awkward, HILARIOUS, and yet oh.so.sexy.
mmmmm. Joseph Gordon-Levitt
used to be
i went back and for the fun of it i read through every single blog post entry i’ve ever made. i peered into myself from over the years through my own words. it was interesting. turns out, much has changed but i’ve changed almost not at all.
there were travels i’d written about, jobs i’d rambled through, love found and lost i gushed and mourned, and there was so much, just so much that i used to write about Nepal. maybe it was coming “home” and returning here with fresh eyes that made me so eager to respond to everything. men i saw on the street, poverty, bus rides, beauty queens…just…everything.
in recent months there’s been less to say about the country, things turn normal and it’s hard to find topics on which i can write lengthy commentaries. it seems i still think as much (which is still way too much) but things have taken a turn internally. i seem to only write about me. and though i’ve said it here before, i’ll say it again, this is my space and i will write about whatever seems fitting.
what seems appropriate right now is how i feel significantly less compelling. what happened to provoking thoughts? what happened to new discoveries? have i hit that dreaded spot of stagnancy? am i no longer interesting? i wonder if these things should worry me.
a little while ago, i met someone new and over dinner he asked me to sum up my life philosophy in one sentence. i said that we should never stop questioning, i better start listening to myself. there are more questions to be had but maybe a few answers to be found. how exciting.
the worst of it
i must admit, at some point in the day, it comes to this–the sad pathetic state of owning my heartache. i wake up in misery whether i dream of you or not, and i prefer to see you in my nightly slumber if only because it helps me sleep better, (not because it lessens the heartache). a friend was kind enough to say, “you know they say if you can’t sleep at night you’re awake in someone else’s dream” but i doubt you give much thought to me, i doubt you dream of me.
everyday that passes without a word from you, i assume you love me less. i assume there’s more you’ve forgotten about us. i assume, as in your travels, you’re going further away. and in a way, that’s okay. my days pass at a snail’s pace and though S says i’m faking it, i still laugh, i socialize, and i make the most of it.
the longer you’ve been gone, the more i understand the extent of my pain. slowly it’s dawning on me just how much you hurt me. you took hurting me to such an extreme degree. and i’ve come to the conclusion that you are selfish, but you have a right to be. and when i said you showed signs of single-child syndrome, it wasn’t a compliment.
you always made fun of me for my memory, you laughed and so lovingly called me Al, but i guarantee there will be so much your memories won’t hold, whereas for me they will be permanently etched into my heart and my brain. do you remember, at one point you thought i was magic? do you remember, more than once you said you’d rather marry me than never see me again? do you remember, you used to think that i spoke the language of your soul? do you remember, you invited me into your world? do you remember, we once joked about if you were to ever break up with me, it’d soften the blow if you’d set me up on a date with JGL? i’ll make sure that’s another thing i won’t be waiting for. i don’t think i’m waiting for you, but it’s hard to tell.
it’s hard because when i have a bad day, when i hear news that scares me–you’re the one i want to go to. you’re the voice of comfort i want to hear. there’s so much i can’t tell anyone, not that i’d tell you, but even if you sang to me again sometimes i think it’d help. worst of all, i want to go to you with happy things. i want to share the best of things with you. but you, as others before you, choose to remain silent. and it makes me hate you.
hate is a strong word, in many ways stronger than love, but that’s the word that best fits the way i feel from time to time. i don’t like it, but it’s there. i think of the guys who’ve come to me in the last few weeks, with offers of sex, with offers of their affection, with suggestions of real commitment and it’s something new for me to actually see i’m a wanted woman (even if you didn’t want me) and i wonder if you’re off sleeping with another girl. i assume you are. there need not be reasons for why i think you would. it does make me think less of you, and right now, i don’t think you deserve my respect.
although i’m usually one to cling on to love, and although i’m prone to always foolishly hoping for the best, i cannot wait to get over you. i cannot wait till i really enjoy being single again. even though you were being honest with yourself, you have no idea what an insult it was to me, what an insult it is to us that you could consider the fact that you want to be open to something happening with another woman. i find that it disgusts me. it belittles us. and it makes me think you’re no different from other men.
even then, there’s a part of me that wants to contact you, to tell you to come back in September anyways, but i expect you won’t. and even if you did, you’d find me a different woman. you’d find me cold. i think it sad that i write these things to you, it irks me that you still have access to my thoughts and feelings, to my world in writing, while i am left clueless about your thought processes.
but what i know of you is this: you’re not one to dwell in the past, you don’t allow yourself regret. you will forge ahead and maybe one day when you’re in your death bed you’ll look around and be glad you took this trip and that you gave it your all, maybe you’ll have another woman to call your wife and those children you wanted by your side, or… maybe just maybe, it’s only then that you will realize you made a mistake. that you should have never let me go. that i really was the best of the best. but maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
you’ve left me conflicted and hurt, but more than that, you’ve left me alone and you’ve broken my home. i want to say i forgive you, but i don’t. not yet.
as it is, i don’t think you even come here anymore. which is just as well. what i write may be about you, it may even be written to you, but i do it for myself. for you, i will write no more.
you have no idea how many nights i have spent sleepless.
i don’t know if you’re quite worth any of this.
