Aug 8 - Letters to Luna - My condolences

Luna,

My condolences to your friend and your heart.  Words feel feckless.

I cannot say you did not warn me.  I only wanted to get to know you.  The way I wrote to you, the poems about the moments we were sharing, I never did that before with anyone, not like that.  It was completely genuine and coming from a place of who I felt that you might be and communicating in a way that I felt you would appreciate.  It was not an act; it was me letting go and flowing to what felt right.  It was not easy to be that vulnerable.  I probably will never do something like that again.  A part of me feels foolish and cauterized.

I was trying to give us a start.  If you want to casually date and spend your life staying on the surface, you’re right that is not what I am looking for.  I was looking for the woman reading with me on the sofa.  That was nowhere near the surface.  I was not looking to pin you down; I just wanted to see the real you, the woman you seem hell bent to shield from the world.  I felt like I saw her from the first time I met you.  Maybe that scared the shit out of you.

I thought maybe she wanted a friend with enough layers to understand where she was born out of and coming from to be her natural naked self.  That’s what I wanted.  I did not want to tame you or change you or make you be anything other than you.  I did want you to open up your heart, in time.  Outside of that I am not sure what expectations you feel I required or requested.  I was ready to give you lots of patience and time.

Simply put, I just wanted you to be you when you were with me, but not the you that dances and everyone gets to look at from a distance, who is in control of the room and gets affirmation for a mask.  I wanted you to be you, but not the you that gets to only ask the questions, but never has to answer them.  Not because I want to push you past uncomfortable boundaries or change, but because you deserve a damn chance to let your heart out to play and at risk. I felt like you were giving me that. 

You can ordain those roles for others, but not with me if we were to foster intimacy over time.  You can work those jobs and you might appear that way to others, but if I were in the audience or sitting in the back seat of a car being interviewed I could not help but see the Luna I met.  Maybe your disguises didn’t work on me and that is what got you so mad. 

I felt like you were giving me that inner self in a measured dose I was comfortable with while we were getting to know each other.  In time, I expected you to let your hair down, breathe and quit being so damn afraid after you saw me for the man that I was. 

I felt like those public costumes you put on for work you weren’t that way with me.  Maybe those are just misconceptions on my part, but from the way you described yourself I felt like you were exhausted from being that every day, filling your time with all that stuff barely giving yourself five minutes to where anyone could really converse with you where you weren’t in control. 

You put these rules up and walls.  You lay it right out at the onset, “Severus, I am going to hurt you.”  So there is no way you could get hurt.

Will: Yeah, I went on a date last week.
Sean: How'd it go?
Will: It was good.
Sean: Going out again?
Will: I don't know.
Sean: Why not?
Will: Haven't called her.
Sean: Christ, you're an amateur.
Will: I know what I'm doing.
Sean: Yeah.
Will: Yeah. Don't worry about me. I know what I'm doin'. Yeah, but this girl is like, you know, beautiful. She's smart. She's funny. She's different from most of the other girls I've been with.
Sean: So, call her up, Romeo.
Will: Why? So I can realize she's not that smart, that she's fuckin' boring? Y'know--I mean...this girl is like fuckin' perfect right now, I don't wanna ruin that.
Sean: Maybe you're perfect right now. Maybe you don't want to ruin that. I think that's a super philosophy, Will. That way you can go through your entire life without ever having to really know anybody.
My wife used to fart when she was nervous. She had all sorts of wonderful idiosyncrasies. You know what? She used to fart in her sleep. Sorry I shared that with you. One night it was so loud it woke the dog up. She woke up and gone like "oh was that you?" I'd say yeah...I didn't have the heart to tell her...Oh God...[laughing]
Will: She woke herself up?
Sean: Yesssss. Oh Christ....aahhh, but, Will, she's been dead two years and that's the shit I remember. Wonderful stuff, you know, little things like that. Ah, but, those are the things I miss the most. The little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about. That's what made her my wife. Oh, and she had the goods on me, too, she knew all my little peccadillos. People call these things imperfections, but they're not, aw, that's the good stuff. And then we get to choose who we let in to our weird little worlds. You're not perfect, sport. And let me save you the suspense. This girl you met, she isn't perfect either. But the question is: whether or not you're perfect for each other. That's the whole deal. That's what intimacy is all about. Now you can know everything in the world, sport, but the only way you're findin' out that one is by givin' it a shot. You certainly won't learn from an old fucker like me. Even if I did know, I wouldn't tell a piss ant like you.
[Will smiles]
Will: Why not? You told me every other fuckin' thing. Jesus Christ. You talk more than any shrink I ever met.
[Sean laughs] Sean: I teach this shit, I didn't say I knew how to do it.
[pause] Will: Yeah......you ever think about gettin' remarried?
Sean: My wife's dead.
Will: Hence, the word remarried.
Sean: My wife's dead.
[pause] Will: Yeah.. Well, I think that's a super philosophy, Sean. I mean that way you could actually go through the rest of your life without ever really knowing anybody.
[A pause. Sean smiles ironically.]
Sean: Time's up.

