Twenty Eight 03.12.10

The sky is covered again with slate gray clouds. Rain falls like liquid diamonds to the ground, soaking everything in its weight, its luster. I feel a deep echo each time my heart beats and utters your name. I am a lonely artist, my muse has fled, and I am left alone pining after her. Hoping that I am not driving her away with my desperate need to love her, my persistence, my gentle heart calling out to her in the most persuasive tones it can muster. This is not codependency, no this is devotion. Many people can mistake those two, I pray that you have eyes sharp enough to see the difference. Gods how I miss your every feature. And yet, I do not cower away from the light and life around me. To the contrary, I go out and find myself in it. I reflect it in almost all that I do now. I live according to my passions and my dreams, my heart speaks to me and tells me this is the right course. But it also whispers your name, over and over, and the only thing to quell this yearning is to look back and read what you have written, what you have said.

I am reading some of your stories which you used to send to me. It occurs to me suddenly that most of your stories were tragic romances. They were always about one character madly passionately in love with the heroine. The reason those characters in your stories were in love with the object of their every desire was no mystery the way you painted them. They were flawed but gorgeous. Worthy of total abandonment of ego and worship. And the central character whose eyes we spied all through, well, they were sad lonely creatures. Usually hiding their talents, basking in the glow of their unrequited love. They were strung along in the undertow of love's grasp. Usually, they were unaware and perfectly happy in a certain kind of melancholy way to be dragged against sharp coves made of unfulfilled love and tangled up in seaweed spun from adulation. In the end, they were usually abandoned in these stories by the heroine; left there bereft of their warmth like empty seashells or spent beer bottles. There was never a happy ending, never even an ending that offered closure, or a chance for peace, or for them to be reunited. Only longing, only loneliness and soul shattering grief. That was their parting gift for having loved openly, but non-reciprocally: their misery.

I never told you why reading those stories, although beautifully written and haunting left me feeling sick and uneasy did I? I'll tell you why now... It wasn’t that I couldn't or didn't want to offer you support and capture every word you laid to paper with my hungry starving eyes. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy reading your writing, I would fucking die to spend the rest of my days in a heaven populated only by your tales, your poetry, your words, your imagination. It wasn't for a moment that I didn't have the desire or motivation to let what you had transcribed there project vivid picture shows on the backs of my eyelids while I read the words. No, I have always LOVED reading everything you write. But those stories, they started to make me more and more uncomfortable as time went on. Here we were right? Here we were happy, you were so in love with me and I with you, and all you could write about was failed lovers. All you could dream up for an ending was break up after break up that left one of the characters free and the other drowning in misery. I started to wonder then, were you trying to tell me something?

Were you like the heroines in your tales ready to cast me off like dead weight and sail forth, never to return to me again? Was I becoming one of those sad tales in your stories? Was I the pathetic wretch in love with you and doomed to loose you while you were the goddess that put up with me this whole time? Why were the only love stories you could write ones that ended painfully? Didn't you have it in your heart to experience anything other than that fearful ending? Especially now, that you said you found the one you wanted to be with, couldn't you give me one happy ending? One were the heroines stayed in love and were good for each other. Was this all you wrote about because it was all you knew of love? Was it your silent fears given life on the page, or just your painful past repeating itself with new scenery each time?

In reality, despite the nagging fears these stories sometimes produced in my heart, this is what I know to be true: YOU are my champion of love convincing me that it is worth having in my heart when I was closed off and afraid of it. Even though in the beginning I was SO resistant and difficult to bear with my run away dog ways, you bore through that resistance. You fed me by hand with trust, gentleness, and force of sheer stubborn perseverance. And when you needed to, you did not back down, you stood up to me and my tantrums and put me in my place: between your ribs.

And when you asked me for my heart, I gave it to you. I gave it to you and you filled it up to overflowing. Did I tell you how when I first met you I was so afraid of you because you reminded me of my first love? I know you think I told you this as a comparison between two people. Perhaps I mistakenly FRAMED it that way with my words, because I was unable to fully articulate what I was feeling. I know what that feeling was now.

She was like a flooded creek, rushing suddenly and raising everything with it. She set a new record for high water on my heart the year I met her. I had not surpassed it, not even come close since, until I met you. You were like a tsunami, a monsoon, and a hurricane converging at once. My world was bathed in water. You are the high water mark that Hunter S. Thompson wrote about. And just like you wrote about once, you slit your throat into a neat set of gills and played in the currents your love provoked in my crimson sea. Your love baptized my heart and I was born again. You were stronger and better than my first love. You are more than all my loves now or henceforth ever combined.

You were everything I wanted and dreamed of, and more. You still are. Even now, while you say you are out learning to become more, connected to me through this distance by your own heart's admission, I can feel you in my heart and I know that this love is not a memory. I assure you, this is not merely dependence, or obsession, or afterglow. This love is present and very, very real. Please tell me you understand what I am trying to say to you: you made me forget why I was so hung up on her for so long, because you showed me love could transcend that level. You were like falling in love all over for the first time, only I was scared, so scared to loose you, so scared of the pain I thought for sure was coming. It was YOUR love that made me able to see, that was the past and I did not want after it with anything as long as you were in my sights.

Seven galaxies show down on me through the rainclouds above. Maps are strewn everywhere until I can’t tell which direction you are going anymore. Black Hole Sun plays through the radio of my car's speakers while I sit at the top of Skyline and contemplate if you will one day write that I tried to break you down; that I tried to stamp out your fire and fill your whirling winds with cancerous smoke. I hope you remember, if you ever feel that way, what you have said to me: that you could not ever and do not resent me. Not even if you tried. That you know I am a good person who loves you with my whole spirit and heart. My water, my fire, my earth, my air, my spirit, all elements combine as one to help to cleanse and refresh your elements. My every wish is that you burn brightly and sail on with the force of a true Easterly wind. BART trains and MUNI buses wheeze and bark in metallic screeches and I hear glass breaking somewhere against a wall, as if someone threw a bottle down like a gauntlet. Someone near by screams and I hear it echo off the empty tunnel I am standing in. I am waiting for a train to come and fetch me. I am waiting to board and let its doors hiss close like it is hermetically sealing me in a time capsule. I am waiting for it to shuttle me away to stops I will not name for the journey is the true adventure not the destination.

Yes we are on a journey my love, I know this. Separate for now, but assuredly these paths with reunite. When they do, I hope we can put this confusion behind us, stand facing each other knowing always that we are the ones that possess each other’s happy ending. Until then, my heart has a high water mark all around and inside of its every surface. This level will never be reached again. The salty residue left from it bears your moniker. As it beats I am hearing it pulse your name into the world around me: Sasha, Sasha, Sasha, Sasha, Sasha, Sasha, Sasha, Sasha…..