Thursday, January 10, 2013

on the 5th day of may in the drizzling rain

So there's this: for starters, there's this: I'm probably kind of old, but I don't know how to act my age.
And there's also this:  this is probably even more important: I am married.  But I'm not sure who I'm married to.  I don't think it's very unusual.  I have friends, and I've even been that friend, who find themselves married to just one person with just one name (unlike me) for a very long time, and they are aware that they don't know who they are married to, either.  For a lot of people, this realization is the beginning of the end of the relationship, but for others, it's something that they just learn to live with.
I'm not really talking about it like it's a monogamous situation.  I'm not sure there is such a thing, really, for an extended period of time, really, because of the way we all tend to fall in love with any number of people all of our lives, there are always other characters in the movie, ones that come in and out, and they make the plot always so much more complex.  Even when none of the characters does anything about what they feel, or who they know they really are, but it's so much easier to pretend that they are not that, not that person who falls in love when they are supposed to be with one person for the rest of their lives.
I am not pretending I am that, but this marriage thing is more complex than I would have suspected, when I was younger and thought love was always complex, but only in the heart, not in the situation.  This is a complex situation.
It started in Vienna.  Like anything worth starting, this all started in Vienna. I was in Vienna because I decided to take a train there one afternoon, because I had money for a train ticket, and I knew that there was a woman in Vienna that I wanted to see, because she said she wanted to see me in Vienna.  I knew I wouldn't see her.  That sounds complicated.  She invited me, but we both know she wouldn't be there when I got there, but I went anyway.
She had a name that was almost exactly like the name of this woman I was trying to get over, only her name was pronounced just slightly differently, it had a Slavic accent to it, and I imagined that if I could focus on her for awhile, I would forget the other one.
It seems important to mention that I didn't think I was going to sleep with her, I don't think this was about that.  One of those stories where you try to forget someone by sleeping with someone else, in order to try to forget them, which doesn't really work, but it doesn't really fail, either.  A lot of people end up together for a very long time from situations like those.  This wasn't about that, sleeping with her, it was about erasing, and it did work, because when I was in Vienna, it was hotter than I suspected, and I was lost somewhere in a tangle of streets, and finally found myself in a cafe where I could sit and watch the sun shine on my glass of mineral water, and hear the sound of my spoon in my espresso, and there was nothing else to see or hear but the shine and the clink.  And they were both gone, in that moment, they were both lost forever and it was a bad moment for my ego that thought it would conquer hearts in Vienna, but good for everything else.
I lost her, but there was something I got to keep, a message from her in Slovenian, something about poetry and rain and something about our hearts, and she knew it was something that I would never be able to translate, and she liked it that I would never know what she said exactly, and in the end, I liked it, too.
And that set forth something, an energy in motion, that since that time I've never really felt alone, even though human lovers keep tending to come and go, and I keep tending to come and go, and I find myself still in love, despite all my best efforts, and it has nothing to do with any of them, at least not after they are gone.
But I like being in love, with real people, in real time, I like it very much, and think far too much about it.  But I also understand that every time is another repetition of something else, another experience that originated all of this, but the origins are never very clear.  Sometimes it seems close, some truth seems close, but it always disappears into something else.  ("There was the time she looked at me and reminded me of that one I kissed when I was sixteen and it was New Year's Eve and the kiss lasted for an hour and that must be it, that's who she reminds me of,"  "But she is very much like this idea I had of Mary Magdelene when I was only five, and I heard about her and thought, 'That's what I want, I want that one to walk through the streets of Jerusalem with me," or, "This one has the breath of Oshun in her, and I am helpless before any of that.")
((In truth, I am helpless, but it has nothing to do with the small gestures of human beings, and my own small gestures are insufficient to make someone fall in love with me, no matter how much I might think otherwise on some afternoons.))
And there are friends who always tell me that I just haven't met the right person yet, but of course, I have, I meet the right person all the time.  They anchor me, and then they unanchor me, and I always find myself floating somewhere in the middle of the ocean, and the ocean is that thing we all come from, so I am unanchored, but I am not alone.  That's very important.  I really am not alone.
And I don't think I'm alone in this, either, this place that felt like so much quicksand once now feels like water that won't drown me, but is unable to sustain any kind of roots.
I don't trust history, I don't trust the forces that push us forward in time and make us behave according to our place in time and space, and I think this might have everything to do with how we love now.

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