APRIL
Forester
I never saw you coming,
red curved cutters in hand
nothing much to say.
You silenced out my wondering
making me also quiet as the hush
under maple leaves in the calm.
You pruned me back to livewood
only the green remains.
Forester,
I am eager over you
growing reaching sapling suckering
pulling in bits of you
through pale new roots.
I was a wizened hawthorn,
a galled densewood oak.
I am now a new-planted ash,
red berry adorned,
overwintered,
sap rising.
Journal entry, 4/29/00
There's this boy at the seasonal job at the garden center where I just started, and... he's not the best-looking one there, and it's not like I'm available, but there's just something about him. He was the one who hired me, I think; I don't really remember exactly because there's about six tall blond guys there and it could have been him or the store manager, but he has earrings and I vaguely remember those from the impromptu interview when I turned my application in.
Anyway.
He's quiet. He's almost antisocial compared to the other guys, and very knowledgeable. I started always going to him for the answers to my questions, and then I started always going to him because he's just... interesting. I didn't think too much about it, about how he looked or who he was, but one day I looked directly at him and all of a sudden there he was, in a sort of jolting recognition I've never experienced before. I realized that he's beautiful. He doesn't talk much, but sometimes he talks to me. I've been seeking him out, trying to work with him out in the trees, doing heavywork, wanting him to respect me. He asked me why I ask him so many questions, and for a joke I told him it was for my notebook because I'm stalking him... hopefully he thought that was funny and not wierd. Sometimes we work late together, and it's fun, reorganizing the geraniums, setting the young potted trees in rows, making everything beautiful, exchanging mild repartee or just working in silence. He can be silent; he doesn't have to fill up the spaces with talk. I think he'd be a really good friend.
The thing is, I've started thinking about him all the time. The thing is, it's starting to scare me a little. I mean, I'm married. I'm a mother. Things are going OK at home for once, my babies are happy, I like my job, Steve is working full-time at last, we're getting along. We're going on our honeymoon, finally, after four years! Victoria. It should be great.
The boy drives a great old black Ford pickup. Its beautiful.
I don't know why I can't keep this boy out of my head, and I really just want to know him as a friend but with the way I feel around him, I'm afraid. I'm afraid that if we get to be friends, something will happen between us. I'm not that kind of woman, no matter what Steve says sometimes.
But I keep thinking about him. His name is Charlie.
***
(this chapter is supposed to contain the story of the BBQ, but I never got around to writing it)
MAY
I spend all my time
trying to live the impression
of his body over mine.
I want to own all his secrets,
and to offer mine singly,
as gifts.
I will find the seat of his
unhappiness, and recline
there permanently.
Journal entry, 5/7/00
I think I'm going to ask Charlie to be my friend. We kind of already are, inasmuch as we've hung out in a work-related context, but I want to ask him to join my group of friends outside of work. None of these guys at the nursery are my friends really, but he could be. He's not like them; they're very suburban, very typical. I'm going to ask him on Thursday, because that's the day we work late together. I don't know how to do this; I guess I'll just come right out and say it. "Um, wanna be friends?"
Maybe he wants to come to my friend Nina's BBQ this week.
***
Today I was going to ask him if he wanted to be friends, but just after he arrived, just after we started to talk, the big bossman came and took him away. He's been promoted, all of a sudden, just like that, taken off to manage another store. He'll be gone from now on, and I have no particular reason to look forward to work. I have his cell phone number, though... he just got the thing... and I have to work up the nerve to call him and ask him if he wants to come to the BBQ on Thursday. I'm going to do it. I already left a silly message on his voicemail, to be funny; something all breathless and sexy about not being able to get him off my mind.
The funniest part about it was that it's true.
***
(BBQ)
***
Journal entry, 5/30/00
Things have happened. Things are happening. It's all coming apart; I had this life and suddenly it's just a mockery.
Steve left me. Maybe I left him. Victoria was beautiful, and he was impotent from his antidepressants, impotent and strange. Cruel. He kept pointing out other women. I must have been strange too, because I couldn't stop thinking about that boy, that Charlie. It was so surreal to be on the belated honeymoon my husband and I have planned all this time, and to have my head full of someone else, someone I hardly know, my body reacting to my imagination of his body. Not just some of the time; it was almost constant, walking the waterfront, having tea at the Empress, all the time. It was all falling apart the whole time, my marriage finally crumbling in a weekend in a strange city, a strange country, my head full of a man I've never touched and my marriage a joke for so long, a struggle, a package held together with the thinnest thread.
Maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise that Steve would leave me, but on the surface everything seemed to be going so well. It was underneath that I could feel it, all the tension of the fights we've had over the years and the times he's left me before, him not liking me, not liking my friends, not liking anything I do. It just exploded one day, and then he was leaving me and I was glad to see him go.
He still lives in my house. We circulate like hostile dogs, avoiding one another, occasionally sleeping in the same room, the same bed, as careful not to touch as high school boys afraid of being gay. He will move out. I will not leave my home. The children will stay with me, although he will make noises about joint custody. He's talking about a trial separation, backpedaling already, unable to believe that I'm finally letting him go, that this is the last time he will ever leave me. I'm saying nothing until he leaves, because I must extricate him from my life. I can't live with his contempt anymore.
