Love's labours: Postpartum
I thought i stopped eating on Tuesday afternoon and started barfing that night because that was about the time it became defined in my mind that we were done, "broken up" if you will--except that he'd never confessed to being a boyfriend in the first place**. But then i realised that i only had food poisoning or a virus or something. I'm not 21 anymore, and i'm happy about that. Nevertheless, i've no doubt i was only susceptible to belly dis-ease in the first place because i'd been feeling the feeling of receiving a long, slow punch in the stomach.
**whatever his behaviour suggested; he'd meant to be done with all that...
Once, while i was sucking his sweetness, he hollered, "You're the only one who deserves to get near that thing!" and as far as i was concerned it was true, i was. That was shortly after the first time he'd slept with someone else since we'd come together, and it was also why i never felt threatened by any such curiosity he might entertain with another--unless of course he failed to use a condom--which he did, all two times this came up. I don't mean that world-class head is how i had him whipped or some crap like that: i mean that what we had together, in every regard, surpassed anything either of us had experienced in love ever before--really, anything we'd even known to hope for. We'd established from the get-go that neither of us owned the other, and i genuinely didn't care what else he did, as long as i was safe. I am glad he didn't use condoms, though, because it's what finally forced me to zoom out and regard the bigger picture of our dynamics more coldly. In the long run, he would only be a boy i'd loved, but herpes would change my sex life forever, and HIV could kill me--or at least cost a fortune, consume lots of energy, and make me very very skinny. Unless he were up to his own role in restoring our balance, i didn't see the point in compromising any further, trying not to be a girlfriend when we were best friends and best lovers and some synergystic sum of those parts. I couldn't do all the work myself, and i couldn't make more work worthwhile to him. I couldn't face his fear for him either. Something had come and gone.
I'd had a dream, three nights before our loverly parting crystallized for me, that he and i had identical scars, old ones, running just inside our hipbones--my left, his right--mirror images. Two nights before, i dreamed i was longboarding up a steep hill, with him as my passenger--dead weight, no help at all--and then the hill got steeper. Hey, we are human. I have rarely been inclined to deny my own weaknesses here, especially not to one who often sees me more clearly than i can see myself. In some ways we are so similar, and in other ways we are more complementary, each of us needing what the other may teach and reflect. One of the differences between him and me is my appreciation of the dirty, failing, limited end of our being--the weak, the frail, the flaws that seem to stand in the way of our perfect efficiency and manifestation of our full potential. I don't just apprehend this: i accept it. I see its necessity. He is less in touch with this reality we're given to work with, preferring so far to reach for certain stars never to touch down on earth. He would probably tell you a different story which would also be true, but for my part, i attribute our end largely to his present inability to acknowledge and labor through all that is yet unredeemed in him and me. (It's both our faults. It's all our faults!) Even a match made in heaven must proceed on land, subject to forces of nature.
Maybe he'll have a change of heart and sight, or maybe i'll just have this much more room for all that occupies me and all that is to come. I'm still kind of amazed at how sanguine i feel, soon enough, in the face of every depression, heartbreak, offense, or slimy stroke of luck. In younger days, any lingering unhappiness threw me into a state of panic--and considering how some ancient profound unhappiness was pretty much my unconscious base of operations then, i guess it's no wonder i was an anxious wreck inside. Relationship failures elicited a whole different order of panic resembling something more like psychosis. I've been through all kinds of rough feelings in this relationship and especially over recent days, and i'm bound to go through some more, but i just... don't take them that seriously anymore. Dem come, an' dem go.
The difference now is not one of cynicism. Rather it's that, bit by bit, evidence has stacked up to suggest that a) hard things are mostly hard because of my calcified bonehead smacking into them, and b) something still better always comes along, usually more or less in proportion to how much headspace i can open up and how much medicine i let seep through the skullcracks. I suppose that's one of my grander reasons for wanting to stick it out with this fella, duke it out, deal with our difficulties: 'cause i know it's a beeline to buried treasure, bushwhacking through terrain i can cross with nobody else right now. My tactics are proven. I'm impatient for all of life. Given a choice between fighting the dragon and plunging my head back into the sand, the latter means certain death every time--but though i may piss myself under fire, pee functions as a sort of flame retardant, and i get to hone my swashbuckling skills a little sharper, and the key rattling in the reptile's belly shall finally free the princess banished to my dreams. Well there was a little adventure in metaphor, hahaha. And she lived happier ever after.
I remember telling him one night that if he were to disappear the next day forever, the gift would remain that he had happened at all--that this depth of love and connection was even possible. He wondered if he had ever, in many years of many relationships, been in love like this before, and he concluded that it had simply never been so conscious. I don't care to retell the story of our coming together. Suffice it to say that it was electromagnetic, twinkling with synchronicities, truly magical in every sense, almost incredible but for its blunt reality. I had never communicated this way with another person. I had never met a man who seemed both my equal and suited to me, a true match, who could follow me anywhere my mind went and show me new sights along the way. Oh god, we had endless fun, talking and fucking and fucking and talking, and playing, and laughing, and illuminating and insighting, and losing time altogether. It's a little sad to write about now, remembering all that--giving up the ghost seems a waste of such a solid foundation. This writing certainly doesn't mark the end of my hurting here. Ah, but anyway... I am changed forever. As is my sense of what may be. It existed at all.
