Hush, now
Close out the light
No need to speak.

Where did you come from?

I want to know the circumstances that create a person, that create a functioning, capable, intelligent, beautiful person. I wish that I could replicate them, could fill the world with a thousand iterations and variations on the theme of rational and clear-eyed humanity.

More particularly, I want to know where he comes from. I find myself having to apologize for my tendency to over-analyze - I'm the kind of girl who ruins a funny story by wanting to know all the extraneous details, what happened before and after, what did she say to that, and then what? By the time I have all the information I want, it's no longer funny. But that process, the growth of an idea, of a feeling, of a person, of a relationship, is irresistible to me.

Time will slow when we surrender
Whisper now
Over the edge

I have made a lot of moves in my life out of a desire to help someone, to change someone's life, to change their stars, as they say in that movie. This desire is inherently arrogant - to believe that I know best for another person, to believe that I have the right to take charge, to force them into motion. I have always believed that I was doing the right thing, but I have never been certain that it would work out well, for anyone, least of all for me. When it has, I accord that mostly to lucky fumbling. When it hasn't, I have been disappointed, but not surprised.

Head rush
Are you still breathing?
Shiver...
Taking me higher.

Perhaps ultimately the difference is not in whether I change someone's life for the better. Honestly, it is no one's responsibility but their own to change their circumstances, should they so wish. Perhaps what makes it different from the way other people relate to people they encounter is that I try at all - that I am willing to be presumptuous, to be aggressive, to be rude even, in the belief that with a bold move, I can help.

I am willing to be despised if a person is happier for what I have been to them. It has happened before. It hurts - of course it hurts - but I am strong enough for that. I don't often ask for something for myself. This isn't an altruistic streak, don't slander me with that, it's just that I do these things because I feel I have to, because I can't NOT. At my most impulsive, I don't consider how it might affect my life at all.

Stay
Darkness take over now
Stay
No thinking twice

There have been two times in my life that I can remember asking for something I wanted from someone I respected as an equal, someone I didn't feel the need to help. That feeling, of needing something, asking for it, having it given without hesitation, is unbelievable. Perhaps I am egotistical in this - perhaps others don't experience the profound levels of difference between their development as a human and others'. But to be shown kindness - tenderness - let alone respect, by someone whom I myself respect: it is nearly unprecedented. It has happened twice before. Those two men are still with me, still my nearest and dearest family.

I've gone off on a tangent here, or perhaps just taken more than my share of time getting to my point. I want very much to write about Aidan - it makes me happy to add a new tag here for the purpose - but I am almost joyfully aware that it is in the vein of a post on his self-affirmation page, me reserving the spot to edit with more information later. It seems foolhardy to attempt to fully enumerate how I feel and what this week has been like when there is so much more to discover. Still, more powerful than my impulse to be complete in my exploration of the subject is my desire to preserve my feelings and thoughts, flawed and jumbled as they are, in their current state. Composed recollection is easy to find time for. These moments of giddy, delighted confusion are more rare, and harder to capture.

Stay for tonight
The sound of your heart racing faster for me
Is what will save me

Being surprised, being challenged, being impressed - sadly also rare for me. I am used to people turning out to be exactly what I expected them to be. I am used to being able to predict what a person will say under nearly any circumstance, and to have psychological musing on their motivations to back it up if pressed.

Aidan surprises me. Impresses me, challenges me. I had barely formed any expectations at all when he shattered them, by being more than that, more than what I have come to assume of people my age, whatever my age happens to be at the time. Instead of compensating, breaking down what I say and what I feel into small words and manageable bits, gently instructing a boy in how to be considerate, thoughtful, open, rational - instead at every turn he met me halfway. It was like coming around a corner and nearly running into a person because you are so used to having to go all the way to where they are. I keep on being startled to find him already at the conclusion I would have reached.