JUNE
In his presence
I shake and stutter
these trembling hands
this cardiac flutter
his turning down
my turning up
he eats from my bowl
I drink from his cup.
***
Journal entry, 6/2/00
I saw Charlie today. Oh god, that's an understatement! He's been managing the other store, the one they transferred him to, but he came to mine to hang out after work, and when he asked me how I was, I smiled grimly and said "My husband left me." He was so nice; he invited me to come have dinner and hang out with him and his friend, and then he paid for everything. We got so drunk! I got so drunk.
We had sex. I don't know how to tell it, it's so abrupt, it's so strange, my husband still living in my house, and it wasn't Charlie's idea. I think. Oh god. I have been walking around turned on by him for so long, and when we were in the bar there was this moment when he came and stood between my thighs, looking down at me from these dark-blue eyes he has, and there's this little spot on the side of his belly so I put my hand on it, and then it was like everything else later was inevitable. Inevitable.
He was driving me home in his beautiful truck, and there was something so thick in the air that when he missed my turn, I wasn't surprised. I didn't want to be home yet; I might have told him that. We were driving past Wilshire Park, the park I take my kids to play in, the park where Charlie once casually commented that he's had sex in, and I looked up at him and said, "Pull over". He did, and I can't remember if I slid over to him or if he reached out to me, but we were kissing, and it was beautiful. He's the best kisser I've ever experienced, even though my mouth was dry and my gut was shivering. I was terrified, but I wanted him. I was consumed with wanting him. Eventually we pulled apart, and he started the truck.
And he missed my street again, and I told him to pull over again. He asked "Where?" and I said "I don't care. Anywhere. Right here." I was so unbelievably turned on by him, so in need of something I wouldn't name in my head, that I didn't think of what could happen; we were in a truck, after all. I just wanted to kiss him again. He picked a spot a few blocks from my house, on a quiet street, under a large tree, and we kissed again. And kissed. And then he was kneeling in front of me on the floor of his truck and removing my panties, and he was between my legs kissing me again with his fingers deep inside of me, and it felt so good, so incredible. I didn't know it could be like this... even with Robin, the lover who did the most for me until now, the lover before I met and married Steve, it was never so sweet. I don't know how it happened, but it was happening and I wanted it to happen. For a split second when he rose up to kiss my mouth again and I felt him hard against the inside of my thigh I was afraid of the mistake I was making, but his gentle hands and gentle lips were on me, and he entered me so softly all the fear dissipated into the drunk and the night and the fog on the windows. He moved into me, and that first thrust seemed to be forever. He felt alive in me, sentient. His body was against me and inside me, and it's never been so good, so good! He leaned back a little and I could look down into the space between us, he and I joined, wet; and I could look up and see the look on his face, his shy seductive eyes looking so directly at me from under those long long brown lashes, full succulent kiss-swelled lips parted, and suddenly I remembered that my husband, though estranged, was asleep in my house, maybe even in my bed, and I was filled horror at going home filled with another man's semen.
I begged him to not come inside me. I was completely petrified. He promised me he wouldn't, but he was drunk and I was drunk and I was aghast at the idea of walking into my home dripping with the smell of sex. He pulled himself out of me and leaned his sweaty head against my shoulder, then shifted himself onto the seat, leaning against the driver's side door, legs half in my lap. I bent over him, took him in my hand and in my mouth. I tasted me on him, and it seemed so incredibly natural, so right. In hardly any time he came.
I don't know what to do now. It was so good. I've never felt like that before, and I feel like I have to have him again, but I was the aggressor and I don't know if he's interested, really. I'm still married. I don't know what to do. It was amazing.
He smells like sky.
***
Letter to Charlie, 6/3/00
I'm no orator; the spoken word is hardly my medium. I don't always come off well; I've been known to cause misunderstanding. The written word is more my home. It's easier for me to be comprehensible on paper.
Charlie, I'm trying to say I like you.
You inflame me more than anyone I've ever touched. I can't stop thinking about you. I spend most of my time protecting my vulnerabilities. I've come to be facetious more often than sincere. I'm stopping that now; I'm telling you that when you ask me how I am and I say fine, I mean my life sucks right now, I'm not suicidal yet, things have been worse, they'll probably get better. I've been going a little crazy doing some penance but not for anything I've done wrong. I'm telling you I like you and that I don't think we should mess around because I'll rebound all over you and that would ruin everything.
I really like you. I like you.
I think I'm only dating women for a while, crazy deranged indian women, but if I meet one who's open to a threesome I'll give you a call. OK?
***
Journal entry, 6/9/00
I've been in a bitch-ass mood all week, scaring myself half to death thinking of calling. Him.
