Rise & Fall of a California Sun.

[rewiiired]

RISE & FALL OF A CALIFORNIA SUN.
(a story I just tuned up a bit)
by Rewired

* * *

It's strange where we find connections -- or make them, as the case may be. Whether we see them because they are really there or we simply see them there out of some psychological need is ultimately, in my view, irrelevant: our minds cannot help but note these meaningful coincidences, these `synchronicites'. Since we do not consciously create them for ourselves this means that they either exist out there in the universe at large, which implies some unseen, external force (and I do not mean any creator-god, before you jump your guns) or something unconscious effects our perceptions, communicating to us through these experiences, trying to get a message across.

So either way, it's important to pay attention. And so I find myself doing that here.

When Kate told me she grew up a Mormon I quickly held my tounge -- I did not want a religious debate to get between us. I explained to her, as I explained to many of my friends, that I try to respect the right for people to believe what they so choose but that I happened to be atheist. She quickly told me that though she grew up a Mormon, she was uncertain as to what she believed and had found herself very interested in other religions. When she named Catholicism as one of the religions she found interesting, it was hard for me not to fall to the ground in violent spasms and begin screaming wild obscenities. Thankfully, for my taste, she turned out to be very spiritual and not religious at all at the time.
Someone at work, Ron, explained her as Wiccan, though she never exactly reffered to herself as such. It's true, she is quite obviously very nature-oriented and loves the forest, which are things I associate with Wicca. More to the point: she explained to me early on that she often praticed what she referred to as `candle magick', and she had done so since as far back as she could remember. She had never read any of the books I had over the years, but her solitary practice with candle magick echoed exactly as those books suggested. She utilized this practice to heal and help herself and others, to let go of anger and depression, to signify the end of chapters of her life and everything else that my half-assed research on ritual as rites of passage has helped me understand bit by bit over the years. Again, she does this as a natural instinct, having grown up in an environment with no obvious neo-`pagan' persuasion.

Not more than a week ago, she explained the specifics of her practice: she first rubs the candle, cleansing it of `excess energy' and fueling it with intent. She then would carve something symbolic or referent to her intent onto the candle, such as a name of a person she was angry at, a person she wanted to help, or something of the like. She would then light the candle and focus on it, meditate on it, and watch it melt and burn down passed the name. She said she would never use that specific candle twice, she would never use it again for any other purpose. I don't recall if she said she threw it away or buried it or simply let it burn down to nothingness -- but it was disposed of.

I found this interesting, not only because of my intense interest in the use of ritual a year or so back, but because this habit, this system, this way or path developed in her naturally and seemed to work so well for her.

The ideas here were revived the first night I spent over at Rena's house with my roomate Nick. Rena showed me some pictures of her previous boyfriend, who she calls the Asshole, and invited me along with Nick out onto the back porch, where she proceeded to burn them. She did is slowly, watching them. The way I watched her as she burned those pictures, gazed at the flames, watched the smoke rising -- the way her current boyfriend, my roomate, held her and comforted her during this little ritual -- all this made me think again of Kate's candle magick and the utilization of ritual in general.

That an external act preformed as a symbol or metaphor for something deeper had such meaning and accomplished so much for these people amazed me. Even if the act of ritual did not really effect the external world through a web of sympathy as various `pagan' traditions would imply, it certainly did have a profound psychological effect on the practitioner. It really did act as a rite of passage that seemed to accomplish or satisfy something deep within a person. As much as a wedding symbolizes the unity of two people. Or a funeral marks the end of a life and a time of sorrow and letting go. Or a graduation ceramony, a birthday, and so many other things...

It seems to satisfy our need for specific points. A sort of structure where we signify specific beginnings or ends of one chapter. Marks of the moment.

It's important to mark the moment.

* * *

I had seen her come into the fast food restaurant where I work a few times as customer on the other side of the counter, and I was always eyeing her. She came in her work uniform, so I knew off the bat that she worked at the fast food place right across the street, and I assumed she had developed the habit of coming over to our fine palace of grease on her break. Through word of mouth, I learned soon thereafter that her name was Kate and that she also worked at the same place I did, only she was part time and worked mornings, wereas I was full time and worked nights.

I obsessed over her. I didn't do a damn thing about it, and sure, I thought of other girls, but the spotlight in my mind was hogged by her from the moment I first laid eyes upon her.

Then I came in one day to work, early as I usually do. On routine, I come in about an hour early, get my free coffee chill outside, smoking cigarettes, sipping my hot java and reading for an hour and a half or so before my shift began. Well, on this particular day we were having an inspection: all the big-wigs and higher-ups and corporate shitheads were coming, and so they had everyone working. The shifts kind of crashed; worlds collided. So when I went up to get my usual coffee, there Kate was, on register.

Her eyes were vivid, penetrating, maddeningly beautiful. I was paralyzed when I went to order. I literally couldn't talk, I couldn't move for a second. I was like a deer caught in headlights. She had her red-dyed hair in pig-tails, and her hair was wet. Everything about her screamed at me, grabbed my attention. Somehow I managed to make out the words, "just a large coffee" and I nervously handed her my money and moved to the side to await my order.

And that did it. That was that. My mind was now focused whole-heartedly on her. It wouldn't waver. And like some high-school mother-fucking moron, I couldn't talk to her, couldn't tell her how amazing I felt when she looked at me. So what did I do?

I did the natural thing: I told everyone else.

I'd make a comment here and there, or I'd come up to someone every few days and say something to them, ensuring before or after I said it that it would `stay between us' and they shouldn't tell her or spread it around.

Fun fact: every ear is a microphone for the herd.

But I knew that. Unconsciously -- maybe higher, maybe closer to consciousness; maybe semiconsciously -- I knew it was bound to get back to her, and that, deep down, is what I intended. It was what I counted on. Why? Simple: it's the shy guy's only means of communicating things he feels rather threatened by.

I had learned from my previous mistakes, though. You see, some shy guys make the mistake of just telling one, singular person -- one member of the herd -- that he likes this girl, for instance. But that's just stupid. Why? Because by the time the message gets back to the girl you want it to get to, the message gets stained with the noise of every brain and mouth and ear it's traveled through. It's edited and translated. Horrendously abridged. At best its an exagerrated truth; at worst, a garbled myth. It's a lot like the game of telephone, where you sit in a big circle of people and you whisper something into one person's ear and they whisper what they heard into the next person's ear and by the time it gets back to you, the original sender, it's something so far removed from what you originally said that you burst out laughing, stand confused, or simply shudder in disgust.

So if you tell just one person, the message will get garbled and stained with the noise by the time it gets to her -- it's the telephone game effect. But if you tell many different people independently, there's a greater chance of more genuine information making it to the intended target. It's not as genuine as it would be if the target would hear it straight from the horse's mouth, so-to-speak, but the general message can be distinguished by the target from the noise it acquired on the long road to her ears. The target can, in other words, decode the myth and get the general gist of it.

And of course the people I'd told said that they hadn't talked, that I could trust them, but I knew it was only a matter of time. In the herd, there are no secrets. In the meantime, I didn't get my hopes up as to what she'd think about it all once she knew: I just obsessed in solitude. Kicking myself in the ass for being some sophmoric shy guy trying to reach out to a girl through some rather high-school technique.

