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. Regarding this thing that I'm attempting to build, here in my tiny little house.

I haven't told anyone of my immediate family the exact nature of this, not because I'm ashamed or worried about their opinions, but rather because I'm not interested in them. I could exhaust myself trying to justify what I'm doing to my mother, and hear her well-intentioned worries and cautions ad nauseum, but I simply don't have the energy to devote to it. I'm spending all my energy making this work, and it is, and it's great. Why should I stress about explaining myself?

Someday I'll stand next to Brendon, and someone will say, "Kiss the bride," and I will kiss him. And then I will rush over to Jeremy, standing on the groom's side, and I will kiss him just as hard. And the audience will be confused. And then I'll explain it to my mom, and when she says, "It won't work, it'll never last", I can simply end the conversation with, "It does, and it has."

So that's why I haven't been explicit with it, except to Katrina and Brian, and the other people who are here in town. But I'm being explicit now, because for those of you who do still read this (pretty much just Brock at the moment, unless I have lurkers I don't know about), your opinions are important to me, and I want to be clear about my intentions, because I am proud of them.

I love them both. They are both here with me and they will stay, and I will love them both in every way that I can.

Yes, I love walking down the street with an arm around both of them. Makes me feel like a pimp. Who wouldn't love that?

Yes, I love having them both in my house. They are wonderful to watch together, and their friendship brightens my life merely by being present in it. I don't have to be a participant in that; I love simply to see it.

Yes, I love Brendon still. Of course I do. In fact, this has only made me love him more, because now he's happy like he never has been before, he's bright and sparking with energy and beautiful because his best friend is here, and I feel so privileged to be with him, for his forbearance and his patience, and his willingness to make this work.

Yes, I love making love with Jeremy. He's great in bed, what can I say. It's new and different and makes my sex life with Brendon new and different too. Not to mention when we all end up in bed together, which I'm going to just leave to all of your fertile imaginations. I'm sure you can understand my enjoyment of that.

Yes, I love Jeremy. As I've stated before, having him here has been far easier than I was prepared to accept, and has changed my life in exactly the way I think it needed to be changed.

So there it is. What we're doing is unusual, and beautiful, and it's working. It's working because we love each other and want it to work, and when I think about these two beautiful boys and how generous they are with themselves and their love and one another, I feel the urge to fall to my knees. I feel humbled as I never have before, dumbstruck with gratitude for the strange angels I seem to have been lucky enough to catch. Love and peace and hope fills me, and I am whole. We are whole, my peculiar fambly.

Labels: Brendon, Jeremy, Love, Polyamory

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

God, I'm bored. I have to go to work in a few hours, so I should really be in bed... but I'm not. B, you've spoiled me, now I'm bored out of my mind during the time you would normally be talking to me. Waiting for nightfall in the real-life dark, so I can hunt again.
I... wrote a sonnet. Yeah, I know. But for some reason I was just inspired a few weeks ago. I'm crap on poetry, even worse on stuff that rhymes, but it seems I thrive under the restrictions imposed by the sonnet form. Some of you may have seen this already, but for those of you who both haven't and are interested, should there be any matching that description, I offer it here.

The Libertine Lover's Oath

To you, my love, in love, I bind my flesh

And if you’d feel the heart that makes this oath

Then lay you now your hand upon my breast

Where beats the vow which break I would be loath

And as in flesh the spirit’s secrets out

Let none forget my body too is thine

Though if you find that aught you are without

Then freely seek another who align

More peaceably with what my love desires

For touch of foreign flesh takes not what’s mine

Nor dims the love for which my flesh heart fires

Nor makes my flesh, my heart any less thine

In bed be you and me and two or three

Long as in flesh, in love, we in bed be.

It's not too bad, I don't think, especially for someone who has no delusions about her utter inability with regard to poetry. Will this happen again? Probably not.
As to my subject matter... what can I say? I'm a visceral person. Flesh and life and death and flesh and love and therefore love and life and death are pretty indivisible to me. What point is there in making pretensions toward separating the mind from the body? It's all made from the same stuff... people only make themselves unhappy by setting their brains at odds with everything else.
Setting death at odds with life is another unfortunate, common habit. There's as much sensuality in dissolution as there is in solid, tangible life. I'm not talking about necrophilia here, you filthy dogs, I'm talking about entropy as erotica. Two people--or, hell, more if that's your pleasure--dissolving, losing coherency in a form they've come to expect, gaining other forms as their constituent parts are literally shared... just because in general people aren't capable of such somatic decadence in the greatest moments of our mortality doesn't mean it's not there.

See, this is what happens when you mix mediocre poetry, pending exhaustion, utter boredom and my own particular, peculiar aesthetic obsession. I am officially a weird, weird woman. Remind me in the future to go to sleep before this happens.

Remember when we were just flesh and bone? You, sir, may have forgotten how good your world can be. Kiss your lover's lips and know that fate is what you make of it.

Labels: Introspection, Polyamory