The I Word
Luna,
There is a part of me
that has wanted to know you understand what happened inside me despite the
tautology. These six months have been
like a disturbed pond settling into tempered clarity. Thoughts form, but are easily shattered
surmise. I keep recycling and refining
circumlocutory expressions because of the intimacy involved. I have written so many words for both of us
in that pursuit, explanations scattered like dominoes not stood consecutively,
but tossed as they surface from within me in a jigsaw pile of dots, because
this was at the precipice of intimacy for me.
I want you to understand exactly why and what that meant to me.
I wanted you to open up
and mirror my vulnerability to help me understand your emotional and mental
identity, the place you are in your life like a good bye in a more complete
picture. Almost everyone I have ever
attempted to or gotten close with has wanted me to be simpler, to fit in a
box. My letters tend to ponder your
complexity. Like an island of inlets,
cavities, and peninsulas as two plate-shifted earthen forms, I thought neither
of us are and could never fit with simple.
We were made such. Whether that
is your truth, only you, me and time could decipher.
This letter is about as
raw and open I have ever been with another human being in the written
form. I have enervated myself; do as you
will. You made your choice; I wanted you
to break the tension, be human with me, and maybe speak on the same level to
help me solder my openness with an alloy of kindness and depth.
I do not know how to
write a letter and break that tension.
There is no interplay. A one man
pillow fight gets old. I can’t see your
face. I can’t flint off the vibe in the
air. I lost my time machine betting the
ponies and number four has a busted metacarpus.
I can’t go back and kill
that dinosaur that sneezed and started the cascade of events that has led to
this ten-car pileup. Maybe in an
alternate universe we’re both honking to clear the damn road. You’re jonzing for coffee and I’m running out
of scraps of paper in my glove compartment to scribble. There was a meteor crash in the center of the
interstate. People are gawking. The tweets are apocalyptic. That guy’s head is in a tree with his
eyebrows burnt off. Look at that woman’s
body the insides are scooped out like ice cream and piled in spheres on that
Prius. What the hell happened? People have to get to work to catch up on
Netflix and let the dog out to piss.
Just quit staring and go.
I write until the blood
on the page dries up from the quill.
Until there is nothing left to write because I was naked as I could be
like a fool on Fat Tuesday breathing in the freak show of all the cities that
work molding in power suits and streets without beer cans and bead-currency
thinking that is what normal is. I laid
it bare to try to find home, to be with my people in costumes that are not
costumes.
I’m upset out here
mid-parade feeling a woman like you exists that makes the rest taste like
Catholic wafers and oatmeal sprinkled in aspartame. I know whoever I thought you were was a
dribble impression farcically incomplete, but right now nothing feels real
after that, just blank games of patty-cake until the clock laughs. Lent has started and I have this memory of
you swimming through my head and the world wants me to abstain and fast.
Your long-long hair feels
like a bird’s nest. Part of me wants to
fly home, but you never were home. You
showed me a heart made of shame, leather, magic, antlers, books, irreverence,
broken glass, divinity, and the intimacy of a childhood softness,
pressed-the-pedal-to-the-floor gasoline running fumes through a desert, and a
pump full of shrapnel fanning glitter-dusted owl eyelids flown off before we
could ever know what was possible. The
glitter lingers no matter how many outfit changes.
We spoke in soft
tones. You made me feel like I finally
met a person who had been through an emotional minefield, a library, an
artist’s rush, and a circle pit that could understand my native tongue. There is a beauty in that. I felt more kindred like I believed in God
again for five minutes. You hair smelled
like the place I came from like atomic seashells, star-sprinkled jazz, a game
of polysyllabic scrabble, soul and punk rock thrashing in a revolution against
standing still.
Maybe that is over
complicating things, over-thinking, over-working the mind to see banality as
native-complexity for a search towards verisimilitude. I saw inner like a compass of navigation to
ascertain truth and falsity in witnessing originality.
I’ve never cared how this
sounds because even if you never read my letters I am at peace with that
native-complexity. I care about what was
and is. I care about if the intimacy was
real. What you choose is
autonomous. I just want you to at least
understand why.
Why is that so important;
because I am human and flawed with poetic feelings that tattoo like
portraits. I am built to emote. I remember emotions I had at eight years old
to thirty-six. I remember writing that
sentence before. I was made with
photographic emotional recall in how I felt others feel. Whether that is reality is subjective.
The layers are
complicated. I have been a watcher, an
observer of spirit. The veil between the
tactile and the spiritual is thin for me.
When I feel another’s essence and feelings, I am drawn to trust the
powerful and give everything I have as a humble intention. With you that gift has held not in obstinacy,
but in compassion as an offering.
I wanted to be heard and
recognized that I was not such an alien to you.
