You look like the sun
I was the only one
Who could stare until you were done
Shining on me.

I've made this post before. I find that... unbearable, and perfect, and perfectly unbearable. How is it that I've come here twice? This inimitable, incalculable, undiscoverable place... I could be a river-guide here, could dodge pitfalls and sinkholes, chart the depths and cruel shores of this well-known sea... where people who have never been in love dream of drowning.

Aye, I know this place. And seeing it again, after years, a different woman than I was when I saw it last - I know it better. I know the senseless, mindless dream that this week has been, more helplessly swallowed by the moment than I've known how to be since I was a child, forgetting all else in the world but this feeling, this breath, this hour that passes all too quickly... And I know the pain of this day too, the raw and wrong sense that something is amiss, the dislocation of a limb I didn't know I had and knew even less how badly I needed, the desperate, haunting and hurting, physical urgency to have you here, to correct whatever unthinking, brutal glitch has marred what I now know to be necessary and true: that you belong here, with me; that after only a week you have become essential to the point where spending another moment without you seems laughable and absurd.

And as we drank our wine
And let the world fade away
The sunrise tried to end it
While we tried to stay.

But another layer is new here - the cartographer's long sight, the sense that I have been here before and I know the truth of this. I know that you will be back. I know it as surely as I know the ends of my limbs and the position of my nose. It cannot be any other way. And I know that I will move heaven and earth to make it so. If I have never moved in my life, not to save myself, not to defend anything I have, I will shake my bones and lift my head and raise this lazy, useless carcass to bring you home to me. If I have any power in this world, I will make it so.

The rest of my life can't compare to this night
And only heartaches have given me sight.
They bring me to you.

The mental images blur - already it's hard for me to recall one day separate from the next, to remember: which day was it we walked in the park, which day did I make quiche, which day did we watch Boondock Saints? How can I catalogue the moments that took my breath away, that stopped my heart, that made time slow down? But where my mind falters, smears lines, smudges delineations, my skin remembers with perfect fidelity. It is so hard - and so incredibly powerful, and so necessary - for me to look at you now, my love. I look at your pictures and I know how your smile looks when it bends with pleasure, or softens with tenderness. I see your head turn and my lips know what it feels like to touch that soft place at your temple, where your blood beats close to the surface and your skin warms. I see your hair and my fingers twitch, wanting to drag through it, wanting the beat of your heart to make my fingerprints ripple and warp. My flesh remembers you better than my brain does, and longer. I don't think it will ever stop needing you.

Moon pours through the ceiling tonight
Shows me we're right
For each other

I can only wish that someone had told me before all of the little things that I could not possibly have known until I had my hands on you. Why did no one tell me? Why did no one tell me that you had silver all through your hair? Why did no one mention the way your body moves when you speak, as if every part of you proclaims everything coming out of your mouth? Why did no one tell me about the way you kiss, your tenderness and care, the way you smell, the look of your eyes when you get strident, the taste of your skin? All of these things seem so profound, so vital, that someone should have noticed before now. Someone should have noticed and informed me, so that I could have taken notice, could have found you before now.

And as we lie here and let the world fade away
The sunrise tries to end it
While we try to stay.

All of the world seems remiss in this, all of the world shirking its duty in bringing news of your beauty and rarity to me. In the same moment I myself am remiss: for not knowing, for not guessing, for not keeping you. But I will. I will be worthy of you. I will give you a place to come home to, I will give you a life to call your own, a family to belong to. Because it has always been yours, even before we knew you. Because we have been looking for you, even when we didn't know your name.

It's all about the first night and the last
Some people say
But I love you so much more tonight
More than yesterday.

So I promise and demand in the same breath; I will be better and I will demand more of you. I will be truer and I will require your truth. I will be stronger and I will expect you to cripple me at times with your strength. Call this a promise, a covenant, a vow even. A bond inasmuch as I am capable of one. I ask you, and command you, and beg you, and demand you, belong to me. Consider me, think of me. With the promise that I will spend every minute considering you, thinking of you, as part of this family I have been struggling for years to make. I will give you everything of me, if you promise to forgive it all. I will surrender every hope if you share them, will confess every fear if you will comfort them. Every mote and minute of my life is yours, if you'll promise the same.

Because it's already so. Because it's already done. Because I made you a promise when time stopped around us, when I held you in my arms for the first time, and because you made me one when you looked into my eyes and didn't look away. For that, for you, for everything you are - anything you want. Now and forever. Come and get it.

Labels: Aidan, Dreams, Happy, Love, Missing You

Last night, I dreamed it rained fire.

