for you to mold as you will. It wanders into a diary-style at times where
I am in part writing to myself. A part
of me wants you to read my diary, know me.
The act of writing it charges me to grow and forget. Part of it helps me push you out of my
consciousness with tattooed knuckles.
The letter is also in many ways like
a prayer or at least my version of prayer.
It is to a degree a meditation. I
have been a lot of places on my journey through Catholicism, agnostic deism,
atheism, and now I just try to pay attention holding onto the idea of God by
the shoestrings. This experience has not
really helped that cause.
I try to do and be present. I know I am obtusely flawed. I do not claim to know anything, but writing
like this is like playing hopscotch with a blind man.
I do not know what this letter is
meant to be in the universe. It probably
should not exist, but I would rather muster whatever faith I have left in this
scrawny dog and howl to see how the universe responds based on my gut growling
at me to do it. The response probably
will not be from you. Maybe it
will. Maybe you will offer a rejoinder
to some of my questions and that will help me understand a deeper picture. Maybe you will let me know more about
you. I don’t know. I don’t have to know. I just know a writer has to write and there
is always a bigger picture beyond the self.
Much of the way I acted around and
towards you came from a spiritual place of where my life had exited in the
prior months as a beginning after the end to the years preceding. I do not want to explain the details of why,
only that I think in life we go through phases like the moon of opening and
closing. You never really described what
stage you were exiting coming into this and I did not ask because I figured you
would tell me when you were ready. I was
about a quarter into my wax seeing speckled trout leap in the tide.
I was more open than I usually
am. I saw a spiritual calling to be
receptive to the universe. In doing so
the absence of other avenues producing navigable waterways and the flush of
points of tangency in what makes you Luna and me Severus made me feel like a
great deal of my past was like stairs in a case to moments we were
sharing. So in I see the watch and this
letter as vestiges of that spirituality.
That spiritual gravity convinced me
to say some of the things I did from our second date forward. It led me to cross the Rubicon of sending you
a window into my poetry. I have learned
in the past that to communicate with women in such ways is a death knell. Poetry risks the effusion of wafting feelings
into a dynamic even when they do not exist or are so fetus-like one can argue
their status of life or minute effect on the developing relationship.
For a man this bears the scarlet
insignia of feminine, the ultimate repugnant pheromone of the savannah of
heterosexual premating rituals. The
words demonstrate vulnerability, pre-consideration, intention, deliberation,
connote want, and so often tip the scale of male away from a woman’s
debate. I will use an excerpt from
something I wrote in the past to attempt to elaborate:
“So often, a woman must place the man
as lover or husband material. If he is
termed a lover, sex is accelerated and then truncated if she is capable of
honest cessation. If husband, sex is
postponed, dinners and flowers are purchased in a parade of courting, but so
often the nice-guy never gets a shot.
Lovers can transform into later
husbands, but once a woman labels a man as husband material. The equation is solved. The game is over. The test is complete. Fun is drained from the equation like an
accountant completing a tax return, rather than a gambler entering an exacta at
the track. All these scents, sounds,
touches and tastes can no longer be experienced with such suspense. Thus nice guys finish alone beckoning voice
mail boxes and email addresses that so rarely reply.
Beauties learn to test a man through
requests. Will he give me what I want,
even when I am petty, selfish, or whining?
Will I be able to walk all over him and see his testicles turn into an
ornament for my key ring? She is not
bitching; she is conducting research.
The paradox is that most women want a
man to stand up to her. She wants no,
like a border line of assertive dominance, to know security in that this male
is competent to care for me in the difference between confidence and
hubris. Women are drawn to this relief,
of the victory of being un-masculine for the glorious allowance to be feminine,
to quell direct concerns, to be able to operate like a rain forest of curves,
meandering roots instead of a rectangular-jawed machine guided by a single
connected or disconnected electrical current imprisoned by ninety-degree
angles.”
Life has led me to the well of lessons
before that to write a woman who I knew so little of in such a way, and even to
communicate in the vein I did on the second date based on the first, risks
being apportioned into the purgatory of the nice-guy. When I led you into a stranger’s house to help
you find a restroom I knew the deed was done.
