Lessons in Love

I've always been saying you can't love without an eye for the end. Someone enters my life and it's the instant connection, and I'm dropping everything to be a part of their life and they can be mine, but moments later I'm picking pieces back up and hiding them away. I can't love you fully, I think, this will be over soon anyway.

One lover or was he just a friend termed it a "crippling aversion to intimacy," but I think I was just softening the blow. Wasn't it a year ago, maybe a little longer, I was confessing that it was the only way to love? To care about someone, I had to remind myself I would be gone soon enough, or so would they.

I don't know where I'll be soon enough. I've left a career for something new, and even that is changing so rapidly. I don't know where I'm headed yet, I don't know who I can take with me and how I'll keep my connections. But last night it struck me: with love, it doesn't matter. Just because it may change, or the person may fade out of my life, does that mean my love can't be real? And is it really less painful to love and see it end than to never really love at all?

And so what if it does end -- does that make it less real? What makes love permanent? Is it that it reveals a permanent effect? Is it that I loved as deeply as I could at that time and now I can walk free of it, or even more fulfilled?

I feel a little embarrassed saying this, but opening my home up to a cat has changed my whole life. I've learned to accommodate another individual without losing my stability. My heart keeps opening up because I care about another being's wellness. I care about his existence. I like to see ours merging, I love it when he grooms my hair and kneads my stomach. I love falling asleep to the sound of his little motor pressed against my face.

I get scared because I keep thinking this has to end. I know it will someday; he can't be physically in my life forever. But put that aside a moment: the change he's effected on me has altered my approach to life so profoundly, that relationship will never end. He's put his print on me. That never goes away, does it? That's what makes love so lasting, we could even say permanent.

A year ago, I asked the Virgin Mary to teach me how to love.

A Singular Year

I've spent the earliest of the afternoon going through last February's writing. What was I hoping for? A lover, survival, I wanted to be a better person, I wrote I didn't want to always be such a bully.

I assumed if I asked forcefully enough, these would happen immediately. Maybe it's a common assumption in the occult community (I really think it is): If I demand in the right way for something to happen, BOOM it occurs!

As I had just started rooting around occult traditions at that time, I'm not surprised at my attitude. I figured, I'm done with suffering! Fuck this, I want things to work out for once.

So the year passed. Here are some of the results: No boyfriend. Actually, not even any sex. I couldn't drag my ass to church except a time or two. I went hungry, I left another job and my "stable" situation to follow my dreams. Life never got easier!

But then I think about how my wishes did get fulfilled, all of them. Sure, I haven't got another lover but the solitude is letting me deal with 23 years of sexual trauma I didn't really want to let heal, the pain that has kept me from connecting with everyone, let alone a partner. While I just wanted it to be better right away, I've actually had the time to work on it.

Dealing with the bullies in my life taught me a lot about myself, too, and about when it's okay to be tough on someone else and how to know that I'm okay and don't have to be a bitch to people. And for some reason, all the poverty taught me not to let the fear of no money rule my life; it freed me to follow my intuition and step into a new world where I'm supposed to be.

I keep asking myself, in seemingly absurd situations I've voluntarily taken on, why am I here? I keep finding myself ready to walk out, thinking fuck this there has to be something else out there. I ask my guides what I'm supposed to do and they tell me to figure it out.

And so I breathe deeply and listen. The difficulty dissipates. I know I'm in the right place right now, I watch, I move as my heart moves in me. When I come home every evening, I am filled with smiles and know I may rest.

And the most important change, the one I've struggled for and never even dared to write down: The voice in my ear that tells me I'm useless, naked, no one wants me, confused, helpless, worthless -- when it comes closer, I tell it it doesn't matter. I know it isn't true and I walk away.

It's the voice of every lover that left me, and every rape and the pipe in my parents' hands that beat me. I walk away because I really am better than that, I really am beautiful and meaningful and I'm not afraid. And even when I am afraid, I know I'll be okay.

Works in Art

Turns out, gallery work is a lot of running up and down Chicago with 50 pound artworks and praying your manicure doesn't shed on a client's receipt. The only glamorous part is I've got to do it in a borrowed $600 outfit and heels. Never thought I could make it ten hours and a couple miles on concrete with these fuckers, but I guess you learn.

