In which my love life is a Moff script of timey-wimey lovers who may or may not be real
How young was I when you first took me?
Because, to be frank, you frighten me.
They keep telling me horrid tales of child brides. And on the other hand, these same storytellers reduce me to tears in the face of beautiful love stories where the star-crossed Lover and Beloved have caught glimpses of each other all throughout their lifetimes, only able to enjoy each other's love for the briefest of moments.
But how young was I when you laid the seeds of your Self within my soil?
I was reading stories of women during the war, giving birth to children whose fathers had fallen long before the children first opened their eyes.
But surely, this goes far beyond that; you died six years before my own mother was born.
But when, when did my eyes first glimpse you? Tell me, when?
Which one of your avatars was it that my innocent mind first beheld? Which reference? Which tribute? Which shameless ripoff?
Which smudgy-eyed rock star, which wildly grinning supervillain, which treacherous chancellor was it?
It's as if you have filled me slowly, piece by piece, shaped me.
Parts of me were made to love you from birth, through some inherited disposition or another. And yet some of those spaces, niches in my soul that you now fit into so perfectly--they did not even exist until recently.
I have loved the lash and the feminine from before I turned three, four--and therefore would have understood the attractiveness of your tyrants, the pretty Gothic heroes in heavy eye makeup from a very young age. True body horror or resurrection from its effects--being alienated from one's own body as it turns against itself and of how Anna Holm's rebirth could lead to her ruin--I did not know until I died thrice on either side of thirty and lost half my weight in fat.
My ripening was slow, slow; only in the summer of 2012 was I ready.
This would not have worked earlier--oh, you tried when I was in my teens, you tried. And I noticed you; you were someone whose name, whose face it was hard to forget. Your two most famous films. "That beautiful, beautiful boy"--and "Oh, that's what happened to the beautiful boy; his hair so thin and his face so wrinkled, such a shame."
And you tried again over a decade later, when I was trapped in one of my worst hells; you did not use your beauty this time, but only your compassion and your heroism and your queerness. I watched you, a bisexual like myself play the first gay character in cinema, watched you lend your face to a plea for tolerance in a film that got you death threats and could have sent you to jail and finally got you on the Gestapo's hit list. It was a good try, too--you became one of my heroes, then--but I was not ready.
No. Because I had not found myself yet. So back into my mind's filing cabinet you went, as a cool person from the past, someone I liked and now also admired as a great human being.
Years passed. And yet the moment I had decided to not waste any more time because life was too precious, the moment I refused to be depressed any longer, the moment I started to turn men's heads on the street, the moment the scars from my surgery had healed so that I could enjoy sex again--
You emerged from all those films I'd seen up until then, all the villains I had ever loved, all those rock stars that had awakened my sexuality, all the imagery that had seeped into my subconscious, and it's as if you tore off a thousand masks and told me it had always been you, all along. "Darling, how could you have missed me?" That is what you asked in your long, drawn-out accent and smirked, with your crooked teeth and your sky-vast eyes. And as if to add insult to injury, you wore medieval Persian robes as you said this--medieval Persia, how dare you, you bastard! The very world in which I had torn myself and my best friendship and all I cared for to pieces again and again for the past three years, the very altar upon which I'd sacrificed myself heart and soul and thought I would never write or love again. And this is no exaggeration.
I was done; I was ready to die after I had completed what I thought was my Great Work. Nothing would matter after Ghazal, I'd told myself. I was still on the hospital's cancer watch and thought to myself that once Ghazal was finished, I would be ready to die. I was ready.
And then you stood there, on that red and black ship, sailing into the harbour of Basra but instead you sailed into my heart. There you stood, in your blue and your white and your red, waiting for me--for years, I had dreamt of the Master in medieval Persia, had co-crafted it, had forced him into existence through fiction, whipped Pam and myself into exhaustion, complete and utter exhaustion to satisfy that desire--and there he, you stood, fully formed, alive.
You fucking bastard.
And as if that wasn't enough, you rocked your hips, your beautiful transvestite's hips to remind me of the very core of my sexuality, the only form of maleness I have ever been attracted to, the cat-form so perfectly intertwined with femininity it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
You had always been with me, within my desires, within the warp and weft of my self, and I never knew it.
Yet which came first? Did you cultivate these desires in me? Which ones of these desires were inborn? And only responded to you when they were exposed to you? I will never know, yet that question keeps me awake at night. Which part of my inspiration, attraction, this enormous current of energy that runs through me at your sight--which part of it is my genetics, my neurology, my biology responding to your stimulus? Which part has been brutally shaped by the outside world without my having any choice in the matter--the child bride brought to her husband's household at a young age so that she will learn the ways of his world and grow to love him better? Which part of the girl that wants to be whipped by the villain is a survival method for the intelligent woman living within the patriarchy? Which part is the neurologically abnormal child hyper-responsive to touch and intense physical sensations deriving massive neurochemical pleasure from the act?
