Sleep and Tenderness

Preface: The threat of tragedy is what makes a romance significant.  Without the risk torn open by vulnerability, love would be without gravity.  You must risk something that matters.

Sleep 

I awake trembling to the scent of lily-white love.  The sun is surreptitiously streaming in through narrow glints that sneak past the heavy opaqueness of the drapes.  But it provides no warmth.  I can't stop shaking, even beneath the leaden blankets.  I cautiously, meticulously, move to my left, towards this monolith of heat on the far side of the bed.  He's so comfortingly warm; he's almost glowing.  I burrow and nestle my way in, eradicating any discernible space between, the contours of our bodies paralleling consummately.  Within minutes the heat magnifies to an unbearably beautiful pain, searing my skin at all contacts.  I endure as long as a physically can, to bathe in it; I'd just as soon stay there forever, but my body is red-hot with fire.  Fuck it, I think.  Let it engulf me in flames.  I want to feel that magnificent burst, that instantaneous powerful flash.  An event horizon.  The only stripe of white light to be seen in the piceous and necrotic universe.  I know not who breaks first, but I find myself staring at the opposite wall, huddled in a pitiful ball, soon enough.

I love the way he looks in the morning.  So genuine, so raw, so human.  Unspoiled by the rigors of the ensuing day.  His eyes, so brilliantly blue, are oceanic, with hypnotizing tidepools of aureated gold; chiaroscuroed tactilely against the freckled and sunken-in nature of his surface.  It hurts my heart to see him drip with insincerity and feigned pretension.  But the world demands it, or seemingly so.  His subjects eat it up like candy, leaving nothing but spent wrappers in its wake.  I want the goofy guy with the bullhorn, wearing my viking helmet, dancing around in his thick socks and fleece cargo pants.  That's the man of my dreams.  That's the man.  The man too busy living and loving to care what anyone thinks.  Wholly himself, genuine and selfless, innocent and understanding.  Courageous in his sincerity.  Real.  Alive.

If we are who we pretend to be then a frightening reality awaits.  So most people choose not to wake up.  They just keep pretending.  The more involved we get, the deeper I fall, the more I feel like I was sent to him for some specific purpose.   The universe continues our course, despite the obvious and more cunning diversions.  For better or for worse, I love him.  I can't help it.  Embracing the vulnerability eases the fear, somewhat.   The make-or-break point came and went and I was left in the lurches of love, with less of a choice in the matter.  But there's a thin line between devotion and chump.  But it's simpler to just fall all the way down the rabbit hole.  To live in a twisted dream where everything is sutured by love.

I'm almost in tears when recalling the strange and vivid dreams of the previous night.  I dreamt a before and after dream, but they are out of order.  I dream the after first: A little boy, maybe three or so sits at a picnic table with a few presumable friends some sunny afternoon.  His eyes are so brightly blue, with those familiar gold flecks.  Shaggy blond hair falls into his labyrinthine eyes and he smiles the most heart-melting smile, with a mouthful of adorably crooked baby teeth.  He's drinking out of a miniature glass, like a shot glass.  He's seated next to the little boy, almost uncomfortably.  The little boy I suddenly realize is mine and there are tears in my eyes.  He pours something into the little boy's glass and the little boy says, "I love you, Daddy," to which he can't help but soften.  I've never felt happiness like the happiness I felt in that dream.  Cut to a party a few years earlier, this strange woman won't stop asking him about having kids.  At which point, he gets mad at me for whatever reason.  I respond by saying I wasn't the one bringing this up, so don't take it out on me.  This sets him off on a ten-minute harangue about how he doesn't want kids because he's got so much going on career-wise.

I'm taken back to the present, to the intensity of the morning, when our bodies entangle like thorned vines in the twilight dimension between dream and reality, between consciousness and sleep, between cognition and emotion.  The only time I breathe in deep and securely.  "Sleep and tenderness, that's all I need," he says.  It sounds like a vaguely familiar song lyric.  I feel incredible.  All I need is to live right here in his arms.

