I'm just writing down a few things that are in my head right now.  I think I'd like to explore them a little more later, but for now I don't want to forget them.

- No relationship has to be equal, in any way.  Balance of power need not be equal, rules and privileges need not be equal, actions and opportunities need not be equal.  All that is necessary is that all partners' needs are being met as fully as possible.

- Being polyamorous does not mean that your boyfriend wants you less.  It means that he has the opportunity, at any time, to see what he's "missing."  He is able at any moment to walk away, and he chooses not to.  He is not required to be with you.  He is not obligated to be with you.  He has free rein to an entire world of other options and he is choosing to be with you.

These are the days.
These are days you'll remember.

I don't think I made myself clear, when I made this list.  I don't think I perhaps ever make myself clear.  I'm sorry for that.  I wish I could - the truth is that when it's not shyness that stops my mouth, it's that I have only begun to understand what I need and why, and I could as little explain it to you fully as I could sail across the Pacific on my own.  I've never been here before, done this before.  I have never tried to correct myself the way I'm doing now.  I have always found abundant fault with myself, but I have never believed before that it was possible for me to change.

Never before and never since
I promise
Will the whole world be warm as this
And as you feel it, you'll know it's true
That you
Are blessed and lucky

But you believe that, don't you?  You believe in me.  To a degree that I am unable to render into words, I think... you believe in me.  You sincerely believe, not only that I am worth the trouble, worth the effort, worth the vexation and irritation and heartache and stress and nonsense that accompanies every day in my presence, you believe... that it can get better.  That I can improve.  That how I am now does not have to doom everything I am and everything I will ever try to do.

It's true
That you
Are touched by something
That will grow and bloom
In you

It's such a foreign thought to me that it's impossible to internalize.  I know that you believe it.  I see it in your eyes.  If I didn't know it, I couldn't do this, not any part of it.  But I can't know why.  I can't begin to understand why anyone - why YOU, of all people - would invest what time and energy you have to spare in this.  I cannot begin to imagine what return it might have.  I cannot begin to hope that I will ever reward your patience, your tenderness, your faith, your strength. 

These are days you'll remember
When May is rushing over you 

But because you believe that I will do all those things, because you believe that I can... I will trust you.  There's a spark of protest in me that says that is weakness - to believe it on the strength of your belief.  But that's the thing, magician.  When you can't walk, you crawl.  And when you can't do that... you find someone to carry you.  I don't want you to have to carry me... but I won't say that I don't need someone to lean on while I limp, for a while.

With desire
To be part of the miracles you see
In every hour

I am more of a fool than you can ever know.  I am such a fool that I can listen to wise people, people who have taught you to be someone I love, someone I respect, someone I am prepared as I never have been before to submit my will and wit to... I can listen to these people, and some part of me still scoffs and insists that it's square, it's played, it's cliched and too mainstream to BEHAVE LIKE A HUMAN FUCKING BEING.  Some small part of me still twitches and tries to laugh it off when people are open with each other, willing to take guidance from each other - when people try to be GOOD to one another.  Some small - and it is vanishingly small, but I cannot deny it is there - part of me still thinks the "cool" thing to do is to swallow everything I experience, and treat the people I love with cold amusement and wry detachment.  I have spent all my life rebelling against this and yet, when people try to reach out to me as they did today, I still retreat.

You'll know it's true
That you are blessed and lucky
  
I should have amended the list of sins I enumerated when we first spoke.  If I could rewrite it now, I would be sure to mention how cynical I can be, how jaded, how utterly unwilling to accept my own worth or any possibility of value on the part of anyone else.  I would make sure to warn you how selfish I can be, how unable to step outside my own perspective, how ridiculously certain of my own accuracy I am at times, how unwilling to listen to correction.  I would absolutely lay bare my habit of stomping on other people's fun when I think they're wrong, and my way of shutting you down when I don't have all the information, and my sinking, swallowing certainty that things will go wrong and therefore I have the right to pass judgment on any attempt to gainsay that.  I would make sure you knew how difficult I am, how egotistical, how lazy, how reactionary, how bloodymindedly certain of my own damned foolishness.

It's true
That you are touched by something
That will grow and bloom in you.

Y'know what, though?  I could add to that list now.  Because spelling out my sins gives me the strength to cop to my saving graces.  Because if you can see and forgive the worst of me, somehow I can see some of the best.  I could add that I really do honestly care about other people, even the people I've never met.  I care about their right to contribute to a conversation.  I care about not harming their chances or their fun.  I care about what they have to say.  I could tell you that I am starting to learn to see when I'm making a mistake.  To stop myself... that, I'm working on.  But I can see when it's done.

These are days you might fill with laughter
Until you break
These days you might feel a shaft of light
Make its way across your face

That's the part I need help with.  That's the part I need you to be a crutch for, sometimes - to help me limp to where I should be.  The stopping myself.  I know when I'm wrong - by god, I really, really do know how wrong I am sometimes.  But I cannot bring myself to correct it, to take it back, to make it better.  Not on my own.  I need help with that.  I need someone to check me, to hush me, to punish me even.  Because there has never been a reason before.  There has never been anything to strive for, before.  There has never been hope before... not hope like that you make me feel, by believing in me.

And when you do
You'll know how it was meant to be
See the signs and know their meaning
It's true
You'll know how it was meant to be
Hear the signs and know they're speaking to you.

I've got so much to ask you
 It's never the time
Why would I
Spoil a perfect evening?

It hurts, but it doesn't bruise.  I don't bruise.  Not much.  No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try.  Try to bruise, try to apologize, try to be ashamed.  Try to be sorry.  And I am, in some ways.  I'm sorry for how I've warped your life.  I'm sorry for all I took you away from, I'm sorry for all I complicated, I'm sorry for all I damaged.


We've gotten this far
On being polite

 You have no idea how beautiful you are.  You may never.  Just as you may never know how badly I've wounded everything you are, how irreparably I cripple everything I touch.  Just as you may never know how sorry I am for all of it.


Besides
I know you're proud of me

You may never know that I'm not sorry.  Sorry for hurting you, yes.  Sorry for putting a fracture in your beauty that may never go away.  Sorry for upsetting the line, the road, the path, that should have taken you where you wanted to be.  Sorry for making you think that I could give you fairy tales, could give you happily ever after, could give you a princess or a goddess or even a human.


When I was made
Did they leave out a part?
Did you know this, and choose to guard the secret?

I'm not sorry for who I am.  I wish I was sorry.  I SHOULD be sorry.  But it's not the same thing.  At some level, I am too much in love with this horror.  I hesitate to type it, I delete it, my stomach turns - that indicates to me that it is right, that I must set it down.  If my body rebels, it is true as the truth can be.


You said 'everybody's born
With a beautiful heart.'
What was wrong with hers?
Why did you leave it?

I should be sorry that there's something wrong with me, that I'm too emotional, too reactionary, too vulnerable, too dangerous.  I should be sorry that I scare you - not angry that you can't take it.  I should be considerate, be thoughtful, remember that I am not in my right mind, am rarely in my right mind, cannot make decisions this way, cannot make statements this way.  As I promised myself.  I should be ashamed of the way my skin splits over my knuckles.  Instead of sorry that I didn't bleed more.  Instead of sorry that I won't bruise.