***
Journal entry, 6/17/02
We had sex again. We went out drinking and when he brought me home, I, Oh I, I more or less flung myself at him with the dogged determination to get him to come inside and sleep with me. He refused and refused and when he was hard in my mouth he finally gave in. Who am I, who does this? Who am I, who seduces men? Only him. I can't understand what it is about him to make me act in such uncharacteristic ways.
He spent the night on the futon on the floor in the downstairs bedroom, and I spent most of the night with him there. He came fast the first time, and then, surprisingly, he said "OK, now I can go on longer" and we continued lovemaking, God I think for hours we made love, it was everything. Afterward he fell asleep and I might have fallen asleep but I never sleep for long, and spent the rest of the night sleeping an hour in my bed, an hour downstairs near his naked skin. In the morning I couldn't resist touching him, and we had sex again. Great sex.
We were both late for work.
***
Letter to a friend, 6/12/00
Cynthia:
Everything I have ever been, done, seen, you hold within you. I am a weakness in the perfect spherical skin of the universe; you are the solution to me.
I am unafraid of you. You are the only person who knows all of me and loves me nonetheless, and you are the only person of whom I am not terrified. In the carbon/oxygen ramblings of my brain/brain against world/computer/self, you foremost steady me because as long as you live I am not alone. Live.
My oceanic avatar, creature of heaven underwater. The small living things of the deep worship you, and I do. The creatures with wings worship you, and I do. The reticent beings which creep along the edges worship you, and I do. The powerful monsters which kill to consume, and the stamping hoofed eaters of plants worship you, and I do. Appetite.
This one thing keeps me.
My memories are incomplete and dialog escapes me completely. I have sounds; yes. Visions; yes. The smell of you and the weight of your breasts while we embrace. The search of your eyes for a doorway from weighty reality. The rising of your laughter, like clemency granted.
Our eyes were burned into our heads, those nights. That was a long time ago, when I still could have made better choices. That was an adventure, even if it was one I barely survived. By grace of you I survived it, by your mercy I survived it. It is before and behind me; it is all around me. In the parking lot shouting out poetry, seducing Mary, lighting fires with great danger of asphyxiating... you, my dangerous one, my pyromaniac Ophelia! Maybe it is in honor of you that asphyxiation holds such allure for me. So clean.
We were so young.
A poem I wrote back in the beginning, for Steve:
I blue and quake in this rhythm
of sorrow, and lose loneliness
with you, my verse-vowed one.
The things our voices promised
from hearts of earnest, hearts
of wishful thinking, tremble
apart and from the regretful
remembrances of things we
should not have done and said
come the ends of us.
Azure promises like rainbow
riches begin to elude us both,
those sentiments of permanence
born on unstable ground, unstable
upbringings; becoming sallow
as goat liver, as acrid as our
vows when we promised to each
other we would cleave always.
When you were in love with me
you lied to both of our romances.
When you came to me with old
doubt on your tongue you told
the truth of these experiments.
We two have failed our search
for reassurance, our growings-
up with each other. My kidney
devastated from poisons of
kind misleadings is finally
giving out in the truth of you.
Perhaps I need a painful switch,
a transplant into knowing our
realities of lonesomeness.
Without the passions and bile
held tight within the sphere
of heartfulness in your life,
this parasitic vine of mine
has no garden to grow long in.
I shall let it wither and grow
instead tangy red tomatoes,
sisters of nightshade,
apples of romance,
poisonous fruit.
I knew then what it took me five more years to understand. All that time wasted in this killing marriage, all my youth spent. On him, this man bent on sucking all my joy from me, burying it in the dry graveyard behind his sternum.
He left me.
He is gone from my house. He has never brought me a fraction of his promises. I am gullible; I believed all his words even when he fulfilled none of them.
This was his idea; until the end I couldn't admit that I had lost. I failed another marriage. Still, he's making it my responsibility; I am the one who must refuse to try again. And I have, and I am. I am all refusal, uncompliant. Even this he hates, even my action which is nothing more than the action he is himself too cowardly to take. He is full of threats.
This is this. I am alone. I am damaged but alive. I will continue. I have beautiful friends who keep me sane, who rescue me on nights when I feel like I may not persevere. My fear is diminished with them, although not gone entirely. I have my beautiful children.
Words
Touch
Words
There is this man, this boy. He is twenty-four. I'm starting to doubt myself, wondering if I am seriously flawed because I have not been any stretch of time without a man appearing to take over my life. I will not be consumed. I will not be subsumed. I will not be owned; I am my own. I won't get into a relationship with anyone for a long time; I can't, for my sanity, and I can't, because Steve would use it against me in the most brutal way possible. Perhaps I'll forget the boy, and I will see many people and keep them all at a distance; I will have friends who might be a little more than friends but not a lot more than friends.
This boy came into my life with the beginning of my seasonal job at the nursery; he hired me. That job ended yesterday and I am now unemployed. He called to offer condolences, but I could hear (imagine) the other part of the condolence, the unspoken part. He's not my boss anymore.
