On Returning

     A year and several mistakes later I return to this notebook.  Half-full of half-stories, half-starts, ideas, forceful and pathetic attempts at catharsis.  Here lie even more tried tries at remembering a pain that I am addicted to.  I don't have the luxury or bad luck to have a vice that kills quickly.  I have chosen(as if there were choice in the matter) love.  Delany says that to love is masochistic, and that the desire to be loved is sadistic.  That makes me both, yet if they tested for such things, there is no doubt which side I would fall upon, with proof strewn across my arms and legs.  The aging of my skin begins to turn this proof into a memory, into a secret.

     Hair wet on broad shoulders, feet dig into cold wet sand as the sea attacks the beach a rock's throw to my right.  The seas endless onslaught against the coast rages on methodically, each grain of sand slowly made sea.  An easy analogy to the war of mind vs body I have been fighting for a quarter of a decade.  There are no winners here.

    In the distance a tall thin man with lips twice pierced and a blonde mohawk halfway down his back walks toward the horizon.  This man is my closest friend.  His freedom is off-putting and often viewed as an attack.  Killing convention he embraces both honesty and the moment.  Our battles mostly stem from my obsession with the past and future and our mutual desire for anarchy, which can only exist in a moment.  He reads Perlman, a favorite of mine, and I can almost smell the heat of a mind hard at play.  The sun sets behind him, unleashing the reds and oranges usually reserved for flames.  The sky is burning and he is part of it all.  It would be a fool's errand to separate him from the sea's onslaught or the burning horizon, so I refuse to.  One day he will revel in becoming the sea, of setting fire to the sky.  One day I hope to be inseparable, so daring and free that the only words to describe me would be violent playful fire, and they wouldn't be near an accurate description.  Until then the sky looms over me infinitely big and the sea holds me with a black embrace to the limit of the abyss.

     There is another.  She is not here, nor will she be.  It is Thanksgiving in America.  She could be with family or at a farm sanctuary not so cleverly named Farm Sanctuary.  I've spent the past two weeks mourning her for five to thirty minutes each night.  None of the hippie/pagan/new age shrine building shit.  No, it feels more like the schizoid rantings of an angry lover that I vocalize in the hopes of letting go.  Each night I walk to the roof, alone atop this small yet miserable city, and I ask myself why.  Why? How? Beginning with the sadism I wonder how she could say she loves me while lying to my face every single day.  I talk to myself, I make excuses for her, I make up explanations she never gave.  I defend her to myself, but the results are always the same.  There is no answer.  I didn't deserve this, but I didn't not deserve it either.  I don't forgive her, choosing to return to masochism.  I return to the pain of loving one who is gone, of loving one who took free shots at a me, who sucker punched me time and time again, who acted like a human could be a punching bad, always on the attack.  I desired an embrace, but I received something much different.
 
     So I return to a cave-like room in a cave-like warehouse, to a shitty computer and a stolen monitor.  I transcribe the writings at the beach as another attempt at mourning and understanding.  I have returned to the only truth I have found in life, that with age comes the knowledge that truth is a much different thing than we ever imagined.  It is not so easy as telling it, for how often do we know it?  If at all?  It cannot be demanded or pried away.  All we can do is hope that someone gives their truth to us.  And in this moment, I search for my own.  I turn to my desires and my fire, and I will keep rubbings the stones together until a spark catches and I set the sky on fire and come crashing joyfully into the sea's embrace.