If I start to cry
I may not stop.

  It hurts.  I punched a tree tonight, again.  Badly.  Hard as I could, over and over.  But my body has learned.  It doesn't send blood to those hands anymore.  It doesn't try to heal them right away.  I don't bruise.  I never bruise.  Hickeys, yes.  But no bruises.  Just like when I was a teenager... none of it means anything, because there are no bruises.


Love runs dry...
I run off.

I'm sorry for everything I do to you.  The truth is that I should be kept away from people, from people like you.  From exactly the kind of people I love.  Because you are too perfect, too valuable, too important to place in my hands.  Perhaps Katrina knew years ago what it has taken me till now to realize: I must be kept away from good people.  I damage them.  I love them... and then I damage them.  The road to hell, et cetera.  It's a cliche.  It's all a cliche.


Can you help me with this heart
Inside my chest?


It's all a cliche, it's all been done, it's all been played.  We're all such terribly self-absorbed people.  We want so badly to be different, to be special, even in our self-abnegation.  But there is no way on this earth to obliterate the ego that has not been tried before.  And every single attempt, by definition, is an enhancement to that very ego.  God... so insufferable.  Trust me, I hear this tone in my voice.  I know how bad it is, and I'm closer to it.  I have to live with it every day.


It ain't perfect
But you should see me use it.

Maybe that's why this.  Because there is no dinh.  There is no answer.  There is no one better than you, no one wiser than you, no one infallible who can ever tell you with perfect certainty what you should do and whom you should be.  Every soul who has ever attempted to give you counsel has doubted, has sinned, has wept, has wanted to kill themselves.  They have all had moments of weakness in which they were more selfish, more helpless, more useless than you will ever know.  No one is worthy of respect.  Which means that everyone is.


But it only works
When I've made a mess
When it looks like
I'm about to lose it.

I'm sorry.  I'm sorry every single day for everything I've done.  To you, Aidan - for everything I have even begun to do to you, and for the future and everything I will do to warp and harm everything you are, everything I find beautiful about you.  Because that is how it happens.  As much as I would give almost anything to worship at your feet - as much as I am dying, every single moment, to set down my burdens and be helpless at your hand, more than you can ever know - I can't.  I want to, and I can't.  And I'm sorry for that too.  You deserve everything from me.  You are more than I ever expected to find in this world.  I wish that I could be everything you need.


If I start to cry
I may not stop.
Love runs dry...
And I run off. 


To you, B, for everything I promised you and have never delivered.  May never.  I should tell you that I'm not the person I promised you that I would be.  I don't know that I will ever be.  All I can ever give you is the knowledge that I wanted to be - that for you I would have given everything in the world to become what you deserve, and that you deserve more than I have ever given you or ever will.  I am so sorry for what I've done to you, for how I've tormented and twisted you.  You are so utterly perfect - there has never been anything wrong with you.  I promise.  I swear to god.  You are the greatest gift I have ever been given.  I only wish that I could ever have had a prayer of being worthy of it.

Yeah, I'm just like my mother
Yeah.  I'm just like my mother.
And if you don't love her...
What does that mean about me?


To you whom I love and cannot name - because your names sting my tongue, because the weight on my shoulders of everything I have done to hinder or harm you silences me.  And I'm sorry for that too.  God - there was a time when I didn't know guilt or regret.  When I could not think of a thing I'd done in the world that I was ashamed of.  But you know what I think?  I think maybe... maybe that was my way of dealing with the fact that I had never done a single thing in my life that I wasn't ashamed of.

If I start to cry
I may not stop.
I want to know why
I run off.

I wish I could think of anything productive I've ever had or done that I haven't subsequently proceeded to royally fuck up.  But there isn't anything.  Any skill or power I've ever had, I've wasted.  Any opportunity I've ever been given, I've squandered.  Any gift I've ever been lucky enough to receive, I've proved unworthy of.  So I'm sorry for that too.  I'm sorry for not being what I should have been - for any of you, ever, in any way.

I want to know why
I'm like this.
I want to know why.

I go wild
'Cause you break me open
Wild
'Cause you left me here
I go wild

Shaking.  Shaking, shaking with need.  Everything in me is loose of its mooring, everything is snapping in a high wind, apt at any moment to catch you in the eye, strike weals onto your skin... or mine.  I am too irreverent, too selfish, too controlling to ever live as someone else's slave, to ever make kneeling a way of life... but at moments like this, I want to.  Not for the reasons I once did, in extremity, aching to surrender my burdens, no.  But because... god, it's hard to put into words even here, in this garden, in this silence, where I have always been painfully honest.

Wild because the chips are down
Wild because there isn't anybody else around
Wild when the waves start to break
And god, it's breaking in me now

Because this week has been so strange, so devastating in its quiet way.  Because each day I wake feeling like every smile, every movement, every word I say is a shivering skin over a howling hell, a kind of reactive, twitching madness like I haven't felt since I was a teenager.  I remember becoming fixated upon an empty picture-frame, the way it tugged at my eye and mind, irresistible and endlessly empty.  I remember weeping for the love of people who didn't exist.  I remember this - I haven't the word for it.  It feels like wrath, roaring and nonspecific, casting around for the nearest target.  It feels like joy, the kind that makes you scream.  It feels like hatred, deadly particular.

Wild because it doesn't make sense
For me to cry out in my own defense
Wild because I would do anything
To tear you off your precious fence.

I remember how badly I wanted to hit the tree, and how badly it hurt.  I remember the relentless, clear-eyed rage that made me not want to stop.  I remember the choked sounds, cut-short screams, when I did it.  I remember how the waves subsided for a moment, how for a moment there was just pain, simple and clean, easy to sob out and wash away.  How the tide kept coming back as the pain died down... and how I beat it away with my fists again.

So this is what it's like living in limbo
First I'm high, then I'm solo
I go wild
'Cause you break me open, wild
'Cause you left me here
I go wild 'cause your promises are broken
Wild when I know you're near

Like Cu Chulainn fighting the sea, beating the tides back.  I wish I could say I was ashamed.  I wish I could say that I walked back home thinking how stupid I was, thinking how it was over and it didn't need to happen again.  I didn't.  I walked back home with my hand trembling uncontrollably, unable to make a fist, and I felt sated, satisfied.  I felt quiet inside, in control.

Tell me what you've come for
Moving like a hunter through my back door
Leaving the perfume of all you adore
To die nameless on my floor

Is it self-destructive to know that something's wrong with you and not have any desire to fix it?  Is it self-destructive to have a problem and not want to talk about it?  I've spent so many years struggling with myself, stamping out inappropriate impulses and reactions, teaching myself to be rational and reasonable to a very fault, refusing to permit jealousy and self-absorption and resentment to breed within me.  And now I'm... bored.

Yeah well, we both know that you don't play fair
I guess you really think that you get me there
Let's be honest, perhaps this little ride
Is too much for even you to bear.