After a rather long period of obsessing, Mitch approached me one night in the back kitchen. Mitch is one of those personalities you cannot help but develop an interest in after only a conversation or two. His head is crammed with endless nuggets of diverse information that would make him virtually untouchable in almost any game of trivia. He is republican in his political views and certainly an alpha male, but I've caught that he is not as `might-makes-right' and as `bullet-is-the-answer-to-everything' as he often tries to make himself out to be. It's just that this man -- a year younger than I, a part-time cop and a full-time McDonalds manager -- is dedicated to projecting this tough, confident, endlessly competitive male image. He prides himself on his intelligence and on his particular in-born talent for applying strategy -- and, I must say, for good reason. But along with this stereotypical male persona one finds, soon enough, a coexisting antithesis in him as well: truly unique and independent qualities that differentiate him from the macho masses. He even has some undeniably feminine qualities, none of which he makes any effort to conceal. He is very confident and self-reliant, and to me that makes him an admirable individual (and an intriguing subject of study).

In place of our usual political and ethical discussions -- and the theological debates we would, and not too far in the future, unavoidably find ourselves entwined in -- he brought up a rather simple question that night, straight up and out of the blue.

"Are you into goth chicks?"

Instantly I was reminded of the insatiable Terra, who had subjected me to torture only a day or two earlier, and I answered with a resounding: "Yes."

He then went on to quickly explain that he had spoken to Kate during the inspection. A mixture of anger and fear immediately swept over me, but, having expected such a reaction, he quickly added that I need not worry, for he had not revealed to her that she was a subject of my interest. He did, however, do a bit of reconnaissance work for me, he told me.

Apparently she revealed that she was often categorized by others as `gothic', that she had a tongue ring, that she was almost 20 years of age. Was she single? She had a live-in boyfriend but that they were having problems. She also had several tattoos, and she was -- and I nearly fell over when he said this -- a refuge from California. The fact that she was gothic-like reminded me of Terra, and the fact that she was from California reminded me of Claire. What was it with the striking simularities with all the women I find myself attracted to? I quickly asked Mitch an important question, but she was not, as far as he new, employed in any branch of the military.

He asked me if I was going to go for her, and I told him that she was probably out of my league. As much as I wanted to get to know her and do nasty things to her, I told him, I would most likely continue obsessing for some time, but it was a fixation that would pass. He offered help, he offered to set me up, to be a medium between her and I, but I flat out told him no. If anything was going to happen, her or I, or her and I, had to initiate it. I wanted to do this myself, if I did it at all. And I told him that knowing me, I probably wouldn't do anything about it at all, so nothing would happen.

He asked me what I was so worried about, and I told him that I was simply a nervous guy. I was also a very `me' person; I was quite the isolationist. I liked my free time, and there wasn't enough of it as it presently stood -- a relationship involved the investment of time, energy and attention, which I already had invested in solitary pursuits, as well as money, which I was also endlessly short on.

And that's when Mitch stepped with this his, "fuck `em and leave `em" philosophy -- treating women as sex objects, using them as instruments of pleasure until boredom presented itself and then dropping them like bags of sand and moving on towards the next one.

Mitch seemed to share this philosophy with Don -- another manager, a hyper-sexed, sexist black man who just about everyone in the place liked. He said he liked me, he respected me, because -- and I quote -- I "wasn't one-a them punk-ass white boys". I wondered, then, what kind of punk-ass white boy I really was. Though I didn't always agree with him, especially in his more sexist, black supremacist moods, I admired him as much as I admired Mitch, which was a great deal. And though Don shared Mitch's "fuck `em and leave `em" philosophy, overall Don seemed to me to be more of a romantic. He seemed to view sex as a spiritual experience, as did I, whereas Rich seemed to often see it as just another area to apply strategy, to use a girl for her resources under the law of `might makes right'. And that may sound unfair, but that's how it often came across to me with him.

Overall, for a Christian, Mitch had beliefs pretty influenced by evolution and `survival of the fittest', and I could say the same about Don. Not that I fit the stereotypical atheist profile or anything.

I told him I couldn't do that, though. The "fuck `em and leave `em" philosophy just didn't settle well with me at all; I wasn't like that. This attitude, apparently unheard of, just fueled a fire already blazing, giving both him and Ogre (who is a rather feminine, elitist manager) further justification for categorizing me as a "pacifist" and a "humanist" and to continue referring to me by the little nickname they'd given me: "Gandhi."

And the attitude of Don and Mitch, their general perspective, made me want to classify them as primitives: treating women as bodies to fuck until a better body came along. And maybe my instinct to discriminate against them on that basis revealed a lot of fear in me -- specifically, that this whole drive for intimate partnership really was nothing more than a product of evolution, and that our concept of love was, as I had once so persistently attested, nothing more than a fictitious, romantic drape constructed by our higher cortex so that we can preserve and justify to our highly-evolved human brains the instincts that are necessary for our species survival and at the same time feel higher, more moral and more sufficiently-advanced then, for instance, two butt-sniffing dogs who want nothing more than to `get it on' and `do it like they do on the Discovery Channel'.

Yet I still told myself that Don and Mitch's philosophy was faulty -- that we saw more in a girl than just the desire for sex. Perhaps love was not just about evolution and sex and animalistic impulses geared towards biological survival. Perhaps instinct was part of it, but not all of it. Perhaps love, relationship, companionship really was something more. Perhaps I could really try and have something with this girl; something meaningful. My feeble and continuing attempts with Terra had certainly failed.

Even if that were true, though -- even if I were to accept that my motives in desiring Kate were as spiritual as they were biological -- so much as walking up to her and saying `hi' seemed to be the most difficult thing in the world.

* * *

The long, hard road towards saying `hi' was undoubtedly aided by two friends and co-workers of mine, Rena and Mary. I had directly told Mary about my insatiable attraction towards Kate, but my means of communicating this to Rena was a bit different. One day, right after Kate had left, I grabbed Rena, pulled her aside, dry humped her leg and growled into her ear that I wanted to do wonderfully nasty things to that girl.

It turned out that everyone wanted to set us up. More than two people had come up to me, and in what seemed sincere honesty, said to me: "I can definitely see you two together." That felt good, but it sounded weird. Someone can see me with a girlfriend? I wasn't sure I could even see me with a girlfriend. I again told everyone that there would be no setting up -- this, I said, I have to do on my own, if at all. Rena kept pushing me to say `hi' to her in the very least. It took me another week and a half, but I finally said `hi' to her. I just looked at her and said it as I was walking passed her, and I wasn't even sure if she heard me. I felt so immature. Why hadn't I talked to her directly from the beginning? This was so high school, and I was 25 years old. I was pathetic. This was never going to happen, I was dead certain. Until the day Kate came in after her shift, handed Rena a peice of paper and said to deliver it, so I was told, to `Bob'. Rena handed it to me, I opened it up, and there was her name and number.

Now I thought at first perhaps the number was not meant for me, for I am, of course, not named Bob. Only later on would I discover what this truly meant -- you see, it was not `Bob' she had called me, but BOB: an acronym for `Boy On Back-line.' This meant, of course, that she was kind of weird, too, which made me feel a whole lot better.

After Rena handed me the number, though, I was feeling even more nervous. What the hell was I supposed to do? Call her. Yeah. Call her, obviously.

Now, somewhere in the back of my mind a random little piece of advice, locked away in there from years ago, just happened to pop up. I once knew this very gothic fellow, (a transvestite, I later was told) who was a magnet for women. He told me quite specifically that a guy should never call a girl the day or day after he gets her phone number, for then you seem too eager, too obsessed, too concerned. Girls don't go for guys ready to jump and go. Take it easy, he told me, wait two days or so. Don't make her think your desperate. Maybe wait three days, even. That was just stupid, I thought. This was no big deal. The longer I wait the bigger the deal its going to feel. I should just call her. But I decided to hold off a day, just so I wouldn't seem too eager.

