The Sisyphean task of sweeping the garden. It seems I do it at least three times a day now. Two trees, all the leaves, the berries green + purple, the feathers of various sizes: pigeon, gull, + birds I have yet a name for. I've barely written. I think of it more often than put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. I keep little notes here + there I will lose among the more practical lists + observations, reminders of the bathroom needing cleaned or the books I could organize. My body is sore, stronger + more sore. I designed a full-body circuit I do on Mondays + Fridays, typically, although I did nothing but dance this week. I want to run in a circle around myself. I want to avoid telling the truth.
+ what even might I write about? There is my mother + her lungs + heart. My brother's blood. Myself. My home. The broader world. The deep pity I feel for the lover who is not my lover, who has forfeited that title + forced me to come up with another name; I so far refuse. There is the friend, who was, as he is: himself. + as he is himself, he was kind to me again in a moment I should have expected it, knowing him, + yet expected something else. The kindness didn't mean anything, + I expected that much correctly. It was a simple reminder instead that we are ourselves, that we are ourselves with one another still + still we do not speak. I didn't know if that would hurt me, but it didn't. A small sad thing only small + sad for its place firmly fixed within the past. A last year. Another time. A moment where I found something new.
I'm saying nothing though. I'm writing nothing. No bravery to be found yet. No confession. No wisdom for the human condition. I'm reading The Ethics of Ambiguity + my own ambiguity feels hardly that.
I was going to write him a love poem. The lover, not the friend. It starts, "My little fire rabbit. I love you in a complicated way." Suddenly, as July shifts itself to August, I have no reason to write more than that, wondering if it is due to the fresh absence or merely already existing as an accurate summarization of my account. I'd rather describe a mug my friend bought for me, the green tea inside it. I'd rather write paragraphs about nonconsequential things than turn my perception toward his refusals. I should be proud. I should be proud that in the face of his four horsemen I did not mount my own. Still, it made no difference. The deep pity continues.
His rigidity. His defenses. I took on the shrapnel of bombs set by ghosts. Still, I kept my cruelty unknown to him. But I'm not ready yet to put it plain or in detail, not ready yet to tell the worst to avoid the pain of the waste of me + all other compatibilities because his belief in his own goodness is not yet strong enough inside him to survive being wrong. I can do so much for love, for another, extend myself like a tulip underneath a dark + twisting grove until I find the sun, but I could not become false so that he could remain real on his terms. I could not relinquish every truth about myself.
So set he is on his identity as the one misunderstood that he diminishes + casts aside the one who can see, as to undergo true witness one must be able to withstand more than a flattering mirror of distortion under one's own control but rather a confrontation with the total grotesque human lurking beneath the thin language of healing + transformation + finishedness where he has overcorrected in the face of more unforgiving natures. He will not integrate. He will not adapt. + so he will remain stuck in a state where he was once again the man whose love was thwarted by another traumatized woman who just couldn't perceive him. Even there, it's a projection.
The man thwarts his own love. The man is entrenched in pattern, in repetition of lessons he can't yet learn from. Afraid of dependence, of need, of being loved + known in full only to be discarded, + so he discards + conceals. He externalizes. He obscures. Inflates the problem until it is sitting on his chest, paralyzing him - some sleep demon in his waking world.
The man misunderstands himself, his authenticity hanging on behaviour + not values. His personhood whatever he says or does in any moment. He tells me he cannot breathe, then he suffocates himself.
I could say I am now becoming guilty of the same relational offense as his own, but it is not quite, as my motive is not to preserve my innocence or protect my own view of me. None of this protects me at all really. I know this. I am only after what is true; even when it hurts; even when it means I must change; even when it changes nothing, no one; even when it means I will make myself more alone for the sake of it.
I could defend now as well every accusation made against me. The woman too traumatized: who is wounded too easily, who must long for a softer man, who does not listen, who hallucinates events. How he came to these ideas of me I can barely imagine. The woman who has never sought his comfort in crisis. The woman who has never made him listen to the veracity of her unswallowed tears, the woman who hardly has them. The woman who functions with or without his positive regard or attention. The woman who chooses to be left before she will ever leave her self. The woman who could hurt him the most + the woman who won't even as he carves endlessly at her restraint.
It was a minor thing. I think that again + again - that it should be a minor thing. The ask to not bring negative judgements of my capacity, intelligence, awareness, insight, responsibility, healing, sexuality, or trauma into disagreements + instead stay within the bounds of the subject.
But it is not simple, is it, for all the machinery behind the action. Because it would also be to ask for him to see me + not just another iteration of the tragically wounded woman who misreads him, to examine the possibility that he may be a recurring variable in the story, to tolerate a more difficult version of reality where it is simultaneously true that he is good + unmalicious + yet still at times behaves harmfully through thoughtlessness + defense + true just as well that while my experiences have made me more acutely awake to certain injuries, this does not neatly render new bruises imagined or self-inflicted.
Because with integration comes grief for all one has lost or destroyed by holding too long onto what once protected them, as if it is armour still required, as if the armour itself is one's own skin + the removal of it would leave the self flayed, for wielding the blunted weapons taken up through harder times of life against our lovers + friends.
I only know because I have too many times done the same violence to myself, believing others too sensitive, too stupid, too people-pleasing + inauthentic, too easy, too unprincipled. Lesser, lesser, lesser. I was sure. I was certain. (I was afraid.)
+ yet in all my gory righteousness, I was only ever more alone, building a jail + calling it a fortress where in every show of strength unmastered, I was as fragile as one old + weathered bone.
When I could do no wrong, I was incapable of doing right.
germansingergirl
amandla
kianamaiart
stormborns
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
titsay
prguitarman