I'm bored with controlling myself.  I'm bored with behaving myself.  I'm bored with attempting to measure up, I'm bored with allowing others to call the tune and set the standards, and I'm bored with trying to solve problems before they arise.  I want to drink whiskey, punch trees, write and sing and kneel at your feet.  I want to do as I'm told and be proud of what I do for the first time in my life.

You've got a lot of nerve to come back here.
You're not the only one who can smell fear.

So give me orders, and I'll fulfill them.  Force me to my knees and I'll be happy there.  Praise me for my efforts and I'll try harder.  Be good to me and I'll be yours.  I've always known that no one rules a man like his perfect slave.  If you know it too... if you repay my obedience with devotion, there's no limit to what I will do for you.

I've lost count of the times I've given up on you
But you make such a beautiful wreck, you do

I have always been waiting for one of two things to happen. Either I would grow old enough that all of my insecurities and fears would fall away, become a teenager's irrelevant nonsense... or I would grow to be everything I have always wanted to be, and would therefore never need to measure myself against anyone else again.

I guess I've been waiting to get married, waiting to have a kid, waiting to tie myself down in all the ways that people do, until one of those things happens. I don't mean to say that I don't have good days. Just that... even on good days, I never extend so far as to suppose that I have approached those milestones.

There's a tavern on the corner called the "Milky Way"
And you look so at home there, it makes me afraid.

My mother defines success differently. That's to be expected - every soul on this earth defines success differently. But I believe most young people do measure themselves against their parents - not simply against their parents' expectations, but also against their own perception of their parents as people, what parts of that model they wish to emulate and what parts they wish to avoid. They are the only structures that stand for us, at the beginning of our lives - they are the only features on the horizon. One can either aim for them, or assiduously avoid them, but there is no course of action one can choose that does not take them into account.

It's also true that there is no one in the world who has the power to make us feel like children like our parents. I have to assume that'll remain true until I'm dead. It's something of a quantum oddity, perhaps: we can move any distance from our starting point, and yet the promontory edifice that represents them will always be on the horizon, never getting any closer and never disappearing from view. We are always as far away as we will ever be, and as close as it is possible to get, to the first examples of humanity we are ever given to become.

I don't mean to sound fatalistic. I suppose I've simply spent a lot of years coming to terms with the fact that I will never reach that point on the horizon - I will never be my mother, whether I wanted to or not - but more than that, I will never be whatever it is she wanted me to be.

At the dark end of this bar
What a beautiful wreck you are

I may never go to school for anything at all. I may live out my life doing the littlest it takes to make ends meet, while I devote my energies to attending to the things that truly matter to me: to the family I've built, to the work I care about, to the joys that matter so much more than the numb, grey scaffolding of finances and compromises that prop them up. I don't care about having a career. I don't want to buy a house. I don't want to nail myself to the ground with a mortgage and good credit and neighbors I can count on and a job that offers dental. I think it's possible to live comfortably without those things. I think it's possible to be happy without those things. I am, and I have been, and I will be.

When you go too far
What a beautiful wreck you are.

If we're sticking with this horizon metaphor - and perhaps it's my early childhood talking, but a horizon to me is always a Kansas horizon, a perfect circle of windswept cereal crops, unbroken from where I stand to where I can't see any more except by the occasional water tower. So let's call my mom a water tower on the horizon there, one I know I'll never reach. I've tortured myself for years, trying to walk to where that is, trying to read the town's name on its side. I can't. And moreover, I can't do that to myself any longer.

But it's not the only watertower on the horizon. It's not the only thing I measure myself against. In fact, if you want the truth, this Kansas skyline of mine fair bristles with monuments, so many that there must be a fucking city everywhere but where I am, just out of sight.

I try to quote songs here that I like, and that match my current mood. I'm running into difficulties lately because the songs don't change - the particulars of my mood might vary, but the broad strokes stay, and the songs that seem to best exemplify those broad strokes haven't changed much over the past few months. I don't wish to bore you with the same songs over and over. Then again, I suppose you could save yourself time, skip everything I've ever written here, and listen to "I'm Not That Girl" from Wicked instead. That would about cover it.

All the plans you had from seven years ago
Like all the promises you made, I watched them come and go

"That Girl" has been a number of different girls, at different times in my life. As something of a perpetual sidekick, the perennial also-ran, I do have a tendency to accumulate strong, sympathetic, dynamic heroines for whom I provide a harsh, rough-edged, unpolished foil. I'm good at throwing impressive women into sharp relief. I'm not so very good at seeing myself, I suppose. I have to assume that, because to not do so would be the most atrocious kind of blind ingratitude. I have been incredibly fortunate - have had love that most people never experience in their lifetime, not once, but several times. Have seen time stop around me at the sight of a beloved person, have seen the laws of the world bend and break before it. If I had died at sixteen, having experienced only what I had known to that point, I would have been luckier than most. At twenty - luckier still. Now - luckier than all but a handful in the universe, human or alien, I feel sure. So to suppose that I am as deficient as I seem to myself is to suppose that all this luck is misplaced or accidental, and I won't insult the intelligence and capabilities of my loved ones that way. I have to assume that part of my deficiency, perhaps the part that cripples me the most, is an inability to see myself clearly, to see in myself what others see.

This leaves me measuring myself against everyone, everyone I encounter. The more important they are, the more vital they become to me or my family, the more I sink in my own sight relative to their height. I thought this would end at some point. I thought that I would grow out of this kind of helpless, juvenile need to be special, to be different, to be someone's goddamn princess in a fucking tower. I'm the one constantly espousing how it's impossible to be everything to anyone, how every person on this earth needs more than any one person can give them, and that it shouldn't be any other way.

You put your keys in the car, but it wouldn't drive
Your hands on the wheel, lookin' barely alive.

It feels like a double standard. Perhaps it even reads like one. I tell people openly that I mean to marry Brendon, that he is my first priority - this never changes. And yet, I can also tell them, in our private moments together, that I belong to them utterly. In that moment, I do. In that moment, I mean it. I don't feel this as a lie; it does not seem disingenuous to me. I feel the truth of it - in the arms of someone I love, I see nothing else. In the arms of two people I love, my world consists of those two, and all else could perish in flames for all I know or care. Is this difficult for others? Is this impossible? Is this a logical contradiction?

I suppose I want... I want someone to be as obsessed with me as I am with everyone I love. To spend the ludicrous amounts of time I spent agonizing about what they mean, what they want, what I can do to make them happy. To bask the way I do in everything they say, everything they do, everything they write and draw and make. To wait as breathlessly, as needily, as greedily, as I do for every word, every smile, every moment they grant me. I want someone else to suffer when I'm away, to sometimes be as foolish and insecure as I am, to need me as helplessly, stupidly, childishly as I need them. Maybe that's not something men do. Or maybe they do, and they hide it. I don't know.

Maybe it's the grand gesture I'm missing, the helpless romantic. The over-the-top, unnecessary act. The surprise, the unprovoked, uninhibited outpouring of devotion, the impractical promise, the impossible vow. It's happened a time or two, I think. Mostly - here's what's funny. Do you know who's most given to that kind of useless, ill-advised, unrestrained adoration? Brock. For all he loves to drive me crazy - for all he promises and then fails, for all he demands and then can't return, for all the times he's gone out of his way to damage me and everything I care for - more than anyone else I know, he has always been the one who regularly surprised the hell out of me with a sudden, unsolicited paean to what he feels for me. Maybe that's why I put up with all the rest of it.