I hoped to care about somebody who was not going to completely run away
from me like I was infectious for being who I am. Who you care for is entirely up to you, but I
wished you would have respected the place that I was based on our interactions
to offer a manner of kindness that correlated with the breadth of vulnerability
I exposed in your departure.
I saw so much promise
with you. I think even the idea of trying
to explain to you what I mean by promise is complicated. The specifics of who I am and what I hoped
feel hijacked. We never got out the
airport gate. I felt judged by when you
asked me what I was looking for in the bed and I mentioned something including
a partner.
I feel the complexity of
what that term partner means to me versus how maybe you took it is such a
divide that part of me wants to offer a nonexistent conversation you never had
enough interest in me to be open to clarify and request. I have little idea of what went on inside
your thoughts except for snippets. You
made me feel like you answered me with the level of effort in which you valued
this as a human experience. This was
unworthy of seeing where my inner self was in the days you left, what it took
for me to get to that point in my life, and where I was ready to try to
be. I felt like you had to deal with
your own stuff and you just needed to check out.
I wanted to hear the
reciprocal of your human words. I
figured there must have been a hive in your mind to get to your decision. You left in a time of grief in alcoves of
your life I was not privy. The whole
experience left me a man stretching like taffy into a black hole in time’s
dilation digesting past, present, and your internal deliberations.
I wanted to experience
more of the identity of the woman I grew to care about in understanding what
brought her to that point even if it was written on the back of a picture I
would inevitably burn in order to forget.
The silence felt like it trivialized this as a function of time rather
than intimacy. Like intimacy was a
forbidden kingdom for you. In case you
never realized it, you talking so little and looking at me with the sort of
blank face I once tried to describe is why I stayed so serious. I felt like your internal cogs were always
cranking.
I guessed at who you are
to try to fill in that silence in part because that is what I felt I was called
to do in my poetry while we shared hours.
I felt like I could be myself, all of me the writer, the accountant, the
punk, the single-father, the recovering atheist, the erotic-poet, the nerd, the
yogi, the music lover, and the artist, but there was so much I still hid.
Even in all this writing
I have fears and monsters I will not speak.
I hoped at a time you had enough interest to meet the mangled terrors
under my sleeve I blend in with paleness.
So please do not adorn my lengths to see you in what appeared to me to
be your grief in a tone of criticism or judgment when filtered by the gates of
your lobes. This has always been to bear
intimacy with your humanity. My choice
of love over fear is an attempt, not an accomplishment.
I have a forest of scary
things in me I have learned to love with than try to kill. I thought maybe you could relate to
that. It was one of the reasons I wanted
to get to know you better, like a boy and a girl inside a camping tent saying,
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
Ghosts haunt the woods; I have so many ghosts.
Your silence to me set the
tone of what you expressed you need in your life. Your quiet sounded like you needed a place to
be soft and away. Like usually that was
just you, but maybe the way I approached getting to know you made you wonder if
there was an alternative outside the feline variety to spend some time with you
in that quiet space.
The urge and passion to
write to you to be in that space lingered like a lit fuse burning itself
out. I felt you so alive when you
offered semblances of confirmation of my understanding of you in the smallest
commentary on my approach.
In the silence wrapped in
what you did not say I saw a woman who wants to be in love again at some point
in her journey, but wards away the intimacy to participate. I saw a woman who has filled her life with
barriers to love. I saw a woman who acts
tough, like a badass to clothe whoever she started out as ten thousand years
ago.
You strike me as sort of
a nerdy-quirky quiet kid who went through some tough mess, bellowed a wildness
in the fire of a pair of dancer’s legs that learned to kick the shit out of
anybody that tried to get in her way to survive. You took me as someone who has been through
wars and rebellions shunning diffident movements. Maybe you hit puberty and flaxen hair became
darker in time, pelvically anfractuous, amply busted and driving men to run up
trees.
You’re obviously really
smart and voraciously independent. I
find it hard to imagine you leaning on a man for support in basically any
form. Maybe you did at some point and he
broke your heart and/or you wrecked his.
I still don’t know and whatever happened never mattered to me except how
it affects you.
I was offering you
something as personal as it gets and you ran for the hills. In my gut I feel like you did that more
because of your past and not because of me.
When you look a man in the eyes like that, where your quiet pierces him,
he doesn’t forget it. You flopped a few
sentences in my inbox and I felt like you sequestered your dark-heart forest of
thoughts.
Underneath I saw a
kind-kind heart that feels most emotions on the upper end of the Richter
scale. I thought of what the idea of
love does to you. I thought of the grief
I guessed at and how powerfully those varying sources appeared to affect you. Maybe you try to dissipate the quakes through
the body rather than let go of control when you really care, when you’re
vulnerable.
