13 Ways of Looking at Love

Is this what love feels like?  The final, fatal cataclysm of the heart?
 

I.

I am at the bottom of a waterfall. It is sixty-six feet; I measure the collapse of hydrogen and oxygen molecules with my shutter-speed eyes and in one sixty-sixth of a second the whole grand spectacle, the flying leap of life crashes with infinitesimal sound. I don’t believe I can move that fast, but I know that's how quick the current kicks and who am I to fight it? I trace it with my senses; soak in the text of the world. I am talking of course about a waterfall and I am at its base.  I am the deep pool and the swirling eddies of blue sky and my white foam are aquatic clouds. I watch the stupendously swift spitting and spewing life-saturated force stampeding in perfect speed over an edge then falling off, gracefully, violently, passionately in sacred prisms of liquid light that can only be described as miraculous. Continuous fall, forever. I watch the sky grow foul and grey. A large bird struggles against the wind putting up just enough resistance to remain still. Leaves pour down from the sky like ash from burning buildings. I watch them pirouette with a carelessness and glee given to those who are departing in their proper time. In a sixty-sixth of a second I know a storm is coming. I let the movement of water drum in my body, the vibrations chilling my skin. The smell of change is so strong I can scarcely focus. I keep my eyes locked on the bird. He glides left and it begins to rain.

I get the notion that everything is a waterfall to some degree. All is given a moment of miraculous flight that is, at the same time, the descent as well as the re-collection of parts. From whole to part to whole. I think about people, naturally, and I think about you and me. Are we waterfalls? Are we falling water? Little hydrogen's clinging to our oxygen, trying desperately to keep it together, moving fast, so fast, so very fast. And you are one sixty-sixth of a second and I am one sixty-sixth of a second and together we are one sixty-sixth of the same second, flowing continuously in and out of one another. I am a deep pool at the end of a waterfall, you are a bird in an ominous sky. You veer right and I cry. How quickly everything changes, how very far the distance of one sixty-sixth of a second.

II.

There is pressure here and it’s difficult to calibrate myself to this alien atmosphere. I try to calm my chest but it aches all the time. You think I wouldn’t even notice anymore. But there are very real, very persistent thumb prints pushing into my collar bone, kneading doubt into my structure, blending fiction with non-fiction until finally, I can’t remember what anything felt like before us and this anxiety and you. I’m being tenderized for something, I just know it, and it will only be a matter of time before I’m submerged in the spices of your wanton expectations. But I asked for all of this didn’t I? I wanted you to mold me if only to establish a constant and crazed hold. I wanted you to own me.  It’s funny how constriction and security sometimes feel like the same thing.

I’m getting my metaphors mixed up. I’m relying on my body to tell the story, but it knows only as much as a somatic simpleton knows. This body is all sweet and sour or dull and sharp or hot and cold. It doesn’t tell me why.  So I ask my ribs, still polished by the pulsating pads of your fingers, “where did I go?” I interrogate my jaw; try to force a confession, “what have you said? What deals have you made? How many times did you duck away to avoid the hit?” My eyes skirt their own glare, “and you, when did you stop looking out? When did you turn into the smudge covered planes of a museum exhibit?”

I oscillate between wanting nothing and everything to do with you. I thrust myself out, knobby kneed and watery eyed, skin as thin as air. I held nothing back, save for all the darkness. I let you feed on the best parts of me, offered up all my light.  I loved you entirely, loved every crazy consonant of your being, every slight inflection, every innumerable pattern and sequence and pairing that could ever make up here to eternity. How can it not be enough when it is all I have?

III.

There is a place I go when everything on the outside seems dismal and dark. There is a quiet warm spot I find. I come with so much of what I don’t want, but I cannot shake it until I get here. I carry it because I don’t know how to let it go. This pain, it knows me and it holds me. I come soaked to the bone with sadness; I come with hands full with grief. I come to you, beaten and alone, I come to you, tired and short, and I come to you because you know. I let it all out, the shouts, the tears, the insecurities, all of it, I shed it. You sit there and take each bit, pull each sorrow from my body and smile. You’re not afraid. You pull the dark from me because you love me. When everything else in the world seems uncertain, I always know that you love me.

IV.

I was going to make something for you, my darling, from the strings I have dangling at my heart but I pulled at one and the whole thing unraveled. Sorry, but you will have to wait until next week, or next year, or next forever. I just want you to know my intentions were my fully convinced dreams and when I promised to be good, when I swore to deliver on every promise, to believe in everything I said, I really meant it. How was I supposed to know that these dreams were not fully developed? We discovered them simultaneously, gasping for breath with lungs inferior. No one can tell if the soft, dripping soul that you present to another, will, in fact, thrive and live a happy, invigorating, soul satisfying life. I find that I cannot exist in this environment; I have come from another place altogether.  My body balks. I must leave. This does not mean I do not love you. I never meant to cheat. It is something clawing inside, something afraid of what permanence looks like, and something certain I cannot survive synchronized living. You said I am incapable of loving and for a while I believed your anger, believed my guilt. Although I left you, I could and cannot stop loving you. There’s a difference.  I left you because I loved you. And when I scoop my soul into my arms and rock it’s sobbing, precious frame back into myself, I promise to always love you.