The next day she again came in on my shift, and Mitch said, "there's your woman." I shook my head. She wasn't my woman; hell, I had just coughed up the courage to say hi to her. Even if her and I were going out, which seemed light-years away from probable, it wasn't as if she was some material possession of `mine'. Later on, Ken, some kid who reminds me of the crazy looking images that used to be on those Garbage Patch cards kids used to trade each other when I was in elementary school, came up to me and said, as he nodded towards the lobby: "Hey, due, your chicks out there." She's not a chick, and I have not assumed ownership. She's a beautiful goth girl from California and I'm a nervous child trapped in the body of a 25-year-old from the slums of Ohio, give me a fucking break, will you?

Mitch came back up to me and said I could go out, have a smoke, and talk with her. So I went out into the lobby, where she was talking with someone. Her hair was wet, her eyes intense, and she wore a red shirt that read `Leave Me Alone.' I walked by her and I forget what I said exactly, but implied that she should come outside with me as I had a smoke.

Outside, we both sat down. She said she'd heard that I liked her or something, and I nodded, and she asked why. I simply told her the truth, that I found her extremely attractive and it seemed like we were two people that might get along.

She asked if I was an insomniac. That's what she'd heard, she said. I told her yes, it was true, I don't sleep well at all. She asked me why and, in my desire to keep the deep end of my numerous instanities to myself for the moment, I said it was a long story. So she went on. She seemed to have an endless array of interesting questions for me, and to this day, when we speak, she still asks them. "What's your favorite flower?" She'd ask, or, "What's your favorite food?" And there were so many things I wanted to ask her. I wanted to know damned near everything about her, but when it came down to having her here beside me, or later on, in the passenger seat of my car, with her and I alone in the dark on the way to my house, my mind went blank. The brain freeze. The brain fart. Most of the time I just echoed the questions she asked me. Her favorite flower? The daffodil. Mine? The rose. Her favorite ice cream? Rocky road. Mine? Strawberry, I think. What was my birthday? November 12. Her birthday? August 31st.

August 31st?

And I slapped my head: she was a Virgo. From California. Claire was a Virgo from California.

By the time my cigarette was out, and I smoked it slowly and let it burn to the filter, I had gotten to know her a little. I'd gotten far beyond a `hi'. In a short time we had evolved into paragraphs; into whole sentences, even.

And we decided to hang out that night and talk.

* * *

That evening, after close, we talked outside on the tables. She told me how her boyfriend was away on vacation, how he'd be back in a few days. He was a problem, she told me. It seemed sex was the only thing on his mind, he was irresponsible, he didn't have a job, he played video games all day, he never wanted to take her out anywhere. He wouldn't even let her borrow the car. He was negligent to say the very least. The way she was talking, she was on the brink of breaking up with him. She told me she was trying to work it out, but if he didn't shape up, it would be over.

Prior to him, she went on to tell me, she was engaged to a guy. She had lived in California with him, and they decided to move to Ohio. Once they had began living here, though, he suddenly got very controlling and wouldn't let her see her friends. He wanted her to sleep when he slept, but she was an insomniac -- sometimes, sleeping was next to impossible for her. And she was sick of spending the nights alone. There were other things that got between them, too: he worked a shift opposing hers and they hardly ever saw each other, he kept putting off the marriage they had planned on three previous occasions but never did anything about, he started getting heavy into drugs, began drinking a lot. She was a pothead, she smoked the shit everyday -- but pot was one thing, she told me, excessive drug use was another.

So she left him. One day while he was at work she wrote him a letter and moved out. Then I think she moved in with her current boyfriend. There may have been one in-between, I can't remember. But she cheated on the one with the other. Later, when I'd think about it, I'd kind of realize it was Terra and the monkey bars all over again, which I suppose I should explain.

I once pictured Terra's situation as her on the monkey bars in a playground, hanging onto one bar -- her boyfriend -- with both hands. Sometimes she would get curious and let one hand loose and let her fingers feel out another bar -- a potential boyfriend -- testing out it's texture with caution. Just to get a feel for it and what it might be like to hang on to it. Is it reliable, or would the bar break away and leave her falling if she grabbed a hold of it with both hands? If it seems safe and reliable, and if she can grab this other bar with her free hand, she'll leave the last bar. Otherwise, she will stay on her present bar, no matter how crooked and rusted that bar is. It struck me that this may be exactly what Kate was doing, and I may be the bar she was `feeling out'. It may be a crooked analogy, and it may be a leap in assumption, but I'm paranoid, okay?

As we were talking, Rena and a few others from work rolled up in a car. We ended up hanging out with them for the remainder of the night. In the back seat of that car, Kate and I began tickling each other. I'm not sure how it started, but it felt good. I felt something blossoming there in the air around us that night. Something that went beneath conversation and flirtatious behavior, something that enveloped both of us. Something I hadn't felt in a really long time: potential of a very special kind.

* * *

A day or two later she came over to my house, looking great as she always does, with that beautifully intense look in her eyes. We hung around a bit with Sandra and Nick and Terra downstairs, watching a very strange movie. Verne was there, too. Later on, he'd tell me that he thought she looked like Claire Danes. That bothered me a bit. Not that I thought she looked like her, but because I had thought Claire looked like her -- which eventually led to me substituting her real name for `Claire' when I wrote about her. Were eerie coincidences ranking pretty damned high here, or was it just me?

Eventually the crowd dispersed, and it cut down to Nick. The three of us went on to watching another movie, and eventually the tickling and pushing and flirting between Kate and I turned into kissing. It's hard to tell who starts what, but the desire was quite obviously mutual, so it's basically irrelevant. Which of course means she probably kissed me first. Anyway, Nick finally got the hint after awhile and left. It took long enough.

The making out got so heated, though, so fucking heated. I can't ever remember feeling like that. Maybe close, with Anne, but never like that night with Kate. She was simply amazing. I felt so calm and natural and passionate kissing her, like it was exactly where I belonged. And every time I would kiss her afterwards -- the last time I kissed her -- it felt just as natural, just as passionate, just as liberating.

Soon she had broken up with her boyfriend, and her and I were officially a couple. Something that had not occurred in a long time, since high school, six years ago, if that even counts. And then something else happened that hadn't happened in awhile.

* * *

Though twenty-five years of age, I'd only had sex twice, and it was with the same girl, the same late night and early morning in the Autumn of 1999. Well, admittedly, depending on one's choice of interpretation, that figure may not be entirely accurate. You see, there was also an incident in May of 2001, I think it was, with another girl, Lena, though I'm not entirely certain that counts as we didn't really get to finish. So as to not exclude this third occasion as an act of sex and at the same time not include it entirely, I've usually found myself stating that I'd had sex two-and-a-half times. Part of that might be the reaction that statement tended to elicit from people, though. I mean, when you tell someone you've had sex two and a half times, they always get that one eyebrow crawling up their forhead in this amusing arch, and they tilt their head like a confused dog.

Anyway, it was the second or third night of being with Kate in ever-more heated situations that she asked me if I wanted to have sex. It was then when I got what I've come to call the `threshold fear': you want something or someone so much and you finally get nanometers away from acheiving it and suddenly this tremendous terror sets in. Fear of the unknown is behind it, perhaps; the fear of change, the fear of foreign terratory. The fear of having a desire finally satisfied -- for that is all-too-often, in my world, foreign terratory. I told her we should take things as they come.