Tenderness

I've never seen a human being so content before.  That look of sheer ebullience.  I'll never forget it.  I never want to.  It made me euphoric.  I was filled with pure delectation.  I'm tired of living in fear, waiting for it all to fall apart, missing out on even the lightest moments.  Constantly trying to fortress my emotions for fear of getting my heart ripped out.  I was so scared to fall again, I superficially cursed love, but never really believing it.  I wanted it more than anything.  And I was finally open to it, but when the going gets tough, old habits tend to die hard.  To my credit, certain fears were justified, but they took over.  They ran amok, Lord of the Flies style.  My pride or more aptly my survival mechanism masquerading itself of pride refused to allow me to do the things I so longed to do.  I longed to touch him, live in the sanctuary of his arms, tell him I love him a thousand times a day, which still wouldn't have been near enough.  I wanted to pine for him while away and dream he was doing the same.  I just wanted to love him, nothing else, but I don't have a balanced middle ground.  It's either all love, all the time, or I shut down.  I play the nonplussed, too-cool, don't-need-anyone, icy, sanctimonious loner.  The dictatoress, the one no one can touch.  The one that escapes into her head, instead of her heart. Where she truly belongs.  She dismisses all of mankind with a smug wave of hand.  But that negates the other half.  The undiluted lover, the self-less nurturer, born to make a man happy, even at her own expense.  She does need him.

Sometimes, I wonder if my clothes dictate my mood or my mood dictates my dress.  When I dress provocatively, I feel powerful.  I feel like I have something to lord over the men that leer and molest me, both past and present.  I am now in control instead of them.  They relinquish control as they are occupied reeling their tongues up off the floor.  It's simple misdirection.  Sex is an easy disguise.  No one gets to the sweet nature.  No one gets to the vulnerability.  They don't get the privilege of the real me, as if that's some great prize.   But it's all I have.  It's something to me, my core.  What was it I saw in those piercing eyes that chilly winter night?  It was as if only his eyes existed in the incandescence.  Just these floating orbs of cerulean light dancing and flickering their way to me.  They made what paltry breath I had left catch in my throat.  My heart sputtered and stalled.  Trying so hard to look slick, but his eyes betrayed him.  I saw right through, so glassine, they were.  It was as though each man I met over those nine months, were another premonition or hint at him.  Because something about each one of them wasn't quite right.  "I'll give you the nickel tour," he said.  It all felt so real, so unbelievably authentic, overwhelmingly so.  I never stopped for a moment to think that he might be insincere, using canned and rehearsed lines.  It was genuine to me, everything I felt, the whirlwind I'd searched for slapping across my flushed cheek.  Slamming like a neglected shutter as the hurricane raged through.  That night, that second night, after he came over and then left so abruptly.  I didn't know what to think. All I knew is that I was choking without him.  I couldn't breathe.  I was left feeling so empty.  I decided right then, that no matter what, no matter the bruise to my pride, I had to know whether or not is was as real as I felt it to be.  I figured it could go either way, completely fifty-fifty, but at least I would have settled the matter, so I could start breathing again,  however shallow and asthmatic the breaths.  It turned out in favor of, the universe working its cosmic voodoo once more.  I chalked up all the strangeness to fear and uncertainty; letting the disingenuousness wash out to sea.  I know I saw something luminous and fragile in that first second, it was only after that the posturing came into focus. But by then, it mattered not.  He just kept staring at me with no regard for decorum.  I found it incredibly infuriating and interminably sexy.  Of course I wasn't going to just let him stare without me staring right back.  But to his credit, he didn't look away much.  We kept our eyes locked on each other.  I remember saying to myself, "Who is this guy?" In part to ask, "Who does this guy think he is?" And in part because, God damn it, I had to know.  Once I laid my eyes on him, I knew I never wanted to stop. It took all I had to look away coquettishly; a patented move.  The repartee was ridiculously wry and tense.  Dripping with deadly serious innuendo.  The air was thick for being so dream-like.  It was all happening so fast.  There was no time to think, but then again enough time had passed already.  Thinking wouldn't have done much good anyway.  Primitive and visceral emotions were in total control.  I wasn't playing any game, despite the lethal roll of the dice.  I knew I was too eager, but so was he, so what did it matter?  "Can I just kiss you now?"  My heart was as fully realized as the low-slung moon that hung in the obsidian sky that night, casting the same eerie grey shadows of arcane romance.  It was never the smoothness that turned me on, that attracted me; it was the roughness.  The missteps, the weirdness, the goofy smiles, the stumbled-over speech, the lisp of a radiant heart.  The flaws he would never let others see, that's what I fell in love with.  When all the swagger and ego and oily cons drained away, what was left was so rich in beauty, so purified in sweetness, so distilled in innocence.  The innocence of a child filled with innocuous thoughts of model airplanes and catching frogs, and being tucked in at night.