I demonstrated I was a man who would
go that extra effort; you no longer would come to me. I had implied I would come to you like a dog
to see what your need was. It was over, the
place inside where the show was going on was not good enough, going on your own
neither; I wanted to help and did. I
literally waited outside to guard a door.
Hell I bought and brought mosquito repellent. Let alone what I wrote in the email
afterwards.
Men like me have to fight our
instincts to take on the role of kindness, of facilitator; we get burned for it
over and over again. The girl vanishes
or the girl goes home with the guy who remains a mystery and gives her a
puzzle, treats her a little poorly by some standards, but he gives her that
border line of assertive dominance and that can be like cocaine.
A poet cannot compete with
drugs. Poets date naked. We give away our secrets like skin cells into
dust. Women swipe their fingers on the surface
and blow us away. Poof, we’re nothing
again floating where we belong.
This disappearing act you did. This blackout silence is nothing new to
me. It is actually what I would predict
as probable from most women I have met past say twenty nine. Maybe you can offer some insight to the way I
come across that keeps prompting it; my best guess is what I wrote above.
I know there was risk in writing to
you and sharing verbally to the level I did.
For a man to create such a disparity of oversharing puts him at the
bottom of mountain; he will never recover.
The speaker has to be interesting.
The listener can be anything or everything the speaker imagines. The speaker just erodes and grinds into
gravel.
Women in my past typically quit
communicating if I write. It does not
really seem to matter the content, the simple threshold that initiates a
disparity in communication negates my masculinity. It’s over; writers just have to put on a
face, keep it to ourselves, and make our heads like vaults, chew some bubblegum
and stand tall.
If not women I have encountered tend
to feel pressured to reciprocate. From
what I gather, women feel pressured to respond in some way like the writer is
conveying that he has made a decision for her or that he has even made a
decision. The world between casual and
commitment becomes clouded in the verbosity.
The poet begins to look like a mangled wolf pathetic and dangerous, just
too complicated to know how to view.
It is a war like a dog sitting with
a steak across the room with his master telling him to heel. (The logical me is the master, the dog is the
writer. Who is in control changes. ) The
facets of a new person to know who might actually interface on the dog’s level
spike the opiates of the writer like licking from forchette to commissure. The writer wants to play with fire. He wants to get burned. He wants to destroy himself. He is a nihilist for everything but the
interplay.
The emotional, the physical, the
spiritual, the mental ball them up into pounds of soul-flesh and the writer
wants to feast. It is all he wants
because the monotony of the surface world starves him. It kills him when he sees the universe
cracking open like an egg in front of him and all he wants is to put his head
down in life’s embryo and give in.
The poetry, the conversations, the
sex, the sitting close, and the unwinding of paths are the only part of life
worth experiencing. The rest of it is a
charade of shit-pretend to get to the good stuff. Fuck day jobs, carpool lanes, cell phones,
people asking what’s up and the lies that follow, parenting blogs, holidays,
Ikea, the mail, television, the mall, lawnmowers, linoleum, and the
drive-through cock-fight.
Give me passion, a barroom, give me
a strip tease. Give me Cutty Sark with a
block of ice. Give me an all-out balling
weep. Give me confessions and doom. Give me baleful theater of pure evil, no
motive just wrong in an amuse bouche for street gawkers to stare at the
honesty.
Give me unadulterated glee bouncing
on a mattress. Give me peer pressure so
I can be against it, whatever it is, fuck it.
Give me a street riot. Give me a
protest rally. Give me Bouazizi on fire
over a fruit scale. Give me the outsider
not pretty-boy James Dean, give me Bukowski and when too many phonies show up
sucking on Chinaski, give me a transgendered escort hustling month to month to
feed his kid singing cabaret to bankers.
Give me no helmet.
Give me what’s up; I’m having a
shitty fucking day. My dog’s sick. I’m broke.
My marriage is a woeful charade.
Give me I am so happy I want to go home and do my wife on the kitchen
floor like a barbarian and bang two saucepans together like a kettle drum to
let the neighbors know. That’s how I’m
doing boss! Give me suicide with a smile
and no condolences for a human choosing what he wanted. Give me the verse.
Give me the nuance of staring into
pupils dilating. Give me I cannot wait
to get home, pull the car over. I am
going down on you right here. Give me
death before submission. Give me a
middle finger to God. Give me a hopeless
prayer. Give me a hole so deep the top
looks like darkness. Give me no
parachute.
