Beard Like A Shiny New Penny
Here I am. Computer room's arranged to I sit on the bed crosslegged while I'm on my computer-- I like beds, or the floor, better than chairs. I don't spend enough time on here for it to matter to my back. Directly behind me is an open window, and if I wanted I could lean out and touch an amelanchier or one of the weeds that's grown up around it. There's sunlight out there, but the sun hasn't swung around to beat on the window so it's still cool in here. A tiny sliver of sunlight comes in onto the bed, across my unicorn. In an hour it will be a wide streak, and then a big pair of irregular squarish shapes. After a little longer, the beech tree will block the light some, and dappled shade will come in. The leaves cast dancing shadows at the right time of year.
I can't lean out the window, though. I rarely wear enough clothing to be street-worthy while I'm insid and we're pretty close to a busy transit station, so even if I didn't get under the skin of my amazing italian neighbors there'd be a group of people passing.
I'm getting older. My birthday's never really been the occasion for me saying that with any sort of weight until this year. August 12th is coming up, that weekend bringing my birthday and that of my boyfriend and one of my best friend's, as well.
I don't feel lyrical anymore. I do, I don't observe. Words come harder to me. Situations are less this word and that word than they are simply a complex sensory experience, where my mind is a sensory organ to detect my thoughts. My actions don't spring from a long line of reasoning, so much, as they do from simply old reactions to things that have crystallised into consequences, into a future extension of my actions that I can feel as much as I feel the action itself. This, writing here and trying to carve the thoughts I'm feeling into prose, it feels jagged and blocky. I might be trying to rip a complicated picture out of the newspaper, and it tears this way and that way, cutting into the image here and leaving extra chunks of irrelevant words there.
I've been spending time with people who are younger than I am lately, on and off over the last month or two. Not just one person, but a couple, and in a conversational context. That's very rare for me with the exception of my brothers, and my brothers don't really count for anything because I love them so unreasonably much and have known them for so long that they don't *change* anything.
Now, though, something's changed. I'm carrying a weight. I had calculated the total number of years of relationships I've been in, if you were to take all my serious ones and pretend they were end-to-end instead of an overlapping mishmash. I'm twenty-five years old, almost twenty-six, and the total number of relationship years is something like twenty, easy. No, it's not the same thing as starting at six years old, but it's a significant thing. I'm trying to say that each one has graven things deep into me, and when the total result of all these engravings is looked at from right here, from this particular day and the days right around it, there's a pattern.
No person has ever been just a pattern to me. No person has been anything other than deeply exciting and new and different and interesting. Still, en masse they create this echo. The weight of the endings presses down on beginnings. The weight of beginnings sets certain things apart, gives details an odd significance or obscures them. Sometimes memory fragments whisper through, fairly often in fact, and I find myself thinking with a bittersweet whisper this one reminds me of Jan's idealism or Sasha was that eccentrically charming or, most devastating, Kynnin was this sweet.
Now I'm sitting in front of the computer crying and I don't even know what I'm trying to say. It's something to do with hope, and something to do with the weight of the past. It's something to do with seperation of people and with integration of experiences. I guess it's balanced. No ending is the end of the world to me anymore, even if it feels like it, even if it knots up inside like it is. You can't have too many ends of the world before you pick yourself up and all you have is dry tears on your face and a sheepish expression. So there, my mind has a gentler low with these endings, emotion but not a storm of identity and self-worth and broken habits so much. The opposite is also true, that's what I've been trying to get at. Hope isn't as high anymore, though it might be fuller. The sadness of endings is fuller too, I suppose, because I understand more what I'm losing (though I also understand what I am gaining).
I remember moments, lying there, where I thought to myself please let me remember these few seconds that hold such transcendant beauty and I can never be sad or lonely again, having lived through this. I even remember some of those moments. I still have them, and I still want to etch them onto the uncertain mass of memory that I carry with me. I no longer take them to mean anything about my future, though. It makes them perhaps more precious, things whose purpose is *now* and not *later* so I can immerse myself fully, but...
Where I am right now, this vaguely chaotic mid-twenties partnership in a rented sunny house with a mismash family of pets and a stable partnership that feels like a handrail on a flat sidewalk or like a hammock hanging over a soft lawn, I've wanted fiercely to be here all my life. I had thought I would be here with Kynnin, maybe with a kid, but the shell of it is the same. I thought that for eight years. Now I'm here with Bob, and it's what I wanted, what I still want, though not perhaps for much longer. I'm happy here, and I used to believe I could be neither here nor happy with anyone but Kynnin.
The individual moments are unique, of course. The feel of the hand in mind, the details of lounging around in the mornings, the way we speak and make love or just fuck, the personal idiosyncracies are all things that cannot be replicated by anyone except the combination of Bob and I.
