Fuck Yeah J'Taime

It’s not real love if it hasn’t taken a turn or two in the mud. I like the kind of love that can be sleazy - a hand travelling up my thigh at an important dinner, an insidious look of things to come while watching TV with my parents, a romp over the breakfast table making us both late for work.

It happens all the time. Look around you. They’re not two but one. They might have separate limbs but they entwine them constantly as if to merge like succubi. 

Love should not be the subsuming of one person into another. Yet it seems we all find ourselves at one or another point in time in some science fiction horror story in some small space entrapped in stasis together.

Marie-Helene Bertino, “2 AM at the Cat’s Pyjamas”

There was no love at first sight for me. At first a person is just an abstract Kandinsky hung on the wall to be negligently analysed. I don’t even fully comprehend their faces. Just snippets - like remembering only the choruses to eighties love songs. But over time we begin to unfurl their composite. I built them with bricks and mortar into colonised beings with discoveries I dug out like dinosaur bones. It might have been an amused, unhurried pace to follow behind, the intake of pleasured breath in parts I bit down, patchy trails of fuzz I jokingly label ‘2 am shadow’, the precise ten minute fiddle with piano fingers to roll, the kindness of a thousand early morning forehead kisses, the smallness I felt as their tremendous body folded in spools about me, the gentle recalcitrance to touch me as if I were some freshly born kid foal.

 We were terrible at taking photos. Our friends took mountains that I had to endure while browsing my newsfeed. But we never did. It was always one or the other smiling brightly as the other snapped.

I kept photos in my head though. I'd take brain-snaps sometimes. Every night before we snuggled up in bed together, you'd drag my hand and we'd go to the bathroom. I knew we were a couple because you'd pee as I started brushing my teeth. You'd eventually join me and we'd stand there like childhood siblings getting ready for bed. Brush. Brush. Brush. We'd look at each other in the mirror and grin or make faces, foaming at the mouth like silly rabid dogs. I'd half-smile at your silliness and also half-smile at this one-of-a-kind portrait I was brain-snapping in my mind. We were cute. You were adorable. We were a couple in the most intimate form possible: just brushing our teeth.

When something bothered me, I didn’t talk with anyone about it. I thought it over all by myself, came to a conclusion, and took action alone. Not that I really felt lonely. I thought that’s just the way things are. Human beings, in the final analysis, have to survive on their own.

Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹)

Consummation is a word used mostly for the conquest of sex. A wedded couple finalises their vows with the coming together and penetration of their bodies. They are now one. But for me consummation always meant a kind of overwhelming sense of completion of oneself. She was through and through a perfect actress.

I felt myself a consummation I could not explain with the divorcing of ourselves from each other. Something deep and dark and without refrain was taking a chokehold upon me. I wanted to slip away from it and god knows, I tried. I plastered smiles on my face, industriously bent backwards over my work and festooned many a lover with the potential for a utterly thrilling fantasy of a romance with me.

Again, the English language fails to have a word to describe the depths of sadness, how a heart can feel heavy, how a stomach can drop to your feet, or how missing someone can cripple you.

Unknown

The end of love is not death. Hardly. The finishing of love is incapacitating. Your veins burn with a steady cold fire, your cheeks hollow with the strain of keeping face, your body needs more and more rest and you become mute. 

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But you still wouldn’t accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.

Maggie Nelson

I lie down and swim into a drunken stupor. My eyelids are heavy and I imagine waves. Calm froth coalescing around my still body. A heavenly sun radiating down upon me. I'm cooled and smoked all at once. 

I imagine the waves aren't salt water but some kind of healing tonic washing over me and taking away my pain. Taking away what you left of me on this shore. I feel the ruins of myself rebuilding, the torn seams of my flesh emending. Even the scars on my skin are fading in the harsh light. Suddenly, I am consolidated.

  "A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I dont know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a huge hole in my heart."    "I dunno", she adds. "Maybe they took the heart and left the hole..."