God, what on earth is wrong with me. I spent years upon years struggling with immature men. Wishing for someone I didn't have to teach how to function, how to be a human being. I have men like that now, more than one. My boys have grown into men. I guess that means that in all that time, I never grew out of being a girl. I wonder if I ever will.

Labels: Aidan, Brendon, Brock, Introspection, Love

I etched the face of a stopwatch
On the back of a raindrop
And did a swap for the sand in an hourglass

Call yourself a watchmaker. Let it be that for this moment, you have the power to dictate the forthcoming years, the incoming revelations, the changes and developments within yourself and those around you.

Would you feel guilty, then? Would you then be responsible? Do we ever come to the point where we know ourselves and our circumstances enough to say that we are truly responsible for what we become? It's all too easy to absolve ourselves of that, to claim that acts of god and man have beaten us down, cornered us, made us do nothing but react, react, react, until what we have become is no longer in our hands.

I heard an unhappy ending
It sort of sounds like you're leaving
I heard the piledriver waltz
It woke me up this morning.

But if I were the watchmaker, don't you think I would be kinder? Don't you think any comprehensible soul would? How could anyone believe in any deity and at the same time hold within themselves a doctrine that emphasized compassion? How could one ever suppose that an omnipotent being could also be a kind one, knowing what one cannot help but know about the world?

That's an interesting question in and of itself - can an all-knowing being ever be kind? Knowing the length and breadth of what the universe encompasses, and assuming that the creator is his creation, is reflected therein - can a being that knows everything and consciences it ever be one you would want to know? Does divinity presuppose cruelty, or, at the very least, madness? Do you see now why I prefer to believe in a universe that operates according to mathematical laws, causality, physics - these things that are heartless but, at the very least, never claim to love me while they torture me.

Think of me, think of me fondly
When we've said goodbye
Remember me, once in a while -
Please promise me you'll try.

I would like to believe that the world is more random than that, because if it were, it would mean that our actions have meaning - in a random universe, our behavior can change anything and everything. Predestination of any kind, whether good or bad, negates the necessity of our existence.

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

So today, I wrote a song for you
Because the day can get so long
And I know it's hard to make it through
When you say, "There's something wrong."

The most gratifying thing in the world, I believe, is to take a guess and be correct, to take a risk and land on your feet. I do that a lot - take risks, mostly with other people's lives. In one way this is the safe way of going about it; certainly I'm never in personal danger. In another way, I am the only one who does get the backlash if there is one: I put myself in the position of taking responsibility for someone's suffering, of doing something about it, and more often than not, there's little in return.

So I'm trying to put it right
Because I want to love you with my heart
All this trying has made it tight
And I don't know where to start.

Maybe that's a start.

In reading through the last few posts, though, I'm realizing how incredibly sorry for myself I seem on this blog a lot of the time, mostly because I don't post as much as I used to, and when I do, it's because I'm so overwrought that there's nothing else I can do but write. In the same way that Keshena writes to Hadoryu, I suppose, when she feels her worst. It's understandable, and considering that my readership here fluctuates between slim and nothing, I feel little compunction about using it in whatever way serves my purpose. But I am also concerned that it doesn't represent me well. I'm not nearly as miserable as I seem, I promise. I am a content creature, a housecat, all curled up with a book to read. And I try to be a lot more rational than I appear here.

So I'm aware - and it must be said, while I'm in a fairly cheerful and reasonable frame of mind; if not now, never - that there is a logical fault in fixating on broken people and then being disappointed when they do not return the favor. You knew he was a snake when you carried him across the river, as they say. In large part, that makes much of the below whinging and carrying-on my own fault, and I'll own that. We all have our weaknesses; I suppose mine is just other people.

'Cause you know it's a simple game
That you play, filling up your head with rain
And I know you're hiding from your pain
In the way that you say your name.

I should be more specific - it's not just other people. It's people who need something. Who need me, ideally. Most suffering people have no fucking idea what they want, of course - you can see quite clearly from the foregoing that I certainly don't when I'm in a lapse - and so I very frequently fall into the trap of allowing a broken person to pretend or believe that they need me, only to be disappointed and hurt when they become marginally less broken through my efforts and then realize that I wasn't what they needed at all. But again... no fault, there. Except perhaps mine for stepping into that silly situation again and again.

I see you
Hiding your face in your hands
Flying so you won't land
You think no one understands

This process, of believing that I am improving or learning from my mistakes, almost never operates at the speed that I estimate, nor do its milestones present themselves when I believe that they have. Almost always a false dawn, in my experience. My growth as a person appears to be largely involuntary, and often either catches me by surprise or proceeds inexorably in spite of my vehement objections. The latest question vis-a-vis this vexing process is whether I am still capable of falling in love according to my former standard.

And you're so tired that you don't sleep at night
As your heart is trying to mend
You keep it quiet but you think you might
Disappear before the end

I'm not sure about that, still. Certainly I no longer do that thing where I talk to someone in-depth for a few days and fall madly in love with them. That's sort of a relief - it never did work out very well - but there's no denying it was exhilarating. I do miss that feeling.

Then again, it's a pleasant thought that I might have moved beyond that level of immature infatuation with most people, into one where I'm actually capable of discerning who is worth my time, as opposed to merely being enthralled by the possibility that someone might want to talk to me. From the few pangs of it I have experienced in the time since it stopped happening so regularly, though, I have to conclude that one thing I am profoundly susceptible to, even to this day, is evidence of someone's attachment to me or need for me.

And it's strange that you can't find
Any strength to even try
To find a voice to speak your mind
When you do, all you want to do is cry.

So maybe you should cry.

It doesn't take much but that - just to hear someone reach out to me, to express desire or need. Perhaps that's such a universal thing that it doesn't even bear stating, but it's interesting how much it affects me. The little things, someone being the first to message me, to start a conversation, someone asking questions, being interested, analyzing.

It seems peculiar in fact to think that what I perhaps fall in love with, in other people, is their love for me - that without that, I have merely intellectual obsession. There's nothing wrong with that obsession, really; it's a simpler version of love, fascination with who someone is - there's that XKCD comic from recently - oh, let me find it, one sec.

And I see you hiding your face in your hands
Talking about far-away lands
You think no one understands?
Listen to my hands.

Found it! That's what I'm talking about, really. This sense, which is a part of my love for my favorite people but not necessarily impossible to experience without it, that I want to attend to a given creature and see what they become, given appropriate intermittent prodding. I want to be privileged both to watch and to affect the process, to prune and protect, to defend and judiciously corrupt.

So I no longer fall in love with people at the drop of a hat. I do still fixate, in this way. Maybe that's better in the long run. Perhaps, if that fixation remains active and vital long enough, it matures into love. I'd be very interested to see if that is so. I hope I'll have that opportunity.

