Power

Is something I have wrestled with, like most of us, my entire life.  I grew up with a lot of it, a hell of a lot more than I knew.  I was used to being alone, the ultimate power, surviving without needs being met.  Needs force us to search out others and things and interactions and friendships and relationships.  I didn't search these things outs really when I was growing up and then when I was 17 I searched them out intensely and with determined purpose.  It has to to beautiful moments and unspeakable pain that felt like it would never end.  the kind of pain that led me to burning myself with cigarettes, punching friends, causing public scenes, and at my lowest moments, knocking myself unconscious with my own fists.  It has also led to moments of infinity, kissing and cuddling and joy among friends that has rendered death irrelevant. 
    What I didn't realize as the impotent child I thought I was, was how powerful I was.  I held to my personal ethics so strongly then, I did what I wanted, I was a fucking desire machine.  At the same time, I learned to deal without my needs being met.  My needs to be seen a bit, my needs to be understood to some degree, and my needs for love and affection.  90% of the time people fucked with me, I attacked them straight away, I punched all my problems in the face, because fuck them.  Now, things are more complicated. 

I am in far and away the best romantic relationship of my life.  I have been with Snail for 7 months now.  We are still as non-monogamous as ever, I had an intuition they had a date/hookup on Friday, and while I have been with them they have not had an ongoing physical relationship with someone in the bay area.  I know that will happen soon and it concerns me. It concerns me because they mentioned that it concerned them.  They told me that they are worried they are gonna start dating someone else and not have enough time for me and that I am gonna be sad, mad, disappointed, hurt.  This concerns me.  As it is right now, I wished we hung out more.  We hang on average about a day and a half a week, which means some weeks once and some weeks twice.  Sleepovers probably happen an average of once every two weeks, maybe a bit more sometimes.  This is vastly different from all of my other relationships and I am madly in love with this snail. 

The point of all of this is that right now I am feeling extremely weak and powerless.  My social circle is the smallest that it has been in probably 3 years.  It doesn't need to be, but I have isolated myself from a lot of my older friends and not done tons of work to make new ones.  I have had a lot of trauma with my social scene too, with my best friend moving back into a house with other friends as we had our falling out and stopped speaking to each other.  I miss feeling comfortable in a group of friends, I don't have that now and it fucking sucks and makes me feel weak.  I still have people who have my fucking back, but not like I have had before. 

So with snail.  They want so much less from me than I do of them... I told them my favorite thing in the world was cuddling and falling asleep with someone(them).  I asked what their favorite was and they said, "being left alone," and "a nice text message."  How the fuck can I relate to that.  I want to make sure I am not going into another relationship blindly and pretending somehow things will magically work when the foundation is fucked.  I don't think ours is fucked, but sometimes I feel so replaceable.  I mentioned recently how nice it was to be with someone who i liked this much, who was cool being so intimate w out penetrative sex, and they told me they thought it would be so easy to keep finding this. fuck.  that hurt.  I am happy they feel that way because I care about them, but I don't know how to get rid of my desire to be irreplaceable and special.  Maybe I don't take that head on enough? I dunno. 

All I do know is that right now I feel that they hold all the power over me.  It feels like they would be sad but fine without me and that I would be fucking devastated.  The power of feeling feels static and not fluid.  I drove them home at 4am last Monday and they said on the drive "i love you so much right now."  I feel like that nearly all of the time.  My feelings for them have been so stable, in terms of my affection and love for this snail.  I can't remember the last time I spontaneously asked them to hang out, I think it has been months, maybe this is being dramatic i dunno....but they constantly schedule our plans and change em as they will and I mostly am fine with this.  I always want to hang more, so they always decide when hang outs end. fuck fuck fuck.  what the fuck do i about this? I don't fucking know.  I don't want this relationship to end, having snail in my life is so amazing.  They are so amazing to share ideas with and our emotional and physical intimacy continues to amaze me.  I love talking about books and animals with them, I love reading to them and I love the way they look at me.  And more so than that, I love how I feel about myself when I think about our relationship most of the time, except for when I think of myself in it as having almost no power.  I think I will try to talk to them about this when we hang tomorrow....fuck.

A Chapter From Something Long I am Working on: Fiction

It was a classic cheap low-end psychiatrist’s office.  Barely decorated, impersonal, and cold.  No rugs, just tile floor and some bland paintings that seemed to melt into the wall.  Dr. Blein was unmemorable.  Average height, pretty, 50, friendly and concise.  Within a few minutes Dylan began his dance with the nurse and psychiatrist bearing witness to his grace, his subtlety, his slow and practiced moves.  

“What brings you here today Dylan,” Blein opened with.  

“anxiety, depression, I feel like there is a hole in my chest”  Dylan began with.  

“Can you tell me more about this feeling?” Blein responded

“I can’t sleep.  It feels like something has been dug out of me, perhaps it never existed.  The hole feels about a foot around in circumference where my heart should be.   It’s more like a void than a hole, it isn’t fillable.  I used to have a friend who would tell me that everyone has this void, and that while others try to fill it with love, music, tv, drugs, or friends, he just liked to go outside and run as fast as he could and listen to it whistle.”

“How long have you felt like this?”

“As far back as I can remember, as far back as I have bit my nails, as far back as I have felt more island than archipelago, never a mainland.”