Love is the only thing that matters.  When I turn away from love, for whatever reason, be it insecurity, paranoia, fear; my life commences to crumble and erode.  What motivates us to cower in fear, despite knowing better?  You have to risk something that matters.  Anything less is a waste of time and talent.  Anything worth anything is difficult.  For if it came easy, one could never appreciate it fully. And appreciation is the medium to lasting happiness.  Materialism , corporate culture, greed, all feed the beastly Cerberus.  The Tao says by quelling desire for these frivolities, we remove all reason for crime; crime of law or crime of spirit.  Coveting leads to the world's worst ills.  Why can't we just be happy with the things we already have?  What is this motivation for more?  It is never enough, so you can never stop.  The snake that eats his tail.  Materialism leads only to human objectification.  And inanimate objects can never fill the void of love.  Dissatisfaction only begets more dissatisfaction.  We are supposed to do our work and forget about it, according to Tao.  We are not to wait around for praise or exaltation.  The lure of  success is a tempting Siren, but it is a hollow endeavor.  It only lures man astray.  If we sync into the peaceful flow of the universe, we will have peace.  To paddle upriver is an exciting, but foolish errand. Peace and excitement are at direct odds with one another.  Lasting happiness is bore from peace, not excitement.  We need only food, water, and companionship to survive, not cars or phones or computers.  But yet working towards these materialisms is not only acceptable, but lauded under the guise of "success" or "drive" or worst of all "high culture."  I often dream of living in a hunter/gatherer society where everyone has their specific and necessary role to fill for the survival of the community.  You get a sense of self-satisfaction whilst contributing to the greater good.  The world is wrought with takers and only a handful of givers, read:suckers.  It's hard to balance basic human decency (assuming such a sentiment exists) with not being a mark.  It's a basic tenet of survival.  Take advantage when you can.  But there are those recherche few that embody altruism.  One-offs from the species, I suppose.

I smile at a shuffling old man passing by my table.  His weathered, but kind face lights up with a stretched and contorted smile.  He waves and I feel good.  It's these seemingly inane interactions that fill my spirit.  "I'm so happy to come home to you," he chokes out.  Is it raw emotion that makes him sputter?  He shakes me up, flips me upside-down.  I burn for the waves of his intensity to wash over me.  He keeps me taut with these currents of electricity sparking and coursing through my synapses.  I've never had what I wanted so dangerously close at hand before.  It makes for a strange and presumably poisonous cocktail, albeit an interesting one.

Post Script: If we are who we pretend to be (See Vonnegut's Mother Night), then we are just that.  Pretenders.  If we pretend to be smooth, or pretend to be cool, pretend to be callous, all that makes us are phonies.  Fakes. Prevaricators.  Nothing more. But what of those who refuse to pretend? Ah. For another time.

State of Affairs or Photosynthesis of Pain

What makes my brain run the way it does?  Strange mechanisms at work.  Beyond my conscious control most of the time.  Universally-leaning.  That metaphysical riddle for me to unscramble.  The great cosmic joke just waiting on the punchline.  Perhaps eternally.  A girl cannot live on tragic romance alone.  Not at all, really.  She needs real nourishment, actual physical affection, something vitamin-rich and soul-satiating.  Something to build a real life on.  Not just some novelistic fantasy a la Sylvia Plath.  Maudlin and bathetic are just fucking fine for a far away recollection of a past life, but it can never sustain a present.  With absolutely no hope for a future.  That's why so many writers are alcoholic suicide cases.  Tragedy is their only currency.  It's their most sacred creative catalyst. Pain is the rawest, most unfiltered emotion to drive the pen.  Everything boils down to pain.  Active avoidance or fervent seeking.  There are  too many pitfalls to morbid curiosity, the by-product of sadomasochism.  I continue to punish myself.  The ultimate sadomasochist.  I have to be the best at absolutely everything, don't I?  A perfect sadomasochist.  Karma is an interesting mistress.  People are so quick to attribute positive events to their own hard work or more likely their sense of entitlement, feeling they deserve good things, as if someone is up there doling them out to the worthy.  I suppose the exercise of free will can get things rolling in one direction or the other, but success and status is pretty much luck of the draw, deeming success and status seeking behaviors worthless endeavors.  It is an illusory and antiquated notion that one can achieve their "dreams" or "goals" or what-have-you simply by old-fashioned hard work and perseverance.  It's a business model dreamt up by the Walt Disneys of the world, a childish notion that good things come to the good and the bad guys eventually get their come-uppance.  If only the wheels of justice moved so swiftly.  And more importantly this internalization of positive events is completely socially acceptable, encouraged even.  But for as quick as people are to internalize positive life events, they are even quicker to externalize negative outcomes.  Not many want to attribute adverse events to their own nefarious actions or sinister thoughts.  And those few that do are considered mentally disturbed.  Only the neurotic, emotionally-scarred headcases, like me, internalize negative events, as part of our self-inflicted internal torture regimen.  For which we are sent to doctor upon doctor and given pill after pill.  Why can't you just self-medicate to the level of functionality like the rest of the world?  We neurotics have far too many emotions to handle; they seep out in dysfunctional gloops.  Glop-gloop.  Glop-gloop.  It oozes.  Glop-gloop.  As it starts to pool around my toes in a stinking, sewage-ridden blob.  Full of love and pain; it festers.  The flies begin to buzz about the bubbling muck.  Soon the rats want their cut.  It turns gangrenous and necrotic as it further putrefies and Stilton-like veins of mold form across the surface.  What evolutionary purpose does it serve?  Our we simply evolutionary defectives?  One-offs from the species?  Or are we the pinnacle?  Evolution run amok, taken to its breaking point.  The limb finally snapping under the psychotic weight.  The brain has evolved beyond its own good.  It's forsaken itself.  Much like man discovering nuclear power.  It's grown too big for it's britches.  There is no suitable containment.  So out pours neuroses.  Even selective breeding has done the same.  Whole industries were born out of the neuroses of domesticated animals, dog psychologists, horse whisperers.  Do we just see ourselves in these animals or is it over-evolution striking again?  Dolphins, elephants or great apes in the wild seem to suffer as well.  Anything with any higher functioning or advanced brain capacity seems to develop emotional problems.  Mo' brain, mo' pain is as a succinctly and flippantly as I can convey.  Vonnegut's big brain hypothesis seems totally credible (see Galapagos).  Horse-shoe crabs have made it millions of years because they never outgrew their reproductive purpose.  There wasn't anything to think about.  In fact, I've never seen nary a horseshoe crab on a therapist's couch.  But we'll blow them all to hell soon enough, nonetheless.

