I just remembered being in love with you. Not the nots, not what it looked like from the outside or through other people, not the could-have-beens, the regrets, the sadism, the unspoken, the stupid, but the magical irrelevance of flaws, snatches of single seconds that were entire. This keeps happening, it has been two and a half years, and sudden jerks of time and space put me in the center of the mushy dead tissue of THIS US (how? How?) even though now I know about psychoanalysis, art as therapy, New York City, pain through osmosis, talking through feelings, depression, absolute unflinching self-loathing, absolute unflinching vanity and self-aware self-obsession, the nobility and ferocity of what I do. I have words for things now, I have artistic diagnoses and mental health suspicions, this is not about YOU, let me just say! It’s about the music you left, and the book I won’t return. This is ‘why? Still?’ with an intentional capital letter of which you should be made very aware. Still is stealth is time passing, these are the days of my life, unentire and unfulfilled, scary, unbrave. Everything I do is unbrave. It’s easy to blame you—almost as easy as it is to dramatically believe that my entire life has been a careening mess since that lackluster, accidental, incidental trip of a destruction. There has been a lot of wondering.
Most people I know about want to be in love. It is supposed to be cheaper, less frowned upon, more durable, longer-lasting than synthetic, illegal replications of bliss. It’s the everyman’s acting gig, it’s the artist’s funnel and celebration. People feed it to us in sweet-smelling wrapped packages of Hollywood movies and matching pajama sets. My mother tells me, quite frankly, that she did know instantly looking at my father on a bus somewhere around Houston, Texas that he was her end-all be-all. If you consider yourself educated, it’s silly to completely ignore or discredit anything with bajillions of converts, it’s silly to pretend it doesn’t affect you, even if you’re ashamed of wanting it because it’s so very terminally predictable, forbidden, unbelievable, painful. The Catholic church may make you cringe but that’s where the money is, that is the crutch of an ancient civilization. Things exist. Know them. And if your disdain is only built on mutual distrust or fear, why not believe? Your excuses are pathetic! Sign me up. I will drink some of your magical potion, Mrs. Witch, I’ll leave my lasting will and testament to AIDS victims in Africa. My heart is whole and ready, let them come to me or I will go to them. We begin.
America. Diagnosis. Perpetuation: the kitchen counter is prepared for dinner, then, just not the inevitable mess of mashed potato forever trapped in the cruets. Stains on the supposedly stainless-steel, though no one wants to do the dishes! I only saw a feast when I rushed aboard. I was coerced. This is false advertising! Yet it’s my fault anyhow, I should have known. But we all have working reptilian brains at the baseline—we all should have known. This is the treatment and paradoxical reality of that which I am told (and willingly agree) to dedicate my life to the pursuit of. Fin exposition, okay?
So I gave it to someone. He didn’t hold it the way I wanted him to. I asked for it back, but it was too late—I didn’t want to hurt him, was worried I couldn’t hold them both without him seeing. His was heavy and warm and wide, I liked wrapping it around me in the cold. Time ticked on and I Told everyone, told everyone, told everyone, that I didn’t need mine, could definitely live without it, whatever, so not a big deal, was happy to see it safe (if uncomfortably clutched in a sweaty palm..). Really, it was hard to breathe, it was colder—and because it was colder, I needed the blanket all the more.
One day, he left it sitting out—just for a minute. I was furious, how dare he? How dare he let it lie unguarded for a split second, even, on the bottom rung of a staircase with no railing? I stole it back, quite selfishly. He went looking for it everywhere, but wouldn’t admit to me he couldn’t find it. This was a scary time but we lived this way for while—me, greedy, with my two, and him, terrified, searching for mine. I was so sad he couldn’t find some way to steal it back from me, so sad he didn’t even know. Furious that I had taken it in the first place. Weighed down with the girth of eight ventricles. One day, I said so—made my escape while still clutching that blanket to survive. Kept it for a long long time until it was gently pulled away from me, and I stood around naked forever after with my two hands grown together (so gnarled from that greedy death grasp) around my own. Blood runs through my fingers all the time and I watch it with a little thrill, but with two tied hands I can’t make it move anywhere, can’t give it to anyone. Watch it run, watch it run, let it dry along my elbows and ironize. Stand naked. I am so cold, all the time, having known the blanket. I am so cold, all the time, without the blasted lump working properly inside my own chest. We are unsafe this way. I freeze.
That’s the story.
