The So-Called Fake Relationship

Apparently there's a trend now to talk about relationships that never came to full fruition or that never achieved something or other as "fake." Maybe it would be better to call it the "almost-relationship?" Isn't it a little callous, a little sad to talk about ourselves as utterly detached as "fake" implies? It's all so black and white, all or nothing apparently--a dichotomy of being. But when you're in it, (it being a new something with someone,) you're in a sea of gray, of getting to know, of possible becoming. We live in a reality of almosts. Of possibles. Of maybes. There are no signed contracts or even verbal agreements of belonging and expectation. No strict social rules regulating our conduct. All you can do is swim through a sea of uncertainty and hope to come out alive? Thriving if you're lucky but often a little bit broken, jaded, sad. There used to be calling cards, agreements between families to even say hello and now there is very little that regulates relationship. If you're lucky, they're a good person who will at least try to be honest with you whether it's "working out" towards the desired societal outcome of unified baby-making or unified consensual bliss til rigor mortis do you part (or whatever your shared ideal is) or not. If you're lucky, their own values regulate them to be decent, to be kind, to think of your feelings, to take the time to talk things out. It's a brutal time to date. It can be lovely but it can be totally horrible. An oscillation of all the unknown heart and hormonal strings with very little understanding of where it's all going. Find your own road and pave it in yellow and hope, hope, hope to find the wizard.

Re York

I'm giving into the reality that a city is only as exciting as the love that it could be. When a potential romance dies, the spark that lit up that glow dims too. I wish it weren't so but that's who I am. I live for love. I write love. I create with it, against it, for it, around it, thanks to it always in endless repulsion and adoration.

I write in love with word that makes love. Love makes the word. The pulsation of my heart to the keyboard tap tap beat beat. Word, word. The beloved object between us, us the word. The beloved linguistic bliss. Or the utter lack of words and just the non-words issued by eyes and hands. A beautiful face that no amount of words could summarize. Only your eyes. Only your glorious eyes in mine. That's hardly a word. That's a perfect heartbeat. Beat. Beat.

Don't forget me forever. Sing me when you're older and you've realized that you've let us slip into a pointless lacuna. When we are more lacuna than present then perhaps we simply aren't anyway.
Aren't. Yet around all the gaps a piece of me will long to keep adoring those moments when we were blissful somebodies. Some body day I'll see you heart heart heart. Is it the you or the deepest of wishes to feel that way? How to separate the blissful being from the inspirer of such feeling? We try to extricate the essence so that perhaps it could be again.

Swish heart into place and adore the everything space that fills the lungs of a dinosaur in a fantasy novel about robots. Non sense permeates the desire to uplift so that it's ok that nothing makes sense exactly sometimes.

=

Being a woman is everlastingly the weirdest and most wonderful place in which I could have landed as a soul. It's horrible, because the objectification continues in a myriad of hidden, perverse, twisted and unexpected ways. It's wonderful, because the power that lies within the conundrum of being a coveted yet all-encompassing societal object is vast, deep, never fully exploited in magnitude.
The innocence the power. The sheep in wolf's clothing. The man in woman's. The power in innocence. The breasts that clothe the power. This costume, this entrenchment of baby hormones, this wonderful cultural masquerade, this incredible depth of feeling and exquisite strength. Empathy as strong as the pull of moon beams.

Take me as a soul object.
Place me in biological and culturally constructed Woman.
=

Ebbs and...

Today after an incredibly successful week, an incredibly productive couple months, I woke up feeling like a broken little piece of glass someone accidentally found in the sand. Sometimes consciousness has to be recollected like a lost fragment. Recollect how it got here to this non-place and this everything place.

I wish washed over myself in a worry of drownings. Always the fear of drowning. Except for literal drowning: the ocean is exquisite. Water calms and soothes, Lake Michigan can do this for me as well. A few days ago I walked out onto the beach which was a frozen-over glacial tundra, icy blue hills and valleys with brown sand peeping out in clumps. The water impossible dark blue behind the tundra hills. My soul was calmed immediately like a baby returning to the breast.

Memory foam

All these words to say to you apparently but they melt into the skin upon contact. The voids allow for words to become the material of contact. Later they can barely keep up with the impulse to kiss. Speaking is lost under kissing, touch itself confirms the word. The word is to be touched in my mouth, hands, between my legs the word begs to be spoken. The deep, aping word of the flower petals opening and begging. Speak body, the openings phrases for you to read, this braille we read in the flesh, flex with the tissue between sentences, comma, kiss.
"I need to reform myself to the mattress."
"Reform yourself to my body." 
Open the eyes or close them and the knowledge is the same. He/she will not disappear.

It was like that reassurance I felt last time after seeing my former (tragedy-inclined) chess partner. The feelings brought on by him had inspired this sense of self, this continuous sense, knowing that I'm still here, with or without him I'm here and somehow the reassurance wasn't that he was the same but that I was the same and would remain so upon leaving. I refound myself in a bleak little room despite the defiant air with which we said goodbye I was saying hello to myself. It was only a beginning in my relationship with myself.