All of this life
Moves around you
For all that you claim
You are standing still
You are moving too.

I will move you.

Labels: Hope, Introspection, Love

I know at what point in my life I became the perpetual also-ran... and I also know the point at which it became miserable.

There was a time when I was happy to be someone's lady-in-waiting - and oh, how instructive that term is, because waiting is what you do - I was happy to live my life in the service of another, because another person was worth that. Because she was so beautiful, so good, so worthy, that knowing she relied on me was all I needed to feel all of those things too.

Hands touch
Eyes meet
Sudden silence
Sudden heat
Hearts leap in a giddy whirl
He could be that boy
But I'm not that girl.

Then she learned not to need me, and I not to need her. But somehow I never managed to get much farther than being that girl - the best friend, the sidekick, the person standing next to the person who has all the luck, all the love, all the attention. I listen to songs, I watch movies, I read books, and there has never been one I read where I didn't think, "No. I'm not that girl. I'm that girl's friend, the person she takes for granted."

Don't dream too far
Don't lose sight of who you are
Don't remember that rush of joy.
He could be that boy
But I'm not that girl.

Love... my love, whoever you are. I am so very, very tired of being taken for granted. I am so tired of not being the one things happen to. I'm tired of not being the lucky one, not being the pretty one, not being the one people listen to. I'm tired of suffering everyone's bullshit because of all the people responsible for whatever happened, I'm the person made to be fucking kicked. I'm the person who doesn't fit in, so the failures of the group are attached to me, inevitably.

Every so often we long to steal
To the land of what might have been
But that doesn't soften the ache we feel
When reality sets back in.

I have never stopped wondering what I'm doing wrong.

All I want in the world is someone I trust to tell me what it is. Perhaps all of this sounds ragingly immature, but I don't care. We are all children, we are all alone, we are all so terribly, terribly broken and worthy of compassion. I am tired of giving it. I am tired of being everyone's guardian, everyone's caretaker, everyone's mother. Just once in my life I would like to need help and have someone come along and solve the problem, simply and completely, without my assistance. I am so very, very tired of being the only adult in the room. And I am so very tired of never, ever being allowed to be as helpless, as juvenile, as lazy, as feckless, as blind, as careless as everyone else. When is it my turn to blunder dumbly through a day, hurting feelings, and be showered with affection at the end of it in spite of it all? When is it my turn to reap rewards I didn't earn, to be vexed by the sheer volume of attention and adoration I'm showered with? When is it my turn to have a fucking first-world problem?

Blithe smile
Lithe limb
She who's winsome
She wins him
Gold hair with a gentle curl
That's the girl he chose
And heaven knows
I'm not that girl.

This does seem to happen, doesn't it. It's two am. It's my birthday, now. I have cried myself to sleep on more birthdays than not. Perhaps that's a juvenile score to keep track of, but there it is. I am twenty-five, halfway to thirty, and I still don't know how to be the person I have to be. I still don't know how to be strong without sometimes needing to be weak. I still don't know when it's okay to be, or who's supposed to keep everything safe when I am.

Don't wish
Don't start
Wishing only wounds the heart
I wasn't born for the rose and the pearl
There's a girl I know
He loves her so
I'm not that girl.

Will I always feel like a fuck-up? I hate to start another year this way. I hate to go into it knowing that I still feel disregarded, forgotten, taken for granted. I hate to spend another year bending over backwards to consider the people who matter, only to realize that I was the only person who considered it at all.

Last year was so very, very bad. There have been few worse. I want to believe that making the next better is in my hands, but I might have done all the working uphill I'm able for a while. I'm at the point now where I'm ready to give up... and for the first time, not even begin to care about who picks up the slack.

Movies, TV screens reflect
Just what you expected
There's a world of shiny people
Somewhere else.

Out there following their bliss
Living easy, getting kissed
While you wonder
What else you're doing wrong.

Every day it starts again.
You cannot say if you're happy.
You keep trying to be.
Try harder.
Maybe this is not your year.

Labels: Apologies, Brendon, Introspection, Katrina

I don't get many things right the first time
In fact, I am told that a lot
Now I know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls
Brought me here.

And where was I before the day
That I first saw your lovely face?
Now I see it every day.
And I know

That I am
I am
I am the luckiest.

What if I'd been born fifty years before you
In a house on the street where you lived?
Maybe I'd be outside as you passed on your bike
Would I know?

And in a white sea of eyes
I see one pair that I recognize.
And I know

That I am
I am
I am the luckiest.

I love you more than I have ever found a way to say to you.

Next door there's this old man who lived to his nineties
And one day passed away in his sleep
And his wife, she stayed for a couple of days
And passed away.

I'm sorry, I know that's a strange way to tell you that I know
We belong
That I know

That I am
I am
I am the luckiest.

I'm tired. I'm tired of being afraid I'm going to turn into a crazy person. I'm tired of being afraid that I already am. I'm tired of having a chip on my shoulder, and being insecure, and being lonely, and feeling left out, and feeling like I don't do anything that matters. I'm tired of listening to people TELL me that what I do doesn't matter, I'm tired of my loved ones letting me believe that, I'm tired of telling myself that I'm going to get my life together and thinking that I'll know when I do by how my life looks how my mom says it should. I'm tired of not being proud of myself, and not wanting to look at myself, and getting sick of my own company.

I don't know how to fix anything. I don't know how to make myself better, or how to start believing that I don't need to get better, or how to know if I do. I don't want to be lonely but I don't want to have to act like the fucking cool kids to make friends. I don't want to be left out, but if I have to tell you to include me it ruins it. I don't want to be insecure and I don't want to be humorless or act like a crazy intolerable fucking girl, but I can't take it when you joke about me being demanding when I'm so fucking scared that I'm being demanding. I don't want to call you and I don't pick up the phone when you call because I don't think you want to talk to me. And then you don't call, for months, and I feel like it's my fault.

I'm tired of not being good enough, not ever, no matter what I do. I'm tired of feeling like I'm the same fuck-up I've always been except worse now because I don't have an excuse anymore. I'm tired of feeling like I've wasted all of these years because I can't justify them to you in a way you give a shit about. I'm tired of avoiding your calls during the day because I know you'll nag me about all the things I need to do, and avoiding your calls at night because you get emotional when you're drunk and I don't know how to handle that. It makes me headshy and I never know if your next words are going to be "you're my puppy and I love you" or "you're a cold, aggressive monster."

I'm tired of being jealous, and being ashamed of being jealous, and trying to swallow my jealousy, and trying to logic myself out of it, and trying to ignore it. I'm tired of feeling like a stupid, crazy girlfriend and not being able to stop. I'm tired of second- and third-guessing every goddamn thing I say because none of it's rational the way I want to be, none of it's reasonable the way I want to be, none of it's serene and beautiful and wise the way I want to be. It's all just fucking bile and whimpering confusion and I hate it. I wish there was more than that inside me. I'm not sure anymore that there is.

I don't know how I can expect to satisfy my mom when I haven't been satisfied with anything I am since I was thirteen years old. I thought getting older would be easier - I'd get nice and fucking complacent, worry about taxes and bills, and not cry myself to sleep like a teenager. Instead I'm more insecure than I've ever been, and every day I see myself turning into someone I can't stand and trying to step on every impulse and feeling that pops up in an effort to stop that process is only making it worse.