Today it was Iron and Wine, Stephen King's Tommyknockers, and circling thoughts of stagnant pools of water somewhere inside, old half-dry blood, gone cold and glutinous with exposure.

If this is an existential crisis, I do those as weird as I do everything else.

It rained fire in great, thick, fist-sized globs like napalm that stuck and scalded and were gritty underfoot. Raindrops were coming too in among the burning hail, all of it warm as saliva, as if the sky were drooling. Someone was there; I don't know who. It wasn't you.

We hid under a big, old fashioned movie marquee, and when it didn't help I looked up to see the rain and fire dripping through cracks above, long horizontal cracks that made the hot storm into thin sheets that fell in front of me and behind me, leaving foot-wide paths in between. I spread my arms, my legs, stood like the Vitruvian man and turned my head to the side to keep every part in that narrow dry channel. It didn't help. Fat globules fell on my shoulders and arms. Clear and ruddy red-brown, flecked with black ash, they hurt a little and left huge purple bruises wherever they touched.

We abandoned the shelter, broke and ran. Cracks opened in the street as the sun came out. I was calm and tired, hectically optimistic. I stumbled without surprise and fell quietly into a crevasse. It was a beautiful day.

It's getting smaller and more tangled behind my eyes every day. I feel I've lost purchase. I can stand up against the force of the sea if I have a good, solid stance on a rock. The rock's not gone... I just lost it. Feel like I'm drowning... but it's a beautiful day, and panicking would be such a loud, messy, distracting thing to do. Better to let it be, let it be. There's a sweetness in the stoop, in surrender, and I wouldn't break this serenity for anything. Most of all right now I just want silence... I'm so tired of defending myself and comforting others and making things work and making things right and talking and talking and talking and listening and talking.

Give me your silence, if you love me, and show me the truth in other ways. Give me your gentle eyes and soft hands, your lips lovely and still, the breath that passes burdened by nothing. Give me slow, steady caresses and the sound of your heartbeat. Drown me in your bed and let me sleep.

Labels: Dreams, Stress

I didn't sleep well last night, for various reasons. Sitting here at my desk at work, my chin on my hand, I dozed off briefly.

I woke with a start in this familiar place, too warm, too dry, too professional. I woke and for a moment it seemed that the past five days had been a dream, one of those sharp, endless dreams that seem to spiral out from the fractions of a second your eyes close.

Then - oh, then... a reversal of the terrible pain of waking and remembering that the world is not what you dreamed: I woke and remembered that it wasn't a dream. That against all odds, he is here, and he will be well.

Like a soap bubble or a butterfly in the hand, I feel reluctant to even breathe too hard, lest I blow it away. Hope is such a fragile thing, but so incredibly strong - as he says, a glass cannon, breakable but capable too of destroying walls and obstacles with the merest touch.

I am very happy right now, best beloveds... I hope you are too.

Labels: Aaron, Dreams, Happy, Hope

Now the radio stutters, snaps to life
Some sour song that sets it right.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to realize that the overriding emotional tone of my life over the past few years has been "apocalyptically joyful". I dream of the end of the world as we know it, best beloveds, and it only makes me smile. This is no goth bullshit here... this is a sense, shared by Brian, that what people like us really need in order to show our true worth and strength is a big motherfucking catastrophe that would destroy the structure of civilization. Zombies, meteors, ravening hordes of Scientologists... what have you, so long as we can pile into a pick-up truck, fight the beasts off with sledgehammers and trade gas for canned goods as our new form of exchange.

When London falls, he'd like to call
But the stars collide.
They're beautiful and much maligned
In a universe where you see the worst
And it's up to you to fix it.

I have the sense from time to time that I'm preparing for this to happen, even if it never does. I see myself going through life, reaching out to minds and hearts worth saving, gathering them close and girding them with weapons and tools, both mental and physical, for the struggle ahead. Something Procell said a long time ago is my guiding principle in this. "There is something here that I will not take away from the world just yet." I act to preserve and protect people because if I had to wake up in the morning to a world that did not contain them and the qualities they posses, I would not want to live in it. Sometimes this world is full of knives for people like those I love. How could I do other than offer a titanium umbrella?

It's easy to dismiss the "what's it all about" crowd
There is no doubt:
It's this, here, now.

Every day I try to convey to Aaron all the beauty I see in him and all the possibility there is for him. I am distressed to discover that his capacity even to imagine joy in his life is stunted, shrunken by circumstance like a plant in a pot too small for it to grow. There is so much more in the world than he can even begin to comprehend, but what I'm most grateful for is that somehow, by some insane faith or hope in him that perhaps he doesn't even quite know is there, he's willing to believe in my belief enough to change his life. I will prove his faith well-founded, by god, or I'm not half the person I think I am.

