scatterboy

Life is so very strange.

The past has a funny way of clouding your present mindset. People rise up, seemingly from beyond the grave, to cast the bones of your joint memories on the ground. Sometimes we can step over them gracefully, other times they catch our gait and bring us crushing to the ground. Other moments arise when someone in our present, unrelated with a particular past, does or says something that calls forth a heartbreaking spectre. They can’t control the stories you tell yourself.  They have no idea what they’ve evoked, clearly.  The pained expression that darkens your face, however, will tell them volumes about right now.

How can you communicate the past in the midst of actively processing it?  We simply do not know when this will happen or how intense the revival of these pains will be.  Our job is to sense these emotions, grant ourselves space, and allow those sensations to run their course… hopefully without reenactment.

The goal is not to be unfeeling, but to be uncontrolled by our feelings.  We can be guided into action if we so wish.  The sensation of being uncontrollably compelled into action or feeling “forced” to react intensely is akin to being caught in a tailspin.  It’s deeply defeating as we know internally that we are at the source of this pain.  I can lie and say I feel nothing, or I can acknowledge and allow the sensation to teach me.

Perhaps I’ll know better next time how to deal with the way that I feel?  The past can only control me if I don’t learn from it.

… is sometimes a question.

Would you believe me when I tell you…?

I had a girlfriend who slept so beautifully that I couldn’t help but watch her.  Her face relaxed so completely, with her mouth falling into an angelic kiss and eyelids folded so tenderly over her eyes, that felt that I would literally die from overexposure to her beauty. She breathed easily, her lips laid gently against one another, arms folded gracefully in any number of positions around her body. It might sound like a bit much, but I took photos of her face while she slept. It was done with total respect.  She was just so utterly beautiful.

I have seen this beauty in children, babies especially. I don’t know when it leaves… probably when we are introduced to so much inanity and senseless duty.  When I’ve seen adults sleep, they’re fraught with pain and fear or they’re so completely relaxed that they are a comical and slovenly mess, tongues hanging out, pools of drool collecting beneath their life-weary faces. Don’t get me wrong, there were times when the whisper of a dream or concern would pass across her face.  But it never stayed.  Like a solitary grey cloud blowing over a sagebrush speckled expanse of prairie beneath a crystal-blue sky…  it never stayed.  She had a gift and I am so grateful that I’ve witnessed it.  There was magic when she slept.  I even maintain that this was the secret to her success.

Even now, when I have a stressful day, have a great deal happening, I look at a photo of her angelic sleeping face and am transported back to those moments.  Quiet mornings of laying beside her, watching her breathe, shift sweetly through dreams, holding them for observation as they passed away, and then returning to her silken lipped, angelic grace.  With so many things to love about a person, this is one I had never expected to allow into my heart.

I am full of gratitude.

I often wonder why this creeps into my life so readily.  I have hard nights, less sleep, more vivid dreams, a momentary lack of life clarity. Whatever the case may be… and it starts a bit of a lonely spiral.  Perhaps it has to do with my diet?  I could speculate like mad, or I could do what I normally do:  press it down, move on with the day, let it pass.  Sitting in quiet, making deliberate choices, taking my time through the days seems to help the most, but there’s the nagging hum of needing personal contact spinning in my mind and heart.  Time time time, I suppose.

it all happened so quickly… and it’s reaffirmed every day.

gently torn apart by the wind.

When I close my eyes, I remember the way that you walk. I can see the way you hold your joints. Your shoulders slightly rolled forward, a gentle fore-foot padded step that causes your hips to rock and sway, your right elbow held at your ribs… arm at 110º allowing your wrist to lose control of your hand. Fingers wagging as you stalk beautifully around the room. I remember the way you eat, grazing, picking, tasting, regard, wishing, smiling, frowning. The bare skin on your hips glowing like a backlit church window – the appearance of grace and the keeper of dark secrets.

I remember the way you smell, taste, sound. I hear you through distant clouds as I fall back to earth each morning… reluctantly leaving my dreams. I’ll make the inverted swan-dive through the cerebral chrysalis and become a man once again, rice paper butterfly wings crumbling beneath the weight of reality.

Plowing my face into a pillow, strangling myself with a familiar shirt, gripping at nothing in particular… I find myself all at once alone and wishing to be surrounded by you again. Unknowing how I can return. Unsure of which reality to choose, fearing that I am illusion chasing illusion; ultimately fearing that I don’t care either way. I tumble down this chasm of memory, letting your scent and taste paint their tangible shapes on my fingertips and thighs. The textures I remember so well, the sensations I find in passing blossoms. Fallen maple leaves, horse-chestnut flowers, stargazer lilies, vanilla beans, mystery soaps and creams, the sweatband of my own hat, roses… roses…. roses… jasmine – always jasmine.

I feel you on my hands. Yellow, pink, teardrop shaped and proud. These are the flavours I will never forget… because when they enter my sphere, I clearly remember the way that you walk. Cloud-swept movements, deliberate-stepped tracks, inward tip-toed, hopeful and… somehow… always slightly out of my reach.