We began fooling around, and things got intense again. We were heated, sweating, panting -- and it almost went in. "Is that a yes?" She said. I thought I'd done something bad; I felt guilty. She explained it was her time of the month -- was I sure? I was suddenly very hesitant again. I wasn't aware her monthly visitor was present, so-to-speak -- the idea of going forward with this wasn't sounding all that good of an idea all of a sudden, but I still intensely, incredibly, undeniably wanted it. I asked her if she wanted to, and she nodded frantically and said `yes' in an extreme affirmative. I voiced by hesitation, albeit reluctantly, and it was finally her that said we should wait -- and that in the meantime, I should do some shopping.

So as it had happened repeatedly with Terra, I was left hungry again -- the difference being that this time, with this wonderful girl, there was a certain promise of resolution.

There was, of course, an issue. You see, this is a type of shopping I have never done before. A kind of shopping that I've never had reason to do. And I didn't know where exactly I might get them. I assumed a drug store, perhaps even a grocery store in the drug section. I looked all over the grocery store one evening and couldn't find any. I finally asked Nick, who informed me I could probably pick them up at any gas station. Mentioning it to Sandra, she said that she had a whole bunch that she wouldn't be using and would be happy to throw the pile my way. I decided just to wait on those.

Soon thereafter, things got heated again one night. In the midst of it, I was informed by her that her monthly visitor had left. I said that I hadn't done my shopping -- and she said, well, then, go do it.

Um, okay.

So I put on my cloths, grabbed my keys, told her I'd be back, and left. I hadn't had that kind of motivation in years. I pulled into the gas station a hop, jump and skip away from home. I looked a while, and amongst the chap-stick and tooth-brushes and breath mints, there I found the condoms. Imagine `halleluyah' playing in the background. I nervously brought them up to the counter, and handed the very masculine lady behind the counter the money. I was nervous as hell. I felt I should've bought something else,so it didn't seem to the lady at the register that this was my sole reason for coming into the gas station, because for some reason that made me feel all guilty and stuff. I didn't understand why I felt that way, and I couldn't think of anything to buy, anyway. Would it make a difference if I threw in a burrito and Pepsi beside the little box of raincoats on the counter? It didn't matter. What should I care what anybody else thinks? I couldn't even say what I thought. I couldn't think at all. IMy head and blood and chest was pounding and racing so quickly I could hardly keep up with it. I was in a heightened state, every nanometric inch of me.

"Have a good night," she said after handing me my change.

"You, too."

I drove home, and stepping into my room I saw the most beautiful sight: candles were all about the room, flickering, giving off that spiritual kind of atomosphere. She sat at the center of my bed, playing with her hands, and looking up at me shyly and sweetly, her beautiful, deep eyes poking up at me just below her lowered forhead. Nothing else existed but me and her in this moment, right now. And nothing else mattered. All else was background. What was once the loud static of my life lowered in volume until it was a fading hum. This was a dream, it had to be. This was too ideal. She was too ideal. Too incredibly beautiful.

I placed the package on the pillow. After floorplay had reached it's pique, I reached it with a bit of fear. She asked if I was sure. I nodded enthusiastically. You? Yes, she said with certainty.

Sex with her was absolutely amazing.

* * *

I remember Kirk, my punk rock pagan friend, who often told me how sexual ceramonial ritual really was. Slowly escalating rythm, eventual climax, resolution. He informed me that sometimes sex was even part of the ritual, between the Priest and Priestess. Other times, the activity of sex was the ritual itself, as in some forms of Trantic sex magick. He said all this to me the day I had told him that I thought abstinence was nessesary in order to acheive my spititual goals. He laughed and persisted that sex itself was a spiritual experience, and that I obviously had never been laid. At that time he was right about me being a virgin, and by the time Anne had taken it I knew he was correct about it being a spiritual experience.

What also stuck in my mind about those conversations with Kirk was that ritual, like sex, is empty and meaningless without a specific intent behind it -- without that intent, that energy, that reason, that meaning, the activity has struture but no substance. It is an empty container, not alive at all, and certainly not spiritual. Without meaning, the sex is not charged -- it is just "cold, mechanical sex."

With Anne, I had sex with someone I had a deep connection with, and a four-year history with at the time. It was spiritual. With Lena, I'd had sex -- or almost had sex -- with someone who I deeply admired in a friendly way, but did not really desire in a sexual or romatic way, and the experience was uncomfortable, regrettable, and -- cold and mechanical.

With Kate, something was different: there was no ambivalence. No hesitence. No questions. No uncertainty. I wanted to be with this girl, to have a long-term relationship with her, to develop something meaningful out of all of this. I felt so comfortable wth her so naturally, so trusting of her so quickly and easily -- at least in a relative sense -- all of which was very unlike me. And unlike Anne and Lena, Kate and I seemed to be what I considered a perfect match, both emotionally, mentally, and sexually. She seemed to harbor the same kind of dark curiousity about sexual possibilities as I did, and her desire for ever-increasing intensity in that category suited my tastes to a tee. Biting, scratching, tying each other up, trying different positions, doing it for a long time and almost violently -- these things seemed to appeal to both of us. I didn't feel ashamed or guilty of these desires with her, and didn't have the kind of reservations I'd always imagined I'd have to have. I knew through the difference between my experiences with Anne and Lena that it was not just about the act of sex: it completely depended upon who you engaged in it with, what the act signified, why is was beng done, what the goal of it all was. And the goal, I felt, was to get as close to the other person as possible.

I felt so free with Kate, so liberated within her. I couldn't share the whole of my mind, I couldn't spiritually merge with her, but with nothing but skin and sweat between us I was one step closer to feeling complete.

I had imagined that sex, perhaps even meaningless sex, might satisfy my hunger -- but here, in what was more, in what was very meaningful sex, I found sex just fed the hunger more hunger. Desire feeds desire, as the Buddhists claimed. I found that I wanted closer. I wanted more intensity. I wanted to dig deeper, as deep as I could go into this experience, be as receptive as I could be to the sensation, the emotion, the feeling. I wanted to experience this as completely as I couldt, to be as honest and open and free and naked with her as one could possibly get on all existing levels and get all the feedback to let me know that she felt the same exact way.

Sex sort of became an obsession or fixation, and though it didn't always play out this way in external reality, my mind was teeming with ways to apply creativity: what else could be done to add to the experience, to intensify the experience? So her legs were around my arms while we did it, I started at the sun tattoo on her neck, she tied me up with my belt. Sex: a great place for creative application.

Then I noticed something: pleasure and pain often seem to have a thin line between them. In the back of my mind, I'd noted this consistently across my life. It was especially true when pleasure and pain reached their heights. With her pleasure and pain seemed merged. I don't mean to say we were psuedomasochistic, we were not, but the physical, sexual and emotional sensations we shared, the reactions we had, the facial expressions, the sounds -- all of them seemed to be pleasure and pain. They became indistinguishable. The lines between them distorted, blurred, and disapeared -- opposites were reconciled; dualities were united in the moment of climax.

With Kate, I felt complete -- and in the act of having sex with her, I got closer to that feeling of wholeness as I've ever come or ever thought possible. Sex, the most ancient of rituals, was charged for me. It meant being close to life again, and she seemed to be the embodiment of life.

* * *

After awhile, I began to worry that she might think that's all I wanted out of it. It wasn't. I had told her I didn't know where this was going, that we should just stand back and watch as this unfolds, but a lot of that was said because I didn't know if I was just a rebound. I said that we shouldn't worry about the future and where this was going, but just enjoy this as it was in the here and now. I wasn't sure how she felt, or how I felt, and after talking early on we both admitted to not knowing how we felt. Later on, though, our feelings had both changed, and they were the same: this was something we wanted to keep going. I realized that I could see myself with this girl, that I could very easily see us in a long-term relationship. I couldn't ever see myself breaking up with her. I looked forward to being around her, talking with her, taking long walks at night with her. She awakened a hope, a sense of life in me that I had thought had long since died.