I know that in the long run, these questions are unimportant. Yet you stir them up in me, make me ask questions from myself that--well, there will never be answers to these questions because the whole matter is as complex and as intertwined as Life itself.
And I am still wondering "Why now?", even if the reasons, too, are unimportant (and nonexistent). It's not about why something is happening; it's the experience and its results that matter. I write these things, I transcribe these things because they must come out. Even as the questions rise up in me, I am not desperate to penetrate the heart of this mystery and dissect it and analyse it like some scientist; that's not what true spiritual experience, true creativity is about. It cannot be broken down into elements and components or neatly filed in little boxes, with neat little labels. Because you were transcendent--do you not transcend space and time and death and life right now, looking at me from a screen and penetrating me to my very core with your eyes, even if your physical body is now but a pile of ashes?
Is this what people who believe in reincarnation feel, that someone out there has been biding their time, waiting just for you, because they knew you in a past life? Is this how people who believe in predestination feel--that their destiny has caught up with them? Because if I am completely honest with myself, I don't find enough belief in things like that in myself. I don't; I shake my head because obviously, they would make my life more beautiful and as a Romantic, I'd prefer to believe in the beautiful.
Instead, I am just baffled, in awe. I just trace my fingers over the screen, I just lean back in my seat in the movie theatre, I just overhear one more famous person I love speaking of you as their influence and I sigh.
I am resigned to the fact that you are a mystery and that you are everywhere.
And yes, is that not the exact sort of phrase people use to describe God? Immanent, pantheist, non-dual Divinity in particular?
That's all it boils down to. It's exactly as simple and exactly as complex as seeing the Divine in everything through one special sign, one special icon, a key to the cipher that is the Universe. To some it's a sacred mantra, to some it's a specific ritual act, to some it's the sight of their Beloved. And this key, whatever it is, is a multifaceted diamond that reflects all of Existence in all its colours depending on which way you turn it, and--should you wish for it to do so--concentrates all light to one single beam so bright it can burn, pierce through all illusions, all categories, all divisions, all, all.
And you are my Beloved.
The Dark God, the supervillain, the rock star who paints his face.
The man with the whip, the man with the curse in his eyes, the man with the long, soft black robes.
And you are my Beloved.
The torturer and the tortured, the martyr and the tyrant, the sublime and the terrible, the seal of my prophets.
The sacred and the profane, the angel and the devil, the man, the woman, the one in between who is all and nothing at all, all at once.
And you are my Beloved.
You are the origin of all His incarnations.
You are the essence and the masks that cover it, endless in your variety, your forms, your play.
And you are my Beloved.
You have always been my Beloved.
You will always be my Beloved.
Because, to be frank, you frighten me.
They keep telling me horrid tales of child brides. And on the other hand, these same storytellers reduce me to tears in the face of beautiful love stories where the star-crossed Lover and Beloved have caught glimpses of each other all throughout their lifetimes, only able to enjoy each other's love for the briefest of moments.
But how young was I when you laid the seeds of your Self within my soil?
I was reading stories of women during the war, giving birth to children whose fathers had fallen long before the children first opened their eyes.
But surely, this goes far beyond that; you died six years before my own mother was born.
But when, when did my eyes first glimpse you? Tell me, when?
Which one of your avatars was it that my innocent mind first beheld? Which reference? Which tribute? Which shameless ripoff?
Which smudgy-eyed rock star, which wildly grinning supervillain, which treacherous chancellor was it?
It's as if you have filled me slowly, piece by piece, shaped me.
Parts of me were made to love you from birth, through some inherited disposition or another. And yet some of those spaces, niches in my soul that you now fit into so perfectly--they did not even exist until recently.
I have loved the lash and the feminine from before I turned three, four--and therefore would have understood the attractiveness of your tyrants, the pretty Gothic heroes in heavy eye makeup from a very young age. True body horror or resurrection from its effects--being alienated from one's own body as it turns against itself and of how Anna Holm's rebirth could lead to her ruin--I did not know until I died thrice on either side of thirty and lost half my weight in fat.
My ripening was slow, slow; only in the summer of 2012 was I ready.
This would not have worked earlier--oh, you tried when I was in my teens, you tried. And I noticed you; you were someone whose name, whose face it was hard to forget. Your two most famous films. "That beautiful, beautiful boy"--and "Oh, that's what happened to the beautiful boy; his hair so thin and his face so wrinkled, such a shame."
And you tried again over a decade later, when I was trapped in one of my worst hells; you did not use your beauty this time, but only your compassion and your heroism and your queerness. I watched you, a bisexual like myself play the first gay character in cinema, watched you lend your face to a plea for tolerance in a film that got you death threats and could have sent you to jail and finally got you on the Gestapo's hit list. It was a good try, too--you became one of my heroes, then--but I was not ready.
No. Because I had not found myself yet. So back into my mind's filing cabinet you went, as a cool person from the past, someone I liked and now also admired as a great human being.