Yet negative emotions persist.  Melancholy, anger, guilt fear.  What purpose do they serve?  I find myself asking time and time again.  One purpose that guilt and fear serve is to forbid me from living like a crazy person.  That's something.  It keeps me in check; guilt and fear are life's cattle fencing.  Keeping me in the pasture, for some semblance of a life.  Some semblance of morality, some semblance of happiness.  Of a life that other people seem to lead.  My head is full of these little snapshots of what a happy life looks like: a young couple picnic-ing under the shade of a grand oak on a sunny spring afternoon, a grandfatherly figure carving a picturesque Thanksgiving turkey with a big, shiny knife with even bigger, shinier eyes, a child blowing out the birthday candles on his billowy white-frosted cake against a backdrop of cheering adults, an incandescently lit Christmas tree littered with meticulously wrapped packages, while a fireplace roars beneath a mantle dotted with handmade stockings. Fireworks exploding overhead in the July heat, illuminating the faces of delighted children sitting cross-legged on an oversized red and white checkered blanket, or an elderly couple holding hands as they meander down a rust and gold leafed path, smiling at each other after all these years, relishing each satisfying crunch underfoot.  This is my foolish, nostalgic, black-and-white movie, Rockwell-ian, Americana idea of happiness.  Anything less than that seems meaningless and trite.  Silly, I know.  I wonder if anyone else, like say under the age of 75, feels that way.  Should I even care about fulfilling such a specific and ridiculous dream?  Probably not, but yet I hold out some bantam shred of hope.  Pervasive idealism is hard to deal with on a day-to-day basis.  So few understand.  No one understands fully.  I've given up on being understood fully.  But damn, I've been close.  God, it was so beautiful and harmonious once.  I could almost taste it.  It was powerful, more powerful than either one of us was prepared to deal with.   I know it scared him.  Fuck, it sure scared me.  It all changed in an instant, without warning.  One omniscient look, the locking of eyes across a crowded room, that's all it took to seal our fate.  The universe smiled between us.  Poetically succinct.  The rest of the world needed not exist in that determining moment.  There was only us, perfectly in sync.  We had it all right there, in the lavender-scented, apricot-hued effulgence.  Just the right amount of sweat and passion.  An overwhelming amount of love.  My heart ached and lurched.  I trembled.  He trembled.  Tears welled in my eyes, but they refused to fall.  For it was too wonderful a moment for even a touch of sadness.  It was the most right I've ever felt.  The universe whole-heartedly approved.  The universe smiled between us.  His heart pounding out of his blond-grey lined chest.  My fingertips dancing lovingly among the brush.  I lived to count the freckles on his arms as they wrapped around me.  Never wanting to be freed from the prison of his love.  I'm a hopeless case, I suppose.  Anyone professional with any sense has already moved on to more receptive patients.  More often than not, instead of his arms, I'm locked in the padded cell of my macabre sadomasochism.   Never letting go of the moonlit memories.  The oxidization of brass leaving a rust-colored stain on my barely-beating heart.  Never to be cleansed of his sad, watery-blue eyes.  The way his mouth curves over his teeth to form the slightest lisp.  Jesus, that barely perceptible, sweet, inescapable lisp.  I had forgotten how strong a narcotic love can be.  God, the exquisite, immeasurable, insufferable pain I longed for.  La doleur exquise, my darling.  You have to die of something.  What better than love?  Real gut-wrenching, blood-boiling, mind-bending, vomit-inducing love.  The hardest drug of all.  The one you just can't quit.  There is no rehabilitation.  Diamond-strength, nuclear-powered, surface-of-the-sun, hotter than the hinges of hell kind of love.  That's where true addiction lies.  Addiction for the emotionally flaggellistic.  Drugs for the cerebral cutter.  I want to see those hot streaks of crimson flash onto my porcelain flesh, so tight and supple with youth, yet slashed and burned with the cynicism of experience.  I've lived a thousand lifetimes in my head.  I want to wear my wounds like badges; pin them to my uniform as commendations.  Survival commendations.  People should take more pride in what they've survived.  Those are the ones who should be rewarded by that great wheel of chance.  Look what I've been through and yet I managed to drag myself out of bed!  I have yet to jump in front of a train.  Let's celebrate!  An un-suicide party.  I didn't put a gun in my mouth today! Where's the limbo pole?  Congratulations, you made it another pain-soaked day without pulling a rifle on a random crowd of people.  Kudos, man!  You didn't go kill-crazy; here's a gift certificate to Crate & Barrel.  Treat yourself to a couple of those really fancy throw pillows to take your rage out on.  You deserve it! Positive reinforcement works.  A crooked and stretched smile is forming across B. F. Skinner's corpse somewhere in the depths.