Give me an actual discourse where
the people spit out their bubblegum and use curse words, blood, desperation and
hold fear right at the ledge of every syllable to talk personal and throw dice
for happy. Give me God damn it I fucked
that up. Give me vomit.
Give me guts of a friend in the palm
of a soldier. Give me a regret that
can’t be fixed with human tools. Give me
incurable-disease-type focus to go out and do.
Not waiting, but doing, because who the hell knows if this is the only
chance one will ever get.
Give me a rollicking backyard
barbeque with charred carcass, beer, friends and talking trespasses. Give me glittering pasties. Give me a drag race. Give me rousing applause from an audience of
one. Give me a gun to my head. Give me an apocalypse. Give me love.
That is all a writer lives for, to
see the passion and the pains of the human condition as small hints at an incomprehensible
universe. You gave me that for a few
moments. I saw something. I thought you did too. That is why I did and wrote what I did.
Ultimately the main questions I have
are: how was your experience with me; did it mirror mine in the way I will
attempt to describe what I felt occurred?
If you want no part of getting to know someone or letting them in beyond
the casual; can you offer me any additional explanation on why your heart works
in such ways from your history to the timing and permanence of such a
wall? What is your version of
spirituality like?
I understand you had no desire to be
in a relationship. I was not at the
point of wanting one either, but I did start to develop feelings for you which
I hoped would lead somewhere intimate and in a manner of what I thought we each
might want.
Your swift departure and succinct
explanations leave me with a lot of unanswered questions and thoughts on what
we shared. I understand the concept of a
relationship achieving a threshold of intimacy lights your alarms and you
wanted no part of it. I know that is why
you kept moving, but such movement is independent of what we shared and who we
are as beings.
Muses may not be built to delve into
the tapestry of such things, but poets are.
Even after the owl flies the blood that pumps her heart remains. Her spirit sits on that branch affected. A part of you remains in me. You say you were up front from the beginning;
I did not realize that we could never go anywhere; the only thing I realized from
the beginning was that you and I both needed to go slow.
The limits you put on yourself, the
rules, come from a bastion of too many unknowns in your past for me to claim
understanding. I know they exist. You accept yourself for who you are, but life
is malleable clay constantly dissipating through our hands. That clay becomes a molded image of our
self-perceived identity.
As we attempt to hold the sculpture
of who we are so firmly in our grasp the shape distorts. Fragments exit. Pliability remains as the atomic level of who
and what we are shifts in and out with the universe.
We can trade parts of our clay, but
our starting allotment in the illusion of self is finite. Any severed crumbling mass held, as if our
hands were really segregated hands, is only part of a common totality. You may go through life fearing others
taking, asking you to change, demanding you to morph your sculpture into the
image they chose.
Love is accepting some of the change
another offers you is a piece of their clay to help you be who you are meant to
become. This is often done in duality,
but not always. I have loved two women
in my life; the mutuality in those exchanges did not always overlap. Nevertheless I offered my clay and at times
spurned theirs.
What we gift disperses us. At times the strewn particles may feel like a
loss. Our finite allotment remains
albeit scattered. We can never gain or
lose, but we can fail to grow.
To reject that is to suffer a denial
of one’s potential. We reinforce our compound
with fear. The statue we think we
identity with as self held in our palm becomes like a Russian Matryoshka doll
in layers of costumes housing a person we have attempted to forget at the
center.
I feel like in the brief time I had
to get to know you I saw a complex woman of intelligence, deliberation, art,
quiet-ferocity, and beauty. I saw a
tepid hand to reach into the emotional sphere, as if breaching the desire
connotes taint of togetherness as taboo.
You made me feel like you viewed the word connection as a
pejorative.
What I wrote to you came from inside
that sphere, but it was also spiritual.
I recognize now even more than then that I felt a connection from the
start. You said in my kitchen you were
big on rules. Maybe your disinclination
to view such a connection as applicable or possible is one of them.
I have led a very monastic
life. My mind is too often focused on
the big picture. Forming connections
with people are rare seeds to sprout; when they do it is because the roots burrowed
deep into the soil to find water. I do
not do shallow. I am not constructed for
small talk, bullshitting, or colloquial banter.