**whatever his behaviour suggested; he'd meant to be done with all that...
Once, while i was sucking his sweetness, he hollered, "You're the only one who deserves to get near that thing!" and as far as i was concerned it was true, i was. That was shortly after the first time he'd slept with someone else since we'd come together, and it was also why i never felt threatened by any such curiosity he might entertain with another--unless of course he failed to use a condom--which he did, all two times this came up. I don't mean that world-class head is how i had him whipped or some crap like that: i mean that what we had together, in every regard, surpassed anything either of us had experienced in love ever before--really, anything we'd even known to hope for. We'd established from the get-go that neither of us owned the other, and i genuinely didn't care what else he did, as long as i was safe. I am glad he didn't use condoms, though, because it's what finally forced me to zoom out and regard the bigger picture of our dynamics more coldly. In the long run, he would only be a boy i'd loved, but herpes would change my sex life forever, and HIV could kill me--or at least cost a fortune, consume lots of energy, and make me very very skinny. Unless he were up to his own role in restoring our balance, i didn't see the point in compromising any further, trying not to be a girlfriend when we were best friends and best lovers and some synergystic sum of those parts. I couldn't do all the work myself, and i couldn't make more work worthwhile to him. I couldn't face his fear for him either. Something had come and gone.
I'd had a dream, three nights before our loverly parting crystallized for me, that he and i had identical scars, old ones, running just inside our hipbones--my left, his right--mirror images. Two nights before, i dreamed i was longboarding up a steep hill, with him as my passenger--dead weight, no help at all--and then the hill got steeper. Hey, we are human. I have rarely been inclined to deny my own weaknesses here, especially not to one who often sees me more clearly than i can see myself. In some ways we are so similar, and in other ways we are more complementary, each of us needing what the other may teach and reflect. One of the differences between him and me is my appreciation of the dirty, failing, limited end of our being--the weak, the frail, the flaws that seem to stand in the way of our perfect efficiency and manifestation of our full potential. I don't just apprehend this: i accept it. I see its necessity. He is less in touch with this reality we're given to work with, preferring so far to reach for certain stars never to touch down on earth. He would probably tell you a different story which would also be true, but for my part, i attribute our end largely to his present inability to acknowledge and labor through all that is yet unredeemed in him and me. (It's both our faults. It's all our faults!) Even a match made in heaven must proceed on land, subject to forces of nature.
Maybe he'll have a change of heart and sight, or maybe i'll just have this much more room for all that occupies me and all that is to come. I'm still kind of amazed at how sanguine i feel, soon enough, in the face of every depression, heartbreak, offense, or slimy stroke of luck. In younger days, any lingering unhappiness threw me into a state of panic--and considering how some ancient profound unhappiness was pretty much my unconscious base of operations then, i guess it's no wonder i was an anxious wreck inside. Relationship failures elicited a whole different order of panic resembling something more like psychosis. I've been through all kinds of rough feelings in this relationship and especially over recent days, and i'm bound to go through some more, but i just... don't take them that seriously anymore. Dem come, an' dem go.
The difference now is not one of cynicism. Rather it's that, bit by bit, evidence has stacked up to suggest that a) hard things are mostly hard because of my calcified bonehead smacking into them, and b) something still better always comes along, usually more or less in proportion to how much headspace i can open up and how much medicine i let seep through the skullcracks. I suppose that's one of my grander reasons for wanting to stick it out with this fella, duke it out, deal with our difficulties: 'cause i know it's a beeline to buried treasure, bushwhacking through terrain i can cross with nobody else right now. My tactics are proven. I'm impatient for all of life. Given a choice between fighting the dragon and plunging my head back into the sand, the latter means certain death every time--but though i may piss myself under fire, pee functions as a sort of flame retardant, and i get to hone my swashbuckling skills a little sharper, and the key rattling in the reptile's belly shall finally free the princess banished to my dreams. Well there was a little adventure in metaphor, hahaha. And she lived happier ever after.
I remember telling him one night that if he were to disappear the next day forever, the gift would remain that he had happened at all--that this depth of love and connection was even possible. He wondered if he had ever, in many years of many relationships, been in love like this before, and he concluded that it had simply never been so conscious. I don't care to retell the story of our coming together. Suffice it to say that it was electromagnetic, twinkling with synchronicities, truly magical in every sense, almost incredible but for its blunt reality. I had never communicated this way with another person. I had never met a man who seemed both my equal and suited to me, a true match, who could follow me anywhere my mind went and show me new sights along the way. Oh god, we had endless fun, talking and fucking and fucking and talking, and playing, and laughing, and illuminating and insighting, and losing time altogether. It's a little sad to write about now, remembering all that--giving up the ghost seems a waste of such a solid foundation. This writing certainly doesn't mark the end of my hurting here. Ah, but anyway... I am changed forever. As is my sense of what may be. It existed at all.