“How do you know he’s alone?”

“Of course he’s alone. He wants to be so alone that he can forget how to live. He doesn’t want it anymore. He wants to give it all back.”

"Picture this: you and me, happy."

"How far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps? How often have you bartered with bone, only to sell yourself short? Why do you find the unavailable so alluring? Where did it begin? What went wrong? And who made you feel so worthless? If they wanted you, wouldn’t they have chosen you? All this time, you were begging for love silently, thinking they couldn’t hear you, but they smelt it on you, you must have known that they could taste the desperate on your skin? And what about the others that would do anything for you, why did you make them love you until you could not stand it? How are you both of these women, both flighty and needful? Where did you learn this, to want what does not want you? Where did you learn this, to leave those that want to stay?"

"What do you say when you’re not enough to make someone stay? What do you do when you meet the love of your life and realize it’s all about timing? How do you accept that no matter how perfect you are for each other, circumstances get in the way? How do you compete with that kind of fate?"

Katie Kavinsky

  I shouldn't have picked up.

"Hello? Hello?"

Crackle. Mumble. Clink.

"Hello?"

"Hey. What's up?"

"You called me..." I say slowly.

"Huh." Clink. Oh no. Silence.

"So anyway..." I continue, "What's going on?" 

Silence.

"Are you okay?" I stress the word.

"Fine. Gloriously fine." The words are slurred and sneering.

"Alright..." I know I should hang up now or make some excuse. I can even smell the alcohol on his breath across the wires.

"You don't give a fuck."

It comes out of nowhere. But it's not as illogical as I think. 

"Sorry. I don't what?"

"You. Don't. Give. A. Fuck." The drawn out enunciation is on point. 

"And what exactly do I not give a fuck about?"

"About me." He grunts, "You make me fee like shit."

"How do I do that?" My voice is even-tempered. I don't want to provoke the beast anymore than I should but my temper is flaring and my patience is wearing.

He ignores me. "You don't give a fuck." Again. "You only care about yourself."

"Uhuh."

"You're fucking selfish."

"Are you quite done?" I snap, "I didn't pick up to be berated."

"Cunt." 

There it is. He is a snake spitting pathetic vials of venom.

I hear him knock back another swig.

"Look, if you keep going down this path - I'm just going to hang up. You're drunk. Everything you're saying you're going to regret in the morning."

"Why? It's all true. You're a selfish cunt who cares only for herself." He hmpfs in self-congratulations at his "honest" revelation.

 "Alright then." My hand flickers over the touch screen. 

"He probably was. Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can't let this one go. It's over, Groceries. David's purpose was to shake you up, drive you out of that marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that youhad to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it. That was his job, and he did great, but now it's over. Problem is, you can't accept that this relationship had a real short shelf life. You're like a dog at the dump, baby - you're just lickin' at an empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you're not careful, that can's gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So just drop it."

~

You're right. I can't let it go. But you forget, love is rarely rational and hardly ever a conscious decision. 

Your body makes the decision, that unpalatable straining in your heart does the thinking for you and pitfall in your stomach draws you right back into the arms of that person, more often than not scrabbling about on your hands and knees. It's a mixture of physical pain and soulful deprivation. 

She had become unknown to me, as unknown as the inside of your own glove is unknown when your hand is inside it. She was with me all the time, but I couldn't look at her. I could only feel the shape of her presence: a hollow shape, filled with my own imaginings.

  Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

  I've a terrible memory. People's faces blur, images and delectations of sound and sight grow indistinct. What I once thought was a red plush sofa now turns brown and muddy and faded. 

I remember you though. I've traced your face a thousand times with fiery fingertips in my dreams. The crinkle of laugh lines, ruddy cheeks over the cold bathroom mirror, your mismatched breasts you press up higher on your chest. There's the indentations on your back and that one tiny black mole on the underside of your bottom, grazing the tops of your thighs.