#consuming desire

The way in which I love scares me. It is a paradox, and a paradox I fear.

To the world in my head, love is either value-based or psychological. Either I fall in love when a person represents something valuable or ideal to me, or I fall in love because through them that I recognize myself.

Here is the paradox: are they valuable to me due to narcissistic mirroring, or by valuing them I learn to better value myself? Worse, in love, have I absorbed parts of them, or upon seeing them, I have seen myself more clearly?

To remain self-sufficient and protected, I have a practice: any desire can be self-fulfilled through inner work and evolution. I won’t love again because I refuse to torture myself in constant uncertainty until I learn why I love. I contemplate this because what intrigues me in mankind is so specialized, nuanced, and rare that I can practically study it and pick it apart. My peculiar taste in men defines my entire philosophy on physiology:

You can read the grit of a man based on the sharp lines and roughness of his face and the thickness or sturdiness of his body. Unique features symbolize unique attributes. Test a man until he breaks. Find the ones who don’t break but turn the game around. Those who aren’t jostled, but soften, listen.

I don’t know if I became the very men I have cared for, or if they simply activated me through our secret similitude. I was raised to believe love to be something transcendent and selfless… but my experience proves otherwise. The disillusionment is depressing almost.

Juniper jumped ship. I was haunted by his fossilized traces and disappearance. The intensity of my fear of vulnerability was only outmatched by his, and that is why he left first. I become an anxious attachee in the face of an avoidant. But the chasing merely masks my true, inner avoidance of attachment. I saw him as my match.

Kurt Cobain was another example of my love of avoidants. Their absence allowed me to avoid real intimacy. He was the first boy I ever caught feelings for, but it resulted in deep depression.

Things changed when I joined the Army. Before I left for training, I pursued an intellectual, detached connection with a socialist wrestler. I perceived him to be my opposite.

At BCT, I met the Perfectionist. In AIT, I met Jaguar. Little crushes. Yet I was enamored by the Perfectionist’s neurotic need for cleanliness and things to be just-so. The Jaguar was my physical and socially dominant match. This is when Skold entered the picture and took over everything. His sensitivity to my thoughts and moods contrasted my cold ambitions and search for strength. I dated him for two years. Codependence. Fusion. The years following our breakup and on-again-off-again emotional bond, I was scared that I caught his demon. Our 4-year farce. I couldn’t ever date again because I couldn’t take it seriously after that. I enjoyed male attention too much. Did I become like him or was I always so affected by his presence because of secret similitude? Is that why it stung so bad? Or maybe he only activated new, untouched planes in me. We confronted everything in each other. Witnessed it all crumble.

Within that time span, there was the man who told me the story about the two wolves. Eccentric, a loner, whiskey-drinking, hyper, and would socially-isolate himself by saying outlandish, provoking things. I liked that about him. It was something I could match. I would reel him back in.

I dreamt often of Blue throughout the years, of his deep-set, dark eyes. My masculine soul mirror. He outmatches me in elusiveness. He who will never fully meet me in the light. In dreams, he appears as a sick man or he meets me in the deep: underwater, underground, on distant roads, he grabs me from behind only because he knows I’ll say no. There is relief in my no. In waking life, I am helplessly magnetized by those eyes, but it feels something other than love… Just like all these men. Something more potent.

The Greek has soft-looking skin. He boxes. He likes to make people insecure. I admire this; I do the same back. I feel guilty. I challenge him. Once drunk I tell him I see him; he softens before me forever after. Why? Why does he sit with me and talk and listen and talk and listen more? I am not his girl. But the Greek feels significant to me.

Why does Blue show up in my dreams so much?

Why does Jay look at me in that disarming way as if he is in love with me? Why would he hold me like that? I have spent years to personally assure the two of remain strangers… Why don’t we act like it in those silences?

Why would Two-Wolves stick with me and give me his gift? Why did he praise me? I was just a kid.

Why did Skold worship me as, in his words, his goddess and proceed to burn me as he told me he loves me?

Why would Jaguar, harsh women, and aloof men in power, momentarily transport into another world to unexpectedly clean me up in the times I was suddenly vacant?

Why did the socialist wrestler pursue women like objects, but respected our intellectual intimacy to never dare disrespect me?

Why did K.C. engage me despite the constant nagging and contempt his friends held in reservoir for me? In confused hushed whispers into ears, he persisted.

Why would Juniper intoxicate me with so much warmth and intelligence right before he dies once again? Why does my presence hurt him still? Why do I bleed all over him?

This is the list of men I have loved, cared for, and felt bound to in some way. But as I have found out, intense people don’t get with intense people. We don’t date each other. We revel in deep moments for a moment. Strings of moments. That’s all. Runs too deep. No one really goes away forever. We haven’t learned how to handle anything. Their pain is their identity. A bunch of paranoid masochists. Skold and the Greek tell me later how solace can be sought in milder, homier women. Juniper and Blue opt out of dating entirely. The socialist wrestler never joined the military; his lifestyle seems to have likely resumed and worsened. Jaguar is a dad now.

I am attracted to men with a tragic backstory. I am not like them in that my family was never broken, deceased, cruel. But we are the same. Pain in youth enlightens the mind so quickly with depth, complexity, and intelligence that it is almost beautiful.

So, which is it? Do I love them for their values, their geniuses, their darknesses, their ability to relate and understand me? Do I love them because I grow obsessed when I see myself in another, or in that maybe they help me see myself? When is love not this act of self-obsession? The need to feel seen, heard, felt, understood; the want to fill the void or silence. I rebuke it! I choose to provide for myself. I don’t need ego-validation. Love is to consume others in order to complete oneself. A hunger. An addictive belly. If drugged enough long enough in mild doses of lonesomeness, parenthood, mediocre sex (or in a sexless marriage), I’m told the intensity goes away. The intense man is placated; happiness is to be found in peace, he says.

I made a promise to myself to never see life as limited to two choices as Achilles did, nor to ever become the everyday man, as Nietzsche names it. But is this not me, the same me from the start, running away from the vulnerability of deep human connections? Neither have I found a method to temper madness/love. But unlike my brethren in soul, I won’t cave.

I will return to mankind when I can come up with a different line of logic for the purpose or secret behind love and having a partner. I am still searching.

Thought challenges: What is unearned love, and what makes it possible or true, if it is true? What is love for an animal? If I were to face a replica of myself, would I love her obsessively, distastefully? Would we feel as one? What is to say of co-creators: people who inspire one another in beauty, presence, or prose?

Consuming Desire

I’m not making this up. In Cafe Latte’s wine bar one of the lovely coeds at the next table touched John on the arm as if I wasn’t there and said, Excuse me, sir, but what is that naughty little dessert? And I knew from the way he glanced at the frothy neckline of her blouse, then immediately cast his eyes on his plate before giving a fatherly answer, he would have given up dessert three months for the chance to feed this one to her. I was stunned; John was hopeful; but the girl was hitting on his cake. Though she told her friend until they left she did not want any. I wish she wanted something—my husband, his cake, both at once. I wish she left insisting upon the beauty of his hands, his curls, the sublimeness of strawberries and angel food. But she was precocious, and I fear adulthood is the discipline of being above desire, cultivated after years of learning what you want and where and how, after insisting that you will one day have it. I don’t ever want to stop noticing a man like the one at the bar in his loosened tie, reading the Star Tribune. I don’t want to eat my cake with a baby spoon to force small bites, as women’s magazines suggest. And you don’t want to either, do you? You want a big piece of this world. You would love to have the whole thing.

Katrina Vandenberg

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More poems by  Katrina Vandenberg are available through her website