Years passed. And yet the moment I had decided to not waste any more time because life was too precious, the moment I refused to be depressed any longer, the moment I started to turn men's heads on the street, the moment the scars from my surgery had healed so that I could enjoy sex again--
You emerged from all those films I'd seen up until then, all the villains I had ever loved, all those rock stars that had awakened my sexuality, all the imagery that had seeped into my subconscious, and it's as if you tore off a thousand masks and told me it had always been you, all along. "Darling, how could you have missed me?" That is what you asked in your long, drawn-out accent and smirked, with your crooked teeth and your sky-vast eyes. And as if to add insult to injury, you wore medieval Persian robes as you said this--medieval Persia, how dare you, you bastard! The very world in which I had torn myself and my best friendship and all I cared for to pieces again and again for the past three years, the very altar upon which I'd sacrificed myself heart and soul and thought I would never write or love again. And this is no exaggeration.
I was done; I was ready to die after I had completed what I thought was my Great Work. Nothing would matter after Ghazal, I'd told myself. I was still on the hospital's cancer watch and thought to myself that once Ghazal was finished, I would be ready to die. I was ready.
And then you stood there, on that red and black ship, sailing into the harbour of Basra but instead you sailed into my heart. There you stood, in your blue and your white and your red, waiting for me--for years, I had dreamt of the Master in medieval Persia, had co-crafted it, had forced him into existence through fiction, whipped Pam and myself into exhaustion, complete and utter exhaustion to satisfy that desire--and there he, you stood, fully formed, alive.
You fucking bastard.
And as if that wasn't enough, you rocked your hips, your beautiful transvestite's hips to remind me of the very core of my sexuality, the only form of maleness I have ever been attracted to, the cat-form so perfectly intertwined with femininity it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
You had always been with me, within my desires, within the warp and weft of my self, and I never knew it.
Yet which came first? Did you cultivate these desires in me? Which ones of these desires were inborn? And only responded to you when they were exposed to you? I will never know, yet that question keeps me awake at night. Which part of my inspiration, attraction, this enormous current of energy that runs through me at your sight--which part of it is my genetics, my neurology, my biology responding to your stimulus? Which part has been brutally shaped by the outside world without my having any choice in the matter--the child bride brought to her husband's household at a young age so that she will learn the ways of his world and grow to love him better? Which part of the girl that wants to be whipped by the villain is a survival method for the intelligent woman living within the patriarchy? Which part is the neurologically abnormal child hyper-responsive to touch and intense physical sensations deriving massive neurochemical pleasure from the act?
I know that in the long run, these questions are unimportant. Yet you stir them up in me, make me ask questions from myself that--well, there will never be answers to these questions because the whole matter is as complex and as intertwined as Life itself.
And I am still wondering "Why now?", even if the reasons, too, are unimportant (and nonexistent). It's not about why something is happening; it's the experience and its results that matter. I write these things, I transcribe these things because they must come out. Even as the questions rise up in me, I am not desperate to penetrate the heart of this mystery and dissect it and analyse it like some scientist; that's not what true spiritual experience, true creativity is about. It cannot be broken down into elements and components or neatly filed in little boxes, with neat little labels. Because you were transcendent--do you not transcend space and time and death and life right now, looking at me from a screen and penetrating me to my very core with your eyes, even if your physical body is now but a pile of ashes?
Is this what people who believe in reincarnation feel, that someone out there has been biding their time, waiting just for you, because they knew you in a past life? Is this how people who believe in predestination feel--that their destiny has caught up with them? Because if I am completely honest with myself, I don't find enough belief in things like that in myself. I don't; I shake my head because obviously, they would make my life more beautiful and as a Romantic, I'd prefer to believe in the beautiful.
Instead, I am just baffled, in awe. I just trace my fingers over the screen, I just lean back in my seat in the movie theatre, I just overhear one more famous person I love speaking of you as their influence and I sigh.
I am resigned to the fact that you are a mystery and that you are everywhere.
And yes, is that not the exact sort of phrase people use to describe God? Immanent, pantheist, non-dual Divinity in particular?
That's all it boils down to. It's exactly as simple and exactly as complex as seeing the Divine in everything through one special sign, one special icon, a key to the cipher that is the Universe. To some it's a sacred mantra, to some it's a specific ritual act, to some it's the sight of their Beloved. And this key, whatever it is, is a multifaceted diamond that reflects all of Existence in all its colours depending on which way you turn it, and--should you wish for it to do so--concentrates all light to one single beam so bright it can burn, pierce through all illusions, all categories, all divisions, all, all.
And you are my Beloved.
The Dark God, the supervillain, the rock star who paints his face.
The man with the whip, the man with the curse in his eyes, the man with the long, soft black robes.
And you are my Beloved.
The torturer and the tortured, the martyr and the tyrant, the sublime and the terrible, the seal of my prophets.
The sacred and the profane, the angel and the devil, the man, the woman, the one in between who is all and nothing at all, all at once.
And you are my Beloved.
You are the origin of all His incarnations.
You are the essence and the masks that cover it, endless in your variety, your forms, your play.
And you are my Beloved.
You have always been my Beloved.
You will always be my Beloved.