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
Dear Julia:
I'm glad to inform you that your mother is a passionate woman. I'm slightly less glad to inform you that she's also occasionally very prickly. I'm trying to eschew such things, but it takes time, and effort, and... something else that I can't see.
Don't worry, baby girl. I'll have it figured out before you get here.
My love, she speaks like silence,
Without ideals of violence
She doesn't have to say she's faithful,
Yet she's true like ice, like fire.Live in me, little spirit. Wake in me, fire my breastbone, whisper in my ear, make me a better wife to your dad.
I got a plush Lorax for Jeremy. He's ecstatic. He gave me a look that shook me to the soles of my feet, his beautiful eyes, his smile when it's real, so real it blinds. It's these little things that save us, baby, gifts for no reason, raspberries at midnight, notes left on the pillow, dinners out that we can't afford. My mother taught me this, and I'll teach you: you're only ever as poor as you act. You might not have anything in the fridge, but go ahead and buy that daffodil bouquet with your last dollar. It's these tiny luxuries that make life worth living, wealth worth having. Ten thousand dollars won't do you shit-all if you aren't willing to give up every bit of it for a taste of what really matters.
Oh yeah... and your mommy has a high-flown hole-in-the-head imagination, and a turn of phrase when she tries like the sun in your eyes, and a filthy fucking mouth. And I swear to god I'll give it all to you.
Love you, little wonder.
Labels: Hope, Jeremy, Julia
Dear Julia:
I miss you.
I couldn't say why I have such an attachment to you already. To the
idea of you, even. I believe it is because you represent so many things to me. You are representative of my success, of the things I want to accomplish, because I won't bring you into this world until I'm certain I can give you the kind of life I want for you. You're representative of my growth, as well, because I don't want to try to be your mother until I know that I can be the kind of mother I want to be, until I'm at peace with myself and the things I do and want to do. I believe that you will make me that way as well... having you, loving you, you needing me, will make me some of the things I want to be. So you are very dear to me already, for all of these reasons.
Sometimes I ache to have you here, as acutely as if I knew what it was to miss you. I wish I could come into the room and have you throw down with me at Smash Bros. You will be as good as your daddy or better, and will beat all of us at the age of six. And Jeremy will call you Thunderhead and make sure that the first book you ever read will be
The Gunslinger.I want to brush your hair. I want to make dinner for you and put you to bed and get you out of bed and watch you play Baldur's Gate. My girl, you are everything to me already. Julia Regina Glasse, I'm waiting for you. For the day when I deserve you.
I love you, baby.
Labels: Hope, Jeremy, Julia
I'm leaving this picture up so that Jeremy, wherever he is right now, can access it if the computer he's on is filtered. But it's also on deviantART, so it's not of any particular relevance here.
So it appears that it's been long enough since I looked at this thing that Blogger has changed a few things about the system. All improvements as far as I can see. And recent events have goaded me to perhaps revisit this old habit of mine. I feel the need to set my thoughts down if only to stop them flitting about and banging against the walls in my head.
God damn it, my down arrow is broken on my Lappy. You never realize how integral it is until it doesn't fucking work anymore. SUCK.
But yeah. Okay. I've been thinking about this whole Jeremy situation a ton of late, of course. Talking to a lot of people about it too - Brian and Katrina. Both of them reacted the way I would have expected. Brian was his usual incredibly insightful and helpful self, giving me advice on how to help bipolar people (he would know). Katrina, as I expected, thinks I'm fucking nuts, which is okay, because I think I probably am too.
The thing is that even when we were kids I was less analytical than she was. Less logical. But between she and I, that's always been the means of problem-solving. It works great for us. It appears, though, that the intervening years have only made me less logical, more intuitive, more inclined to act on my hunches. She and I can still understand one another, but she can't quite understand the things I'm doing now, because they no longer make any real rational sense.
I've never felt so strong as I do right now. I've never had such bottomless, unfathomable conviction that I cannot be shaken, that I will accomplish what I seek, that I
can help him. And yet, the past few weeks - maybe past few months, really - have been so surreal that I frequently feel as if I must be dreaming. The person that I was - the rational, cold, analytical person who absorbed and spat out Ayn Rand and aced her Philosophy and Logic courses on debate alone - doesn't understand what I'm up to.