V.

Love is a slideshow of images framing how you see. My love is a series of microscope slides, an atom thick, universes wide and infinitely deep. My love stretches out all around me in transparent sheets of meaning and I live in a cell of unintelligible animal beauty; my love, consumes me and I circulate in and out of her in animal intensity. She gives me images that I store in the library of my animal heart, corridors boasting synchronous metaphor and promising eternal metempsychosis. My love is fluid and fixed at the same time and I pull up slides between forefinger and thumb of mind.

Image one, the moon is a marrow filled fissure in the sky curving like a snake running backwards. There is an apex star holding up this low sickle arch that grounds our floating existence like metal grounds lighting. I look through this slip of a porthole; “someone has forgotten to close it”, you say and smile. We make up the rest of the image so that the moon is whole even when it’s not. And it occurs to me that perhaps we only really see ten percent of things and the other ninety percent is imagined. This would indicate that we live in an altogether fabricated world sewn together by the imaginations of our loves and our lovers.

Image two; I am on my back looking out at the world, wondering why stars have names. Can we know them truly enough to mark them static, forever, until their dying day? My chest is free out here as open as the night sky.  And I ask you, can you see black, ever, wholly black? Even when I close my eyes I see a shade of light. What does absolute darkness look like? You say you don’t know and I am happy enough with the uncertainty. We make up our own constellations and imagine ourselves light-sensitive aquatic dinosaurs at the bottom of the deepest ocean.

Image three, we like the sea. Always lingering on the edge, watching the tides flicker like rascally ribbons. We stare at a fish that swims towards us and disappears, slipping into another slide. We giggle and muse on metaphysics while wild dogs race around us. I like framing my world in consideration of you. The images are hypersensitive, a glow of the abstract with colors and texture that is other worldly. It’s no wonder I haven’t a clue as how to deal with my present world. How does a solar system keep revolving when there is no central force holding it together?

VI.

I awoke with dreams of roots and you.  Root roots, the bifurcating and mysterious expansion of a pale to translucent assembly of plant feet. Root roots, the kind that finger through soil and grip, with all their life, to a specific spot, and, in fact, become so connected to their particular plot that upheaval could result in death.  These roots were bright white, almost fluorescent, and completely isolated, hanging in picture frames as normal and one would photograph a single flower and call it entire. But the roots belonged to something, someone, and yet the owner had been cut off and the soil removed, roots laid threadbare and washed like a heart someone left behind.

Then there was you, interspersed with these visions, like fall leaves caught in the boughs of young and inexperienced maple trees. You felt so very far away and I questioned whether not or we had actually met before. My fingers get tongue tied trying to explain just how I felt watching you move away from me. We floated through my melancholy mind, surreal as sea nymphs, equally detached from one another as the roots from their homes. Somehow I felt I lost you as sure as I lost any sort of grounding, as sure as I’m floating, as sure as I’m not sure.

I see you next to me, your brown hair washed over the white pillow, your face set in a peaceful sleep.  I want to touch you to make sure you are real, to push back the convincing narrative of my dream.  But what if you aren’t?  What if I’m not?  I can hear my heart beat in my ears.  The drum is familiar, “run” it says.  “Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run”.  I love you so much, it scares me.  Before I know it I’m at your bedroom door.  It’s three in the morning.  I won’t be returning.    I take one last image of you, your small body curled up under the white, white sheets, love laid threadbare and washed, a beautiful heart I left behind.     

VII.

There is a famous painting by the enigmatic artist Frida Kahlo where her two selves sit side by side and face frontward. The women look ordinary except for their anatomically correct, vibrantly live, lucidly raw hearts which soak through their very proper postures. The hearts are complete in human form having two ventricles and two atriums each, the aortas are intact.  The veins and arteries of one run into the veins and arteries of the other. There is no more literal connection than the one Frida has drawn and no more poignant an articulation of the heart to heart fusion. I sit next to you and feel the strum of your love in my veins and feel your colors coursing through me and feel the soft call of your soul in the highest aspects of my atrium. Together we are a closed loop, a sea of symbiotic revelry.

 What do you want? I ask you. You hesitate, not because you don’t know the answer, but because you aren’t sure you dare set it out before this open sky and inquisitive mind. We see the painting at the same moment. We’ve been drawn before, every century in a different hue but the lines are ancient. My heart overflows with you. What do you want? You say, Love. Love. Love. I smile. Me too.

VIII.

You are another self, clean and healthy. You are another self bathed in light and a pure halo like the divine. You are another self in another time and you are timeless. Everything else is inconsequential.

IX.

