Saturday, November 22, 2014

Aug 27 - Letters to Luna - A packaged mistake pt 1

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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