I saw a woman who handles
problems herself. I saw a women trek
across poles from below sea level hot humid swamp to mountain snow dry desert
and back into the belly of jazz like a living metaphor for
self-definition. I saw a leader in her
community putting the Puritan cops in their place forging her scene. I saw a woman holding that all in and the
outside gets a whirlwind that looks like a 1920’s movie star, elegant,
intelligent, naughty, but not mean.
Maybe the dancing is a
counterweight for a woman on a sofa who reads books, probably lets her cat
crawl up to cuddle and that is the most intimate she gets on most nights. Maybe she talks with her best friend since thirteen. Maybe she plays with her nieces and thinks
about being a mother and thinks about love and she wrestles back into the pages
of some book or a costume idea for the next adventure. Maybe I feel the need to use third person,
because I have no idea if I know who you are and maybe just a little piece of
my heart got broken, because I want that to be you and I may never know.
Maybe she thinks about
event after event, the places inside that never leave, and where she’s in
control and not. I felt like the
luckiest man in the world sitting with you on my sofa because I thought maybe
you were open to changing that, to letting me in, to letting you out.
Of all the men that you
probably could choose to invest your time with I was with you in that
moment. I attribute that to our minds. I don’t know if my thoughts of you at home
with your cat or books and what draws in your head and heart in those moments
if they do happen occur. But I do know I
have sat on that sofa many times reading, wanting exactly what that felt like,
a seed of intimacy. I have searched for
a mind like yours.
So much of the term
partner that I used has to do with intimacy.
It has to do with the idea of a person who knows another on the deepest
level reciprocates that vulnerability and participates in that person’s life
with that intimacy as foundational stitching.
Each human adventures from a secure understanding of the other and the
self with a dexterity and freedom to be open, free, and personal to be a
complete individual complemented by the other.
Worlds become like two giant circles with a minority concentric area
high in quality, but not necessarily quantity.
I need my alone
time. I need my art, projects, and
pursuits like reading, writing, yoga, public spoken word, and others which are
singular in nature. I like to go to bars
alone and read books, occasionally start up conversations with random
strangers, but I like to have my cushions just in case. I keep ‘em close: headphones, a book, a
notepad, a book sack, a hoodie.
I like dancing at punk
shows, headstands, notebooks, and crow poses.
I balance having to anchor as a single father, this left end artistic
heart to feel the blood, this right end business mind to know the world’s
machines, a desire for space to take it all in alone wanting to meet a soul
capable of understanding what it is like to be inside me and share her own with
a commensurate gravity.
I have lived a very
solitary life. I was born a cactus and
finding the balance between having an intense passionate partnership that
affords me space with a woman who needs the same pliant breathing room and is
capable of that level of mental depth and passion has been very difficult. I have had so many failures in that search. I need to be around people who can see
through that veil between our five senses and the spiritual and not drown me
with words like Jesus or karma, pretending everything happens for a reason or
justice always balances, but play there with me in daily life in writing, art,
comedy, and emotional connection in the true streets of fire incinerating the
superficial in the bluest flame.
When you wrote me you
knew you could never be the woman I was looking for and you would only
disappoint me, that you knew it would never be you, I felt preemptive
judgment. I felt like you saw a defined
man trying to rein you in, make you give up your options, prompting you to
change or tame who you are. I felt like
you were tossing me in a box you had logged predecessors without giving either
of us a fair chance to explore the intimacy flickering. For me it was always about intimacy.
The idea that you could
be vulnerable or intimate on an emotional level I knew was a struggle, but I
saw you were doing it in where we were headed.
I was happy for it, but cognizant that you have a legion of demons I am
only partially aware that call you towards extracting yourself from intimacy.
You gave up on me as a
potential friend, lover, and in this sense of intimacy partner. The smell of intimacy, the act of intimacy is the purest
thing in this universe between two people.
Some confuse intimacy with love.
I don’t think you do, but to express the greater thought please bear
with me. Love is so much more than
dopamine. To me a whole love can only be
a byproduct of true intimacy, but intimacy is a standalone spiritual experience
of seeing a being for who that being is beyond the layers our human construct
affords. We witness where they have
been, done, the tattoos, scars, and smiles, the poems and stories that document
their divinity inside the shell of their journey. Displaying the vulnerability of offering that
gift to another without demand for reciprocation is the precipice of
cultivating true intimacy.
That leads to a human bond.
A traditional romantic coupling is possible, but not the point. To me that is the best soil for love, but love
itself is a choice based on logistics and practices of what works in a person’s
life which is renewed based on the energies invested in how a person is treated
so that choice is remade daily. To me
intimacy exists on another plane; it is the sharing of self as divine beings
and gets closer to what we truly are in this universe.
The proximity to what we are piloting these bodies is either
kept as naked as we were as children or caked in cynical distraction as we age
in a thicker veil. In adulthood the
daring attempt to refine understanding of that universal truth by pursing
nudity through vulnerability. To me
these are the artists, the dancers, the poets, the painters, the philosophers,
the musicians, the writers, the actors, and the readers in all of us creating,
searching, and burrowing into our collective self for the divinity of
life. Sometimes one of these artists
will connect with another and through that intimacy a piece of the magic in
this universe can be revealed like a sparkling jewel.