Even my roomate, Nick, noted that this girl seemed to be the perfect, ideal mixture of everything I wanted. And she really seemed to be, from soul to skin. The resistence I once had with women, with everyone, was easing -- I could feel the knots in me loosening. I stood naked before her in more than a physical sense. It all seemed so ideal. It was my recognition that it was so ideal - perhaps too ideal -- that caused me to preserve some resistences, though; to disallow myself to give myself up to her completely. So far life has only shown that nightmares seemed to be the only permanence, a voice in my head reminded me, but all dreams always ended the same way: with a rude awakening.

And I was fully aware of my trust issue here; of my reluctance to stand before her in total, naked vulnerbaility. I was still such an infant, it seemed -- I was such a child in all this. The difference was that this time, unlike all the others, I was trying. I really did want her and I to be together. I could've never imagined such a beautiful thing as this bond I felt we shared. I wanted to explore this foreign terratory in all possible directions. I wanted to spiral out of my circles and cycles as far as was possible, push the thresholds passed my known universe. It was an eye-opening exerience -- she was an eye-opening experience. Finally, I thought, I have something true, something real. I wanted to grow, to crack through the ceiling and reach for the stars, bathe in the sun, let the hells of my reality roll off me like rain and laugh at life in spite of it all -- laugh to the universe for the fact that in all the shit it had thrown on me over the years, I had finally found my candle light in the darkness, I had found a vibrant, new California sun breaking through the dark clouds of my sick Ohio sky.

I was nervous, though -- I didn't want to be made a fool, as I'd seen happen to so many others in the past in regards to relationships. So as much as I wanted to trust, I tried to keep myself away from blind faith or premature certitude. So ambivalence remained in me out of a need for caution, out of a lack of complete trust and total faith.

One thing that bothered me, one thing that made me be wary of my trust, at least at first, was that she was still living with her ex-boyfriend and his family. Now there was a fucked-up situation. I never would step inside that house. Apparently she was friend's with his family first; she used to work with the mother while she worked at the fast food place across the street. While she was with her previous boyfriend and looking for a place to live, the lady offered Kate a room in her house, and she evetually took it. Then she just ended up having a relationship with her son. After they broke up, both the father and mother told her she was welcome to stay. The reasons were quite obvious, too, and they told her it quite clearly: unlike their son, she was responsible, contributed money to the house, and even held down two jobs for awhile. Now she was working full time at the same place I worked. If anyone should be kicked out, it would be their son.

And yet with him being her ex-boyfriend and all, it couldn't have been easy for her to live there. Getting back to Terra and the Monkeybars, I was wondering if she was expecting to move in with me. She wasn't on the lease, obviously, so I couldn't really ask her to move in until October when it would renew, anyway. I mean, I could, but it'd be risky. So I accepted the situation, with her living there. I didn't say much about it, nor did she. Then in conversation, shortly before she left for her vacation, she briefly stated that they still shared the same room, but he was pretty good about letting her have the bed when she actually slept there and not at my place. So they shared a room. Fucked up situation.

* * *

More discomfort arose out of that whole situation with her ex-boyfriend's family, however. The feeling that struck me when she wanted to spend time with her ex-boyfriend's family, or when I'd feel uncomfortable about her living there, or when I thought about her leaving for those three weeks for her parent's house in California -- was how incredibly wrong it was for me to be so fucking jealous and untrusting of her. And to feel as if I owned her, as if she was some sort of poessession. That's what I hated so much about human relationships, especially intimate ones -- this instinct to act as if you own another person like some peice of property.

It reminded me of my short experience with Sara. She was a few years younger than I, and she had jumped ahead in high school and went to college at a young age. As it often happens with girls I become interested in, I met her at a point of crisis in her life; on the threshold of a turning point. She had just come back home from college and was living with her mother. She had also just began taking her `hiatus' with her boyfriend. She was in the porcess of debating `where should I go from here?' when I met her and her friend in that resteraunt. She was quite the extrovert, and the first day I met her we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes as she told me in a very passionate, animated fashion about her life. We exchanged phone numbers and hung out a few times and my interest in her grew, but she told me she didn't want anything serious with anyone, and she said she didn't want to have sex (and for the record, I hadn't asked her).

The last time we would ever hang out, she had come over to Nathan's house -- a friend of mine at the time. A few of us hung out in his basement, listened to music, threw darts and began drinking. One thing led to another and she ended up walking around topless and gave several of my friends lap dances. The jealousy and anger I felt rising inside of me like a storm, the hurt I felt -- even after what she had told me -- was so intense that I had to leave the room. We weren't even going out, I hardly knew her, I didn't want a relationship any more than she did -- and yet I took to her giving lap dances to my friends as I would take them rummaging through my room and reading my diary, or using my car without asking. I was absolutely disgusted with myself and my reaction to the situation.

The situation between Kate and Kate's ex-boyfriend itself was in this respect not as extreme, but my possessive emotions were all the more intense. To myself, I acted as if she was mine, and I hated myself for the instinctual delusion that caused me to feelt that I owned her. I rebelled against it. She had even spoken about how controlling her ex-fiance had gotten after they had come together down to Ohio, which only served to increase my resistence towards this posessive intinct. I wasn't going to be another controlling boyfriend.

An intimate relatonship, I was sure, was not about posession or ownership of another, as if the other were an item -- it's about trust, mutual respect, understanding, and a sense of value in one another. It was about nurturing a bond, giving it the appropriate conditions in which to grow.

* * *

We saw each other about every day; usually we took a few days off a week. That was good, because I needed my alone time. She worked mornings and I worked nights. She'd walk up from where she was living at her ex-boyfriend's house to work, maybe a ten minute walk, and wait for me until I got off around midnight. I'd smoke a cigarette, talk with her a bit, hold her, then sometimes we'd go somewhere, then we'd go home. And when I didn't have to take her home early in the morning so she could go to work -- on those nights when I got to `keep her' -- life seemed to take on a new light.

And thanks to those nights when I got to `keep her', I can honestly say one has not truly lived until he has woken up in the morning next to a girl like Kate; to find his arms around her naked body, to feel his own skin, once numb with negativity and de-sensitized and dissociated in the anti-light of his nihilsitic persuasions, now suddenly and inexplicably acute and sensative to the soft, smooth warmth of her own.

One has not lived if he has not smelled the sweet scent of her hair. One has not lived until he has bubbled in the bliss of sex with her to such a degree that he came to the bridge of tears and was unable to concieve of how happy he felt.

One has not lived until he has turned his head around so that her beautiful mood eyes met his own, as he gazed in her so deeply and she gazed back with such a natural and equal intensity.

And one has not lived until he has heard such a girl utter `hi' to him in the morning in a voice so sweet, so comforting, so energizing, so sexy -- a voice that made him melt like the hot wax from the lit candles that flickered and wobbled on the shelf below your window as her na dhim had that passionate sex in the dim light of the room the previous night.

One has not truly lived, I promise you, until she takes his hand then to the bathroom paces away from his doorway and they both smile gently and laugh to each other as they strip each other down and enter the shower, water pounding hypnotically upon the skins of both of them as they wash and watch each other.

And the morning coffee, the morning cigarettes; the kiss he can't resist giving her; the knowledge that talking to her, staring into her, pressing her naked body tightly against his own, having mad, rough sex with her could never bring you close enough to the unity he desires with her; the feeling that this is all some beautiful dream and that he does not want to wake up so as to be forced to label it as a `cruel dream' in it's stark, harsh contrast with the dreariness of reality -- one has not lived, either, until one has experienced all this.