I wish all of this didn't feel like worthless, whiny first-world-problems bullshit.

Labels: Apologies, Brendon, Brian, Introspection, Katrina, Lies, Love, Rants, Stress

It dawns on me that I've been keeping this blog for five years this month, on and off. And I really mean on and off.

I don't really have anything to say about that except, "Holy crap."

You should all go listen to David Bowie's "Five Years" now. It's completely unrelated, but it is awesome.

Ahem! *cough* Let's just, ah... sweep the emo bullshit under a rug for a while... God, no wonder you bitches don't read this anymore, it's fucking intolerable.

B and I were discussing yesterday how remarkable it is how often we run into WoW players in our daily lives. One might say that the population is large enough to make it an inevitability, but eleven million out of six billion shouldn't be such a frequent distribution, especially when only about three million of those come from the US.

The truth is, though, that "gamers" are no longer really in the minority. That's the ultimate aim of the gaming industry, of course, as it is of any industry - to expand their potential customer base ad infinitum. But cultures don't have that same impulse. Cultures in general struggle with two conflicting desires: the wish to expand, and include others in whatever defining characteristic or pursuit is endemic to the culture, and the wish to be exclusive, to feel special. All members of a culture or community need to feel that being a part of that community is an asset. They need to feel that it lends them some kind of unique trait, and the purpose of the history and storytelling traditions of such cultures is to outline those traits and ascribe them value. Every story you've ever heard does indeed have a cultural component at its root, especially those that have been passed down through generations. Tall tales are an easy example in America. My tries-not-to-be-Texan beloved tells me that when he was young, he was told the story of Pecos Bill, who wrangled and rode a tornado. Such a story, part of the oral tradition of a culture not necessarily restricted by state lines, serves to outline virtues that culture values and ascribe them to a heroic figure native to that culture. In short, the underlying message of such a story is always, "We, the people of this community, are so, and so, and this way. We act like this, we think like this, we have these good qualities." The effect, when the story is retold, is to make members of the community proud to share that heritage. Similar stories may be cautionary tales, intended to outline differences between members of the community and outsiders - "We are like this, but definitely not like that."

I've gone badly off the rails here. The point is that communities and cultures have the impulse to expand, to acquire more members, but also to define boundaries and make membership a special privilege, an exclusive club if you will. (Which you will.) We see this very clearly in any minority group - minorities wish both to have their concerns addressed, to have their aims and beliefs shared by the wider population, and to remain distinct from that population so that members still feel honored to be included.

The community of what one would call "gamers" is an oddity in this case. It has those same desires, but in fact the ultimate success or failure of the community, and the policies by which it comes to that point, are in the hands of people not necessarily a part of the culture - as if, for example, the primary campaigners for women's suffrage had been men. In this case, those who have the power both to expand and exclude - namely the leaders of the industry, men in charge of policy at Nintendo, Activision, Microsoft - are very often businessmen rather than what we know as gamers. Now, a businessman is interested primarily in expanding his clientele. There is no percentage in being exclusive from a business standpoint. Making the benefits of the community widely available and accessible to the mainstream buying public is a sound financial decision.

It may be that this is the very best thing for the success of the gaming culture. Where, like many other cultures, they might inevitably exclude too many people and dwindle to nothing, that choice is taken out of their hands. Let me simplify: imagine a club at a grade school. The members of the club of course wish their club to be large and successful. They wish to know other people who share their particular interests and qualities, whatever those may be. But they also wish to be special. They wish to have the right to deny membership to anyone they dislike. This sounds childish when phrased this way, I realize, but it's not really. It's a natural impulse of any community. Now imagine that a teacher is placed in an advisory position over the club. It is in the hands of the teacher to recruit and screen new members. Suddenly the club's population soars. Why? Because what you might call a "foreigner" - someone outside of the community - was placed in control of the decision to expand. That person retained the club's impulse to be large and prosperous, but because that person was not part of the club, they had none of the impulse to be exclusive. A club in charge of its own decisions in this regard might eventually die, with no more members than it started with.

Where "gaming" culture is concerned, we are rapidly reaching the point in terms of market penetration where people who were never before part of the culture are included by means of the technology. Nintendo caters to those who are not familiar with games' interfaces by producing a system that operates in a manner they're used to - a controller that resembles a remote. Games become more "mainstream" every day, very often to the disgust of longterm users, early adopters or "hardcore" members of the community. The community itself is often unhappy with new arrivals or the changes made to their pastime in order to attract outsiders, but because the decision is out of the hands of gamers in general, the community as a whole prospers wildly. It's not at all unwise to conclude that before the decade is out, what we now know as game systems could be serving a multitude of other purposes and thus be as ubiquitous as televisions are now. By that point, the culture no longer has any defining characteristics, because it has swollen to include so many diverse populations. One can no longer assume that to call someone a "gamer" presupposes a selection of other physical and mental attributes - pasty skin, social maladjustment, liberal attitudes. Once the technology becomes universal, everyone is a gamer, and therefore no one is. It is the ultimate goal of every culture, and at the same time, it is the death of a culture.

Perhaps, then, the best thing for any community hoping to spread its beliefs and interests is that they appoint a leader from outside the community. Certainly it would be an unpalatable choice... but isn't that always the way? In the same way that the man who does not wish to be king is often the best king, perhaps we - as a people - do not have the distance from our own goals required to effectively reach them.

Labels: Evolution, Games, Rants, Technology

Who's seen Jezebel
She was born to be the woman I would know
And hold like a breeze
Half as tight as both our eyes closed.

For the first time, in this place, I am speaking to no one. I hear my voice fall flat in this garden, sink into the numb earth and drown, forgotten.

Since ever I began writing this way, in this declamatory fashion, I had a vision of a small, familiar court of listeners, composed of those I loved in life and fiction, each and every soul of every description who held some power over me. One by one, that court melted away while I wasn't looking. Now I speak and I hear myself echo.

Ananias is pinned to the page by my words, no longer alive in my head. He has told his story and has nothing more to say.

Procell and Adsartha are silenced by circumstance, their mute eyes no longer even opening at the sound of my voice.

Who else would I have found here once? Who else did I speak to, or speak around, knowing that sooner or later they would stumble upon it? Like leaving notes on the path, I led my loved ones on a hunt to find them, and took comfort in knowing that however long it took, my whispers would eventually reach a welcoming ear.

Now these words are only read when I sit a person down on purpose and make it so. No more hunts, no more floating thoughts suspended for months and made richer by the wait, no more quiet surprises when you, or you, or you read your name by my hand months after I've spoken of you, with reverence or with pain. No more bites on my line, though I string it with love and bait it with honesty. The lake is dry, perhaps. The wellspring is gone.

I miss you all. I miss your voices in my head. I miss your faithfulness and your hope, knowing that it might take me an age but I would be back here, always back here, whispering again. During which long silence might I have spoken the word that held you?