He is six-foot-three and lovely. His body is smooth, dense, perfect. Like water. He has a steel ring in each ear and he is acutely intelligent, but quiet. For three weeks at work I noticed him only for his seriousness and for being a reliable source for answers to all my questions... the fourth week I realized that I was profoundly attracted to him, and since then he has been taking up an inordinate amount of space in my brain. When Steve and I were still together, I would wake shamed and fearful, certain that Steve had found out — only there was nothing, nothing to find out, just the uncertain difference between my dreams and my actions. During our belated honeymoon to Victoria a month ago, I couldn't stop the running in my head of how I wanted this boy and I knew that the trip, meant to be symbolic of the beginning of the union between Steve and I, was to mark the end.
And this boy I must stay away from, at least must curb my urges to prevent any entanglement, because I can't keep leaping from relationship to relationship. I must have some time by myself, free of other people's expectations, free of the head-fogging toxins of infatuation. I have enough to juggle in my life without a lover, without one at least who is more than a source of physical gratification. At the same time I want to foster my friendship with him, because he is gentle, intelligent, quiet, honest, humorous, and intensely interesting.
Oh, how incriminating this letter; if Steve finds it in his snooping, in his frequent unwelcome intrusions into my home, he will make life inutterable for me. Horrible. I am alone and free, but not in his mind. Not yet. I would be a Jezebel, a harlot, an adulteress in his eyes, if he knew I had a lover before the divorce is final.
He (that boy) is incredible.
I am utterly unsuited for this. I am utterly unsuited for love. I am hopeful and frightened that it could lead to that. I must keep him at arm's length, must not let him into my head or my internal organs. I am stressed and my confidence is broken — my fear of rejection is sailing out of control, my suspicion of male motives running almost to paranoia. I am not myself. I am meek in situations where I would normally be in control, callous where I would be sensitive. I say things that are unlike me. I am not a good emissary for myself.
My palette is gone; I can't paint pictures with words anymore. I can't write anymore; I am all written out on even this. I don't know what to do with it, I have no address. I am blind to the direction of the sun.
I don't know if anyone is reading, let alone enjoying this. I still have 100 pages more to post.
um to be honest i was sort of waiting until somebody was going to say "zomg that's really awesome" and then scan it in some more detail. i'm a slow reader and i just can't read all long texts on these forums.
I totally understand, also I'm not sure it's going to get a "that's awesome" from anyone.
anything candid and engaging is usually pretty awesome
i dont know if this is fiction or not, but it seems candid
and its engaging
i dont know if i enjoyed it but i read the whole thing and would prolly read more if it was posted
reading this reminded me of when i accidentally started watching the sopranos and was subsequently forced to watch the entire show by unseen and unidentified forces
(what does the word 'engaging' really mean?
its not really addiction
but it can result in the repeated performance of an action
maybe people are hungry for different things at different times)
Thanks! Validation that someone is reading... I will post more (it is fiction, though of course elements are drawn from life).
***
Letter to Charlie, 6/23/00 (Never sent)
Charlie,
So in case you hadn't noticed, I'm a little gone over you. Of course, you'd probably have to be blind to not have noticed, but I thought I'd just tell you. I feel like such a big dork, because I get giddy and can never say what I mean on those rare occasions when I get to talk to you... I end up rambling inanely, and in general being a poor emissary of myself.
It's not just that I have an ungodly huge crush on you; it's also that I'm in the middle of what is probably one of the biggest transitions of my life, and consequently my head is not altogether in a good place for anything having to do with romantic engagements with other people. At this point I don't even know where you're at regarding romantic engagements, so all my speculations are pointless, but I can tell you for sure that while psychologically I'm only slightly bruised, emotionally the next relationship I'm involved in is likely to be textbook rebound. I mean, brief, intense, heartbreak ensuing, yadda yadda yadda. Plus I definitely need to not be beholden to fidelity for a while; I've spent almost my entire adult life being monogamous with someone or other (with a couple of notable exceptions) and I need the excitement and ego boost of being relentlessly pursued by, and ultimately surrendering to, some hot horny bucks and does. My confidence needs rebuilding, and more than that, I just need to have some fun.
That broken confidence is the main reason I'm writing this instead of talking to you. Christ; I don't know how much you like me, whether my company is welcome or unwelcome. Not only is my self-esteem a little tarnished, but I've become suspicious of male motives, and on the one hand while my instinct tells me that you're a kind and genuine person, my new paranoia warns me that you might be a mercenary more interested in experiences you thought I could introduce you to than in my own unassuming self. I'm a little off these days; I'm harsh where normally I would be sympathetic, meek where I should be assertive, awkward where I used to be right at home. I've resorted to coyness, and my impulse for play is dimmed; I distance myself from touch and casual affection.
OK, so... can I quit playing with all these words and just write what I want you to know? How about this: I like you immensely. I would rather have you as a friend for a long time than as a lover for a short time. I'd rather not rebound on you. I think that I could fall in love with you very easily; I don't remember the last time I felt this way about anyone. Actually; I do, and I fell in love with him. And it lasted eleven months, and it broke my heart. Twice shy? Maybe. And this love talk is sure to freak out any normal person so I should shut up about it. You probably think I'm this desperate lunatic by now, anyway. I'm not; I'm just an ordinary girl who's known a few extraordinary people and had some adventures, the latest of whom/which is knowing you.