If you just wanted to have fun and nothing serious, I really wish you would have politely asked me not to write the poems.  That process and how you responded to them made it a bit personal.  You can describe yourself as a selfish creature and this ready-made disappointment.  Those are excuses to justify distance.  If you do not want to be in a relationship, that is not selfish, that is just your truth.  I am not who you want in your life, that’s fine.  That’s your choice.  I respect that.

I have this whole universe to offer, my weird little world.  I am not what I seem on the surface.  I felt kindred in that respect with you.  Maybe that is nothing, but it was something worth investing my attention.

Today probably hurt pretty badly for you.  I apologize if you feeling compelled to truncate our bud at some construed presumption on my part is making this difficult time worse.  I simply missed you, because I started to have feelings for you.  I was also worried about you because life seemed to be hitting you pretty hard.  I did not realize the dire immediate nature of the situation.  I am truly sorry for your loss.

I spawned a tear, because well, it does not really matter what I thought or why.  You radiate defensiveness, a buffer zone.  I get that.  Personal stuff makes you run.  I just wanted to make you dinner, not get married.

The way I see life, the same person you or I are today, fundamentally we were years before and years after; cores rarely change.  The timing on exposing that truth is only an illusion.  Who a person is exists whether the other party is aware or not. 

God damn it, this sucks.  I feel like you poured gasoline on all of this because that is the easy road compared to actually caring about somebody or letting somebody in.  I think I scared you because something was too close to going someplace real. 

I don’t know what else to say.  I feel like you are picking fear.  I have been there.  You told me how afraid you were.  If you wanted to just hang out, that is all I was trying to do.  You can date and skate the ice.  You can recycle this point in time of pushing people away who actually want to try to care about you.  Replace whoever’s face came before me with mine and flip the next, so doing you are only avoiding yourself. 

When I asked you on the river banks, if you loved yourself; you flinched.  I would have.  Most people do.  I have my demons.  I have seen death.  I tasted responsibility for death.  I have been scared out my skin.  I have cursed God to the point of oblivion.  I have seen the flip side of love in my path…

 …’s butter pat of Catholic kindness was served on a yellow-fever Indian picnic blanket paired with hemlock wine and donkey ham.  The meal pierced my stomach like a flock of armored toxic mosquitoes toting jagged-barbed blades hooked for the extraction landing in concert on the helipad of my abdomen.  The foul-chutney was a swarming sucker-punch.  The air was pummeled out of me.  The bugs severed my skin into a circled path unlocking my belly button to my entrails in a convex convulsion of flesh.  Heaving, twisting; the tug of war unfurling my guts out into our living room.

 I have seen redemption lost, revived and dripping through my fingers.  I have pushed people out of my life and picked my demons over love.  I have created masterpieces of hurt and tints maybe the average eye would see the ugliness, but to me they helped me see how beautiful the world really can be.  I have lived in the marrow.

I have seen a lot of the dark.  You seemed like you have too.  Call me an idiot but I took that as a good thing, at least for me.  I thought you might understand and I wouldn’t feel like a fucking alien.  I thought to myself, “Wow, she has this place that maybe wouldn’t fit with most people, but maybe something bigger put me right in the crosshairs of her life in this moment.  I thought pay attention, give it everything you got, because if there is a God he is in the middle of this and you don’t have to get it, you just have to try to not let your fear fuck it up as you see if this has a chance.”

So I am sitting in front of my computer tonight a little vodka later.  I am disappointed, but I do not want to invest my time and affection for someone that does not want me or is too damn afraid to pull towards me when she is afraid rather than tell me her fear wants her to run but she is choosing not to because she’s seen that path and maybe this little spot of vulnerability at the top of the stairs is worth holding out for five damn minutes to let go and quit trying to be so tough.

I appreciate you being straight forward.  Although I feel like I could be anybody right now trying to get to know you and you would have just as readily pushed them away.  In that respect I do not take this personally, but I am disappointed and hurt.

Best wishes in your journey,

 Severus