My ka-tet... was it ka drew you away? Did I miss it? Is there somewhere I should be?

Who's seen Jezebel
She was gone before I ever got to say
"Lay here, my love
You're the only shape I'll pray to, Jezebel..."

Labels: Aaron, Brendon, Brian, Brock, Jeremy, Katrina, Missing You, Sara, You

I've got so much to ask you
It's never the time
Why would I spoil a perfect evening?

She doesn't need me anymore.

I know that should hurt. It does, a little. Not as much as I would have expected ten years ago.

I'm in the transitive stage out of adolescence and into adulthood. I have... ambivalent feelings about that. As I mentioned to Brian recently, I constantly find myself checking my own assumptions and actions against what I believed when I was thirteen, fifteen, sixteen - constantly asking myself, "If who I was could see me now, would I hate me?" I'm never quite certain of the answer. I can already feel myself justifying, rationalizing, settling even. As a teenager I was a creature of infinite passion and conviction... but then again, which one of us was not. I abhorred beyond all else the willingness to accept, to bend, to compromise. Of course, that doesn't survive childhood. It can't possibly - unless that too is just something I tell myself. Nevermind.

I can't be certain of anything anymore. I miss that. People say that teenagers think they know everything. I think the reason it bothers adults is because they're envious. I would give anything to be as perfectly, unshakably assured of the right path, of my own place on it, of the right thing to say and the things I wanted. There was a time when I would have said proudly that I had no regrets in my life, no guilt, and no sins. I remember understanding my own internal logic and morals and believing with flawless clarity that I had never violated them. I might make mistakes, or hurt others, but at the age of sixteen I had never done a thing in my life that I had thought was wrong.

My mother would laugh. I probably would too, in another mood. But I do miss that peace of mind. I cried myself to sleep more often than not in those days, sure, but I never had trouble sleeping. I never worried. I had grief and passion aplenty, but no stress. I had the answers I needed, and the ones I didn't have, I knew for certain I could figure out between me and Katrina.

That was it, wasn't it. Even as I got older and started to find things to feel guilty about, even when I made mistakes that I couldn't take back and hurt people in ways I couldn't fix, I still could tell myself that there was one thing I had always, always done well: I had always been her friend, and always done right by her. I never lied to her and never knowingly hurt her.

The trouble, I guess... is that those distinctions no longer have meaning. Hurting someone by accident doesn't make it okay. Sometimes even "sorry" doesn't. Sometimes nothing makes it okay, no matter what you do. I spent my adolescence never regretting or knowing what it meant to live with guilt, and to this day I have no idea how to absorb it. Something in me still expects a flawless record, still expects me to acquit myself with unfaltering righteousness at least by my own standards. When asked to accept that I have done wrong and cannot ever, ever repair the damage, it seems to go into some kind of grim loop. It can't begin to live with that. It can't even understand the premise.

So I got older and up until I was nineteen I still believed, at least in this one thing, I had never broken faith. And of course, when doubt came to that, it came to everything else. I don't have answers anymore. I'm no longer certain that I've ever done the right thing, because I have no idea what that might be. And there's guilt here, where there never was before.

This place we've come to now, this unhappy, rather frozen place between us, is so strange and yet, in hindsight, so inevitable that I can't help but wonder what would have become of us if she had stayed here, if we hadn't been separated. If I had been able to share that time with her, able to involve her in every tiny loss of confidence, and vice versa... what would we be now? Can anything so rarefied and pure as that bond survive the corruption, the corrosion of conviction that comes with growth? I am not the person I was, no. Nor she. But as I wonder whether these two people we are now will ever find common ground again, I'm forced to wonder whether, under any circumstances, we could have. Was this unavoidable? Is it worse if it was, or better? If I had spent the last five years in her constant company, as I spent the five before them, would we have found some way to preserve one another's sanguinity, or would it just have meant being forced to watch an inexorable erosion up close?

She doesn't need me anymore, not the way she used to. That would hurt more if I didn't know that it's been years since I needed her the way I did. It's been years since I cried myself to sleep because I didn't know how to help her. Years since she was the only one who knew me well, the only one I trusted, the only one I would kill or die for.

That betrayal, at the very least, was inevitable. I'm not fool enough to think otherwise. Unless I was to live alone forever, waiting on her time - which itself would eventually poison any relationship - at some point I had to find someone else to depend upon. I know that that didn't make it any less painful for her, and it doesn't make me feel less guilty. Every other infinitesimal act of neglect sprung from that, I believe. The last five years of numbly, nervously struggling to make things fit again like they used to... all of that came from that point, somewhere between when I was tormented by wondering what I would do if she moved away and when I found a way to live with it. Just that... finding a way to live without her.

I'm not the only one. She's found a way too, I believe. Trouble is, I'm no longer certain. Not certain of anything in general, and not certain of her in particular. We're not honest with one another the way we were... that excruciating, unflinching honesty that was the centerpoint of everything we shared. It's not the same. I omit things out of fear of judgement, she omits them out of... what? By definition, I don't know. I no longer know her mind. No longer grok her, as it were.

I'm coming to terms with the fact that it won't be fixed this way. Won't be fixed by bi-weekly phone calls where she talks about work and her boyfriend and I listen and try to find ways to share in it all, phone calls where I struggle to find things to tell her about a life she doesn't understand and I'm afraid to try to explain, a life whose particulars are so powerful to me and so mundane to her that, for the first time, the things that bring me bliss and pain and passion and power are completely and utterly trivial to her, and I am silenced by that knowledge. Without her here, with me and willing to devote real time to starting over, to retracing our paths to find where it was we went astray and bring one another up to speed, there's nothing we can do.

So here I am. Half of me trying, as it always has, to carry on pragmatically. To live without her and to live with my mistakes, to swallow doubt and regret and be glad of the joy in my life and try not to remember what I've lost. Half of me looking at myself from ten years ago and railing against my compromises, raging at myself for being lazy and fat and complacent and content, constantly tugging at everything I've messed up and can't repair, certain - always so certain! - that somewhere there are the right words to make everything right again.

I wish I knew them. I wish I could believe they exist.

I wish love was enough.

Labels: Introspection, Katrina, Love, Missing You, Stress

I hate this kind of bullshit.

Arguing about conservation is essentially an argument over one of two things.

Sometimes it's an argument about how we can save ourselves. Let me save you some time - we can't. We have messed up our own living space enough that in time it will become unlivable, and we will have to either adapt or move on to another place, another planet perhaps. We cannot save our species from what inevitably happens to every species that over-succeeds: it experiences massive die-offs as its population equalizes again to what its ecological niche can support. This will happen to humankind, but as a process, it matters very little to the rest of the world.

The rest of the time, the conservation argument is in truth about whether or not we can save the earth as it is right now. Here's another spoiler for you: we can't. The earth will recover from our depradations and incorporate what it can't dispose of into a new environmental structure. So plastic takes a long time to biodegrade? It will become useful in that time for some other purpose. Everything in the environment is forced into function eventually. Wildlife moves in to abandoned houses and broken trucks. Birds work thread and bits of plastic bag into their nests. Nothing is wasted. Nothing just sits there breaking down. Even that process of decomposition is useful to the bacteria that make it happen.

