The Strangeness of Absence

It isn't that I refuse to feel. It's not that. I don't resist it. I believe I am ready to welcome it, wholeheartedly, like rain after summer. I am ready to welcome it gladly. Every day I wake up and rush to the front door wishing that it would dust its feet on the mat outside and knock, finally, after so long. I want to. I long to. I am mad for it. I am mad like the torrential fire that ravages the forest.

Or so I'd like to think. Maybe I'm not as mad as I think I am. Maybe I am only as mad as the soft dying glow of the spent bonfire. The heart, perhaps, burns only like solid ice. A chunk of cold ice---only frostbite, mistaken for flame. Perhaps, perhaps. I've forgotten already.

This is youth. I see it gallop like a wild horse, away. The rushing river has reached the lake. On the horizon I see the sun as it bids goodbye, leaving this sky for another's. There was something lost; but it came too quietly, this passing. I hardly even noticed it leave. Had everything come abruptly the pain perhaps would've been too unbearable, but the feeling wanes like the aftermath of a storm in the last few hours of its life. I only remember, and what I remember I pine for, but perhaps it's too late. 

Luminous

"I would like to sleep

with you, to enter

your sleep as its smooth dark wave

slides over my head."

- "Variations of the Word Sleep", by Margaret Atwood

I want to touch you in your hidden places. When you are sleeping, I will secretly crawl in your dream and whisper behind you. I want to walk my fingers on your skin and feel the landscapes of your iridescent body, to feel your legs and hands entwined with mine in this lazy Sunday morning. 


I want to wake up everyday and see you looking at me that way you look at me when you think I'm not looking, and then I'll stare at you, and you'll ask, "What?" and I'll say, "nothing" and then smile, the hours melting into fluid desire that fills the vessels of our souls to the brim. We are overflowing. Today is illuminated with everything that is plenty.

The Fairy Child

"Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea. For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail--" -- from "Babbitt", by Sinclair Lewis

You always want to be the one who leaves because you think it's much better that you disappear before the other even realizes that you weren't worth it from the start. Your lovers' cabinets are never filled with your clothes; your belongings are always stashed in some luggage somewhere, under their beds perhaps, or their closets under the stairs, just in case you wake up one morning and that familiar feeling sinks in again, telling you it's time -- yes it's time to go. It's time to walk away, or maybe run, never look back, catch the next bus to the next train to the next plane to the next man whom you will say you love with all your heart, like a line from a movie you've watched too many times already.

So many beds and so many couches, so many bathtubs and towels, so many coffee pots and stoves -- you leave a trail of you, the scent and song and soul, but you, you only take yourself. Every time you walk outside a house and a life, there is only a fresh start, a clean slate, a new beginning waiting to welcome you back. No pasts, no pains, no tears, nothing but a smile, a laugh, a blind acceptance that this is your fate. You can only keep the charade for so long, and before they can see through you, you know you must go and leave, take away all the imperfect in you and carry the burden alone, to preserve that perfect picture in your lovers' heads: the you who always knew when to kiss them and embrace them, the you who always had the right things to say, the you who was forever new and interesting.

Because staying necessitates a revelation, you choose to leave instead. For even in silence, just by staying, one eventually divulges the flaws, the chips, and cracks -- all those things that weary the soul. A dream is beautiful because it is exactly ideal; reality is only a dark, depressing room. You are the dream. You are the ideal. You are the desire which haunts them, the one who got away, the one who will be remembered even when you have long gone. You will be the one who will haunt your lovers until the end, your smell and touch and kisses wafting forever in their memory, a tragedy that echoes in the cave of their lives when they sleep beside their wives.

You are only a mist that comes a little while and vanishes -- but yet you leave such a beautiful rainbow every time.

If God sneezed, what would you say to him?

Cover your mouth.

The only stupid questions are those you do not ask. So ask!