I met a man who knows you, his name is Patrick.  His knowing made you feel real.  Again.  I told myself I wouldn't look, wouldn't look at the wound because once I did, I'd want to pick at it, I'd want to open it up. I said I wouldn't, promised myself I wouldn't. But he pulled off the bandage and low and behold there you were staring out from my chest.  I spent so long trying to discount your existence you see? It's not healthy to love. you. Not healthy, so I just cut you out. Or I thought I did. But here's Patrick, fingering my heart telling me to give it up, to open the flood gates, to free myself. Free myself. Free myself. "Give it up, it's a sham, we both know you loved" he seems to say. "She's a good friend of mine" was all I could muster. But that's not it, is it? There's more, much more. Bittersweet Patrick, tricky Patrick. I hold my chest afraid my heart will drop out, right here, in the open, in public.  

X.

Taciturn clouds close their lids batting strained rays of light like eye lashes onto a heavy and pensive sea. I am holding you on sand so grey we look electric against it as the wind comes in from the west. Rain gives movement and texture in the northwest corner of this scene and pulls slowly toward us, manifested magnetism carried over miles. I clutch you tighter, wanting to shield you from the rain. You feel so cold. Every day we sit here and watch the sea, it's a strange thing lovers like to do. Perhaps it's because the sea is love embodied, infinite, deep, shifting, mysterious, rhythmic, revealing, life giving, drowning, translucent and mirroring. (The sea is us and we are love.) Perhaps love is the water that comprises our bodies and our bodies are the essence of the sea. (The sea is us and we are love.) I hold your image tightly in my right hand. I miss your body. The taciturn clouds open and a bright-eyed sun looks knowingly into me. (Today.) I take you in again, stare at the glossy photograph I hold in my hands, you were so young but you knew me perfectly. Waist deep in water I lay you on the surface of the sea. You said, "The Sea is us and we are love". I let you go, your image forever held in my loving embrace.

XI.

How do you love? Tell me! Tell me! How do you love? The question raises its fist inside my brain like a combusting techno fever dream. The morning is new and swaddled in the mist of an already exhausted dawn. Everything feels crisp and sharp and the brightness stings my eyes. I traveled this road many times just never in this direction at this hour. my skin seems to burn in this cool air; I am a turtle without it's shell, the earth without it's moon and every other metaphor you can think of to describe the severing of one essential from another. That is to say, I am leaving you, though it feels more like dying. All the things I need or at least had the nerve to remove are weighing heavy on my back. Despite the weight on my shoulders I cannot seem to balance the overwhelming gravity of my heart which is perpetually plummeting in sadness' vicious velocity. How do you love? Tell me! Tell me! But you can't reply, or rather there is nothing to say. And when we both say nothing, I ask, why don't you love me? Tell me! Tell me! Why don't you love me? And you reply, because I can't, love you, love you, because I can't.  I lock your gate quietly; I don't want to cause a scene. I don’t want to think, I can only hear my pulse frantic and mad, it goes, where are you love? Tell me! Tell me! Where are you love? Long gone! Long gone! I fight to keep my body moving, one small, painful step at a time. The road is vast and it feels so empty. That is to say, I am leaving you though it feels more like dying. Mother always told me it would. Women will break your heart. Simple fact. I’d rather she took a rib instead and let me back into her lighted garden but our story was not fated to be thus. The sun is pushing itself up and over the Pacific Ocean. I feel the light running through me in fiery rods; I could dissolve any moment.  My body seems to disappear; I focus only on the light. Where are you love? Tell me! Tell me! Where are you love?

XII. 

Aren’t we special? Please tell me we are special. I don't want to die alone. I want to die in arms clasped tightly. I want to die under hot breath. I want to die being held together and never being let go. I want it to end softly and with great love. Aren’t we special? I think we must be. You are the bits of me that escaped, that flew out in the corners of the world and sang to the most charming worldly clouds, who lived and loved and longed to come back me. And I am the bits of you that escaped, that swam to the deepest trenches and serenaded the ancient creatures, who lived and loved and longed to come back to you.

I love you. It’s a strange thing. Love. Not what I expected. Not gushy. Not full of low lights and soft music. No brilliant one liners. No long pans across exposed torsos and close ups of dilated pupils and the sounds of bated breath. No. It is maple leaf covered roads in northern New Hampshire and the sound of your guitar and the way my soul sways whenever I hear you sing. I remember your lungs; I remember your hugs. I remember being held tightly, transported to someplace where there is coalescence, where I felt altogether content and present.

 I miss you. Part of me run out and searching. Part of you run out and searching. I put your letter close to my chest. Let your words hug me, clasp tightly around my body. Make me feel special. Make me ready to sleep a while. Sleep a while. Aren’t we special? How very beautiful we are. Beautiful you, beautiful me.

XIII.

I wrap you in metaphors to try and understand you. Perhaps this is silly, or childish. Perhaps I am weakly forgetting the hurt you've caused me and the monster you harbor inside yourself. But I wrap you in metaphors to keep my angry mind from consuming you, gnawing ten thousand teeth and foaming at the mouth with pain and distrust. I could quickly banish you there; chew you until all I have left is a hard stone of hate to carry as my token of you. Still the lover in me and the soft memory in me tries to save you.  Can I love you after all the hurt? Yes, I will love you, even when I think there's no possible way I could. I don't know what's happening to us and I haven’t completely forgiven you, but I do love you because in you I can still see light and goodness.