That is the reason I took this so seriously. I did not experience love or a launched
relationship. What I thought we
experienced was the precipice of intimacy which was so much more precious to me
for its rarity, potential, power, and beauty.
People can have long-term relationships, do all the
cohabitating, regurgitation of daily bullshit, motion through coitus, sign
mortgages and still sometimes avoid or fail to achieve intimacy at every
turn. The yoked oxen biblical metaphor
of two burdened sacks of organs waiting to die with the next forty years
pre-written because art is a dead flamingo in the living room no one mentions
happens. People sign up for that in
red-droves to turn their brains off, bundled up and get far from the
fire-tongued essence of what we are as part of all of this. Divorce taught me I damn sure don’t want that
life; I damn sure don’t want traditional, but I also know given the right spark
sometimes another soul makes that fire even bigger if you each believe in
magic.
Part of that magic is the interplay of compassion in
suffering. Suffering is like an alarm
clock set to awaken our beings to activate change. The volume varies with attention to the level
of our repetitive behaviors. On a core
level I felt the suffering I felt in you resonated with the suffering I have
experienced in my path. The Dali Lama
described compassion as, “We have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our
biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of
concern, affection, and warmheartedness—or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to
alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being.”
Courage translates to an active heart. I was brave enough to open and in that
awakening I saw you. I saw your
loveliness and your suffering. Maybe the
glare of that was too bright. These
letters have been my compassion presented with an imperfect tongue. Ubuntu.
Me seeing you does not mean you or I should proceed on a common fork,
but this compassion I hold for you is very real. You may dismiss it as obsessive, arrogant,
pious, lame or worse. I have
contemplated I may come across those ways.
The altruism of compassion is tainted by desire to be cared for in
return. I seek your compassion as well.
You may feel I don’t know you well enough to see you or if
you may view it as such judge you; I simply witnessed what I witnessed and grew
to care. If you do not need or want that
in your life than I am happy for you to be in such a place of firmness; I’m
not; I’m not in that place. I wanted to
keep exploring who you are and how we interfaced.
I am happy with my life, happy with myself, but I keep
growing. I wanted you to be part of that
growth. You made me feel like if I
wanted that with you that there must be something wrong with me. You referred to yourself as all these images
that hurt or scare. At the same time in
other phrases saying you were scared.
I am on a journey to see, learn, and share as much of this
world as I can. I spend every hour I can
mustering to absorb and share where I can, but I have needs. I have a font to offer, but also I am not too
proud to admit my weaknesses and divulge my servant heart humble and walking to
find people to exchange as student and teacher, teacher and student.
I seek the thoroughfare of the naked soul. I try to remember the ground’s constant
support. The aura of kindness blends in
the darkness around us. It is always
there, always open. It is our awareness
that fluctuates.
I might sound like a crazy person. I might write, say, or do things that don’t
make sense. Some people would say oh
that is sane if you had a crucifix around, but you’re mad to remove the myth
and get to the core of what all this is.
To ponder how people connect as not God’s plan, not God doing a favor
but simply what is flowing in everything connected through a universe that
always was beating in the veins of another person is chaos to normalized
plugged-in humanity. Claiming that
affected you at a root that begs you to try to understand why so many
occurrences simply reduce to choices in consciousness of love or fear, of
connecting or disconnecting, of paying attention or indulging in distraction is
childishness to the cult of the commercial.
Intimacy is a place of staring straight into somebody and
summoning faith that this is the essence of life I am choosing to be present
for in a moment. Either you sensed beads
of that with me or you didn’t. What I
think happened is that you did and you fell into a familiar quicksand.
This whole time all I wanted you to do was look me in the
eyes again, let go, & face whatever feelings surfaced honestly. I was holding my hand out; take it or not,
stay in the sand with all the Princess Bride fire-swamp metaphors you want or
take a chance. That is why I wrote so
much. I wanted you to give us that
moment before it decomposed in a pile of bobby pins, eraser shavings, bookmarks,
cocktail ice, orange rinds, and gritty teeth.
I
knew the look I saw behind your eyes was like a weight anchoring you to where
you come from and a deflecting shield like a barricade for anyone to go in
there. When you looked back I felt like
you put you in me without words, because something told me you could not lean
on the alphabet too hard. Nevertheless it felt like you were
communicating a greater story of your life hesitatingly, fragmentally in sparse
verbalized detail, but in full bursting emotional undertones which harkened an
honesty that was daringly intimate.