Most of the time in those instances, I would rather not say anything,
bring a book or a notepad, and dive into adding or birthing inner words. I felt out of place very early on before I
even knew what introvert meant.
This made sparking a fire
problematic, but my inner being made maintaining one more native. Sometimes I feel like God gave most people
flints. I just was not meant to have
one. I understood the layers of heat,
the lay of the wood, and the beauty of the hottest blue. I also learned that a good number of the
people I did meet were more comfortable on the surface; going into the blue was
foreign. So I sought compromise; each
party helping the other.
I was imbedded in this kiln of
analysis contemplating every fleck of transforming ash at once. I sank into the life of other people’s hearts
and often exposed places they maybe wanted to go, but were afraid. Sometimes it was too raw. The universe glared too brightly. Sometimes their repression would bring
reprisal upon me with passive aggressive blockades that it was too much.
The effort I put into rubbing the
sticks and tinder to kindle, my lungs as the bellows to blow the spark; it was
all too much. The world wants to pull
out a damn lighter, spray some fluid, and sit back. Watch the flame until the liquid-squirt
dries.
I had to do with what I had and that
was attention to all these variables built in a foundation all at once, but my
when the pit got burning, my what a pyre!
The stamina of the logs over the kerosene ran like the tortoise. That body lit up in a thousand tongues of
detail licking the heavens! I felt deep
and powerful and the world could burn.
Fuck it. I was alive. Life blazed!
I became Hades. I was born to live in the fire, born to
abscond into a place most people cannot or do not understand. It felt unnatural to be on the surface; it
felt hypocritical, fake. Sycophancy equated
to lying. I held principles tightly with
honesty at the forefront.
When I was eight I stole some money
from my father’s change drawer. I went
to a store on my bike to buy something my parents told me not to. I did this several times. On the last attempt on my bike I pedaled face
first into a piece of lumber sticking out the back of a pickup truck.
Haste, the willow tree behind it, or
the lie: whatever reason my three permanent front teeth were gone and my head
was gushing blood from front and back. I
got up walked home as my new Frankenstein and was never the same. A flipper denture does something to a boy’s
social life.
I became very big on rules including
honesty and denying addiction and impulses.
I am not sure if I have ever forgiven myself. I learned to fear and distrust myself and
compensate with a manner of asceticism.
This is the main reason I think I
never touched drugs, not even a cigarette, and am a bit wary of getting drunk,
although I will. There is power in the
word never like a badge. The power is
ersatz, but it is like an Al-Anon teddy bear at least it is something to hold
like taking a placebo.
It was mine. In the absence of friends to fuck up with and
my older brother taking Cain’s route for parental attention on the outside my
demons and my rebellion went internal. I
fought to find me, argue with God, the what is life, the why do we do these
things kind of war. I have had this belligerency
inside my whole life. Maybe a flare
might go up in a poem or two, but for the most part I did not let people see
it. It was mine, at least I had that.
I am wary of any form of potential
addiction. It may be part of why I don’t
drink coffee, I don’t want to have to need.
The cliff is an inch away, always.
The end, the gutter, saliva on the concrete, it’s always accessible if
one wants it.
The existential war never ends, no
surrender, no retreat, just poems and conversations, scotch and sunrises. Hope, faith, love, and fear in the chamber,
fire away. Let me see what I got. Roulette with the bullets, that last one is a
bastard, but I would never trade these scars.
Hades took responsibility. In my few relationships, I made no
legislation; Persephone, whoever she was in the day, was always free. I never demanded. I barely asked for my wants. I merely spoke, sometimes asking for her to
bring me to the cooler air, to spend time with her friends and family, to play
in ways I may have found difficult to start, but enjoyed as she fissured the
ice to slip into the cooler waters.
Those opportunities offered by others were rare.
However I placed the rules on
myself. I learned when I did that the
people who cared for me, ended up suffering, not because I put my rules on
them, but because it created a distance between us and in pushing them away I
was denying them me, part of the person they cared for. There was only so much they could take before
it hurt them, grew exhausted, and made other choices.
Although sometimes I doubt they
really wanted to be there, given how much effort and communication I
invested. For every push away I made
seven explanations and requests for return.
I think sometimes people prefer the lie.
I know in my spirit I do not believe
any romantic partner has ever loved me.
