i think one reason why i love reading so much, especially poetry and prose, is the depth of emotion i can feel without any real risk to myself. a book is a guided tour, a multicourse gourmet meal you can trust the dedicated chef to deliberately prepare. a book is the drop of a roller coaster: the incarnate knowledge of safety and unreality, despite my suspension of disbelief, despite my inherent fear in the moment. so when i hurt i pick up a book and I try to follow the characters without writing myself into them. but somewhere along the way minds meld together- like smoking weld, two perspectives becoming one. two shards of sharp metal that hurt each other and melt each other and dissolve each other, absolve each other; two corrosive chemicals mixing in a thermal reaction (and a cloud of smoke). i blink and suddenly i am here in a world where you alternate between yourself and a shadow of a character written by some meditation/crystal go-getter in a plush couch.
you know, if you love someone so fiercely that becoming anything more would kill you, you'd rather not love at all. that's me. and if you've lived your whole life destroying things (yourself and others), then one day you start choosing the being alone over the everyone else. that's you. i've been burned so many times by so many different things (the sun and the stars in your eyes). my aversion to fire is strong but not as wildly magnetic as my attraction. you know, my best friend loves the water. as a child, she used to throw herself into open water, into pools and lakes. you know, there was a girl at my elementary school who threw herself off the very top roof of our play structure because she believed so confidently that she could fly. she even tried to convince us all that we could too. they had to call an ambulance. you know, one time asa a child i believed i could tumble, so fiercely that i launched into a flip knowing nothing. i landed on my face, smashed my skull into a corner table, and bled.
i don't know what these things mean; we are deluded and desperate. i don't know what it means when i keep making excuses to see you, refusing to look directly into the desire. see, you are not something i allow myself to explore too closely. like a tantalizing alley, like the twisted dark corridors of an abandoned building. you are dangerous and you are on fire and you are the slowest beating heart i have ever met. you are the glassy surface before a riptide, the great ocean shielding its deep mysteries below. i breathe, exist, simply be within the space. i don't jump down the crumbling walls of empty shafts, don't lay on eons-old furniture and stomp like a rowdy paranoid group of teenagers; don't poke my head inside the doors of musty shops and around corners of heavy shadows. i don't dare swim out into the waves, don't allow them to crash over my face; i don't learn to dive, don't set off with headlamps and harpoons. but i can't stop myself continuing to come back to you, over and over. like those infinite drives to the beach, or the heady smell of pines in the Santa Cruz mountains, over and over again in my mind. some unstoppable will, some hidden knowledge that i am inherently closer to what i seek when i'm around you. can't help the thought that you are mine, that i don't wanna share you, in the ways that an expert carefully guards their secret methodologies. like a particularly whimsical forest clearing, or a hotspot in the sea filled with rainbow fish. you make me feel like running in the rain, or in the dark. breathless, calamitous calm. the soft embrace of a dangerous thing trusting you, of settling dusk upon your shoulders. the ease of putting your bare hands inside the mouth of a malinois dog.
in many ways i return to you with my guards and filters the way i return to all the places that are not mine. like sitting on the beach, watching dolphins leap and spin just a few meters offshore. or the abandoned insane asylum, how i keep refusing to return without proper masks and gloves. there is even a certain apathy in my will to go back to santa cruz and see old friends, to ruin magical memories with fresher, more mundane ones. i know i could put in a little more effort, learn to take the bart and find my way to someplace that feels like a home. instead i watch and allow two threads that crossed to uncross, yanking at the loose end of a bracelet and finding the whole thing built out of slipknots. i watch crumbling history that no one cares about, stand with my feet on the earth and inherently hear the voices of the people, the trees, the wide open sky. i ask if you have work, but i don't ask if you need to go home because i know the ways we are: dancing around each other. an ocean and a wildfire, afraid to touch, afraid to extinguish. i don't know if i'm afraid even just to see you. these days, i don't know anything.
but some nights the last thing on my mind is how severely i shove away the hope of it all. the uncertainty, the doubt, the contained possibilities within an "i don't know." we never want to find out, so you spare me. because you don't want to hurt me, or because you don't want to hurt yourself. and i know you're right; i've been burned a few times. somebody like me, we don't get so close to the sparks and expect to come away clean. when i angle grind i lean my face over the piece, watching with precision while i guide my hands. i feel the sparks prick my face, my arms; i feel them stab and burn even as i stare in meditative stupor at their beauty. but those are sparks, and these? these are fireworks. these are bombs. it's true, i'm very safe in a lab; but i have never stopped a fire. when i play with my lighter you take it away. and the one in a million chance that we can set off something brilliant vanishes over the horizon with all our fears.