San Fermin – Sonsick – Audiotree Live
I found me a hopeless case and resolved to love
Maybe we can find a decent place when I’m old enough
Found love in an empty gaze, tried to fix it up
I found me a hopeless case, oh, oh.
I’ve been fueled by single size candy-bars this week, returning to Canada face first into my stash of kit-kats and candy scooped from various Google offices. I would say the amount of sugar I’ve consumed this week would be a problem, but it’s keeping my brain going.
My problem, more, is where to start. I want to dive in to all of the stories that I have been living, but I am stymied by the staggering number of moments that I should be sharing, should be documenting but instead have been allowing to slip past me, unrecorded, and so, eventually, unremembered. Our grandparents probably did not write very often, our parents probably only wrote a little bit more, but our generation knows The Word, knows its power, understands that literacy is a window into history. Our own as well as that of others. Society seems nostalgic for what came before, but really, we have never had it better than this. Yet here I am, wasting the page, spending my Friday night sitting in front of a screen.
My chemicals problems feel like they have swallowed me whole. Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, epinephrine, norepinephrine. Long words for relatively simple things. Call and response. But when they should trigger, failures. Call and then nothing. The grapes shrivel on the vine.
I went to the doctor today to ask for a test to gauge the levels of depletion, in order to add them to my file, to try and see what could be fixed. The doctor refused, says I need to “talk it out”, but he is wrong. It is physical and I am tired of being permanently defused. I want to be lifted up by life again. I want to be able to touch the world and feel it.
Meanwhile, I have been put in the position of needing to dismantle some of the only care and intimacy that I ever have found completely satisfying. Bloody difficult. Needful, but the logistics slay me. How does this even work? This isn’t a task I’ve built a tool-set for.
Instead, we play the question game. We entertain ourselves, we put off the inevitable for a few hours more. I quote Shakespeare. He claims I am risking his life. On the surface, this is very little. Peel through the layers, it is the world. When I ask why he continues the dance, we are no longer playing. He stays. I stay. He calms me. It is enough.
Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire. — François de la Rochefoucauld
We set off fireworks for my birthday when I was in Seattle a few weeks ago. My dearest and I, scouting along the river at midnight, along with one of my best friends. All of the romance of shifting with a left hand. Explosions, incredible, gigantic explosions.
We texted a handful of our people, looking for co-conspirators, fellow anarchists ready and willing to break a handful of small laws. Only one replied, but he took awhile to drive south enough to meet us, so this fey creature and I found ourselves by the river, booting about a park the size of a postage stamp, a discarded piece of land too small for even the city to care about. I was in heels, fool I, as I had walked through my sandals when I was in San Francisco, but the rough chunks of cement proved to be easier to clamber over than I would have expected. I almost fell anyway, slipping in the dirty, industrial dark, but he was there, elegant as calligraphy, the odd way he moves, this man, this boy I would love some day.
All of these things I write about, but I do not write about him. Again. Yes, again.
Let me tell you instead of other people, other parts and pieces of my history. The one who lied, lied as I watched, as I suddenly knew. Silver at his temples, silver and silver, thirty plus two pieces, some better future offered in the palm of his hand. Take it, he offers, take it and forgive me and help me and we will conquer. He looks at me as if I am the one who keeps the keys to the prison of his life. When he looks at me like this, as if I am needed, a requirement for breathing, I cannot deny him anything. Who am I to judge the lost? We are the same.
Or another, the one who omitted, who erased. How he read what I wrote and felt, slightly, like he was dying, even though I held him through it, wrapped him in a cloak of my care. “That might be making it worse.” I understood but I wasn’t going to let go. We were in a park, a beautiful place I had never been that he knew I would like. In that space, his favourite tree. We watched the ferries come in and leave again. What an interesting thing to care about, I originally thought, a favourite tree. I was struck by the novelty, but in that moment came the realization that it matters to me that it matters to him. It was like listening to a motionless heart start beating. I carry it, that recognition. I am incapable of forgetting. Through his eyes, the red wood is new and beautiful. I am redefined. “It makes me happy to make you happy,” he said, our selves clasped together. What else is a definition of love?
Now that I have started writing again, I am shocked that it has taken so long to do this again. Here are the words, the letters, the language. Tied to these men, to these memories, tied to the bare winter branches of everything I have left. It is only the middle of summer, but it feels like I have lived an entire year since January.
The fireworks; our own thing, finally shared. The thick sulfur smoke stayed in the air, praise for our work. A grubby stranger paused in robbing a local stock yard, stripping it of metal, to watch. We laughed, argued with lighters, dashed to the illusion of safety and back again. I lightly burned part of my left hand, sparks from a short fuse. He kissed it later, unknowingly, and I felt the sting again. Electric flares, willows of light. The concussives were so large they punched holes in the air, slammed into our rib-cages, forced my mind to focus. I almost felt like I was under water, how it has been described to me, the voices stilled, as if music were playing to drown out the entire world underneath the shock of the sound of the bombs.
They were almost bright enough, almost loud enough, almost enough, almost, almost, to get through.