Maybe that is my lie I tell myself, it doesn’t mean it is false or that
I do not believe it. To me it’s
real. I guess like anybody that is the
only truth that matters, the one in our head.
So often we just don’t want to admit
what we really want. We have to cover up
with a blank tile or spell nonsense.
Sometimes the truth is simple. It
is glaring in the image created in the absence of the foreground calling out
once all the bullshit is carved away.
The background, the background, I am a child of the background trying my
best crippled starfish making paintings on the ocean floor.
From processing relationships I know
I am built to best be with a woman who has some hell in her, a deeper older
soul. Writers are tormented people. We are tormented most often because we see
the world in stark and monstrous detail which is easier to obliviously bypass
in ignorance.
I see coping mechanisms,
face-touches, spirituality, inflections, the moment someone grabs their hair a
certain way and what they happen to be saying, newscasts, marketing,
implications, media, music, religion, art, familial histories, global social
systems, protests, and every stimuli I am aware to connect a person or event
more intensely. I see the topics that do
not appear related in a general conversation, but are like the spider web
neural pathways in our brains.
He said this, because she said
that. That makes him think of his
grandfather and something his friend did in third grade, eating that when she
was with her cousin, who went there. The
world implodes in sticky degrees of separation through time as the universe
bubbles up in such ways.
I see too much. I think too much. I write to get it out. I did not realize the extent of how much so
compared to the average person until well into my adulthood when I started to
read a lot of philosophy and psychology books.
Sometimes the chatter of the endless
script of the world is overwhelming. I
am not saying a thing, but the noise of life blares in my head of interlacing
storylines from Gaza to my coworkers to daily events of people I care for. Amongst that clamor, Luna I felt like I saw
you. I saw you like a shooting lane in
forest to spot a doe through the thicket of leaves and vines. My mind’s camera flashed and you were off as
if even the recollection of the image was a theft warranting banishment.
Part of me felt like you saw me in
my words. I felt like you started to
care for me, that you wanted to start to and ask me to stay. I felt like you asked me a question and all
of a sudden my camera was construed as a rifle, as if to envision a string of
tomorrows with me was to see the doe’s body as a taxidermist labor. I felt like you saw me as trying to collect
you in my desire to get to know you. It
made me feel offended, judged, abandoned, and lost in the all too familiar
jungle-land.
You described yourself as this
creature that men and women always want things from, put expectations on you,
or want to change you. To me you are a
pensive dervish. You are whirling inside
like a twister and outside silent and still, listening and watching others come
to you.
You may see yourself as the
scorpion, the siren, or the spider in wait.
I see you as a human navigating the world she has experienced who at the
end of the day has a quiet soft cool chamber wanting intimacy and a raging
rough fire chamber wanting the world to keep its distance. These spirits are strong in you. I see a woman trying to find a balance between
alone and love she sees as sacrilege as each of these spirits vie for her
nourishment.
You do not appear to want others to
know what you want or that you have needs other than to be given space. On some level you want others to know you are
intelligent, but do not wish to elaborate or appear as if their acknowledgment
is relevant to your equation. You wear a
mark of wisdom on your arm, but dub yourself an underachiever.
You imply the elevated status of
your ACT scores and reluctantly emit your undergraduate matriculation. As if in the tone, you felt that institution
could have been another connoting greater excellence as if this differential
might infer onto your intellectual prowess or worth. Past life choices were chaining in the moment
and the scent of possibly being assessed made you visibly wary in the way your
eye contact shifted in the annunciation.
From your description of the dancing
competition around the tales of the cocktail event, you gave me the impression
that you do not like the idea of being judged or others thinking that you are
invested or want their approval as if winning matters. It makes you uncomfortable to be focused on,
compared. Reading this paragraph
probably pisses you off a bit.
It feels like despite knowing your
positive attributes you would rather avoid being evaluated as if the private
discourse before such a competition requires bragging, which makes you feel
inauthentic. Performing your dance is
artistic and is delivered with a distance from vaunting.
The smile, the lusty spank to the
demure, the fun of playing with a body behind lingerie, boas, or pasties there
is always a barrier of control. The
audience never sees the fullness. That
is the power, the control; the ecstasy of wanting that invigorates mankind to
zest for God.