Dylan was putting on a show.  How he relished these moments.  Sitting in the hell that is the West Side Crisis Center, waiting in the rain with the homeless and broke clients, he had the psychiatrist and nurse on the edge of their seats as he leapt and spun on the head of the pin.

Dylan continued, “I awoke the other day to smoke.  I stood outside with all the cold humans in the fog of the outer sunset, and we kept ourselves warm with our cigarettes.  Inhaling poison and making a deal with death, one less day for a few more moments of rest.  I filled the air with American Spirit Blue’s in  sea of Camel smoke.  I am just bourgeois enough to smoke spirits instead of camels.  The fog was too thick to see the ocean from my house, 2 blocks away, so I walked to the dunes stretching to the lapping shorebreak.  I hate doing most things, nearly everything, including walking most of the time.  Anyways, I spent an hour chain smoking half my pack and deciding whether or not to walk out into the cold violent sea and give myself to it.  I am sick of taking care of myself, I am shit at it.”

“Thanks for sharing Dylan, that sounds really hard.  Do you have much support”

“I have a few friends, but I am mostly alone.”

a long pause:  Dylan could feel the power of the storyteller, the attention, the presence of his audience, holding their feelings and emotions in his hands.  It was a beautiful thing.  A lot of his anarchist friends think they can destitute power and Dylan spent most of his life afraid of his power.  He had once tried to murder a peer at 17, and had been scared of his own power since.  But in this moment, he was free to do what he does best, tell a story.  And he wove the web with the expertise that was so much more common before the written word took precedence centuries and centuries ago:

“ I fear being alone.  I keep people close who I feel little to no affinity for, and because of it I am more alone.  I fuck strangers and burn myself with my American Spirit blues repeatedly the moment they leave.  My mother was always there but never present.  My father angry and alone, never cut the psychic gap between us.  My siblings fell in line, I was alone, at war with myself, my peers, my family, my teachers, my society.”

Dylan’s execution was pristine.  He had the setup complete, and the best part of it was that it was all true and concurrently total fucking bullshit.  All the real, the material reality, had happened as he had said.  But, he was aware enough to have changed his relationship to these things, but had he?  So deep in the story of his own supposed tragedy that it became impossible for him to discern his own feelings as he moved through it, shared it, vivisected himself just enough for the psychiatrist and nurse to catch glimpses, but not enough for them to actually see.  

Dylan began to lose himself and with it the audience, caught up in his own reality or lack thereof.  He noticed it just in time and moved forward in his dance, his movement, the play he was putting on for a few handfuls of Klonepin.

“This isn’t my first time.  I have been other places like this before.  There is only one thing that has ever helped me, allowed me to work, to maintain friendships, to be a functional member of this society.  It was some pill they gave me before…”

Blein jumped in, “xanax”

“No, something else, that one doesn’t work”

“Lorazepam,” she stated

“that one has never helped.  It was ca, cla, clasernam.?”

“you mean klonepin?”

“yeah, that is it.  That is the only one that helped”

Blein responded slowly, “well, we try not to give out benzos(short for benzodiazepine), but…”

“But, it seems like they have helped you before and I trust you to be careful with them”

Dylan, ever the professional actor, “of course! I hate drugs! Most of them make me feel awful and I am scared of them.  I only use them in case of emergency, when I feel most scared of myself”

Blein took our her script and began writing a prescription for Klonopin.  Dylan felt relief and pride at having pulled off the delicate dance.  The nurse, who an hour previously had told Dylan that he would not be getting benzos today, shook his head in disgust.  He was no fool, and while Dylan may have captivated him for a while with his story, this young man was far too cynical and cared too much about people with supposed real  problems to be fooled by this privileged human in front of him.  

Blein handed the script across a big professional table and Dylan slowly took it, folded it, put it in his wallet and listened to a long lecture from Blein about safety, before quickly thanking her, taking joy in one final smug glance at the angry nurse, and slowly walking out of the building with the small sheet of paper that he had come here for.  Victory really can differ across what is commonly known as humanity.

fortune cookie

A week ago I went out on Friday with a friend of a friend and saw a few bands play in a backyard of another friend.  Got drunk and high, and smoked a shit ton of cigarettes.  Conversation with this person was actually pretty good, he was interesting and different, not a city person, so it was nice to have some other conversations that I don't usually have.  Anyways, I woke up the next day feeling fucking depressed as all hell, anxious as fuck, wanting to die. 

I spent almost all of Saturday in Bed, except for the 20 minutes I went to panda express for "dinner" and stopped to get some candy and snacks to ease the shitty feelings.  I felt so fucking shitty on Saturday that I ate my fortune cookie without looking at the fortune...I just grabbed the fortune and threw it straight in the trash can.  It's hard to decipher what that means, or why I did that.  It is a behavior that I have never exhibited.  I guess it is good, or interesting, or what fucking ever, to still surprise yourself with your own decisions and behaviors.  Or, maybe it was just a new low.  Maybe I just felt so fucking shitty that no words on paper could help me, maybe I didn't wanna pretend like I had a fortune, a future, anything to hope for, maybe I wanted to rely solely on myself to get me out of the mess I had built for myself.  I don't fucking know.