I am drawn to extraordinary people, which may not seem obvious yet from the friends you've met, but it will, eventually. You yourself are extraordinary in some way that has not yet made itself clear, and I am so much looking forward to getting to know you, to cross the boundaries of intimacy that have nothing to do with the body. When you're with your friend Shelley I feel very sharply the difference between her knowledge of you and mine, and I envy her... I know she knows why your walls are up, and what it is you are doing, because I know you are doing something. You're in the middle of something, some transition, and I want to know. I'm selfish that way. I envy her easy physicality with you, a relaxed intimacy I have with only a few friends.
I have no summation.
I'm not going to say I'll never come on to you again. I am absurdly attracted to you, and despite my best intentions I am largely driven by appetite. Hell, if you think this letter is a bit much, you should see the missives I've written solely to confess my pornographic longing! This should, by any lucid act of judgment, join those in the trash, and I should move on from spending my childless nights hoping you'll want to hang out to committing vile acts with my seamier friends, the ones you haven't met. Maybe I will, but even if I spend my Sabbaths (and Sabbats) engaging in some newfound amorality, there will still be a part of me hoping you will call Monday morning to wake me from my hangover and offer a hint of redemption. Not that I think you're pure. You're no choirboy. (Or maybe you were. I've known other choirboys and they're not at all what people think.)
-Elena
***
JULY
Journal entry, 7/3/00
Moondrunk calf kills millennial kitten.
Moon
Drunk
Calf.
This is the stumbling, blinded stage of crush intoxication. Vomiting is normal at this point, and insomnia. It will pass.
Except it doesn't. And it doesn't and it doesn't until three months later I'm still wondering why I know that his mouth tastes like Merlot and his armpits smell like grapefruit.
And I'm waiting for it to pass, but it just keeps increasing. I've arms-lengthed myself into a corner, and I don't see any particular way out of it except to stop being coy, stop evading, and tell the truth - not in one big ghastly confession, Jerry-Springer-Style, but in bits and pieces when he asks his weighted questions.
And maybe his feet will sprout wings a'la Nike, a'la Artemis, and he'll fly away. Maybe the fact that he hasn't yet is a good sign that he won't. He already knows a good part of my craziness, and he still calls.
And maybe he'll crush my infatuation but remain my friend. Ouch.
This reminds me of the terrifying experience of falling in love with Robin, that man who stole my daydreams for nearly six years. I'm only now over him, finally. Now this. He is as beautiful as Robin, and similar in some ways, but he is completely his own.
Why does this feel the same? I'm not read for this. He's made it perfectly clear that a relationship is not about to happen. I can't put myself on the line by admitting that, against my intentions and my better judgment, my feelings are (still) raging out of control. I lied from the start- sure, it began as nearly pure sexual attraction, but as soon as I started liking him as a person, THIS started and it never went away.
And now I'm moon drunk, Charlie-drunk.
***
Letter to a friend, 7/14/00
My beloved Cynthia,
I am at this moment ridiculously content.
My house is empty; I am recovering from a cold and sitting curled on my couch listening to King of America by Elvis Costello. Until I was taken by the urge to write this letter, I was rereading the Principia Discordia, which I'd just about forgotten about until a series of references brought Eris to the forefront of my mind. It's been a while since I declared myself an Absurdist, but somehow I'd forgotten or never noticed that Absurdism is a branch of Discordianism, or vice versa. I suppose I got hung up on that question of religion or philosophy, and forgot that we can decide the point is moot.
This month on the 30th I am going to get in touch with the Cacophony Society, because I need a little Cacophony in my life. I need Dynamic Discord. I'm taking my Boy, described in the other letter, and probably another boy who I like less but who has unfortunately become infatuated with me. Boy2 was the reason for a new set of rules posted on my stairwell door:
It is decreed that No One may sleep in My bed except for Me and those persons who have issued forth from My body: and further, that No One may pass the boundary into My sanctum, as delineated by this Door and these Stairs, without explicit permission from Me.
This proclamation elicited an interesting degree of dismay in Boy, (the first and preferred Boy). I assured him that it was nothing that reflected personally on him, although it was perhaps partially due to his whacking his head on my light fixture and then, moments later, falling down the stairs. It seemed overall like a message that others, or perhaps just male others, are not meant to be in my nest. Boy2 was the real catalyst, though, by inviting himself into my bed to sleep and then by being a groping spaz all night, and disheveling my bedding.
I no longer have, by contract, to share my bed with a person who dishevels my bedding, and by god I'm not allowing anyone else to enter my nest and fuck up my sheets! I did tell Boy (the first) that I might make exceptions for him, but that I do not want to "snuggle" and that he will have to give me lots of space, and not pull the sheets up.
The lesson learned from boy2; inexperienced boys are a mess and more work than they're worth. Now I have to cut him loose without messing up his head too much; thank god he's going back off to college in a few weeks anyway!