Now the universe left you for a runner's lap
It feels like home when it comes crashing back
And it makes you laugh, and it makes you cry
When London falls and you're still alive.

For the past two nights I've dreamed about Julia. In the first dream, yesterday morning, she was about five. Ladonda swam in a pool, got out bedraggled and wet, and turned into Julia who was also soaked. I took her hand and dried her and dressed her warm, and we talked about how you can love someone without liking all the things they do. This morning she came again, younger, about two, not out of diapers yet. The city was afire and filled with smoke and dust, and buildings were falling in a beautiful golden afternoon light, and someone brought my baby to me and she was laughing, talking about drawing a picture, completely unafraid. And I carried her through a tunnel with my boys at my side and we were alive and happy. She tangled her hands in my hair and I forgot that the world was ending.

The radio stutters, it makes you laugh
In the aftermath
Open up your eyes!
You're so alive!

Brendon's eyes are unbelievably beautiful, and sometimes it seems as if all of the peace and slowly-growing joy in my life flows out from that source, from his quiet adoration, from his excitement and his animated hands, from his laughter and his kiss. He fulfills every promise he ever made me, about exploration and discovery, about paradise and paradigm shifts, every time he whispers in my ear. He fills me with light.

All of us, together, laughing as the city comes down. We're so alive.

Labels: Aaron, Apocalypse, Brendon, Dreams, Hope, Julia

Okay okay okay okay.

I'll try this again. The previous post was me trying to find something to write about. Never a good start. But then I started clicking that ol' "Next Blog" button up there...

I stumbled upon this: the blog of a mother-to-be, or so it would appear. It brought me to tears...

I have to say this right now. I'm not sad about what I did. I had to do it. I didn't have an option. And I didn't connect with the thing in any way. It wasn't a child, it wasn't even a fetus. It was a vaguely fish-shaped lump.

That said... oh my.
You know what I cry for? Not for that little thing. Not for something I lost. Not for the creature-that-might-have-been. I cry for something I do miss, and something I look forward to having again someday, when the time is more right: the way it changed the feelings between me and him. That feeling of being three, at night, lying together. That feeling of being part of him, and him part of me, in a literal, physical way. The sense us being part of something else... part of living, part of dying. Part of each other and the world in a visceral, primeval way. I felt whole, and filled.

I mentioned below this conviction of mine that women are hollow. In a physical sense this is literally true. We have a place inside that almost never fills, and men have no such corollary. It's why women rage differently. It's why women are more self-contained and insular. It's why a woman can be whole all by herself, where men will always, in some respect, be incomplete: because there is a resonating chamber, where echoes rise, and it's full of potential and silence, full of hope and sorrow and waiting. Women never lose this. And when that place is filled... that's something else again.

That's a validation, it's a clarity and a diffused confusion. It's an answer and a million more questions. It's the use of a thing that has no other use, and that's wonderful. It's a terrifying theft of freedom and self-determination, and that's hard. It's a thing with so many implications that those too fill her up. And it's real love, in a way that will never be equaled by any other sensation: to gift her lover not only with the ultimate safety, holding him within herself and caring for him, but also with the ultimate promise of faith and constancy, assuring him that even this risk is worth it, and that she thinks he's ready, strong enough, healthy enough, happy enough to be a father and help her be a mother.

I think I'm qualified to speak here. I may not be. It doesn't much matter; this is what I got from the experience. Let me reiterate: I do not grieve for what I lost. But I hope and look forward to that sensation, that completion, and that utter companionship with him. Again someday. For real, someday. When I'm ready. When I can handle it. When I've earned it.

I love you. I love what you gave me. I love how you love me and loved me even when I had to throw it away. I hope you'll trust me enough, love me enough, to give it to me again one day.

Labels: Brendon, Dreams, Julia, Love

I was making a comment on your post, B, but then I started thinking and it got lengthy, and I discovered I had a lot more to say, more of an actual answer than a comment. So here it is.

