"somewhere other than inside the out there" -- part two
so as i was saying, i had this love once...
typically and usually, when a boy meets a girl or a girl meets a boy or however you kids are doing it these days, sparks either fly, eroding atmosphere that could have previously interfered, or there is that dull scratch of wood against damp wood, proving little more effect than frustration and wasted time. in the former circumstance, lost without calculation or experience of such a gentle ride, it's natural and not quite unprecedented for a meltdown process to begin in four chambers, commonly known as the human heart.
with a person like me, a bit more jaded than optimistic and quite a bit more cynical than hopeful, a damaging emotion such as love is commonly masked behind easy hatred.
but man, i fell hard. i hated him that much. it was all kind of funny, when i look back on it. but at the time, this good man was foul and loathesome. if i had a goat, he would have got it within moments of even entering breathing space.
you see, all the torches i had carried were at that time useless steaming sticks that i used to poke and prod newcomers. well, in spirit of my misused metaphors, i took a good beating with my own sticks. it was about that time that i realized it was going to be difficult to ever really imagine making a decision without knowing his opinion.
i'm getting ahead of myself.
let's get back to this love before i drag both of us head first into the deep end of contemporary relationships and their effect on the psyche.
there is a love out there that does not live within the space of the heart. instead, it guards and inhabits the perimeter, those pearly gates rusted shut by unpredictable weather and years of "i find it difficult to trust people." it comprises the very shape and dimension of the heart, and without it, the heart is flat and undefined. once you discover it, you're amazed that you ever had a heart before that particular moment.
it is not the lines on the map, nor is it the original pen used to sketch those lines. but it is the very concept which once occurred to you, after a night of bad conversation or in some peculiarly long shower, that there was something that needed to be mapped.
consequently, it's completely baffling, abstract, and will fuck up the navigational systems beyond you or your dearest friends' control.
what i'm saying is that not only does it fuck with you (bad joke with a worse punchline), but it will always end up letting you know when you are not becoming the person you want to be.
for example, kind of, or maybe i just want to tell you this story, i knew this guy back in high school. mid-nineties, public inner-city school, lax dress code, under-funded, falling apart type of place. anyway, i had known this guy, we'll call him tom. i had known tom for the entire length of high school which, at the point this story takes place, was about three years. tom and i had never gotten along. i scowled at him whenever his mouth opened to what our naive minds deemed sexist comments. if his name came up, my friends and i were on the record with "fuck tom." we were members of different groups, but we always took similar classes and occasionally showed up at the same social gathering. there was no nemesis thing going on. we weren't enemies. we simply did not co-exist. i gave him little to no thought unless his name was brought up.
enough back story, there's a point in here somewhere. um. oh yeah..
so a little while into my senior year, tom approaches me and asks me out. i was a little shocked, to be honest. and frankly, i thought it was a bad joke (worse punchline) and that my best friend was having a cheap laugh at my expense. i snickered a bit, and i gave him my number.
well, come to find out, based purely on my ability to form an opinion and the fact that i didn't really care either way what people were saying, tom had grown quite fond of me over the years from an incredibly safe distance. (i was kind of destructive, he said.)
we had a few nice conversations until i blew the horn by noting that i thought he was pretty ridiculous, as a date and a human being. he and i never spoke again. we all have our off days, i suppose.
anyway, i promised you a point, and it's this ... without any awareness, i had contributed to this guy's idea that there was something out there worth being mapped. and he told me that i made him realize that he was not becoming who he wanted to be.
now, i have no idea nor conclusive evidence that this was at all valid information. (part of me still thinks that my best friend is holding back the punchline.) but tom and i's inherent conflict provided him with this warm affection that he didn't really know what to do with after a while.
and sometimes, i keep talking even after i've completely muted the point to all of this. let's just move on.
sometimes, with any small chance or piece of luck you happen upon, you're given an opportunity to mold and fashion your own heart, in cahoots with that one goddamn person who isn't afraid to tear you apart and make you understand who you want to become.
and it's sad that sometimes, i would have given it all up to know that he was out there, living and breathing, without me. it's sad that i've had to think about that at all.
but i don't have that choice.
today, one of my good friends went to a funeral. her childhood friend, at twenty-six, died of a heart attack. she turned to me, and she said, "life is so fragile."
and all i could say was, "and we have to learn that lesson over and over again."
but again, i'm getting ahead of myself, skipping around and such.
let me, quickly, tell you about the first time i saw him.
i was eating a quiet lunch in the dining hall, my freshman year of college. i was all geared up for mashed potatoes and catching up on my russian history reading. at this point, i was actually psyched about finally plowing through the bolsheviks, and therefore, i sat on the calm side of the dining hall where no one would interrupt a cold, dismal history replaying itself in my head.
all of a sudden this team of assholes, laughing and talking loudly, clowns in to sit at the table diagonal from me. they all proceed to eat and joke and one-up each other with movie quotes and that neverending "sequels" argument (that really should be curbed by the end of your first week of film school).
as i turned up the volume on my walkman, i made the deep mistake of looking up and seeing this person crouched, perched really, in one of the chairs and smoking in the non-smoking section.
i think i ended right there. my entire self. i believe that i rose up and out of my body and watched my entity drip and coagulate on the cheap carpet. and yet, somehow, i continued to, machine-like, eat my potatoes. one eye on the revolution and the rest of me on him.
i suppose that i blinded myself from the small smirk i had on my face because i didn't want to recognize that i was only going to become more from here on out.
again, i'm going on. we've got plenty of time for the romance and the drama, and thank god, more of my over-used metaphors.
today was a bad day, one of those days that i wanted more than anything to know what he had to say. and in the words of my father, "speculation is just a badly marked exit." yeah, i'm still not sure what that means, but it sounds good.
on that note... i suppose it's confusing to some people why i would (still) give up every moment of my relationship with him just to have him alive again and to not have to learn what this dying world is like without him, but, god knows, those pedantic fucks have never, with any breath they've taken, muttered any word close to 'love.'