I am seeing another boy this afternoon, the one I've probably mentioned before as Choirboy. Choirboy is a strange, lunatic individual, a church organist and part-time pervert. I like him pretty well, but since my current intentions on virtually everyone are really rather mercenary, I'm not sure how this will go. He's Jerry Blue's best friend, so sleeping with him is out of the question.
Enough with the boys. Enough with the girls. (There are no girls.) I am in this strange, content space, this place where despite rent coming due, despite being unemployed, despite being a newly-single mother to a two-year-old and a nursing infant, despite an insane husband who has promised several times to make this divorce long and messy, and despite having a cold, I am relaxed and full of the feeling that all is well in the world, and that adventures are opening up before me like evening primroses at sunset. The Boy is fun, and I may have an opportunity to write for a local paper next month. A new job at a good company is forthcoming, and things just seem... nice. Free! I am not owned by anyone, and no one will own me. Ever. No one will ever be under the illusion that they own me, never again.
If I ramble, it's probably because I took a dose of Nyquil to help suppress this cold. I'm tired of coughing.
I have so much to tell you, so much to convey to you about the brilliance and hope of the way my life looks now, so much about the melancholy of letting go of old dreams, so much about the rush of making romance with an impossible Boy, the fantastic free-fall void of freedom! I know you know all these things. You know all the things I know and a thousand more.
Love,
-Elena
***
I also find it engaging.
But I have a lot of work to do at work, and I am also avidly avoiding my current emotions post break-up etc, so due to my love of repressing things rather than dealing with them head on, I am avoiding like the plague anything that make me feel feelings. :p
So I am not currently reading, though I do generally find it well-written and, as said, engaging.
:)
I like it too...
:D Danke!
***
Letter to Charlie, 7/23/00
Exotic newly-single young Mother seeking winsome poly Discordians for rompsome adventure.
I sense in my imagination a definite lack of beautiful love letters in your life, and so I have written you one, which I'll never give you because it would be so absurdly inappropriate. But then, as an absurdist, maybe I should give it to you after all?
Ineffable Charlie, unknowable you. You are golden, you are snow; your body is dense as water, as lithe as serpents. Charlie, Mesopotamian poets cried out in their sleep over you, and in the instant you were born seven thousand mothers whispered your name. This is your innocence, Charlie, the moment of your birth indelibly imprinted on the universe, to follow after you like a shadow of purity forever, to drift faintly in your wake like traces of an unsettling perfume after you have passed through a certain space. It is your signature, your symbol. It mingles with your scent, ripe as mangoes, it lingers on my pillow and sometimes during the hungry unrestful nights I awaken before dawn with your taste on my tongue, to stumble downstairs and lie in the stain left by you.
Charlie, I don't know a fraction of a fraction of you, but when, alone, I sigh out my most intimate secrets, it is to you I am giving them over. These confessions I breathe only to you without shame, freed from reluctance. Not an iota of me is unpermeated by your existence; even the memes I perpetuate carry with them a single repeated word as a postscript, and that word is your name, the name which is indelibly writ upon my holiest frenulum. I am incapacitated by you; spending time with friends I will suddenly sharply be incarnate in a moment with you between my thighs, your half-lowered eyelids telegraphing a message to my nipples, my cunt, my frenzied entrails; I will gasp and my hands will flex as if controlled by a startling, brief seizure. I am seized, truly, I am seized by you and your intensity and your traveling tongue, by your unconscious seduction of my body, of everything that my skin contains.
Charlie, I am starving over you. What food can have flavor after your succulence in my bed? Having taken sacrament from your altar my mouth is too dry for mundane victuals, my jaw too weak for secular meat. In honor of you I dream endless dreams of other women, and also in honor of you my masturbatory hands are never stilled but wander compulsively throughout muddled nights and exquisitely bright days. You dole out tidbits of your mystery and I consume them with voracity; the secret of you whets my appetite no more and no less than could omniscience of you. I would become a scholar of you, catalogue your psyche like a student of Pythagoras recording equations, file your details in the portion of my mind reserved for that which is sacred and most absurd.
I have written unending reams of love letters to my poet, my Cynthia, and within every word for her exaltation I have hidden two in praise of you, so many that she herself is now madly and furiously in love with you, though she does not even have possession of your name under her palate. The girls in Santa Clara whisper of you at festivals of Dionysus, Charlie, even the children are in awe, so imbued are the undercurrents of my thoughts with your essence. Everywhere the electrical impulses of my brain are epidemic, there also is disseminated an infectious fascination for you.
This is how saturated my appetite for your enigmatic being; a woman in another state is waking right now from a dream, and her legs are trembling in memory of a consummation which has left her weak and febrile. Her dream was of you, but she knows you only through the chance propagation of my stray brainwaves, a viral contagion of ideas symbiotically infused with the notion of you. In this way you are famous, celebrated nocturnally by virgins and grandmothers and sluts, and by absurdist single mothers in search of Discordian lovers.