Whisper soft
Anticipating this eclipse

It's more, too. He catches me out, picks up on my fallacies and lazy thinking. When I spend too long talking to people who either understand me utterly, as with my near and dear, or who are not aware enough to catch me in my lapses, as with essentially everyone else I deal with, I cease to mind myself quite so well. I have not been kept on my toes this way in a very long time, and it is exhilarating, infuriating, maddeningly wonderful. It is what I need, to be challenged, to be given a reason to improve myself. I - and those who love me and forgive me my faults - have perhaps become too forgiving, too willing to let me sit contentedly in error or laxity. Just having someone to talk to who doesn't criticize, but without judgement makes me want to step up my game and offer the best of myself in order to properly return what he gives - it makes my excuses look as paltry as they really are. It makes me remember why I used to do a lot of things - dance, write, paint, sing. It makes me wonder why I don't anymore.

Pulling you closer
Melting now, covered in silk
Letting go into the stillness

It's easy for me to think of reasons why I do not feel worthy of this. Because I am not what I would like to be, because I do not do those things that I once did all the time. But where that thought - a perennial one - has depressed me into profound stagnation this past year... I hope, and believe, that I can change that. I feel as if there has been some colossal cosmic accident, that this feeling, this regard should be returned by someone like this - and yet, I am in no hurry to set it straight. On the contrary, I feel inspired, wickedly eager, even, to hurry up and BE the person that beautiful bonehead sees in me, before he reconsiders.

Head rush...
Careful, don't drop me
Shiver...
Taking me higher

It may just be the eternal romantic sixteen-year-old in me, but it does feel utterly banal and a little silly to exalt in someone's care, someone's deliberation. Still... if I shake my head and laugh in wonder, if my lips move, shaping "I love you" when he says something gorgeous that finds an echo in me - no less do they do so when he deliberately, calmly lays out his concerns and his caveats, his needs and his assurances. Such clear-eyed, unselfconscious consciousness of self, such honesty and integrity, has become vital to me without my realizing it, over years of doing without it in the people I invested time and emotion in. To not feel at risk, not feel - this seems dramatic, but no less is appropriate to people like Jeremy - to not feel so goddamned doomed in my affection for a person - I didn't know that I could still find that. I didn't know that anyone save those few I have clung to over the years was capable of inspiring love that does not hurt or weigh me down.

Memorize every moment
Letting this love take you over
Just breathe...
And stay.

Perhaps it's that that makes this easier, that makes me less reticent about groping through my thought process this way. I know that I am not being blinded or manipulated. I know that if I make a mistake, it will not be the end of the world, because we are neither of us children. And I know that if this can be whatever it will... it will be clean, and conscious, and make sense. I can be - and I am - completely head over heels, and at the same time understand everything. This can be both perfectly, humanly complicated, as all things are... and sublimely simple.

Hope. What a thing. What a voice, what eyes, what hands, what thoughts. What easy, fluid hours passing unnoticed. What a hell of a week, my love. What a creature... what a discovery.

I feel as if I should applaud.

Labels: Aidan, Happy, Hope, Introspection, Love, Polyamory

So today, I wrote a song for you
Because the day can get so long
And I know it's hard to make it through
When you say, "There's something wrong."

The most gratifying thing in the world, I believe, is to take a guess and be correct, to take a risk and land on your feet. I do that a lot - take risks, mostly with other people's lives. In one way this is the safe way of going about it; certainly I'm never in personal danger. In another way, I am the only one who does get the backlash if there is one: I put myself in the position of taking responsibility for someone's suffering, of doing something about it, and more often than not, there's little in return.

So I'm trying to put it right
Because I want to love you with my heart
All this trying has made it tight
And I don't know where to start.

Maybe that's a start.

In reading through the last few posts, though, I'm realizing how incredibly sorry for myself I seem on this blog a lot of the time, mostly because I don't post as much as I used to, and when I do, it's because I'm so overwrought that there's nothing else I can do but write. In the same way that Keshena writes to Hadoryu, I suppose, when she feels her worst. It's understandable, and considering that my readership here fluctuates between slim and nothing, I feel little compunction about using it in whatever way serves my purpose. But I am also concerned that it doesn't represent me well. I'm not nearly as miserable as I seem, I promise. I am a content creature, a housecat, all curled up with a book to read. And I try to be a lot more rational than I appear here.