The truth is that on a long enough timeline, the earth will recover from everything we've done. It's not a terribly long timeline from a geological perspective either. Certainly it's not on a human scale, and perhaps that's what makes people have hissy fits. No, the earth will not turn into a primeval fucking paradise in your lifetime or your children's. And no, maybe the tigers and this particular bunny species can't be saved. That in itself is not a tragedy. Hundreds of species go extinct every day, from the microscopic to the large, fluffy and endearing. Hundreds of new species are forming every day as well, evolving from older models. That's how evolution works - unsuccessful species die off and more successful ones move into the space they left. This conservation bullshit is really just an attempt to save the species that we've gotten to like. It matters so incredibly much whether or not the white tigers are okay, but the bacteria and the insects that die out? Nah, never mind those.

Lemme break it to you - the white tigers were going to die out some day. With or without our involvement, they would eventually either die off and be replaced by another adaptation, or be changed beyond recognition by the slow, inevitable process of natural selection. Everything dies. Everything changes. If you think the world is going to look anything like it does today a million years from now, you're crazy. Nothing we do can make that happen. It shouldn't happen. We cannot arrest the process of change by any mechanism, no matter how fond we are of the spotted owl or the California condor.

The truth is that humanity is the most successful species we have ever known. We have evolved to live in every kind of environment the earth has to offer. We have yoked every kind of creature and plant to our need and put every kind of biome into service to feed, shelter and entertain us. Don't think for one minute that if wolves or ants had the opportunity they wouldn't do exactly the same thing. That acquisitive greed for more space, more resources, more reproductive chances is a part of every lifeform on earth, and it doesn't stop just because something evolves a cerebrum. The "graceful" dolphins, the "noble" wolves, the "beautiful" birds, or whatever new anthropomorphized monster is being plastered on lurid airbrushed posters and t-shirts today, are all myths. Each and every one of them would do exactly as humanity has done if they had the chances and the luck that we've had, because that's what successful species do. They wipe out every threat or perceived threat to their survival, they hoard every resource they can, they expand their territory as much as they can usefully control and administrate, and they reproduce as fast and as furiously as possible.

I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying it's nice. But it's not unnatural. We are animals like any other animals, no better or worse, and the things we do are merely a larger-scale version of what every species does in its desperate attempt to be the best species, the longest-lived, the strongest.

This is impossible to squash out of the human animal, which is why conservation doesn't really work. You can wear your hemp pants and take your cloth shoulderbags to the grocery store all you like. You can recycle your newspapers and bitch out Girl Scouts because their cookies have too much packaging. But for every one of you that does those things, there are a hundred thousand people who don't give a shit. And those hundred thousand people will do more to ruin the environment for our future generations - which is really all we can even hope to affect with anything we do - than you and all your friends could clean up if you worked all your lives. The only thing conservation does is make you feel better. It's an attempt to assuage some nebulous guilt in your life by believing that you can make any kind of difference in the long-term fortunes of the planet. It's masturbation.

You don't have any control over what other people do. You don't have any way to fix what humanity has done, and all the screaming you could manage for the rest of your life wouldn't make most of the great dozing mass of humanity sit up and take notice. And if you somehow get off on feeling like you have some great talent or responsibility because you have an upper brain, banish that notion now. You and everyone else obeys the same natural impulses as does the rest of the world and every animal in it, and that goes for every glorious bald eagle, delicate white-tailed deer, and iridescent fucking Lisa Frank kitten out there. If they had hands, they'd build factories and nuclear power plants too.

Labels: Evolution, Rants

...say or do.
I can resist anything but
The temptation from you.
But I'd rather walk alone
Then chase you around
I'd rather fall myself then let you
Drag me on down.
It wouldn't have worked out anyway...
And now it's just another lonely day.

I barely wrote about Aaron before he arrived, and I didn't write about him while he was here. It's been so hard to understand how I feel about him - what I saw, what moved me, what it became and what it provoked in me, where it went and what it left behind.

I seem to have a habit of falling in love with people who don't exist. Heh... my polite understatements aren't necessary here. I constantly fall in love with fictional people and I always have. When you're a child dreaming of Ged or Will Stanton or Link or Arthur it doesn't harm anything. When I grew old enough to conjure imaginary heroes of my own, after my own lights of nobility and beauty, it began to pain me. It's a powerful image, I can't help but think in retrospect: a young girl crying herself to sleep because she believes so intensely in her own white knight that every waking moment in a world that actively denies his existence is murderous. There was a time when the world's failure to live up to my dreams made me physically ill. You see... even looking back I can summon some of the overdramatic passion that characterizes adolescence. I'm not sure whether or not I've left that behind, and I'm not sure whether or not I want to.

These days it manifests in subtleties... those devilish details they're always talking about. These days I work not from whole cloth but from life, embroidering from basic principles and mundane information about a person an expansive landscape, a Weaveworld to fall into and become lost. These days I fall in love with the man I believe a boy could become, with the beauty I imagine speaking his words, with the person I expected and the things I hoped he'd say. Needless to say... this is far more painful. I expect disappointment; one could say I actively court it at times. I love my own fictions far better knowing they're false.

So it is that most of my loves end in caveats: I love Jeremy... when he smiles, when he writes, when he plays. I love Brock... when he's sweet, when he's brilliant, when he's inspired and inspires me. I love Aaron... what nascent sprout of strength and imagination hides in him. Brendon is the only man I've ever met who was everything I dreamed and more, who lives up to his own fictions.

How can I mourn a person who doesn't exist? How can I miss someone who was never here to begin with? What do I say to you when you leave, how do I say goodbye when I don't even know where you belong or where you are? How do I tell you I love you when I don't know if you're the person I love, if you will ever be or can ever be?

But I do. I love you, or loved you, or will love you. I miss you. You tried so hard not to belong and not to make waves and not to carve a place for yourself, and somehow you surprised us all - even yourself - by belonging so quietly and simply that I was shocked at how much your absence hurt us. I didn't know how to beg you to stay. I didn't know I needed to.

If you came back it would be the same. You would irritate me and frustrate me and make me laugh. You would ask me to clarify the way I talk without ever seeming to resent having to ask, and never seem ashamed of what you have and what you are. You would surprise me with sudden demonstrations of affection that remind me of little boys who pushed me down in kindergarten and ran away laughing, thinking that was enough to convey your love. You would still be inconsiderate and it would still hurt. I would still forgive you, because it would still be completely unintentional. You would be content with your ignorance and your simplicity and it would still make me want to scream. You would smile and give me a steady, unavoidable eye and it would still make me grin. You would still be my friend - just that.

My friend left at five in the morning on Sunday. His quiet panic in the hours before he did hurt my heart, and I didn't know what to say. I didn't tell him I loved him. I didn't tell him I'd miss him. I'm sorry.

I do.

Yesterday seems like a life ago
Because the one I loved
Today I hardly know
You I held so close in my
Heart, oh dear
Grow further from me with every
Falling tear
Further along we just may...
But for now it's just another
Lonely day.

Labels: Aaron, Apologies, 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