To-do list. I suspect what I want is my proverbial money back. It would be nice to not feel static and preserved, it would be nice to find no shock in new Facebook relationships or feel the need to stalk you at all, it would be nice to have that cathartic, unfathomed rebound guy with some amount of ease. It would be nice to be warmer, but to be tighter, wrapped more comfortably. I’m sure it would be nice to find some way to generate happiness and validation from within, but the more I obsess the more I begin to think that that is not what it’s really about. I am loved, after all, people love me on a daily basis—but not without condition, and sometimes (lament the cruel waste!) I don’t love them back. Through with tongue-in-cheek self regulation, our heroine lays down the gauntlet—I want something so profound from all sides that I’m forced to change, I want an external deus ex machina. My mother tells me that she just knew, I want to just know, I want a chance to repeat but improve. Where (Still?) can I find those moments of being entire, how can I move past this and be better at everything? How can I even begin to respect you awful fictitious Hollywood or couples on the street outside my building sharing cigarettes and secrets, how can I not hate you for lying to me and then, after I called you on it, coming back to taunt me again with that beautiful little goodness of your lie, your exquisite lie? The playing space is no longer fertile or prepared (well, I should hope I’m still fertile) and I am weak, that’s the disease, but ultimately what I struggle with is how to open up to it again. Still? Still? I am over you, but not what it was to be with you. I am terrified. So I talk.
I want to walk through history now. I want to dance towards current events, and sentences that do not begin with ‘I’. Fat chance. On Netflix last night, I watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Here is John Cameron Mitchell’s interpretation of how (on earth and above) we got into this mess:
When the earth was still flat,
And the clouds made of fire,
And mountains stretched up to the sky,
Sometimes higher,
Folks roamed the earth
Like big rolling kegs.
They had two sets of arms.
They had two sets of legs.
They had two faces peering
Out of one giant head
So they could watch all around them
As they talked; while they read.
And they never knew nothing of love.
It was before the origin of love.
The origin of love
And there were three sexes then,
One that looked like two men
Glued up back to back,
Called the children of the sun.
And similar in shape and girth
Were the children of the earth.
They looked like two girls
Rolled up in one.
And the children of the moon
Were like a fork shoved on a spoon.
They were part sun, part earth
Part daughter, part son.
The origin of love
Now the gods grew quite scared
Of our strength and defiance
And Thor said,
"I'm gonna kill them all
With my hammer,
Like I killed the giants."
And Zeus said, "No,
You better let me
Use my lightening, like scissors,
Like I cut the legs off the whales
And dinosaurs into lizards."
Then he grabbed up some bolts
And he let out a laugh,
Said, "I'll split them right down the middle.
Gonna cut them right up in half."
And then storm clouds gathered above
Into great balls of fire
And then fire shot down
From the sky in bolts
Like shining blades
Of a knife.
And it ripped
Right through the flesh
Of the children of the sun
And the moon
And the earth.
And some Indian god
Sewed the wound up into a hole,
Pulled it round to our belly
To remind us of the price we pay.
And Osiris and the gods of the Nile
Gathered up a big storm
To blow a hurricane,
To scatter us away,
In a flood of wind and rain,
And a sea of tidal waves,
To wash us all away,
And if we don't behave
They'll cut us down again
And we'll be hopping round on one foot
And looking through one eye.
Last time I saw you
We had just split in two.
You were looking at me.
I was looking at you.
You had a way so familiar,
But I could not recognize,
Cause you had blood on your face;
I had blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine.
That's the pain,
Cuts a straight line
Down through the heart;
We called it love.
So we wrapped our arms around each other,
Trying to shove ourselves back together.
We were making love,
Making love.
It was a cold dark evening,
Such a long time ago,
When by the mighty hand of Jove,
It was the sad story
How we became
Lonely two-legged creatures,
It's the story of
The origin of love.
That's the origin of love.
Biologically, we are cells splitting constantly. We are fractions of a whole milling about and expanding, but expanding as less than—we are quantitative, rather than qualitative, aim to be massive over pure. This song is lifted (gently) from Plato’s Symposium, in which Aristophanes makes a speech in praise to the God of Love Eros and outlines his version of where the death trap comes from. Zeus “cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cuts them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that man might contemplate the section of himself: he would learn a lesson in humility”. So we see the grand design, yes? Later, Aristophanes writes of Zeus’s abject cruelty: “After the division of two parts of man, each desiring his other half…they began to die from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and one of the halves died and the other survived; the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them—being entire sections of entire men or women—and clung to that.” See how I was not wrong, to use that word entire to describe our most loveliest? What did we learn from this? There is no newness to this pain; it is beyond the beginning of time. There’s no solution. I refuse to tie up this reference neatly; I swear this is not some kind of exacted academic treatise. It was wealthy recognition to hear that magnificent Hedwig tell me why I feel this way and how I am not alone, in one sense at least.
I do not want to forget us. I won’t.
I want to be more of, and than, what I am.
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