My thoughts of you are not always pornographic. The veracity of you needs only to be tasted to be known; you secrete your genius rather than speaking it, like aphids secrete nectar to be lapped up by civilized ants. These creatures need not be beautiful to be marvelous, but Charlie, you are both. Profundities copulate with gorgeous inanity in your language, and without velleity you utter perfect lines or even entire stanzas of poetry in your musing. You are the coition between metaphor and absurdism, absorbing, realigning, and outgrowing particles of the absolute carnality of human existence, of your own manifestation. You are vital; you are necessary for the planet to continue her rotation, for the tides to maintain their answer to the moon; you are necessary for Charon to remain infatuated with Pluto. You are necessary for my fevered insomnia.
It is a source of beauty and mystery that one word for hunger is almost the same, save for a single vowel, as another word for truth. This beauty and mystery, Charlie, is also completely, utterly encapsulated in you.
— Your secret admirer.
Some of this is figurative, some of it metaphor, and some of it is exaggeration, but all of it, every letter, is the truth.
***
AUGUST
Journal entry, 8/1/00
Oh, God.
Twenty-first Century Digital Boy, ineffable Charlie.
Usually when I have this turmoil of emotions, turbines churning in my innards, I sit in front of a computer and drain myself with the comforting clack of keys. Tonight, and for the last week, I lack that pacifier. I get to strengthen my wrist by writing by hand - it's probably good for my soul. I assume I require redemption, despite my denial of same. Despite my soap.
Whether I'm addressing this to myself or to Charlie or to some invisible third party (God) is probably irrelevant. Relevant only is that I use it to purge, to clarify my thoughts, emotions, intentions. Playing cool. I've been playing cool for how many weeks? Months? Perhaps three... perhaps thirteen, fourteen weeks, while my intentions metamorphosed from purely carnal to an unidentifiable state in which tenderness and lust and friendship and obsession are mingled, a state I've felt before for weeks at a time but I wait, oh I wait and wait for this insanity to pass, to return me to a lucid state, and it doesn't. I felt briefly lost this way about Jerry, more than a year and a half ago. After being friends for four years, my spate of intoxication passed in two weeks, three at most, and I returned completely to normal, our friendship unchanged. Before that, it had been over five years, (my Robin) and its taken me until now, yesterday, to return to normal from that - or maybe to realize I'd returned to normal.
I have never felt so possessed over Cynthia; my love for her has always been clear, clear, driven, certain. From the first words of our moment of electrification to the last poem she read me over the phone, it has been exposed and undeniable. This is not that. Friendship. OK. Lust. OK. These things I understand; they are simplicity. This other, infatuation, (obsession?) it comes and goes but usually it goes. It's always going. No. This muddle, this is not what I want to write. I should ask Larry, he knows what I want to put down. No need for question-and-answer, no need for evasion with him, he knows.
Charlie, I am not going to admit to loving you. It would be untrue. Oh, in the friendship sense I am coming to love you (I am in love with all my friends) but in the sense of the paramour, it's not that. My friend, I evade (clumsily) your questions when I don't want to answer them, by returning with a question and then either sidestepping and feigning ignorance of your point, or by falling silent altogether. The guilt of this is piling up, in a way - I don't like to be an evasive person. Some of your questions put me at risk of vulnerability and rejection, and I can't handle that fear right now, so I evade (or ignore) them.
The truth of it is that I am smitten, infatuated, gone over you. Its sex, and it's that I like you more every time we hang out, and it's some mystery element that makes this degree of fixation happen between some people and not with others. Maybe it's your smell - you smell delectable to me, and your flavor is incomparable.
So what this is exactly, I don't know... rebound, simple complete infatuation, falling in l___... but my quandary, and what takes up endless space in my thoughts, is what to do over it. It could be dangerous: somebody could get hurt, and more than likely that somebody would be me. I seem to be endlessly getting my heart broken; I never seem to learn. My defenses have been up for all of three months and already they start to disintegrate. So what tack do I take? Do I carry on as usual, and hope it passes? Unlikely, given my basic impulsive nature. I'm not really a paragon of restraint in any area. Do I attempt to reintroduce distance, hold you off a little further? This also seems improbable, for the same reasons. I could hand you this letter, hand you the now (in-) famous love letter I wrote a month ago, and hope that you understand who I am well enough to not simply leave and never call again... which entails too much risk for me. I could, I could, continue to see you as both friend and lover and stop, or try to stop, evading your questions, the ones that open me to vulnerability, try not to freeze like a nightbird in headlights, and see if your responses reveal any corresponding level of feeling or just a fear of relationships.
I don't want a relationship. I myself have a fear of relationships. I don't want to get hurt and there are no assurances of safety once people start to get close. I like the idea of a close friendship plus sex, but these emotions want to be confirmed and they want, most of all, to be reciprocated. Damn them!
I don't want to own you or anyone, and I don't want to be owned. I've talked enough that you know my ideal. I don't know where I'm going with this... perhaps I'm hinting at some kind of experiment. Something that's not quite friendship plus sex, but certainly entails no sense of ownership and requires abandonment of jealousy.
