Of Bridges And Water
Nov. 12th, 2013 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormIt's been too long since I've written; I have too much to say. It's been too soon since I've written; I can't step back and pick out a pattern.
When I look up from the keyboard I see seagulls picked out in brilliant pink-white by the setting sun, highlighted against a dark background. I have a three-song playlist on: The Lumineers and Temper Trap, Stubborn Love and Ho Hey and I'm Gonna Wait. I've been listening to it for three days, and it's primed me for something. There are two contented rabbits curled up within sight, and a dying rat in the other room. Bananas are frying quietly behind the music, and their smell of caramel and cinnamon matches the golden dying sunlight. I'm in my house, alone. I've been folded open but there's no one here to receive me but you. So, receive me.
Blake is gone. Nothing has changed in this regard except: we've had contact three times or so, tiny facebook exchanges where he sends me a link or I send him a piece of information about the graff I've been brewing. Last night I sent him a bottle of it along with the stuff he'd left here. He sent me a thank you, he'd drink it when he wasn't sick.
That's twice he's let me know when he's in a bad way. I disregard it because I have to, because being a prop for someone who can't support themselves is one of the things I fear most, because I don't want to set precedent, because I don't want to bow to manipulation instead of an open request, because... I choose to disregard it. But it is hard, and it hurts. I love him and I don't want to see him unwell or unhappy. I miss him and although I need so much distance it hurts me in so many places. I feel like, when he hints at being not-so-well, he's extending me trust and I'm proving unworthy of it when I deliberately turn my gaze away.
It's better to feel pain than nothing at all; the opposite of love's indifference.
Blake isn't the only person I'm deliberately turning my gaze from these days. Some things went down with Graydon that weren't okay with me and I had a couple choices; I could put the work into engaging and explaining and processing and fixing, or I could just turn away. I've turned away, left all that hard work and struggle behind me, sought out a different path. So here I am on a path that feels free and unnatural and rubs against my moral grain or my feeling of being a good person who tries hard for people I love. Here I am alone in a room talking to a keyboard.
The future is certainly unwritten. I trust it both more and less than I should, I think. I trust it to bring my people back to me if it can without harming them or me, not just Blake and Graydon but my very dear others who are off on adventures and lives of their own. I know, though, that I've tethered myself to too many people to ever have them all close at once again. I have-- oh, my dears, I haven't told you of my startling, disturbing abundance yet! --I have so much, sometimes my flesh can barely hold in everything I've been given but the absence will also always be there.
She'll tear a hole in you, the one you can't repair/ But I still love her, I don't really care.
I am becoming a magnet again. People are responding to me as if I were January sunshine. I don't think I'm ready for it. I'm trying to be busy living my own life, spreading myself lightly, certainly falling for Dave but also doing too much brewing and dancing alone in my livingroom and being good friends with my amazing neighbour and starting the ball rolling on switching jobs and dating and reconnecting with oh so very many people and reading poetry too late at night and keeping my fridge marginally cleaned out and, and, and...
...and always, at the beginning of things, I can give people what they want. We've been down this spiral of talk before, I can't live here, but I keep coming back to it. I love intimacy with people. I love closeness and the insides of folks when they open up and are such an incandescent complicated irreproducible pattern inside.
People want to be loved. But on the whole they want something more from that love than I can give them. They want safety and there is no safety on this earth. They want strength but my strength is all from personal momentum and cannot be long lent. They want to lay down the burden of their selves but I consider carrying that self a holy act.
All that comes later, though. Right now people look at me and see that I see them. They open up, let me reach in, bare their bellies. I love that they do this. I've been through it too many times not to be afraid. I suppose that's why I love the self-contained ones, people who are aloof and for whom I don't seem like I could ever be necessary.
I'm too tired to continue. I've been crying as I write. I haven't cried like this in a long time. Winter's finally over. As I've been recently reminded, it's time to move to to spring: renewed warmth but also all the rainstorms that drive decay and growth.