Every morning I ache all over. My head, my neck, my arms, my back, working down. Something seems to be loosening up when I'm no longer the work of art to sell these days: shocking, I think, it's the first time I've been told to stand down in years. I thought I always had to sell myself, turns out capitalism isn't always human prostitution.

I spend all my days clearing out another human's space and learning dark and light places pushed into the paper with pastels and paints, I'm brushing bits of their souls off my fingers as I store originals away in paper and plastics and I'm sweeping staples off the floor. And you know what? I rather deal with the fear of smearing someone's outpouring on the back of another than all that time I wasted trying to make ugly people beautiful. Turns out, it's something only you can do from yourself.

When I sit down and see the glimpses of shine in an artist's eyes, or when I can finally spot the glimmering candles past all those canvasses, there's something inside me that's opening up. I know it because it's not just the muscles I use to lift frames that ache every morning. Everything is charged with the static electricity of wanting.

I ache, I ache all over and it's because I'm working with my soul. I'm cleansing another person's life and the dredge and bright are both rushing through me. I know the fears that divide me from every other human being, and I can't keep pushing them down. I've got to feel them and I'm chipping away with each obsessive worry.

I want to be with because I'm starting to be with myself. I don't feel so lonely anymore.

Mid-January, Waiting for a Paycheck

Why do I worry?

It's so cold the cars outside slide bleak over the white asphalt, all ice and useless salt these days, and the awning won't stop rustling and tugging against itself. I haven't got an answer yet but do what you know and I'm bleary from lack of sleep.

Last night I felt too charged to rest. My shoulders tense, plans were flowing over my mind. It's too cold to write this morning.

Wallbreaker

I am increasingly aware of a growing aversion to intimacy. Perhaps it's always been there; I know a number of my exes accused me of it. But now I feel it. I just don't want to be close.

That is not to say I don't actually want to be with someone. I just don't want to be with anyone. I'm remembering all the time I spent with lovers wondering why I didn't even feel like I was there, in that space, with them. I must have really been somewhere else, at least in my mind.

So what does that mean for me? I don't have a burning desire to simply open up to the next fucker that moseys his way into my life. If anything, I'm glad to be aware of it. I wonder when the walls will drop next, though. It's been a long time.

I've been reading The Drama of the Gifted Child, which is kind of a therapy classic. She makes the point (rather quickly and precisely) that our emotional pain stems from parental inadequacy in the first moments of our lives. When we run up against repetitive behaviors and roadblocks, the answer is to look backwards and find from where it stems.

While it may not be the most practical guide, it seems in my experience to ring true. It doesn't exactly give me something to do with my feelings right now other than to acknowledge them, and look back on the six years of therapy and digging out old memories and traumas. If anything, it's relieving to know I have these feelings not because I'm crazy, but because I'm still working through a difficult life. Those feelings are okay, and I don't have to run for them or the situation.

I wonder when the last time was I truly and properly raged. I suppose I've raged in writing, but over in my mind I see the two-year-old with fists clenched, and face screwed shut but for the mouth lolling and the wail twisted up out of it.

They said I was inconsolable, a willful and bad child. They say I had to sit in a pen and they'd lock themselves in another room for the inconvenience. All they could do was ignore me, they said. I was a bad child.

It's over and over in my mind because I catch myself ignoring others' tantrums. When my cat fusses, when a friend collapses, if a coworker grows irritated, I become an ice wall of silence. That's not appropriate, I think, don't you know how to handle your own feelings? We don't talk like that. We all have needs, but you needn't show them.

My parents insist I never really spoke till I was three, which contradicts nearly every early memory of mine. At the very least I babbled often. I suppose they didn't want to hear it either, and anyway no child really knows how to say he or she is being raped. Few people really can say it in adulthood, but we all learn how to scream.

Yes, but screaming is by its nature inconvenient. it is designed to disrupt and here you are disrupting me would you just be quiet?

No? Well, I'll ignore you.

Or I won't. Melting the wall puts a sticky warmth in my stomach, and my arms feel heavy. I don't want to share feelings, but I do want. I must. I  will. These walls will break down; I will it.

