Your hand around my heart, or at least the empty space. A ghostly shape, appalling and unwelcome, because nature abhors a vacuum. Frigid and cold, the sharp note of absence.
Once upon a time I hated winter. My forest was basically my entire emotional support system, and while it was beautiful and terrifying in full bloom once winter came it felt like clean-picked carcass. The trees, once lush and dense, were now just fragile sticks. In summer, everything was moving, subtly - insects scrambled constantly, worms churned under the leaf litter, birds danced in their own little world, and there was always the feeling of something larger just around a corner - deer, fox, coyote, bear. But in winter, it was all laid bare, just a sea of white.
That changed. I’ve talked about why in a previous entry recently, so I’ll leave it at that.
It was never relaxing or pleasant the way lying out in the forest in summer was, but at the same time… the stillness was new, and powerful. It was quiet.
Sometimes there’s just too much. You’re too much. It hurts to be anything at all.
Winter was the solemn promise of oblivion, the offer of escape. A refuge from being, well, anything. A dangerous kind of idea to play around with too long, but when everything you’ve turned to fails you you’re compelled to go looking for solace in dark places. Anything powerful, that really means something, is dangerous. Everything else is a facsimile, a watered-down version of the truth. That is to say, a lie.
I remember, my hands were always shaking. Low blood sugar, probably - it was hard to eat, and I was starting to frighten my friends and family with how gaunt and withered I was starting to look.
But out there in the cold, they held steady. Numb, sure, but solid - in control. I thought it was a fitting metaphor at the time, and laughed.
…
So perhaps you can understand, I’ve made my peace with the icy hand around my heart. With the quiet emptiness. It doesn’t impose, it doesn’t demand, it doesn’t bring anything new - like the winter cold, it’s just there, and that’s it. Not comfortable, no, but maybe a little comforting.
Contrast this, then, with the prospect of a living hand. A warm-bodied, self-possessed human being. Prone to moods and with their own suitcase of drives and goals, with their own set of dreams liable to push and pull them through the edges.
A twitchy, jumpy thing. With routines and idiosyncrasies, with it’s own heart-beat rhythm.
And then my heart beat isn’t mine, anymore, it’s ours - and the differences in timing make for the tensions and harmonies that define the relationship between two things, dissimilar, and I’m not alone anymore.
I don’t, honestly, know if I know how to do that anymore.
I want it. I do. It terrifies me in a way that’s exhilarating. More than anything, I hold myself back because I know that once I get the faintest sense of having it, of being able to really feel it - I won’t want to let it go.
I’m not talking about a kiss or sex or a one-night stand, of a moment in the corner with a look in the eyes and the moonlight as “what-if” catalyzes a chain-reaction in the brain which can only terminate in the insanity of infatuation.
I’m talking about the moment when you stop hiding. When you let down your defenses, when you’re finally convinced that you can trust them, that it’s okay. And you open up your ribcage and there it is, naked as day, what makes you tick. What you are, in the language of stark reality. Not you described or presented or composed, just you.
And you let them touch it, because they seem to actually want to, and that simple axiom of attraction is echoed everywhere, the truth for which all the fucking and dancing and kissing is really just a metaphor.
I want it like a junkie, because no matter how hard I tried to keep myself intact, all I ever really accomplished was picking my addiction.
I looked inside my eyes in the mirror and said - if I have to want something, why not the very worst thing? Why settle for what’s attainable, for what can be readily found? Sex, drugs, alcohol. Friends, family, familiarity. Excitement, adventure, thrills.
Why not go straight for the tap? Why drink from the ulnar, the femoral, when you can have the carotid? Why spend my life in a thousand little drops, when just once is fatal.
Why settle for the physical, for sensation and endorphins and carnal satisfaction, when you can have the metaphysical? I’m still a mind in here, still a consciousness, still maybe even a soul.
I’m more than a little bit of a pyromaniac. There was one camping trip - oh, the fire. We make it seem mundane, but you just have to look at it - make a few arcane gestures, prepare the implements just so, observe the rituals. And there -
Fire; brilliant burning light from wood. Ephemeral, aethereal, insubstantial but potent and gleaming like the sun here on little earth.
But it eats the world to sustain itself. Eats little pieces of dead life, chains of carbon found only in the living, now left behind. Eats it, and makes it beautiful, new, and strange.
This trip - always looking for more fuel. Imagining the fire, how massive, how it would light up the night. There were the little pieces bought from the ranger station - we got a lot of it, but each piece was small individually. It would eat them quickly, flare up and fade.
I wanted logs, stumps, tree trunks. Forests, acres of it. I wanted everything.
That’s me. Sweeping and dramatic, too much isn’t enough.
People like to pretend they’re never going to die, that they’re going to live forever. That the best life is the longest. That we should always just be thinking of how to live more.
The philosophy of a cancer cell.
I’m glad I’m going to die someday, because life is hard. Living is hard as hell. And I want my life to be a bonfire. I want love to be the thing that kills me, all at once. I want to be shattered completely, destroyed. I want there to be nothing left, I want to be consumed utterly.
I’ll smile with my teeth, because even if it hurts like dying the fire will be worth it.
Loading comments...