The
intimacy I felt in the exchange we had rivets me under. The power that I felt existed between us
despite knowing so little drew me to a place I have never been. It confronted me face first with my path as a
poet, a writer, a divorced man, a father, sex, my music, this city, and so much
to be the man who was sitting next to you breathing in everything you exposed
to me about how you came to know my name and how I could exhale us in the
poetry we created.
This
poetry is not an act. People are born
with all sorts of gifts and curses, this is mine. I feel like almost the whole damn world wants
people to turn our souls off and fall in line with some program of paychecks,
churches, and price tags paid in fear.
Even the outsiders sometimes are just as clueless opting out of the
program by keeping minds locked in drugs, apathy, or the high-horse of
complaint to avoid the responsibility of the inner. I have fought my demons to keep my soul
bright to champion the untamed spirit that flows through my lungs and explodes
the layers until all that is left is the divine common essence that makes me
part of this universe. I damn sure am
not perfect, unique, or a paragon, but I was born to be raw and live every day
trying not to forget what is important and maybe one day write something that
is worth a damn.
My
poetry and writing is centered on what we are as living beings, why we are here
and connecting to the core of what I see.
Compared to everything else that intimate exchange makes the rest of
life feel like a theatrical device to hide us from being too close with what we
are. Baring empathy with those we share
the planet with in how we choose to live our lives through compassion,
kindness, systematic structures which mitigate exploitation and instill mutual
assurances to deter the corruptions of human fragilities and selfishness are
functions of seeing the divinity in individuals we may never actually
meet.
However
to meet another and be so close, to share the sovereignty of that personal
domain is like a kiln that fires so much of what we can do and be in this
world, not because the other person gives us that, but because we give
ourselves the self-love and bravery to be vulnerable to expose our sanctum
growing from our suffering and blessings.
That courage is the most powerful force in the universe. It is the love of the enemy Martin and
Mohandas wrote. It is the act of
lowering your weapon first in a standoff and choosing faith in love and
relinquishing pride to risk the reward of being understood of being seen as a
divine being worthy of empathy.
I
have aspired to be that brave, to love myself that hard, and to expose my
sanctum to walk that path. I tried to share that process with
you. To see what I thought I saw in you
as what your being is capable and gives to this world I felt privileged and
tremendously disappointed in losing the opportunity to share each other’s
selves.
Intimacy
means you are exposed. The other person
sees everything. You have the goods on
each other for life. No matter what
happens: things go well, are just for the moment, or fall apart like they
usually do each person was seen. They
can speak sentences of truth other people do not have access. You can leave on good terms, not see them in
years, and set everything down to help no questions asked because when they
speak you see everything around the words that is unspoken. Sometimes you can’t help caring about that
person even when they give you every reason to hate them and you no longer want
them in your life and they are gone. You
do not love them the way you once did, but you want what is best for them
because you have seen their core and that intimacy makes you feel a common font
of this universe from which we all come.
Sometimes
it’s hard not see the former in the current opportunity. To look at a new face you see too much of
what you would rather not recur like a mirror of what lives inside us. We run from ourselves not the ghost of the
former. You have seen the former’s
rawest form. You are linked because the
intimacy shared changed what you bring forward.
Their imperfections become Godly and beautiful because you saw them raw
and honest. Even the worst of us bare a
common divinity deep in there.
The
best of us shine like supernovas. You felt like one of those to me. Not because I thought you were anywhere close
to perfect. I saw your selfishness. I saw your fear. I saw your self-preservation. I saw walls I could not see behind. I saw your mind like a vortex analyzing soaking
in life. I saw you dripping in whatever
you have been through behind your silences and flashing in your
exuberance. I saw a common exploding
star fueled by the power of emotion that exists in you.
I
know you got all this before you ever met me.
I am not writing this to preach.
I am not writing this to impress or implore you. I am writing this for you to know what I
saw. However redundant, weird it may
come across it is all about the intimacy.
For
me to feel so close to creating that memory with you of birthing that intimacy
and seeing the details of you from what you were talking about at the top of
the stairs, to what happened in the desert, to what fuels that fire of you
teasing rough in bed. For me to open up
my home to you and be ready to talk about my past. Being so close to that and sensing how
beautiful it is and watching you fly back to wherever you came from tore me
apart. To know what I wanted to show you
from inside me in a commensurate offering and that was so disinteresting to you
just carved me out.
Do
you have any idea how many times people have looked at me or responded like
they did not have a damn clue on what to say in return? Do you have any idea how many women have
thrust me in this pile of ‘I don’t know what to do with a man like that; I’d
rather just not say anything and walk.
Sure he sounds smart. Upside down
headstand pushups those are cool. He
looks all right, but sometimes he is just talking in a foreign language.’ Do you know what it is like to act on the faith
that I felt like not only did I think you were capable of knowing what to do
with me, but that my sentences were not hieroglyphics to you, that you wanted
to act, to remain untamed like me and light a fire? I was left to debate whether it was more your
disinterest or your fear. Do you know
what I saw in you the first time I listened to Bird Gerhl? Do you know how much energy it took for me to
open myself to try to go down a path to burn with you?
