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