We are meant to revel in our
physical selves. The dancing the art of
the shared experiences pours the essence of life, but the talking, the awarding
line up after a competitive iteration of such burlesque breaks that barrier of
personal. It ruins the wine. The work, the time, the effort to craft the
audacity of the human experience for one to want and the other to be wanted is
everything.
To break that barrier or reverse the
direction of the current is like saying the dance is just about sex in a dolt’s
default. It is taking away why the
audience paid to watch. We don’t want
God to show us how the movie ends. We
want the yearning, the wanting, the thrill of the illusion that this life has
not all happened before.
You work two careers where everybody
comes to you. They talk, they cheer, and
you listen. You adorn an enigma of
whatever they think you are and by role cannot tell them who you are even if
you wanted. You choose that.
You mention you know you know how
good a dancer you are at Namese, but do not feel the need to prove it. At the sight of the clunky drunks gamboling
at the Maple Leaf you sardonically denounce your own abilities. I often find as an introvert I am reluctant
to accept a compliment or spotlight my prowess.
Giving myself permission to say I want, appreciate, or need affirmation
opens me to growth, even if I have to suffer the introvert’s ignominy of
feeling a bit fake in the process.
I think of the things you told me of
your father. The emissions came in
quickly opening and closing apertures.
If I missed the color on the hummingbird’s wings in the frenetic flutter
too bad for me. The redwood returned to
be the listener.
The pillars in the strands of what I
was to try to make of your past and why you may choose to conduct your
sequestration of personhood come from the notes you spoke. You told me you learned how to run from
him. You told me he was in three tours
in Vietnam with the horse on his badge.
You told me your parents were divorced, but never your age or the year
only that sometimes your father would take you on impromptu day trips on the
back of his motorcycle. You told me your
mother remarried a man who is a mechanic and likes to drag race and is into
four wheelers. You told me your father
died of cancer.
You told me your childhood was hard,
rough, and not easy. You told me you and
your mother share an educational discipline in psychology. I saw the angle of your feet in my kitchen
after you spoke to her on the phone contemplating an arrival. You told me you were a natural rebel and
noted your contention with you mother, but were not as specific in respect to
your father in running away from the swamps. Maybe it is what he would have done. Maybe you’re a centaur. Maybe either he did or would have
congratulated you for the action. You
indicated rebellion was an instrument of self exploration and definition.
In claiming your life in Arizona you started your own dancing troop, identified yourself as having a new dance
mother and worked in a world of dangerous men.
You counseled them and saw them in their honest horror to reach
someplace outside of concrete.
Mentioning nothing but the word divorced on your dating profile, I am
left to imagine your marriage’s respiration was conducted during however long
within the spectrum of your decade Southwestern sojourn.
I know the kind of man that I
am. Maybe you like men that work with
wrenches and darkened shadows like an outer cowl. Maybe they ask fewer questions. Maybe you get to stay more in control. I have no idea, only that you indicated that
I was not the type of man for you. I am
a man of insides focusing on every moving element at once. I cannot help but see them.
I do not know who your father was,
but it looks to me from the pittance of chicken bones you flopped on the table
for me not to read that you may be chasing him in some way. I cannot abide that the details that you
elected to speak were random. However I
do not know. There is no way I
could. It is none of my business. I offer this allotment as a measure of saying
I thought I saw you. I thought I saw why
you closed up, got on your bike, and road off when things were getting
closer. I do not know how you give love
or why not. Maybe I am just lunging for
a why.
To me what you shared, especially
that night by the top of the stairs felt like grand gestures from a laconic
woman as if maybe no one in my position may have been made privy to such before
or often or it had been a while since you opened like that. Whether my ears were donned to usurp a virgin
status of other men hearing such measures of your story I doubt it, but part of
me felt that maybe I heard interconnected vibrations in a way few had for a
time as your words tethered down to a personal-you which you were not expecting
me to see. I saw the bird gerhl.
As I noted in one of my letters,
coming from where my life exited before we met I was in a position to see a
bigger picture in our meeting. I was in
a spiritual place of renewed faith, practicing my yoga and very aware of
blocked and open paths upon my journey.
I was releasing control of knowing, of thinking I had to see.
With you I did not expect what
happened. It was just a date. I found myself naturally being very
open. When we talked about psychology at St. Joe's I felt like to share those words and feel like I was free and
appropriate to speak like that it registered this is where I was supposed to
be.