Oh, God, God, I don't know, it's late, my thumb hurts from all this writing! I'm going to bed.
All I mean to say from all this is that you, my friend, Twenty-First Century Charlie, are a person who has become very dear to my heart, and despite all the napalm feelings I'm currently experiencing, the one thing most important to me is that you remain a friend of mine for a very, very long time. No matter what. In that light, I do love you and I would even be willing to give up having sex with you (a steep sacrifice, believe me!) in order to retain your friendship.
In loving porkness,
-Elena
***
Journal entry, 8/7/00
Here I sit, at someone else's computer. Mine is gone, taken by that foolish man. It is hot in this upstairs room; almost unbearable, muggy, thick. My stomach is in knots over the usual thing, the Boy.
I spoke with him today. He may be coming over this week, I may see him Sunday night. If I see him Sunday, I'll take him to bed, I'll take him into me in the woods, at the park, in the river, in the sky. He's my water, I'll drink him and sweat him out of the glands in my thigh. I'm all frayed over him, unraveled. God forgive me, God forbid me, God deny and instruct me! What have I done, what can be done, what will I do? I am halfway there and it is inexorable, inescapable, no matter how I pull away or think I'm pulling away, think I want to pull away, I cannot resist the gravity of this. It is pregnant. It is full of the inevitable, swelling with significance. It is the end of me.
Today I vow to use fewer periods. More run-on sentences will improve the world considerably. Hold, on there I go with the periods again! I must stop.
Dinah and I have been talking about tormenting my glorious boy, taking him to a strip club and fondling each other shamelessly in front of him, speak of spanking and and leather, bring him to the highest state of arousal possible in public and fully clothed. Who knows what happens from there? In our minds, the night can only have a succulent conclusion, but Dinah is married and doesn't fool around with other men. My boy, like all men, (or most) has a weakness for Sapphic amory, and to exploit that weakness is a persistent temptation. Perhaps he also has a weakness for being spanked, or for spanking; he bites most eloquently. My beautiful boy! I don't want his monogamy, I only want his fidelity. There are other ways to be loyal than with the body.
I am done.
Cynthia, if she were here, would hold my silly head in her little hands, strong world-encompassing hands, and heal the universe of my blemish. Goddess, angel, poet, lyrical creator of beautiful word-music, universe-healer! Beside her I am merely a good speller. This is not a letter but everything I write is to her, because she is the spring, the cold deepgrey well of my alphabet. Ocean. She is both source and destination to me, wind and anchor. A week ago, Venus faltered on the western horizon, and the new sliver of moon turned her back to the lady, almost touching. I saw her and her moon-colored hair, and I saw four pairs of lovers kissing under the Goddess-sanctioned moment. The winds stopped, cowed under her presence, then resumed in celebration of her holiday.
Cynthia, hold my silly head. Absolve me of my guilt, for I am a liar, a deceiver of innocent young men. I have lied from the very beginning, because three weeks after I met him I was already falling in love and I KNEW IT, I KNEW IT, and I lied, lied lied! I lied to Steve, I lied to all my friends, every one. I lied to the recipient of my devotion and I lied to myself so I could take him to bed without conscience. It might not have been even three weeks; I looked at him one day and it began, and from that moment I have not had any sixty seconds free of him in my head. When I whisper his name I come shakingly, when I remember the sight of him among trees I become the river. For three days before I saw him I had a pleasant crush on my manager, but he wiped it spotlessly away as soon as he entered my curiosity.
Everything in my memory is in threes. It's the witch in me. Even though I look back on my coven days as a silly phase dramatic girls go through, I am superstitious and can never shed away the ritual. Yesterday I burned a red candle with his name under it. Maybe I imagined that part; maybe I burned a piece of torn yellow paper containing a tiny prayer.
The heat is stifling me. I wish he was in it with me. I wish I was better able to control my insanity. I never wish I was sane.
I looked today through a Leonard Cohen anthology for Famous Blue Raincoat... I know I have it at home, but I am at a friend's house, Dinah, (with whom I have far too much in common) and her book doesn't have it. I think she has Leonard Cohen books because her husband is a fan. I don't know that she likes Cohen, particularly, or that she much likes poetry for that matter. It's hard to find people who actually like poems, enjoy poetry rather than read it in order to be literate or read it in order to say they read it. Then there are those who don't read it in order to be able to say they don't read it, and I find them just as incomprehensible, and reprehensible.
My eyes are closing. I am not sleepy; I am only weak.
He is gorgeous. He is water. His eyes, his side, his calves! His lips are astonishingly firm and smooth, his hands perfectly formed and long. His cheek! He laughs. He is beauty, he is the smell of moss on cedar. He is my favorite tree, and he is the root that travels to the stream. His voice is gentle, young, and carries perfect sentences on the air from within his salty chest. He is berries on ash, and he is the robins who eat them in winter. He is unselfconscious; he doesn't know the truth of his own body. He touches me like a man twice his age touches a woman he's loved for years but has only slept with six times, and the things he says while lying skin to skin make the hair on my neck rise.