I'm gambling again, is the truth of it. I've always done this - involved myself in people with whom I became fascinated, embedded my energy and my abilities in their struggles, tried to affect the outcome. I don't believe this has ever been an altruistic habit on my part. I'm not altruistic in any sense. Up until now, I believed myself aggressively selfish, self-promoting, self-absorbed. I did these things, took part in the lives of these people, because it interested me. I would gamble - bet my emotional stability, my friendships, my livelihood sometimes - on the attempt to change someone else's life.
I've failed before. One major failure. It destroyed me for about four years after. So I know what the stakes are. If anything, they're higher now. I love Jeremy more than I loved Sara, and Jeremy is far more actively self-destructive than Sara was. I also have more to lose now. Brendon and I are arriving at our second anniversary of being together. He's the light of my life. I don't think that anything has the power to destroy that, or even shake it, but if something happens to Jeremy, it could certainly ruin my happiness in just about everything for quite a while. The same is true of B.
So it's another gamble. It's the hardest thing I've ever done - I've never fought someone so exceedingly eager to test me before. I've never tried to catch someone so far down. And I am staking more than I ever have before on this.
You think I'm nervous?
Fuck no.
Heh, it sounds crazy. This is why I think I must be just a little off my head at the moment. But no, I'm not scared. There is
nothing in me, not a goddamn thing, that even begins to imagine that I might fail. It's not that I feel like I can't, like I don't want to - it's that it isn't a possibility. To get nerdy about it, even if I roll ten ones and critical miss this one, I can't fail. My skill modifier is
that high.I'm engaged the biggest gamble of my life, but I feel like a card-counter in Vegas. Yes, there's an element of chance involved. But you know what? I'm the best in the business at this.
No one else can do what I do. If there is someone else on this earth with my abilities, they're not anywhere near Jeremy. Circumstances have aligned to put me in a position to help this man, and because I am willing to do it and unwilling to give up, there is no possibility that I won't.
Why am I willing to do it? That's something that he keeps asking me, and I want an answer as much as he does. I don't like not knowing why I'm doing something, especially not something as potentially life-changing as this. So why am I trying to save him?
It's not because I love him. I
do love him. I have since I met him, and having him here will only strengthen that. But that's not the reason I'm doing this.
Up until today I couldn't find an answer. I just felt a rock-solid conviction that I couldn't
not. But today, as I was doing dishes and pondering, I found the truth.
I don't know why this is so. But I know that, in my intuitive fashion which has become the norm - so far divorced from the rational, pros-and-cons-stacking that I did even a year ago - when it hit my brain, everything in me spoke its truth. It resonated in me as things only do when my conscious and subconscious are in complete agreement as to my motivations.
I am doing this because
he is worth it.Even if I didn't love him, I would do this. Because
he is worth it.He is a person who has already brought such brightness and grace to my life, and who, as long as he lives, will continue to do so. There is nothing, no one, who can ever reproduce his effect on me, my life, my Love. Jeremy is irreplaceable.
I talk a lot about my daughter. I talk about her as if she were already here, as if she could hear me, as if she were a guaranteed event. In a way, she is. Like a relay runner standing in the turn, holding out his hand, she awaits me somewhere ahead in time, seven years, ten, waiting for me to catch up with her, waiting to leap into my body and into my life and through me into her own life. My Julia is already there, before me, and she is watching everything I do that leads me to her moment, her birth. I love her already. She is already changing me.
That, Jeremy, is why I speak so fervently of how you will affect her. She already knows you, knows how I feel about you. If she doesn't get to meet you, she will know all too well what she is missing.
For her, for Brendon, for myself, for Jeremy. I'm doing this because
it is worth it. It is worth anything and everything I have to give. Maybe that's something that Jeremy won't be able to accept now. That's fine. I'm willing to tell it and keep on telling it every second between now and the end of the world. Maybe when her voice joins mine, when she speaks her love for you and you can see my adoration looking out of my child's eyes, maybe then you'll believe it. I'm willing to gamble on that chance.
Deal the cards, dearheart. And know now that you're playing with the fucking
best.Labels: Brendon, Hope, Jeremy, Julia, Love, Polyamory
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
