When I wake up around 8 AM with light leaking through the plastic amber blinds I panic and think I’m not equipped to love you. But nevertheless. Last weekend when we were up on the ridge and scrambling over jagged boulders was the only way forward I also thought I can't do this but I could and I did. The mind plays tricks, undermines you. I can do things that seem physically overwhelming: it follows that I can do things that seem mentally overwhelming. Awareness of the self is often all that's in the way.
“Writing a book is like moving into an imaginary house." Loving a person is like moving into a house you've only ever seen pictures of. Shocked by its live idiosyncrasies, you wonder if you can be happy there, if you can create balance out of the erotic and the domestic, the turbulence and the calm. I read a lot of books about how one might conceivably do this well. The answers are easy to decipher (bids for attention, clear communication) but hard to live.
I read that writing requires brutal honesty with yourself. I used to not be capable of that honesty but I'm getting better. Here's what I know: I'm afraid of commitment, terribly scared of being trapped. Despite this I continue to make commitments. I try to be truthful about the push and pull of it.
It's so hard to be close to people. Murakami: "But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.” Attachment hurts, but despite the pain of attachment it's the central problem of our lives, the puzzle most worth solving. Who would deny that?
You say that you want me to love you fully and completely. The way I live is complicated, hard for you to decipher up close. You appreciate my complexities but don't want me to stray. I say I'll try my best and let you know in due time how it goes. I explain that I'm working on a project: I suspect there's a way I could love people where I could watch them carefully and never judge. I could let you do what you want and never be jealous. And when you're absentminded or accidentally or deliberately cruel I would just let it go. I would believe what you do is all about you and not about me. If I could live this way, love would not be consolation: love would be light.
Of course, all that is mostly theoretical right now. What I know is different: I grew up understanding love as an attempt to covet and acquire, to own and keep. To bind someone to you and fill an incompleteness within yourself. Acquisition of a scarce resource. That's how men have always pursued me: they want to fawn over me, praise me, adore me, alternate between detachment and intense obsession, ultimately want to own me. They can't imagine what I am like outside their sphere of perception, how I exist when no one is watching. You are calmer: more equanimous and generous. I see that you're capable of loving me almost without reserve.
I'm explaining to you that love replenishes itself. There‘s a way I could give you everything and still remain complete. I use words to try and unpack the whole lens of my experience to you: early September in Park City, blue sky tinged with smog from the wildfires, me in my little gray shorts hunched over my laptop on the bed. Utah in late summer is all cliffs, bluffs, berries and alpine grass. I'm trying to imbue the external world with my internal experience. I'm watching him as he wanders, as he returns to the fold. Prodigal lamb of a boy. Aren't men always boys in their hearts? I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. We're all kids frozen by attachment trauma, longing to return to open wonder, harboring tender fantasies of the good life.
Robert Hass: “The myth they chose was the constant lovers. / The theme was richness over time. / It is a difficult story and the wise never choose it / because it requires a long performance / and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts." Intimacy is fantasy translated to tenuous reality, intimacy is deeply unstable, intimacy shifts under our feet, intimacy betrays us and we allow it. We welcome it back hungrily. We are undone, unwound, drawn and quartered by it. We expect it to deliver meaning and it delivers only us: bodies on a bed, hands curled around limbs, the birds and the bees.
Intimacy is hard. Instead of living in a tunnel I want to live in open air.
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