You
may have read so little of me and me so little of you, but you lit me. This has been me melting as you walked away
from the pyre. I saw in you a room that
just kept going and going and going unlike anyone I have ever met on such a
personal level. You may scoff that I can
be so audacious, repetitive, or peering, but I know what I saw. I was attracted to that and wanted to create,
dance wherever our feet might have taken us wild and pensive.
The
departure of that left me to try to fill the space of the opening I had created
for you to enter trying to figure out who you were and what this was. The metaphors, the story, the letters all
came from my flawed human attempts to process that intimacy. That may sound intense, too much, but when I
search my thoughts of this of you, of what happened, that is what this was for
me. Maybe that bowled you over and you
needed time to digest, maybe it looked like Nagasaki sunshine, maybe you have
been through this before, either way it happened here in my space. Your reaction is what it is.
I
do know my persistence generates from going to an intimate place that resonated
with my entire life to this point in my weirdness, art, pitfalls, and little
glories and wondering what the full scope of your soul is like as a reciprocal
to that journey I felt. If this was
love, it would be different. Love to me
is higher up. Intimacy is way down,
deep, like it does not use normal language to communicate. A whole love is developing both the heavens
and the labyrinths. I felt we were like two people seated quietly by candle light in a
cavern just talking, watching each other’s bodies soaking in the shadows like a
bath.
I
felt called to be next to you in the darkness you appeared to be in and allow
you to witness a compassionate inky soul who only wished for your joy. I felt you would decide whether you wanted to
exit or let a man breathe alongside you in that not necessarily bad or sad, but
private-distant place or not.
Everything
you showed me told me you run. You
mask. You are a trained enigma behind a
stage light and a master’s degree in analyzing others and staying quiet.
I
know what it is like to want to be close to someone and process a compulsion to
push them away because you need to be in your own space. The other becomes a variable to mind
after. They are too much around. You can’t just do what the fuck you
want. You become obligated. You’re under surveillance. You feel stuck in the middle between your
urge to be alone to attend to your internal and this other person who you care
about, but is in so many ways a threat.
Love can become more of a punishment between freedom and infringement
rather than a blessing between companionship and loneliness. It’s like there can be three parties in the
relationship and one of them always has seniority.
The balance takes a rare
empathy to comprehend. I do not know the
roots of why you pushed me away, but in my guts I feel it was because you were
more hopeful than hopeless. Maybe it was
that you looked at me and saw confrontation with that place inside you. The more you care, the more intense the risk that
you will lose that space to hide, that time to process in that introvert’s
sanctum. The friends and felines that
supplement your family know the line to not cross. That relationship is probably simpler than a
human attempting intimacy.
You can go out there and
dance in a characterization to entwine in the loud in a mix of dear friends and
applauding strangers, but what do you do in your quiet? What are your emotions in there? Who is permitted to care for you knowledgably
and fully to see the divinity of your soul flawed and graceful, honest and bare
who you will love yourself enough to let witness you in return for everything
you have been through, are, and wish to be?
That is a garden of intimacy I hoped to try to explore because I need it
too.
You know what my answer
is to that last question, no one. I do
not allow anyone to witness me in my garden.
This is why I asked you if you love yourself by the river, because I
wanted to know if you loved yourself enough as the gate to maybe let me in and
I could let you in if we went in that direction. Self-love is the cornerstone for
intimacy. No one will ever love us more
than we love ourselves. We are our first
relationship. We always have us. I figure others take our self-love as a guide
on how to love us back.
I have hermetic
tendencies. I damn near try to do
everything myself. I have never really
had people to rely on or request assistance.
I don’t rely or request. I trust
people at their intentions, but I do not count on them to come through. I make backup plans. I avoid situations where others are required
to complete. I make safety nets and
over-analyze, because I know I at least have me. That is why self-love is so important to me.
I am poor at letting
people in to support me. I push people
away even those I care about because I cannot fathom their desire to be inside
me is legitimate or achievable based on my perception of their capabilities
given what I know exists within me. I
have sought and been rejected or disappointed to an extent that birthed an
active ignorance to what it feels like to be fed, supported, desired, wanted,
attended, nurtured, cared, acknowledged, witnessed, conversed, interacted,
loved. I have lived in this form with an
imbalance between offerings to which I cultivate an intense love of the
universe through the portal of the self as a component of the whole. The lack of engagement in the consistent
concern by others through either direction of rejection has left me to open
bare in spiritual nudity.