And so thanks to Kate, I can smile an authentic smile and say that I have, indeed, lived the dream, and that it was made all the more beautiful by all the bullshit I had to wade through to get there -- that it made the bullshit (that, with her, seemed so far in the past) worth it because I now was living in a bueatiful Now that stood in such unbelievable contrast to that previous nightmare.

* * *

I wanted to take her places and do the boyfriend thing, and I did all I could think of with the little cash I had. Which wasn't much, admittedly. One of the things I liked about living in a college town is that so many things are in walking distance -- resteraunts, grocery stores, all-night gas stations. Since Kate liked to walk and I did as well, this worked out perfectly. I knew she liked Rocky Road, so I thought we could walk down to the ice cream stand in the plaza nearby where I lived. I ordered my bannana split -- I hadn't had one in ages -- and she got her Rocky Road on a waffle cone. Another time, I took her to a movie. Not much creativity in that choice, I know. We walked our way to the theater, which wasn't far from the house. After I bought the tickets, we had some time to kill, so we sat on the bench in the lobby and watched some kids playing video games as we talked.

She told me a lot about her family and about the small town of Barstow, California, where she grew up. She told me how, to her ears, we talked funny here in Ohio -- how she had never before heard the terms "my bad" or "it's all good." She told me about her first kiss, when she first tried pot, and the boyfriends she'd had since high school. Like Claire, apparently, high school relationships didn't count with her.

It was strange being there on that bench with us talking so casually, with her in my arms. It was unspeakably odd, feeling the way I did right then and with it seeming so natural. I actually felt as if I was a boyfriend. That I was mature. That I was real. I felt as if I was really part of something special. I never felt that way before.

She made me happy. Just holding her, looking at her, talking with her, having sex with her, laying next to her in bed... I'd been on the bridge of tears, she made me so happy. And a part of me, this tiny voice, kept warning me to be careful. Not to fall too deep, too fast. That plunging in the deep end, especially so early, is dangerous; one must beware of those trecherous waters too soon, one must ease oneself into them. It screamed at me not to be attached to desire.

When someone stimulates emotions like she does, it's easy for one to get addicted, and if the drug leaves you the withdrawl symptoms can destroy you. I was down in the dumps, trapped before she met me, but if she lifts me so high up off the ground as she has and then drops me...

Well, the higher you soar, the harder you fall when your wings are taken away. Gravity is the enemy. The strong climb themselves. It's always safer at the bottom. But I was lifted, I was weak. I wanted to do this all myself, cure myself, but I found her to be the antitode. An addictive healing agent. I kept telling myself: I can't use her as a crutch, I have to heal myself. But I simply could not help the way I felt around her. I've never felt that way, have I? It made me so happy and made me so scared.

I remember thinking then, as we both sat on this bench: make this feeling last. Let this feeling grow.

* * *

Whenever others confide in me regarding their newly-acquired significant others, I always warn them against falling too deep, too fast -- there's a certain danger in rushing into things, I tell them. I promised myself that with Kate I wouldn't forget that. I wouldn't be one of those people who expect others to do what they say, not what they do. I would lead by example. I told myself that I was taking my own advice. That I was not a hypocrate.

She eventually asked me if I knew that she was going to visit her family in California for three weeks. I told her I'd heard about it some time ago in passing, but she herself had never mentioned it to me. In a half-joking fashion, I asked her if she was intending to stay. She said that she had been considering it awhile back, but that she had decided against it.

Even by the time she'd told me, I knew those three weeks would be hard to bear. I adored this girl. I'd damn near seen her every day, which is completely unlike me -- usually, as a rule, I need a good amount of time alone to think to myself. Now when I went into my isolation for a day or so, or even on break at work when she wasn't waiting for me outside, all I could think about was her. I would have a horrible day in the back kichen, I would get ready to go at the end of the day filled with my usual anger or depression, and I'd walk outside to find her there, by my place on the patio beside the garage can, her knees pulled up to her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs, looking up and into me with those beautiful eyes of hers.

In an instant, it would all wash away. Her presence made all the negativity just dissipate; the world I carried on my shoulders was left to be held by the fabric of space, and with her at my side I could step into the world and feel connected with life again.

For her to be gone for three weeks was inconvievable. I refused to even think about it. I had embraced that delusion from childhood: if you ignore it, maybe it didn't happen; if you don't acknowledge it's existence, maybe it'll go away and you won't have to deal with it. You don't have to see what you refuse to see, and what you don't see can't hurt you.

Very consciously, I tried to take my own advice. I tried my damnest not to be the biggest fucking hypocrite in the world -- but to no avail. I fell too deep, too fast. Like a sumo wrestler in a gravity well. Every moment with her seemed ideal, every day had a purpose, a new discovery. Always in my life I had been the nucleus I always returned to -- I was my own home base -- and now it was her I returned to, her I revolved around. It was her I looked forward to seeing, not the reflection of myself in my deluded mind. Prior to her, days around people were days of waiting to be alone -- now, my days of being alone and days of being with people other than her were days of waiting to be around her. Nothing was enough. No amount of her could satisfy -- but I soaked up every moment for all I could.

And if that's not falling too deep, too fast, I don't know what is.

* * *

One day, a few weeks after we'd met, after we'd had sex, she said something that I thought I'd heard wrong. Hoped, in a way, that I'd heard wrong. And I closed my eyes, and I took a deep breath, and I forced out the question just to make sure i was hearing things. Tell me, I said, tell me I'm hearing things.

"I love you," she said.

No, no. not that word, Kate. We've talked about that word. That's a bad word. A bad, four-letter word. You hate the word fuck, I hate the word love. Fuck sounds cold to you, love sounds insanity to me.

"It's just a word."

No, its not just a word. Its a powerful word. It signifies something with unique, undeniable depth of emotion and spirit and meaning. Sex becomes a vehichle for meaning when it serves as a metaphor, a ritual signifying something deeper than the act itself. Love is not just a word to me. To other people, love is a word: they love ice cream, they love long walks in the park, they love this thing or that person for this long or in this way. Love, I'm sorry to say, has been thrown around so much by some people its meaning has become void. Use it all the time for everything or say it to everyone, it means nothing. Love has become a whore of a word. Behind it, I place a lot of thought, a lot of caution, oceans of emotion, an inconcievable amount of spirit, because the next time I use it I want to make sure that I had to, because there is no other choice. That's how it was the first time I used it. The first time I said it to a girl.

"You don't have to say anything. I'm not trying to make you feel uncomfortable. I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

"I love you."

I didn't say anything then. After she had left for California, she called me one day at work and, as was usual, she said at the end of the phone covnersation those three words. It always made me feel uncomfortable before, but it felt right when she said it then, and before i realised it i said, "i love you, too." So naturally. So honestly. And there was a long, charged silence before we said our usual goodbyes.

No regrets.

* * *

The day before she left for California to visit her parents, it was really hard for me. A few times, I half-jokingly asked her not to go, but she brushed it off by saying it was only three weeks.

That night we walked around town, down back roads and the beneath street lights. The college town seemed like a ghost town, at least in memory, without a person in sight, with perhaps only the occasional, passing car. We walked and talked, she told me more about her parents and their house, about how she loved the snow in Ohio but missed the California sky and the beautiful, multicolored sunset and sunrise you could see from her hometown of Barstow. Her words painted an almost mythic place in my mind: a desert of silence, a desert of beautiful, open skies where on long walks to the straight horizon you'd only happen upon a passing tumble weed, a scorpion crossing your path, or some other wanderlust soul.