What is happiness without pain, anyway?  How can we appreciate light without shadow?  How can one discern warmth without first experiencing frost?  If good exists, so follows evil.  Everything has its natural opposite.  Positive and negative charges.  To live in the neutral is not to live at all.  I want to experience the full range of human emotions.  Why was I given them to experience otherwise?  What is their purpose?  Surely, it's not just to keep Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline lining their pockets.  It does follow that that is one reason negative emotions are frowned upon, for as long as they are condemned, the patients will continue to pop their pills, so those yachts can stay afloat and those jets stay in the air.  Why is anesthetization so much more socially acceptable than experiencing negative emotions?  Medication, be it self, or prescribed just perpetuates and prolongs the cycle of pain.  It pettifogs the brain, so you can't intellectualize or rationalize the problem for any lasting relief.  It only temporarily treats the symptoms without attacking the cause.  If you allow yourself to feel the naturally-occurring emotion, you can confront it head-on, and work through.  That takes true courage, and it's wholly honest.  There is no need for delusion.  And self-medication only works for as long as you swallow it.  All that pain floods right back the second the drug dissipates, therefore you take another hit, and another, and another, until there is nothing but that ever-fleeting drug-induced stupor.  All you've done is kill time, at best.  At worst, you've killed yourself or any remaining facsimile of it.

People really loathe sanctimony.  Especially when it contains a grain of truth.  No one likes to be held up to the light.  They aren't the beautiful prisms they purport themselves to be. They are ugly, contorted, self-absorbed, fungus-covered, swarthy, volcanic rock.  No one ever likes what they see in that mirror.  It's hard to stomach a cold, hard look at yourself.  Where are those redeeming qualities you thought you possessed?  Just another middle-of-the-road, unremarkable, terrible asshole.  Barely a memory.  No one wants to be a dime-a-dozen kind of chap, but someone has to be.  Delusion is the opiate of the masses.  It makes the world go round.  Otherwise, I guess we all would be lying in mental hospitals getting shock treatments.  There are a few sapphires of existence, but they are rare, exceedingly so.  They twist and writhe and push themselves for the sake of others, for some greater good, but to no tangible reward.  Most often to their detriment.  These tragic, genuine, beautiful creatures are the only unsung.  Justice is propaganda.  You know why some people punish themselves?  Because the world is terrible.  It's full of terrible things; hate, murder, evil.  And some poor sap has to absorb and process those terrible things.  Emotional migrant workers.  There is no landfill for pain.  It has to go somewhere.  The photosynthesis of pain is a necessary torture.  Without it, how would the rest of us breathe?  The sun shines for thee.