I offer. I am open, cognizant I can only flow my
volition. I own my decisions to push
others out, yet acknowledge they are not entirely absent of regret. I love myself tremendously because I see
beauty everywhere. The most common
sentiment I feel for others is compassion particularly for their
suffering. I am no savior or saint, but
I brim with love. When things do get
darkest, I find love in the darkness. I
find the whole. Wherever I am, someone
else was once here. Wherever the other
is, I was once there. In this liberty I
find happiness, a pure-pure smile celebrating like a sun salutation for all
that I am blessed for I am always part of a whole in this timelessness. Om mani padme hum.
All I could ever do is
offer what I have to give. There is
always a choice. Whatever you or I have
chosen to this point, this life sits right in front of us to seal off and never
speak again or lay it on the table and play.
Please if you did, do not misconstrue the depth or seriousness of my
thoughts as an anchor claiming you; my intention was always an intimate and
beautiful mutual exploration in the vastness.
The
idea of being chained by a relationship is a struggle for me too. It is like asking yourself, “Who am I going
to give up my ‘me-time’ for? Over and
again in life I have told myself, “No, I would rather have my ‘freedom’ than
you.” One of the main reasons for this
is that it is hard to find women who understand what my ‘me-time’ is, why I
need it, and most of all how to balance that out without creating either
resentment or incongruence.
It takes intimacy and
understanding between two people to appreciate the cosmos that breathes within
the other to have that deep layered inner world that is craving and cultivating
growth that is not always about their ‘partner.’
I thought you might
already know what that ‘me-time’ meant in your iteration. The timing of Alabama working in some of that
‘me-time’ juxtaposed with what I was writing, what we were sharing, makes me
feel like you felt you were going to lose that freedom as if I meant to snare
you. That is the last thing I would do. That is the last thing I would want another to
do to me.
I have in relationships
felt a fire closing in on me in my gut like there was no way out. I felt the other person wanted me to heel
like a dog or entertain her. No one
should ever feel guilty or have to feel like permission is part of the
equation. People should do what they
feel is best, trust, and more than anything be secure to communicate to avoid
anyone walking on eggshells.
Each person has to want
to keep growing and be a tree not too close to the other to have space to
branch out. One of my biggest fears in marriage or a long-term relationship is that
I will be asked to stop growing.
I saw what you could
offer and your reluctant self-permission to give. I saw an uncommon depth across both vibrant
and deliberative disciplines. It was complicated; it was intimate and all I can
do is write to try to explain why while knowing that boulder always rolls back
on Sisyphus.
When I speak of such
things it is not hyperbole, it is not out of bounds, it is realest human
endeavor I am not ashamed to say it is not a pursuit about perfection or even
love, but the artistic beauty that resides within each of us finding a space to
resonate with another human being. The
intimacy of that is like looking straight into the sun. Most people are so worried about their own
eyes, losing their way, putting weight in their side of the equation that they
flinch their vision, they hold their words and thoughts in caverns low.
Intimacy is simply about
offering. I am who I am. I show you me as honestly as I can without
grandeur or layers of pomp and perfumed enticement to shroud. Intimacy offers an opening, hands spread,
ready to both give and receive based on the love of the whole that reverberates
in the self. Loving the self becomes
loving the whole in such magnanimity.
Maybe
you can never have a partner. Maybe you
have seen what you have done in the past when you were vulnerable and know how
much destruction it caused and cannot fathom preventing a manner of sequel and
avoid intimacy because of it. I don’t
know.
Nonetheless
I hoped out of respect for a path to the intimacy I value most and a desire for
your happiness and mine. I know your
internal introspection of the paths that lead to your happiness do not perceive
my continued presence in that journey as a preferred or necessary
component. I imagine your decision to
truncate matters when you did was to an extent to spare me exacerbated pains of
what you felt you no longer could see yourself perpetuating. I know this is the salted reality of the
earthen crop I attempted to sow in one-sided correspondence.
These
and almost all of my words come from a humble spark in me for celebration of
the place your human divinity brought me and continued to bring me even after I
have no longer heard from you. However
strange that may be comes from a place that understands you do not want this,
the hope I retained was in the why of that declination.
I
weighed the cruelty in your non-response to me breaking raw in my writing
before you compared to the kindness and trepidations I witnessed. This was not just about a relationship ending
or continuing. This was about human
exposure of seeing who a person is to the marrow and respecting that
process. I went to a sacred place in me
to write you those poems to not only share the accounts of our dates but to
live them with you in preparation to write the next subscription as you put it. That was vulnerability to an exponential
degree based on faith in the woman I was witnessing in pursuit of a mutual
intimacy. Frankly it was one of the most
vulnerable romantic endeavors I have ever attempted and I feel like you threw
it back in my face.
You
self-adorned in a shawl of selfish as if in that cloak you could internally
justify staying out of reciprocating that vulnerability. I felt mocked and kicked after I was already
down, because to go to that place to visualize you in my spiritual canvas I
started to care about you in a way that was attached like you put a harpoon
quill in me. I felt like a hunted-thing
you didn’t even bother to eat. You just
slung the barb and left me on the beachhead.