I was half-inclined to ask her if I could go with her, but I knew that would be crazy.

More than once as we walked, we would stop on the sidewalk and hold each other, kiss each other. The me I hated; dark, dreary, nihilistic, pessimistic, fatalistic me -- he seemed to be miles away in memory as I stood there embracing her.

When I dropped her off at her house the next night, we kissed in the car. We kissed goodbye. I gave her a look. She told me then, as she would many times on the phone after she'd left, that I had no need to worry: she was coming back. And for weeks, I kept telling myself that.

* * *

For awhile there while she was gone, I'd call her or she'd call me -- not a day went by when we wouldn't seak to each other. She'd even called me two times at work; they didn't care, they thought it was so sweet, so cute.

Then I didn't hear from her for two days. I wondered: should I call, should I not call? I called once. She had gone on a walk. A day went by. I called again: she was at her friends house, her sister said. I called again: still not home.

It wasn't just the lack of contact or the distance in space, I think, but something else was bothering me. I had this horrffic feeling in my gut, in my chest, in my head, in my heart. It was physical. I woke up one morning after a considerable amount of sleep (for me, anyway) and I was dizzy all morning, even after going in to work. I just felt fucked up, like I was on something. I'd drank a bit at the party the night before, but not nearly enough for a hangover, and alchohol never made me feel like this. Never. Something was gnawing at me. Was this psychosomatic, I wondered?

"Aw, you're lovestruck," a girl at work said. I was confused. Does she mean I'm addicted to Kate and these are withdrawl symptoms or something?

I went over our conversations in my mind. Since she'd gone down there, one major thing had horrified me: her parents wanted her to move back to California to stay with them. Her father even said he could get her a position in this job at a plant where he worked. She looked into it, she had told me, but just to satisfy him -- she wasn't serious about it, not at all. Eventally she'd like to move down there, she said, maybe, just maybe, but not yet. Not yet.

I knew damned well it had been in her head as serious option, not for later, not as a future possibility, but as a present, immedeate option. And something in me told me she was swaying towards staying in Cali. Call it paranoia; I did. But I wasn't really letting emotions get in the way. What I was doing was walking in her shoes, looking through her eyes, and thinking how I would think if I were her in the circumstance she was in. I mean, what did she have here in Ohio? Some amateur boyfriend with a lousey job and a lousey car, some uncomfortable household with an ex-boyfriend, some job at a fast food resteraunt? What did she have down there? Family support, a good job just waiting for her, a beautiful Caifornia sun in the expansive desert sky of Barstow...

When she finally called me a few days later, something seemed wrong. Something unspoken, something buried there beneath the surface. A day lapsed again. The calls were getting fewer and farther between. Then she called me late one evening, it was about three AM for me. I aready knew it was coming, I could smell the stench of the truth in the air, taste it's bitter flavor in my mouth, and it had literally been twisting in my stomache. I saw it as she spoke, as she tried to beat around the bush.

I asked the right questions in the attempts to make it as easy as possible for her to say it. I asked what had been going on, and she told me about her parents -- about her father's back hurting, the fact that her mother had been in the hospital a few times while she was down here in Ohio and not told her, how she still wasn't doing all that well.

Then I asked what had been on her mind as of late; if there was anything new. She revealed that there had been something, and that it dealt with what her parents had been talking about. I asked her what it was specifically, and she said it was in regards to her staying there in California to live.

I asked her if she was coming back. She said she didn't think so. I heard a sob. Then another.

The first was hers; the second, mine.

She wasn't coming back. Her decision was final. She told me that she still wanted to call me, and I told her I want to keep talking to her, too. After a short conversation, though, I said that I had to go: I couldn't talk about it right then.

She used the four-letter word again in the usual three-word sentence, but she added a `still'. I used the four-letter word again.

Again, it had become a four-letter word.

* * *

I took some time that night, and I cooled off. I tried to maintain control. And it seemed to work. The first day it was as if nothing had happened. Save for that initial sob, I kept my cool, emotional detachment. I was: cold, mechanical. At work, I was great. I was so fucking proud of myself. I have matured, I told myself, and the proof is right here. Years ago, I would've been bitter and hateful and depressed and angry at everything. The epitome of chaos.

And I was. It took a few days to kick in, but it occured. I had held by breath, and the inevitable exhale came upon me like a torando in my mind, ripping apart every square inch of my soul. As hard as I tried, I could not silence the rush of emotionally-charged thoughts shooting through my mind at high velocities:

"I still want to call you," she had said to me. Just like the line everyone's heard from high school: "I still want to be friends." I know how these long-disance friendships work, especially between people formerly more than friends. All I could think about was how I had felt for Claire all those years, how it would absolutely kill me when we talked every three months and she'd tell me she'd be moving to a different state, how she'd met a different guy, got engaged again, got married again, got pregnant again, got divorced again. I caught echoes of my jealousy, my hurt, my rage, my wondering just what she feels for me on the surface or deep down. I recalled not wanting to cut off my friendship simply becaue I had stronger feelings for her, and therefore maintaining it -- and therefore allowing myself to be subjected to the emotional torture, drug through the mud of hell after hell, bearing shit-storm after shit-storm -- and then, when I'd think I was over her, after I'd think I'd never want anything more than being freinds, I was suddenly faced with seeing her face to face after so long and feeling all those emotions flood back and kill every peice of my being, every drop of hope I had for being over this. No, I thought, fuck that: I'm not ready for all that bullshit again. To hell with this. But to escape now is possible.

California, goth, Virgo, long distances, Claire Danes, sun and moon tattoos, four-letter words. Red flags for the future. Steer clear when spotting these signposts: heartache ahead.

And even if I never saw Kate again and we just talked, how bad would that be? It would be just a different flavor of hell, I knew. In my personal opinion, talking on the phone absolutely kills; I hate the phone. It's just bearable when you'll see the person you're talking to in a few hours or the next day, or even in a week or two or three. But to be around her, then have to bear her being gone on a vacation for three weeks, it was torture talking to her -- and then to have the vacation extend indefinately? It was too fucking much. The phone is a tease for real interaction, which was real communication. The closest closeness to the farthest distance. The real life to mental masturbation. Living life actively to becoming, yet again, the passive witness to life as it trails by, like your butt is going numb on a sofa while you're watching television. Only now made worse by the memory, by the knowledge, that there is a way of living so far removed from this death-like, zombie existence you perpetually lead. The higher you climb, the higher you're lifted, the harder, the father, you fall, fall, fall.

And the more I thought about it, the more it pissed me off. I had been through hell emotionally-speaking. No arrogance in pain here, I'm not saying others haven't had it worse, I'm not blinded by the stench of my own shit -- but it was shit, horrible shit. As reality was bending and twisting around me and I was constantly wondering if I was insane or not, no one was listening to me -- and when they tried, on the rare occasion, they didn't really hear me -- and I was feeling more disconnected than ever towards the human race as a whole. I was anxious, depressed, poor. Drifting. Then she came along and made me feel great. We went places, we talked, and so on. I felt alive again. My pessimism was fading; it was unable to justify itself before the beautiful reality that blossomed before me in her presence. I felt different around her -- closer to `me'. Whenever we were together it was like some kind of sacred space formed around us where the world could not harm me or infuriate me. I felt like I could relate to the world around me in a way; I felt grounded and connected with life. Then she left, and I kept fearing that it was going to be some sob story that I'd be whining about forever, like Claire and Anne, dwelling on her endlessly to justify my pessimism and fatalism towards life, my defeatest attitude towards achieving some form of happiness, and more fuel for the depth of my nihilistic feelings.