I dreamed a long time ago, the first time I saw him in my dreams, of walking through halls, looking through windows, and of wearing masks to show him and make him smile. Masks and faces, disguises, costumes are a recurring theme between us--we're both storytellers, both dreamers, and both frequently yearn to be freed from the limitations of the form we occupy. Both aching for magic, for wings, for a sword or a spark, a deus ex machina, a spanner in the works to force a change in our lives like the ones in our dreams.
The irony here, the beautiful irony of the way we relate is that it flies directly in the face of the way a lot of people think about "relationships." You could say, and we do, with some hilarity, that we started off with a broken promise, and that's true. It's also true that we both spend a great deal of time wearing masks, speaking to each other through faces and people that, in many cases, bring us into direct conflict. Our characters frequently fight, sometimes physically, and with the catalyst of their respective foibles (Anfini's curiosity, Procell's neuroses, Rivaine's innocence) do things to each other that are, in civilized society, considered quite horrible.
There are a lot of reasons why our relationship is odd, and I love it. The way I think of it is that we spend... all of our time, really, telling each other stories. Telling each other things, in general, sharing information, trading media, showing each other stories, in pictures, in writing, in movement. It's all stories, and we're in all of them. I want you all to read the short story by Kurt Vonnegut called "Who Am I This Time?". It's exactly what I'm talking about. We wear faces for each other, not to hide from each other, always in total consciousness of who we really are, but evolving that concept of who we are by wearing faces that allow us to feed off of each other, to change, to wield magic, to fly. Together. Becoming greater, reaching new heights... I defend him with my sword, with my fire-breath. He lifts me and saves me with his wings.

Judged: Good
QOR: 15% evil, 85% good.

Labels: Anfini, Brendon, Dreams, Lies, Love, Procell

God, such a weird mood today... I hate it when I'm cruel. Because I'm never cruel except to people I care about. Other people don't even register with me, so I'm never so horrible to anyone as I am to my friends.

I'm sorry to the people I lashed out at today. I don't know what's going on in my head, but it'll be better once I've gone to Mexico and come back. Then I'll be able to treat you the way you deserve.

This last month before I leave is going to be hard for all of you. I don't say it'll be hard for me, because it really won't... I'm going to work as much as I can, make as much money as I can to make up for my absence, and then go. But all I can tell you is I really hope I don't hurt any of you before I get this unpredictable, capricious creature in my head under control. If I do, if I have, god am I sorry. I will make it up to you.

No one, least of all you, my friends, my dear ones, deserves to be treated the way I can treat people when I lose control. I'm very sorry.

I had such an awful nightmare last night... my dreams are getting worse and worse.

I was floating, in dark water, no stars, no land, just floating in the water that was warm, and I was alone. I was so stressed--the way I have been--about money, trying to figure out how not to crash and burn, how not to fuck this up like everything else, how I'm going to pay the next two months' rent, how I'm going to buy food, how I'm going to pay bills, how I'm going to fix the window that broke yesterday... all the grown-up things on my head and trying to be grown-up about it. I was floating in the water on my back, thinking about these things, and I started to cry, not sobbing, just quietly, angrily, and when I did, I began to sink, sinking feet-first into the water. There was light below me, and when I stopped falling I was in the street outside my apartment, and I was looking in my wallet at the ten bucks I got at work last night. And people I knew, people from school who I just barely know, came up and asked for money, and I gave it to them, smiling, "Of course, of course, I don't care, don't worry about it, you can have it."
Then I looked down in my wallet that was empty, and I put it away and I was going to go inside and go to bed, but then the sun started to rise, and I realized I'd fucked up, I'd been up all night.
I looked up at the sun and it was warm, on my face, too bright to look at, and I closed my eyes and let it shine red through my eyelids, and I almost felt relaxed, I could feel every muscle of my body, standing there. You never notice how many muscles it takes just to stand still until you really try... and I could feel each and every one, and some of them ached, and I was glad of the pain because it meant I was still in there, still attached to my body, as crazy as my mind felt right then. I could feel the wind on my ankles and between my fingers, and I could smell that cold smell that mornings have, like snow. And then I tasted blood.

I looked down at my hands as the sun came up and covered me in light, and I touched my lip and there was blood on my fingers. So red—nothing’s redder than blood in the morning sun. And I could feel a pain in my mouth, and I searched around with my tongue for the source of the blood, and then there was a sharp pain, and one of my back teeth fell out into my hand. It was so small, like a child’s tooth, and I was so scared, because I knew I’d fucked up again by not going to the dentist in two years, and now I was losing the only teeth I’d ever have. I looked at the tooth in the light and it was translucent and pink with the blood, like a lump of glass. I spit out the blood and tried to keep the tooth in my hand as I climbed the stairs, but I lost it. When I got to the top it was gone, and that squishy place in your mouth when you lose a tooth was just there, and the taste of blood.

Nothing chases me in dreams anymore. There's hardly any people at all in my dreams. Just me... falling short. Not coming through. Not having what it takes. I guess that's how you know you've grown up, huh. When your nightmares aren't about monsters anymore, just about failure.