In the end it all adds up to this enormous sense, when I am with someone, that it doesn't matter very much. That this which we share right now is wonderful, but it has a beginning and an end, and if not you, then someone else sometime else. There's no edge of desperation, no feeling of completion, no ability to fully lie myself down and surrender to the chain that begins with the feeling and ends with you are the most important person in the world and everything will be alright now.
And that, I suppose, is why I feel older. Cause I am.
I can't lean out the window, though. I rarely wear enough clothing to be street-worthy while I'm insid and we're pretty close to a busy transit station, so even if I didn't get under the skin of my amazing italian neighbors there'd be a group of people passing.
I'm getting older. My birthday's never really been the occasion for me saying that with any sort of weight until this year. August 12th is coming up, that weekend bringing my birthday and that of my boyfriend and one of my best friend's, as well.
I don't feel lyrical anymore. I do, I don't observe. Words come harder to me. Situations are less this word and that word than they are simply a complex sensory experience, where my mind is a sensory organ to detect my thoughts. My actions don't spring from a long line of reasoning, so much, as they do from simply old reactions to things that have crystallised into consequences, into a future extension of my actions that I can feel as much as I feel the action itself. This, writing here and trying to carve the thoughts I'm feeling into prose, it feels jagged and blocky. I might be trying to rip a complicated picture out of the newspaper, and it tears this way and that way, cutting into the image here and leaving extra chunks of irrelevant words there.
I've been spending time with people who are younger than I am lately, on and off over the last month or two. Not just one person, but a couple, and in a conversational context. That's very rare for me with the exception of my brothers, and my brothers don't really count for anything because I love them so unreasonably much and have known them for so long that they don't *change* anything.
Now, though, something's changed. I'm carrying a weight. I had calculated the total number of years of relationships I've been in, if you were to take all my serious ones and pretend they were end-to-end instead of an overlapping mishmash. I'm twenty-five years old, almost twenty-six, and the total number of relationship years is something like twenty, easy. No, it's not the same thing as starting at six years old, but it's a significant thing. I'm trying to say that each one has graven things deep into me, and when the total result of all these engravings is looked at from right here, from this particular day and the days right around it, there's a pattern.
No person has ever been just a pattern to me. No person has been anything other than deeply exciting and new and different and interesting. Still, en masse they create this echo. The weight of the endings presses down on beginnings. The weight of beginnings sets certain things apart, gives details an odd significance or obscures them. Sometimes memory fragments whisper through, fairly often in fact, and I find myself thinking with a bittersweet whisper this one reminds me of Jan's idealism or Sasha was that eccentrically charming or, most devastating, Kynnin was this sweet.
Now I'm sitting in front of the computer crying and I don't even know what I'm trying to say. It's something to do with hope, and something to do with the weight of the past. It's something to do with seperation of people and with integration of experiences. I guess it's balanced. No ending is the end of the world to me anymore, even if it feels like it, even if it knots up inside like it is. You can't have too many ends of the world before you pick yourself up and all you have is dry tears on your face and a sheepish expression. So there, my mind has a gentler low with these endings, emotion but not a storm of identity and self-worth and broken habits so much. The opposite is also true, that's what I've been trying to get at. Hope isn't as high anymore, though it might be fuller. The sadness of endings is fuller too, I suppose, because I understand more what I'm losing (though I also understand what I am gaining).
I remember moments, lying there, where I thought to myself please let me remember these few seconds that hold such transcendant beauty and I can never be sad or lonely again, having lived through this. I even remember some of those moments. I still have them, and I still want to etch them onto the uncertain mass of memory that I carry with me. I no longer take them to mean anything about my future, though. It makes them perhaps more precious, things whose purpose is *now* and not *later* so I can immerse myself fully, but...
Where I am right now, this vaguely chaotic mid-twenties partnership in a rented sunny house with a mismash family of pets and a stable partnership that feels like a handrail on a flat sidewalk or like a hammock hanging over a soft lawn, I've wanted fiercely to be here all my life. I had thought I would be here with Kynnin, maybe with a kid, but the shell of it is the same. I thought that for eight years. Now I'm here with Bob, and it's what I wanted, what I still want, though not perhaps for much longer. I'm happy here, and I used to believe I could be neither here nor happy with anyone but Kynnin.
The individual moments are unique, of course. The feel of the hand in mind, the details of lounging around in the mornings, the way we speak and make love or just fuck, the personal idiosyncracies are all things that cannot be replicated by anyone except the combination of Bob and I.
In the end it all adds up to this enormous sense, when I am with someone, that it doesn't matter very much. That this which we share right now is wonderful, but it has a beginning and an end, and if not you, then someone else sometime else. There's no edge of desperation, no feeling of completion, no ability to fully lie myself down and surrender to the chain that begins with the feeling and ends with you are the most important person in the world and everything will be alright now.
And that, I suppose, is why I feel older. Cause I am.