I felt like you just walked away and cried whispering, “I can’t do
this.”
I
never saw cruel. I saw injured and
preoccupied. Some things happened in
your life. I don’t know what, but I know
what it is like to be hurt and to go through awful. I imagined you like a lioness with a thorn
and I might write and you might decide to pull your own thorn out.
You deserve to know you could have come over for that dinner
looked me in the eye told me your truths and I would have understood and wished
you well. This writing me what you did
like I was just another digital face in your phone, I never believed it, and
probably never will.
I
wrote you before to ask you to search yourself, to un-layer yourself in that
intimate space and feel what the universe was speaking to you. In the loudness maybe the quietness
speaks. Maybe that naked place resonates
in your path to such a moment of doing nothing more than being open, not
knowing the path forward, just to be vulnerable and dwell in a place of faith
rather than attempt to control. Maybe
that happened and you felt nothing; I don’t know.
I
mediate a lot; I do my yoga; I write.
Earlier this month I was in a bar in the Quarter listening to a
spiritual leader in the Houma Nation sing in Mobilian. The roots, the vibes, to me of what we are
mean a hell of a lot to me. I take it
seriously. In this year you intersected
my path. Your spirit spoke powerfully in
my space. This is why even though I do
not see you; I feel a perplexing connection I would rather offer every shred of
my consciousness to try to understand, share, and lay bare than ignore.
I have never met a woman
who has changed her mind about a man, not once.
Most women I know get addressed or accosted by male advances, invasion
of space in scattered settings so that filtering the bullshit from the slivers
of welcome becomes like a hormonally-tuned four-point compass for assholes,
hotness, weird, and potential. There is
just too much noise in the machine for reconsideration for what it takes to be
a female. Maybe it happens, but it’s
seems like a white-buffalo.
If a woman sees a man as
creepy or bad he’s just out, no shot, shut the fuck up dude, anything you say
just confirms that you trying defies her and sanctifies the validity of her
decision based on your lack of maleness to worry what she thinks to express
feelings. There is a display of
femininity in the act of emotional outreach and typically the potential for an
undercurrent of male-coercion that I gather both are rather repulsive to a
heterosexual female.
There is no going
back. There is no saving that. No matter the reason. No matter the point, she’s made up her mind
and there is nothing more rooted than a woman who has made up her mind.
Maybe you have looked at
my letters as that type of pursuit to change you, to change your mind, to tell
you I know better. None of my words have
been that. I don’t claim to know better;
live your life the way you damn want to, I just thought that you deserved more
information to make your decisions because this particular decision affects
life in a very personal way.
My words have been to
express the place meeting you took me, to peel back the flesh of my chest,
bifurcate my ribs and show you my heart beating a glowing seed of this universe
for who he is and how you changed him in the rarity and beauty you displayed.
Poets
live like an open nerve of raw emotions.
You seemed to have so much reservation about being vulnerable. Maybe my vulnerability shoved vulnerability
in your face and it was too much. I did
not mean to do that. In the moments when
you were vulnerable with me, those were some of the most beautiful human hours
of my life. I felt the distance it took
you to travel there and it resonated in my being like an awesome sun peeking
over the horizon to sound dawn. However
blinding you may have intended in your defense mechanisms I stared
straight. I know what I saw. I saw you raw. I don’t know the story, but I know it was
you. I thought maybe I was built to help
you get there like a poetic key to signal a solstice in the shifting of your
season. Maybe I was like permission to
dream.
You
brought me to that place, however we got there.
You did that. I respect
that. I thought I might have been on the
verge of bringing you to a similar juncture of release. The recollection I have of the things you
told, of what we did, is in spots uncanny.
I don’t know how that stuck in me to write all I did then and
since. I just know I respect the way the
universe appears to work for me to pay attention to the interconnections.
It
was not a simple woman staying on the surface of casual life. It was not a laugh and a drink and forget the
sabotage-heads that get us in trouble.
It was not let us pretend what our hands and legs entwine to do is disconnected
from these spirits and waves that wander our interiors. It was not drink in a bar and combust the
engine under sheets until the smoke evacuates occupants in the morning. You and I were not occupants.
I
hoped in divergent ways; I hoped diametrically that you were capable and not
capable of walking a path that might lead you to intimacy with anyone. For in your capability I find your
disinterest coupled with a joyous heart unburned by the potential manners of
grief I once wrote. Conversely in your
incapability I find hope that your desire to try to grow with me lay dormant
behind a greater quest to summon the vulnerability intimacy requires. So it is in these counterweights I send a
prayerful swallow to flutter upon your window in this season of giving, however
shameless singing thinking of you wondering if you ever think of me.
In
kindest regards,
Severus
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