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

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

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

Hokay!

There's been a lot of emo crap around here lately. Let's push it a bit further down the page, shall we? We'll replace it with things that are making me feel delightful today:

Our (mine and Dan's) birthday dinner on Sunday was lovely and very tasty, and I felt a wonderful, quiet sense of pride that I have made myself a life wherein I can dress up in a beautiful new dress, select make-up that compliments my face, wear my mother's wedding pearls and look fantastic; wherein I can go out to an expensive meal at a nice restaurant with my friends whom I love dearly; wherein I can ride home in a warm car, full and sleepy, listening to James Brown and talking about some aspect of American history with Marcus and Brian, just like we used to do around the dinner table at my mom's house. I have made this life, all by myself. I feel adult and capable and beautiful, and I feel that I am reaping the rewards of the work I've done.

In other news, I am the scourge of geeky men! I give them confidence and force them to laugh and rage and be interested, and I wallop them about the head and shoulders until they believe in themselves! RAOWR.

I feel unreasonably awesome. And, as I've been feeling more and more lately, I want to share this with all of you. Whoever you are, reading this right now. Whether I know you or not - hell, especially if I don't know you. I want to talk to you.

Hey. How are you?

I have a name, and so do you, but that doesn't matter much. Mostly online I go by Gentle, so you can call me that if it helps. I'll call you whatever you want.

Are you having a good day? I hope so. I'm not just saying that, either. I really do. Actually, that's a good thing to remember about me. If I tell you I care, if I tell you I hope you're happy, if I tell you I love you, I mean it. I mean it to the fullest and deepest extent of the word.

When I tell you I care whether you had a good day, I mean that I want to know all about it. I want you to tell me what was good, and what was bad, and why. I want to know what you saw that was beautiful, and how it made you feel, and what you thought about it all, and what you'll remember.

When I tell you that you're beautiful, understand that I mean you, sitting there in your chair or on your couch or at your desk. You, the person sitting there thinking that I don't mean you. You're exactly who I'm talking to. You are beautiful, and not in that inspirational-poster way that we're all beautiful people inside. That's bullshit. Your face is beautiful and your body is beautiful, and if I could touch you I would show you how true that is. Your voice is beautiful and your eyes are beautiful, and if I could see them I would look into them all day. Your mind is beautiful and your words are beautiful, and I want you to give them all to me so that I can listen.

This is not a selfless request. I am demanding your words, your work, your thoughts, your truth, because I want them. I will accept no less than everything you can give me. I want them because they make me happy.

So when I tell you that I love you, this is what I mean: I find you fascinating and enchanting and dazzlingly lovely, and I would like to watch you as long as you'll permit to see what you do and what becomes of you. I want the greatest happiness in the world for you, and I want to see what your face looks like when you get it. I want to see you weep, see what breaks you, and I want to help you put it back together again to see what you become after that. I will always want to hear from you, I will always be glad to see you, and I will always open my arms to you when you arrive. You will always have the best of me and all that I can give.

Yeah, you. Sitting in your chair.

I love you.

I'm kissing you and I'm holding your hand. I'm smiling into your face and giving you a little shake to make you laugh. If I made your day a little better, or hell, a little worse, tell me. Yell at me, rant at me, whisper to me, sing to me.

I'm listening.

Labels: Happy, Love, You

Sure. Every day you're not here my glow fades. But why should I worry, when just talking to you brings it back full-force?
My phantom... you're magic. I mean that as a noun, not an adjective.

Judged: Good
QOR: 35% evil, 65% good.

Labels: Brendon, Happy, Missing You