And it's kind of sad, because that means that what I see in her in a sense then is a reason to be happy, to have hope: it's like I'm throwing it all upon her, as if its all dependent upon her.

My goal of self-overcoming was diverted somewhere along the line and I fell more towards a philosophy where `meaning' is dependent upon some external sourse. I have become what I've warned people about in my previous writings -- because when people make some external sourse their center and identify with it, when it falls away they fall along with it. They end up feeling as if they've lost themselves. External things are impermanent to the person in question; the only permanance to the person is themselves -- not their contents, but their will. One should be their own nucelus, constantly changing. overcoming themselves, pushing their thresholds, independent of all that surrounds them, liberated from all attachments.... or is that healthy?

Do we all need someone else in order to be healthy and happy and free?

And I used to be so happy being alone.

So do I flee now into isolation? Or does the drug of intimate interaction now have me? The truth is that I need a balance, but I need that connection. I just have to let go of this thing with Kate.

I've always been bad at endings, in both my stories and in my life. If art is the reflection of life, it should show the open ends clearly. Seasons change, yes, but there's no real death in the way we think of it, only points of transition -- points always made easier my marking the moment clearly and irreversably through a sort of rite of passage; where you let go of one story after reflecting on it and precuring from it what wisdom you can so that your arms can be free to stretch out and embrace whatever may come. No more living in the past, live in the right here, right now.

The most important women of my life all seem to send this message. As with everything else, I find it hard to believe this is coincidence.

* * *

There is only a small minority that still practices the origional form of Buddhism, and this is the sect known as the Theravada, or `The Teachings of the Elders'. They imagine that we are all stuck in an ongoing cycle of death and rebirth, which they refer to as samsara. Throughout this continuing cycle, we are constantly enduring suffering throughout each and every incarnation due to our desires or longings -- and so the Wheel of Samsara is seen as one of endless, redundant dissatisfaction. The reason that our desires cause us pain is because we long for that which is transitory or impermanent, under the insipid delusion that posession of the object of our desires could be eternal. But nothing is permanent, the Buddhists say, nothing is eternal. Seasons come and go. People live and die. The moment comes, and then it's over. Everything changes. The universe is in a constant, unceasing state of flux. By following the Middle Way that the origional Buddha outlined for us, they say, we can learn the art of letting go and eventually achieve a state they call Nirvana, which is ahrd to conceptualize but is often described as extnguishing a flame -- ending all desire.

And so the Buddhists remind us that there is no constant in the universe save for one exception: impermanence.

I have always had a particular fondness for Buddhism, though I was never entirely certain if I bought into all of it. They believed in no creator-force, no god, and so that was appealing to me. They recognized the persistent sense of pain and emptiness of consciousness in relation to existence, and that was perhaps another reason for my affinity to it. And while they believed in a form of reincarnation, they also believed in no eternal self, no immortal principal to consciousness, and I had issues with that assumption. What drew me to Buddhism with such intensity and, strangely, what bother me about it most was the goal of Buddha's Middle Way: the extinguishing of all desires, of all attachments.

I felt so certain that the Buddhists were right in that desire led to dissatisfaction. People projected so much meaning, so much value in certain things -- they made it their nucleus, they revolved around it. If they managed to keep it for some time, if they managed to get reinfocement for their illusion of posession, of ownership, they eventually threw more into the sphere of the nucleus. Their job, their wife, their kids, their car, their coffee table in the shape of a yin-yang. And tey not only projected meaning and value onto this nucelus, but they identified with it -- it not only reflects who they are, it is who they are, as much as their habitual mannerisms, pet peeves and choice of words defined for them who they are. All this becomes their nucelus, their solid ground, there sense of stability. But there is no stability. Sooner or later, the nucleus eventally changed or disappeared and they were thrown out of orbit into te dar void of meaninglessness, valuelessness, once again. Inevitably, they found something else to project meaning onto, and the process started all over again.

Yet it has come to my attention more and more often that desire is really not the problem. Desire, passion, intensity, will -- it's the driving force of life. It brings the good and the bad. To extinguish desire would be to extinguish both.

A seed of insight was planted in my mind as I was mildly intoxicated one late evening at a party and talking with my friend, Ludwig. For as long as I have known him, which has been for as long as I have been mad, Ludwig has been a great friend of mine: always there to listen when I need him, always there to advise when I need it most. And it also strikes me that he is to me as Socrates was to Plato. If one were to ask the man, Ludwig would undoubtedly describe himself as a Zen Discordian -- the one and only member of the path, so far as I know. He is chaotic, witty, and wiser than he knows, and he always has at least one tiny conceptual nugget to throw at me that I take a long time thereafter to chew on. That evening, what he told me was that he had discovered as of late that a single quote helped him deal with life optimally. It was a good guide on the ath of life he told me. It came in the form of the words: "This, too, shall pass."

It reminds one that everything in life is, as the Buddhists say, transient. When you are in a bad situation, Ludwig said, this quote reminds you that you will not have to endure this pain forever, for nothing is eternal. When you are in a good situation, he went on to say, this quote reminds you, again, that this moment will not last forever -- and so you should live it to the fullest before it passes, you should sink your teeth into it, you should bath in all the bliss of the Now. And the more I thought about it, the more Ludwig's philosophy of "This, too, shall Pass" made sense to me -- and it helped me realzie what I liked about Buddhsm, as well as the problem I had with it.

The problem with desire is that we do not withdraw it; we do not control it. I once heard that almost anything is easier to get into than out of, and I think this describes desire to a tee: we know oh so very well how to hold on, but we are so unspeakably horrible at learning to let go. The Buddhists scream that we should completely detach and let go of everything; that we should distinguish desire completely -- as `in-between' as they claim to be in their tread down the Middle Path, they seem rather extreme in their persistence that one should just `let go' of everything in the so-called liberation of Nirvana.

What the Buddists missed and Ludwig seems to understand is that learning the art of holding on is just as important as learning the art of letting go. During a given lifetime, and during a specific period within a single life, there is a certain `window' during which a set of desires is useful and beneficial -- but they eventually wear out their use and begin being harmful to us because we refuse to let go. In our greed, we want to preserve the moment, make the transient eternal, even after we've been continually provided every flavor of evidence through experience that such a feat is impossible. Desires wear out and need to be replaced. To do this we must learn well the art of holding on as well as the art of letting go, and to have the wisdom to know when and were we should excersize each.

We need to know how to light the candle -- and how to blow out the flame...

* * *

 

[iLoveYouWithaKnife]

i read this whole thing in it's entirety.
usually, it's difficult for me to read long posts.
well written as always.

 

[rewiiired]

bump.

 

[Average Whiteboy]

I read the whole thing and I must say that you are a superb writer. I loved your use of analogies. Especially this one:

I had learned from my previous mistakes, though. You see, some shy guys make the mistake of just telling one, singular person -- one member of the herd -- that he likes this girl, for instance. But that's just stupid. Why? Because by the time the message gets back to the girl you want it to get to, the message gets stained with the noise of every brain and mouth and ear it's traveled through. It's edited and translated. Horrendously abridged. At best its an exagerrated truth; at worst, a garbled myth. It's a lot like the game of telephone, where you sit in a big circle of people and you whisper something into one person's ear and they whisper what they heard into the next person's ear and by the time it gets back to you, the original sender, it's something so far removed from what you originally said that you burst out laughing, stand confused, or simply shudder in disgust.

I feel like I learned a useful lesson just by reading your story. Thanks for sharing it.

 

[neverwas]

We need to know how to light the candle -- and how to blow out the flame...

that was the perfect way to finish your story.

i was captivated from beginning to end...three coffees later