more things on my mind
my uterus is fucked up. let’s skip the details and move on to the bit that’s been on my mind the last few days. when i went to the gyno she told me that with what’s happening inside of me, it’s going to be difficult for me to conceive. which, in all honesty, didn’t bother me too much seeing as i don’t really want kids. but then due to a recent conversation i thought about it, and maybe with the right partner having kids is something i could maybe actually do. it was a thought i had that was strange to me. foreign. abstract. unnatural. the idea of me being a mother. the thought that someone else and i could have parts of ourselves born into another being. i can’t say it exactly appealed to me, but i urged my imagination to guess at what it’d be like. i took deep breaths and when i imagine a certain someone by my side…it didn’t seem so bad. i thought, maybe, maybe i’ll be able to do this…one day…maybe.
and then after a follow up visit to the gyno, i read up on uteral issues to stumble upon a terrific statistic: women with my condition are four to five times more likely to miscarry.
that angered me. i probably would have been indifferent to that figure if i’d been in the same state of mind when i discovered it’ll be hard for me to get pregnant. but, i wasn’t. having a number slapped onto my fertility, it was upsetting. it made me feel alone. i wish that one thought-provoking conversation had never happened, because if i hadn’t considered the fact that i could want kids one day…it would have been one less thing for me to worry about. it would be one less reason to be hurt. it all just feels so damn unnecessary.
i should so like to be comforted.
When Neruda speaks, I listen
‘Perhaps not to be is to be without your being.’
Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.
‘Carnal Apple, Woman Filled, Burning Moon,’
Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,
what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight,
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.
‘Absence’
I have scarcely left you
When you go in me, crystalline,
Or trembling,
Or uneasy, wounded by me
Or overwhelmed with love, as
when your eyes
Close upon the gift of life
That without cease I give you.
My love,
We have found each other
Thirsty and we have
Drunk up all the water and the
Blood,
We found each other
Hungry
And we bit each other
As fire bites,
Leaving wounds in us.
But wait for me,
Keep for me your sweetness.
I will give you too
A rose.
‘Don’t Go Far Off’
Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because –
because — I don’t know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,
because in that moment you’ll have gone so far
I’ll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
‘Always’
I am not jealous
of what came before me.
Come with a man
on your shoulders,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river
full of drowned men
which flows down to the wild sea,
to the eternal surf, to Time!
Bring them all
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be you and I
alone on earth,
to start our life!
‘I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You’
I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it’s you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.
‘If You Forget Me’
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
post-perfection
in the remaining last few conversations,
you dared, through tears, to say
“i know you don’t want to hear this”
(but you said it anyways)
“to me, you’re perfect.”
what good has it ever done anyone to be perfect anyways?
You quote things to me, and I’ll quote things back to you–there will be no more of this, understood?
The glamor of youth enveloped his particoloured rags, his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings… And there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearance indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity… He surely wanted nothing more from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, impractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this be-patched youth
Daydream delusion
Limousine Eyelash
Oh, baby with your pretty face
Drop a tear in my wineglass
Look at those big eyes
See what you mean to me
Sweet cakes and MILKSHAKES
I am a delusion angel
I am a fantasy parade
I want you to know what I think
Don't want you to guess anymore
You have no idea where I came from
We have no idea where we're going
Launched in life
Like branches in the river
Flowing downstream
Caught in the current
I'll carry you. You'll carry me
That's how it could be
Don't you know me
Don't you know me by now
She began to know me too well, and I began to hate her for it. Even when I was unpredictable, she’d predict it. For those of us who aspire to be original, that’s the worst sort of banality. She died. I’ve missed that banality ever since.
When you talked earlier about after a few years, how a couple begin to hate each other, by anticipating their reactions, or getting tired of their mannerisms. I think it would be the opposite for me. I think I could really fall in love when I know everything about someone. The way he’s gonna part his hair. Which shirt he’s gonna wear that day. Knowing the exact story he’d tell in a given situation. I’m sure that’s when I’d know I’m really in love.
_________________________________________
Self aware though you may be
I know you, better than you know yourself,
certainly better than you know me.
what to you is an ongoing discovery
to me, is a destination i already see
your thought process
your responses
your romantic notions of the world,
of what is it you’re doing
allow me my vanity to say,
i see your world before you do, i see it as it is coming:
there are truths to be found,
there are disappoints to be had,
there are changes to anticipate
i’ll leave it in generalities because
telling you the details would make this less fun for you
and less fun for me.
and i’m not too concerned with what you think
(not anymore)
as it is, already, your love means less
i’m saying this for my benefit
because i knew you once,
which means i always will
and when you come to those points in your life
i’ll smile to myself–owing it to your predictability
and you, you’ll be by yourself.
so when you said you’d be here
because you “need” my honesty and you
want to feel the “full extent” of my pain,
(though it kills you) i find myself laughing…
when did i give you anything that was but honest?
and what have you to benefit from reading about my heartache?
take my honesty and go, leave me to my pain
you and i don’t owe each other anything anymore.
of anything we had, of anything we shared,
of months, moments, conversations that once mattered
the memories will fade.
in a pillow or a poem i’ll find home, elsewhere.
Listen, if somebody gave me the choice right now, of to never see you again or to marry you, alright, I would marry you, alright. And maybe that’s a lot of romantic bullshit, but people have gotten married for a lot less.