So now upon knowing that I'm here, the knowledge of non-disappearances. Despite mortality, the knowing that all will continue to be and be. Even the seeming permanence of the stars is non-permanent, is old light. We look at ancient history when we look at the sky at night. Who knows what quickens the pulse of the universe thousands of light years away? What word chimes between her legs? Maybe she lays clocks like a hen, alternate realities ticking inside.

I'm hatching a few.

Object permanence is a constant concept to re-evaluate. All life long. If I close my eyes will you still exist? The young child doesn't know yet, mother leaves into a realm of non-existence. Mother reappears and she is reborn. The mind is remade every time mother appears and reappears. Birth and rebirth is introduced. Attachment is a series of relationship births and deaths over and over again. A constant reincarnation of the self and the other and the other and the self and the mirror that comes back come back to the mirror look at yourself, smile, hopefully. Smile. The grin on that face that's your grin to have and keep it's probably not permanent but you know that you could make it again it's yours to make. Smile, melt into the word and the skin the word the skin that makes the word.

Letting the brain fly as it will

Fly brain, fly.

I get sucked into other people's problems and projections too easily sometimes. Especially when I'm procrastinating on my dissertation and I'm hungry for a distraction, oh anything to remind me of something that matters, to remind me of something that resembles REAL things in the world where people feel and love each other and maybe even sometimes fight for each other? Even if the fight is nuts, as it often is in the games of love and war people co-construct in their minds, it's a fight and you get energized and your heart beats like an eager little soldier boy's drum da dum.

Something to trigger the passion in the brain. My stories of heart ache, where I ached until I couldn't ache any more.

It's too easy to become the target of someone else's insanity. The fixation for someone else's depravity. The cookie jar for cookie monster.

I'm no cookie jar. I'm a vat of infinite light and sound
watch the colours swishing round, colour fish
singing magical dolphins,
seas of infinite creatures

you best learn to swim in these waters, swim with me. Breathe like a mermaid. Serena. Serene. Ocean Yemanja Emerald Queen

Third Life Crises and Central American Predators and Such

A friend of mine talks about how she needs 6 hours of uninterrupted time to get 2 hours (?) of work done. For me, sometimes it's days of reluctantly transforming myself back into a monk. Or something.

This morning I wondered through my half-sleep about having a third-life crisis. I did so well in that play last weekend--maybe I was supposed to be an actor all along and here I am having spent most of my 20's in a PhD program for Self-Torturers in which I haven't been nearly as productive as I know I could be/would like to be. But the nature of this activity is such that it's hard for anyone to sustain constant motivation and productivity. You are on your own with usually no support whatsoever and you're supposed to keep imagining that what you're doing matters, that it's worthwhile, more importantly that you want to be doing this.

The whole point of running off to Central America for a couple weeks, (yes I just did that,) was to turn it all off. Because at some point you become so bombarded with expectations and obligations and emails and calendar reminders that it seems normal. But that trip, though lush and full of jungle views, was quite weird. It's like I forgot how to be properly defensive with strange men. I was overly friendly. I smiled, I wore adorable outfits. I had so many stalkers that there was a limited period of time during which I could actually stay in one town before it would get to be too much and I would have to move on.

Now I'm back in Chicago clamoring for space, on some nights opting to spread out luxuriously in the huge apartment I rented instead of going to parties. Luxuriating in my own territory. That trip left a bit of an antisocial (more like anti-random-men) taste in my mouth and it might take a little while to get past it.

The trick I'm sure is not to stop letting people in entirely, but to let them in selectively. You don't want the whole village thinking you're a welcoming target. It's a tough negotiation for women. (And more obviously so in a country where everyone's blood is boiling from the heat and more insidiously so in a country where everyone pretends to be polite and pc.) On the one hand there will always be endless numbers of predators looking for a babe with a friendly grin...on the other if you become too defensive when do you meet someone nice and decent? Barbie would have drowned instantly, that plastic lipsticked beauty pageant grin is there for the whole wide world to aim for. And we all love her, don't we.

My clearest voice and sense of self has always been right here, in writing. Which you would think should be my answer, probably is my answer. The trick is somehow using all this other stuff (i.e. PhD torture,) I have devoted years to in some kind of positive, useful way--whether in academia or outside of it or both. I mean certainly flushing five years down the toilet seems pretty self-obliterating. But that's impossible because I'm a different person now whether I like it or not. My mind has been trained and sharpened and looped into deep, meticulous thinking processes. These five years have changed me, regardless of what I do next.... Some say you can do multiple things, be a Renaissance Man. My father used to warn me against being a jack of all trades, master of none. I hear all these voices. And here I am sitting with them, echoes of echoes. My own dissertation topic a reflection of something I ask myself--something that can seem incredibly clear on some days and the warped, ever new day dreams of a little girl on others (be a fireman a ballerina an astronaut)--how do people figure these questions out, I mean really? And how on earth do you let go of The Bell Jar's tree of possibilities?