TTVV
To be present in my own life, to make my own choices + every single one with the intention of what I most want. Will I be punished for being human? Will I care?
Do we downgrade our friendship? Every time you touch me, are you moving farther away? Or do I say further to make it the intangible, the not your body but everything else apart from it. No one can hurt me unless I have a say, + give sanction. So then only I can choose the possible pain of being, buffed + rebuffed. Wondering though still if you might believe it noble to relieve me of all my terrible + brave autonomy + my nature of always knowing myself. My emotional experience after all not your responsibility + how I would deem it distasteful if you were to ever think it so.
A man tells me I write male characters well. Which I view as a very big compliment, although there is much I would now edit in that story, my mind scrutinizing everything. But I am, in the end, solid + unflinching at the sight of all things beyond my own feeling. No version of another I could not understand. + having watched men my whole life, to know them is to survive them, + yet it is more than that instinct, as to know them is the only way to care deeper than every container overspilled with self-protection at the very expense of existing in any true freedom, as who one is remains always at the base of everything since built to withstand the world's demands over every coming year. I see myself in that. + I think, when I write my mess + expose my interiority, I see it as a radical rejection of getting in my own way, of the urge to police the self into a prison of my own imagination. I want to let it stand, no matter the potential for embarrassment, as a reminder that we are all swirling chaos around inside of ourselves, sucking it between our teeth + swallowing or spitting it out.
Someone injures my nipple. + the sex, ruined by the awkwardness of bodies, whips around the room like a wind that dies out on our tongues.
On another night, my face + head are pressed into a mattress like dried flowers between book pages.
I wake up after nightmares to someone yelling at me, frustrated by all my screaming which I am not at fault for. + I'm confused, my shoulders having been gripped + my body shook.
I wake up on Saturday + the morning reading is my mother's colonoscopy report, the act of decoding. The house is loud, riotous + buoyant with joy + music. I consider more writing a novel but feel torn between all my ideas. Just another thread I've spent the week untangling, the manner in which all I want to do renders me at times frozen. What is, in truth, a very common problem. That human stumbling block. High fantasy, noir, historical fiction of a Viking woman I once dreamed of. Oh but I have my essay project as well. + the channel. + I have all the research I want to do, which I call research but is really just a desire to read all day, locked in a room with iced coffee biting at my cheeks every now + then.
I think of someone I like + I think of how rather good it is for me to have it, to experience such a liking, with the awareness of how rare any such connection is to be. I do receive something vital from the circumstance, a waking-up-ness to things buried + the uncomfortable yet necessary unshrinking that follows. + I was, in every piece of the process, present in my choice, watching for a very long time before deciding. Still, none of that makes me any less skeptical of the validity of my calculations. How I'd love to be for once someone capable of less self-questioning + yet know it is not a gift I was ever to have bestowed. + the thing is I know very well my own wanting + perhaps, yes, it is both too much + too little. When he calls me stoic, I wonder if he is used to another sort of attachment than what I put on offer. If perhaps so often for so many, care is only read through another's needs + demands rather than the other's conscious choice.
Yet that is all I have to give, to say. As in, you are my conscious choice. Yes, I will or would live without you + continue in my expansions without collapse, but I looked at you + decided it only right to place you here squarely inside my life + there is no taking of that back once I have done it, which I suppose becomes one explanation for why I'm never found seeking assurances or reciprocations, because the choice is not contingent on anything but itself + it is mine + it is done.
But what would I find ideal? I'm not sure it matters. I think I wonder if you're here on purpose + I think I would not like it if you weren't, never wanting to be one more demand in your days. + I would rather know that you would tell me with some immediacy if your own feeling were to ever change, so I could stop reading any prolonged silence as the harbinger of some danger - to be in this separated from the fear you would ever leave me to wonder anything you already knew. + if I were to be selfish for once, I would say much to remain the same. My desires being for an exchange one to three times a week. But then there are other desires as well, to not want to drag you along by the tail, to be allowed.
+ what do I mean by that, to be allowed? I suppose what does anyone mean + I suppose I mean. No. Yes. I do not want to be placed into some box that downshifts friendship to some barely-there situation of a sometimes. I don't mean all the time. I mean I suppose a certain continuity of a kind + to be able to even articulate that which I wish I could articulate, unable now to even mutter such a thing as a missing when we go more than eight weeks in separation, or to say that in an ideal world, in spite of the unideal one, I would never wish to be longer than 4 to 6 weeks without some time spent holding your hand, which sounds so stupid + so soft when I put it like this. + now, with all our touching, I worry if I've damaged it all, that I must only monitor + contain myself more + more until I barely cease to be to you. If I can ever just read a book in bed beside you, or write while you do something else, or reasonably ask if I could see you ever so briefly the times I pop into the city or even, at times, pop in only + very simply for you, that we may reach each other + are not doomed never to do so again. Anyway, I never learned how to ask for things, much less this, much less you, + all again without wanting to be a demand, all again with wanting to be for you a type of bodied reprieve.
I think, in this lifetime I have, the only one which I will ever inhabit, I'd like to be something soft + bright. A star in the distant sky. A smooth white pebble in the pockets of all my friends.