Morning Fragments

I slipped out of the hundreds-year-old building through a door in the blackwood, and suddenly a rush of sea air plunged toward my face. I could feel my right eyelid in a different plane beginning to creep open and I steeled my mind against wakefulness as I moved into open relief after an evening in a dark and confused setting.

The area expanded into a wide promenade, nearly circular. Displays bordered the walkway, each intricately and accurately carved into the shapes of humanoid fishes and mythical creatures, each mouth opening into a speaker. Music, dramas, voices pumped through and on first glance they seemed to live, excepting the fact they couldn't move.

The sun was bright and my guide was explaining the meaning of each station. "I understand!" I accused. "Everything here is designed to be just slightly understimulating. You're lulling every resident into a state below their ability to resist."

She admitted it, lowering her face a bit. I stumbled onto a group of men who'd had their genitalia removed and their anuses moved to the front of their bodies -- the perfect gay bottoms, pregnant with their own asses.

I opened my eyes, back in the darkness of my own apartment. I could feel a stream vibrating above my head, at an angle almost foreign to the plane I was on.

[...]

We were walking through the livid brightness of an eternally autumn wood. Branches stretching over the myriad paths, I remembered the road I often took onto an isolated bridge, green water drawing in the drifting leaves, and the massive house hidden just behind the opposite bank.

My childhood neighbor lived there I was recounting. My mother's sometime caretaker, over the years the house had grown darker and she dimmer. Finally, the kitchen rests empty, the door locked, the windows vacant. Last visit I could hardly make my way into the musty first steps up to the daylight table. She had withdrawn from the plane; even the house might be fading now.

[...]

I could hear my neighbor struggling with his keys to enter the door. The apartment was black and my cat had left the floor for the lofted bed above my head. I couldn't move, my body pressed into the rough sofa floral.

A shifting pattern of light in front of me: swaths like silk darting over the blackness of the hole opening up. I cried out, I still couldn't move, I cried out again, I tore my hand out of the stricture.

I shifted to my back; I shifted again. I felt my body sliding out of itself.

Love and Darkness in the New Year

I am torn, often, by this desire to understand the nature of evil and why it undergirds our sense of existence. I am torn, I say, because I begin to wander down a path that makes me irritable, and selfish feeling, and those are not wrong per se but the tearing comes when I know I can be better, I know I am capable of more, and yet I feel I am feeding some part of me I haven’t exactly learned to integrate.

 It bothers me because I know there is more to love than just a feeling I get in my genitals. And yet it feels so shallow when people speak of it, even Christians, Jesus loves me this I know they’re saying and I wonder if they’d feel that way going down on some old businessman knowing you might just make it to rent this month? I mean what does the idea of their invisible friend’s love even mean? Just a good feeling, for when things are going okay?

But there must be some depth to love, and every time I find myself scurrying around dark corners there is this part of me that feels disappointed in myself. Residual guilt, perhaps, but I could use a hell of a lot fewer mornings waking up feeling like something just went wrong.

And then there is the behavioral side of the question: the paths we walk. Some of us are called down dark paths, and I do not know why. We need some understanding of the blackness, at least enough to know what it means.

And are good and evil like day and night? Do we need them both? Is there something false about the choice?

I’ve been reading of St. Thérèse de Lisieux. Did you know the Little Flower was syncretized with the Orisha Oyà? Oyà is rushing emotion, and a total bitch to boot. I thought Thérèse was sick and dying of love for Jesus.

And so I find myself wondering, with the warmth of my cat seeping into me body as he sprawls across my arms and I’m running my fingers through his white softness – what is the point of anything else? It’s love isn’t it, that moves me to walk even crooked avenues. Love inspires me to understand and see strange difficult places, even past the bounds of taboo, it seems.

Then there are the places I tread out of emboldened curiosity. I want to know what makes this bad is different, or even I want to know why this bad thing is important is different, than I need to tread this way because it will teach me love and forgiveness, even if it seems bad.

There is, I guess, a difference of motivation. But it’s not just a motivation, it’s a purpose. There is a reason why I am here or there.

But how can Oyà be St. Thérèse? They must both be absolute love, somewhere, just two faces of the meaning incarnate and mythical. They move  through bright and murky means and yet still come out burning, passionate love.