I am two men at my war sharing a
soul. I felt something kindred in you in
that respect. My war is with the
universe as the self like God is a one being boxing match. Left and right hand throwing haymakers and
gentle fingers stroking piercing for love before the madness sets.
I have this business/family man side
and the solitary/writer. Like the master
and the dog from earlier, human and animal.
One is called to fit a societal expectation and hungers for achievable
companionship, survival, and a unique brand of love. The other is compelled to dive inward and relate
to what he cannot help but see, write, and attempt to participate in the grand
scheme and often yearns for destruction and extinction. I attempt to balance being a provider and an
artist.
In you I saw a brief glimpse, but I
saw you quiet on wooden steps and sofa the way you held a book, were playful
with a girl kicking a soccer ball, petting cats, peering into a make-up mirror
as my head was turned to order us food from a truck, turned the light and your
body to shield the frontal-you from my vision before entering my sheets, the
way you curled your back to me and welcomed my arm to embrace the curve of you,
the way you showed appreciation for the way I touched your back, the way you
asked to be by the wall instead of the center at the rock show and the
restaurant or the shadow of a half-wall at the top of stairs (and in each I saw
a woman seeking or finding her spot to be able to express her inner
softness.
I heard you in the distance at the
violin, piano, and flute. I pictured
your photographs like fingerprints of where you’ve been. I saw the watcher I imagine that draws you to
psychology and art, the helper, and a vulnerable woman wrangling her
insecurities to confront this maddening human world.
The other is the dancer, painted in
rebellion flared and taught muscles flexed, rough to take the offensive on her
own terms. She is a chameleon of
whatever others choose to see her as in those moments. None is real but in the viewer’s gaze. For who she is, is in a conclave
contemplating other realms safe from true confrontation or intimacy.
She is fun and vibrant dancing like
the phoenix released. She is the way you
pulled your mouth and body parts away in bed, the way you are the holder of so
many other people’s secrets, the raging flying maleficent fairy who sees the
ground as a place men will attempt to chain her in iron and detach her
wings. She is a daughter of the
darkness. She bites, grabs, and
teases. She is chaos in the flame.
(I know you are so much more than
these fumes, but this is what you gave me to breathe. But I ask you, what do you say for a man who
saw you as such; die he really see you?
Was he on par? Does it
matter? Is he like the men in the
audience it does not matter what he thinks he sees? It does not matter who your patients think
you are. Is he tangled up in a blue
nothing sky to pass as silent nonsense?
How does being seen make you feel?
How did him wanting to see you make you feel? Who are you?
)
That juxtaposition, these swords and
shields we carry, my business suits and your patients, and my pages and your
dancing antlers paired with our books protecting raging hearts; in such I felt
a rare passion in play of internal gardens and external fences waxing and
waning attempting to maintain our flowers and briars. I look back and feel like there were these
four parts quadrants cut pulled to the corners, two in each of us calling out
never letting either one of us ever feel settled.
When you wrote me that you could
never be the woman for me; I felt like how does she know when I don’t even
know? I am nowhere close to
knowing. Why does she even have to go
there now? I know the way you made me
feel, more importantly the space in me I felt I wanted to be around you and the
space in me I felt you might be capable of empathizing and understanding to
where I might have a chance at catching my internal white whale of feeling
genuinely heard.
The way you made me want to write
and open felt more at home than I felt in years. It made me want to pay attention, stay
focused and it made me want to try to see what you needed and wanted in your
life and how I might or might not be built to fit into part of that puzzle and
how you might fit into mine.
I realize in reflecting, that was
coming from a spiritual place in me that if I mentioned externally would
probably frighten you off. When you
alluded to my words of “what we could be” as too much, that contemplative
algorithm was recognized as better sequestered to the hypothesis that it will
always be. Like the nice-guy excerpt
from before, the better path is a murky pond rather than crystalline Jamaican
coves. If you see the clown fish and the
anemone’s waving in the coral, however colorful, the clouded potential of a
snapping turtle in a turbid bog is all the more enchanting.
Once we know the end of the story,
why read the tale? Sometimes I imagine
that is why if God does exist, God keeps the details incomprehensible to the
universe. To explicitly reveal such
would halt the wheel, end the strip tease.
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