When I look up from the keyboard I see seagulls picked out in brilliant pink-white by the setting sun, highlighted against a dark background. I have a three-song playlist on: The Lumineers and Temper Trap, Stubborn Love and Ho Hey and I'm Gonna Wait. I've been listening to it for three days, and it's primed me for something. There are two contented rabbits curled up within sight, and a dying rat in the other room. Bananas are frying quietly behind the music, and their smell of caramel and cinnamon matches the golden dying sunlight. I'm in my house, alone. I've been folded open but there's no one here to receive me but you. So, receive me.
Blake is gone. Nothing has changed in this regard except: we've had contact three times or so, tiny facebook exchanges where he sends me a link or I send him a piece of information about the graff I've been brewing. Last night I sent him a bottle of it along with the stuff he'd left here. He sent me a thank you, he'd drink it when he wasn't sick.
That's twice he's let me know when he's in a bad way. I disregard it because I have to, because being a prop for someone who can't support themselves is one of the things I fear most, because I don't want to set precedent, because I don't want to bow to manipulation instead of an open request, because... I choose to disregard it. But it is hard, and it hurts. I love him and I don't want to see him unwell or unhappy. I miss him and although I need so much distance it hurts me in so many places. I feel like, when he hints at being not-so-well, he's extending me trust and I'm proving unworthy of it when I deliberately turn my gaze away.
It's better to feel pain than nothing at all; the opposite of love's indifference.
Blake isn't the only person I'm deliberately turning my gaze from these days. Some things went down with Graydon that weren't okay with me and I had a couple choices; I could put the work into engaging and explaining and processing and fixing, or I could just turn away. I've turned away, left all that hard work and struggle behind me, sought out a different path. So here I am on a path that feels free and unnatural and rubs against my moral grain or my feeling of being a good person who tries hard for people I love. Here I am alone in a room talking to a keyboard.
The future is certainly unwritten. I trust it both more and less than I should, I think. I trust it to bring my people back to me if it can without harming them or me, not just Blake and Graydon but my very dear others who are off on adventures and lives of their own. I know, though, that I've tethered myself to too many people to ever have them all close at once again. I have-- oh, my dears, I haven't told you of my startling, disturbing abundance yet! --I have so much, sometimes my flesh can barely hold in everything I've been given but the absence will also always be there.
She'll tear a hole in you, the one you can't repair/ But I still love her, I don't really care.
I am becoming a magnet again. People are responding to me as if I were January sunshine. I don't think I'm ready for it. I'm trying to be busy living my own life, spreading myself lightly, certainly falling for Dave but also doing too much brewing and dancing alone in my livingroom and being good friends with my amazing neighbour and starting the ball rolling on switching jobs and dating and reconnecting with oh so very many people and reading poetry too late at night and keeping my fridge marginally cleaned out and, and, and...
...and always, at the beginning of things, I can give people what they want. We've been down this spiral of talk before, I can't live here, but I keep coming back to it. I love intimacy with people. I love closeness and the insides of folks when they open up and are such an incandescent complicated irreproducible pattern inside.
People want to be loved. But on the whole they want something more from that love than I can give them. They want safety and there is no safety on this earth. They want strength but my strength is all from personal momentum and cannot be long lent. They want to lay down the burden of their selves but I consider carrying that self a holy act.
All that comes later, though. Right now people look at me and see that I see them. They open up, let me reach in, bare their bellies. I love that they do this. I've been through it too many times not to be afraid. I suppose that's why I love the self-contained ones, people who are aloof and for whom I don't seem like I could ever be necessary.
I'm too tired to continue. I've been crying as I write. I haven't cried like this in a long time. Winter's finally over. As I've been recently reminded, it's time to move to to spring: renewed warmth but also all the rainstorms that drive decay and growth.
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no subject
Date: 2013-11-13 03:06 am (UTC)And so it goes. Maybe this is a part of that growing up in and through life thing. Might be good to see what the next stage is instead of holding on to the last one.
Ghosts hold on to the last stage. I stopped being a ghost.
C
no subject
Date: 2013-11-13 03:32 am (UTC)Being a good person can include other things, such as anticipating and avoiding boundaries in yourself and other people, limiting time and space in a way that's safer, even if it's less exciting. You can't say yes to what's working for you right now without saying no to the rest. That's ok.