Shit, I'm sorry to burden you all with this mess. This is why I hate these things. Angsty bullshit I'll get over tomorrow, and you have to hear it. And yet... I'm still gonna push that "publish" button. Someday I'll learn.

Labels: dread, Dreams, Stress

God, I'm never going to get back to what I was thinking about. I am dead tired right now, so I'm just going to say what I came here to say and then hit the proverbial sack (do not ask me where that phrase comes from, I just fucking work here. The grammar and etymology wizard is out for the evening.).
So I went to a party tonight. Go figure, huh? I do not do this thing they call social life. But it was a thing for May Day with some people from work, who are really my only friends here in town, and I'd nothing else to do, so I figured I'd shake up the ol' routine a bit. The place where the host lives is really attractive--not expensive by any means, but architecturally pleasing... I wanted it for my own. They were having a May pole, which made me ecstatic, since I haven't had the privilege of that particular fertility ceremony since I was a wee mite. Good thing I was there too--no one else knew how to do it. We kind of screwed it up at the beginning, you know, with the dancing and the weaving and the everybody being a bit drunk except, I guess, me; but by the time we got about halfway down the pole we really got it, and it ended up working out great, the braid of the ribbon so tight you couldn't even see the pole anymore. Really satisfying and fun. Should do that more often. Or things like that, you know. By which I mean cooperative constructive project things, not... um... pole-dancing.
Then I hung out for a bit, not knowing too many people. Had lots of free food, rock on. And then another friend from work had brought her Tarot cards with her, so I let her do a reading on me. Let me set one thing straight right here: I don't believe they predict the future. I'm a rabid atheist, and I don't believe anything can predict the future with any degree of accuracy. What I do believe Tarot cards do is provide a random process to aide the subconscious mind in bringing forth things it noticed. The subconscious picks up on patterns and little things that the conscious doesn't notice, and by bringing those out, one can often tell more about a given situation or possibly anticipate a certain outcome with some success based on probability. So my interest in Tarot is strictly in that sense.
Given that, it was interesting. Her cards were really beautiful. I heard pretty much what I expected to hear, which, hell, is par for the course as far as Tarot goes--you rarely hear anything that really surprises you. My mind is just really full right now--it's fucking hard to think. School is one thing, but it's really only one among many things clogging my cerebrum right now. My book and other creative endeavours are possessing me, which normally would be a good thing, but it's been a long time working very intensely on it, so it's a little foggy itself. Some other ideas... whirling around in there. My continuing, unpredictable, evolving story with his esteemed mysteriousness Mr. Janus Anfini... my angel project, stalled for so long but still in the back of my head... certain ideas of more esoteric import... my point is, it's fucking noisy upstairs. What I need is a hell of a break. I need to go to Mexico. Katrina, get yo punk ass back here so we can go lay on the beach.
So as is my wont when overclocking my brain, I recited to myself while watching the antics of the drunken people a short, cyclical story I memorized from Clive Barker. Some may be familiar with Nisi Nirvana. For those who are not, I present it here in its entirety:

There once was a woman named Nisi Nirvana, who went into a city full of iniquities, where no ghost was holy and no flesh was whole. Someone there did a great hurt to her, a hurt only a man can do to a woman. She escaped him, and returned to her own city, and she knew that she must make a good thing out of this bad thing that had come upon her. So she made a perfect little child. And she loved him so much that in a little time he grew, and on the day that she knew he would be leaving her, she called him to her, and she said to him, "I'm going to tell you a story, and I want you to remember, child. There once was a woman named Nisi Nirvana, who went into a city full of iniquities, where no ghost was holy and no flesh was whole. Someone there..."

And so forth. This story never ends, it just spirals inward. The key to breaking it open lies in the woman's name, Nisi Nirvana, but in most cases I don't want to break it open. The cycle, reciting it perfectly in my head or under my breath, over and over, is a kind of a mantra for me, cooling my brain, forcing it to concentrate on one repetitive process and let go of the more complicated things it's running itself ragged on. It helped tonight. The party ended up being a satisfactory experience, inasmuch as such events are interesting to me, which is to a very limited extent. I'm afraid social stimulation is an area in which my predilictions are fairly specialized, and over-stimulation makes me intimidated and frozen. I'm pretty damn shy, actually, when confronted with large groups of unfamiliar people. So extracting pleasure from such an encounter is a process that actually requires work, mental effort, for which I have the patience and strength... only once in a while. I think I'm good on my partying for the next few months or so.
Oh look, it's after midnight, and right on time the Vocabulary Apoplexy kicks in. I'ma go to bed before it gets worse. A good evening to you all, lords and ladies.

Labels: Brendon, Dreams, Introspection