So I'm aware - and it must be said, while I'm in a fairly cheerful and reasonable frame of mind; if not now, never - that there is a logical fault in fixating on broken people and then being disappointed when they do not return the favor. You knew he was a snake when you carried him across the river, as they say. In large part, that makes much of the below whinging and carrying-on my own fault, and I'll own that. We all have our weaknesses; I suppose mine is just other people.

'Cause you know it's a simple game
That you play, filling up your head with rain
And I know you're hiding from your pain
In the way that you say your name.

I should be more specific - it's not just other people. It's people who need something. Who need me, ideally. Most suffering people have no fucking idea what they want, of course - you can see quite clearly from the foregoing that I certainly don't when I'm in a lapse - and so I very frequently fall into the trap of allowing a broken person to pretend or believe that they need me, only to be disappointed and hurt when they become marginally less broken through my efforts and then realize that I wasn't what they needed at all. But again... no fault, there. Except perhaps mine for stepping into that silly situation again and again.

I see you
Hiding your face in your hands
Flying so you won't land
You think no one understands

This process, of believing that I am improving or learning from my mistakes, almost never operates at the speed that I estimate, nor do its milestones present themselves when I believe that they have. Almost always a false dawn, in my experience. My growth as a person appears to be largely involuntary, and often either catches me by surprise or proceeds inexorably in spite of my vehement objections. The latest question vis-a-vis this vexing process is whether I am still capable of falling in love according to my former standard.

And you're so tired that you don't sleep at night
As your heart is trying to mend
You keep it quiet but you think you might
Disappear before the end

I'm not sure about that, still. Certainly I no longer do that thing where I talk to someone in-depth for a few days and fall madly in love with them. That's sort of a relief - it never did work out very well - but there's no denying it was exhilarating. I do miss that feeling.

Then again, it's a pleasant thought that I might have moved beyond that level of immature infatuation with most people, into one where I'm actually capable of discerning who is worth my time, as opposed to merely being enthralled by the possibility that someone might want to talk to me. From the few pangs of it I have experienced in the time since it stopped happening so regularly, though, I have to conclude that one thing I am profoundly susceptible to, even to this day, is evidence of someone's attachment to me or need for me.

And it's strange that you can't find
Any strength to even try
To find a voice to speak your mind
When you do, all you want to do is cry.

So maybe you should cry.

It doesn't take much but that - just to hear someone reach out to me, to express desire or need. Perhaps that's such a universal thing that it doesn't even bear stating, but it's interesting how much it affects me. The little things, someone being the first to message me, to start a conversation, someone asking questions, being interested, analyzing.

It seems peculiar in fact to think that what I perhaps fall in love with, in other people, is their love for me - that without that, I have merely intellectual obsession. There's nothing wrong with that obsession, really; it's a simpler version of love, fascination with who someone is - there's that XKCD comic from recently - oh, let me find it, one sec.

And I see you hiding your face in your hands
Talking about far-away lands
You think no one understands?
Listen to my hands.

Found it! That's what I'm talking about, really. This sense, which is a part of my love for my favorite people but not necessarily impossible to experience without it, that I want to attend to a given creature and see what they become, given appropriate intermittent prodding. I want to be privileged both to watch and to affect the process, to prune and protect, to defend and judiciously corrupt.

So I no longer fall in love with people at the drop of a hat. I do still fixate, in this way. Maybe that's better in the long run. Perhaps, if that fixation remains active and vital long enough, it matures into love. I'd be very interested to see if that is so. I hope I'll have that opportunity.

All of this life
Moves around you
For all that you claim
You are standing still
You are moving too.

I will move you.

Labels: Hope, Introspection, Love