All of the words that come out of my mouth are magnets on a lock box. I can't really write with them or explain what they say, they just magnetize to the poles extending from the key hole jammes with a broken key, across the enteric nervous system of the universe. I can only dance with them, feel them with someone else. The words won't make it all ok. They might provide soothing explanations or defacto manuals; stroke my ego for long enough to feel like a "functional" communicator only to be superimposed on fantasies of scripted tv scenes. Oh lala do you see me? capture the love of someone whose reading them; but they will never fully express the pain of duplicity, fluidity, disregard, denial, bystander effects, group think, words, judgements, geminis, generalizations, tyranny. The pain that happens when someone is beautiful in one moment and terrible in the next. The pain when someone is so close to you, or seems so inviting and full of warmth it's inconceivable that they could do such a thing.
When such a thing, two best friends curb stopping eachother over a small interaction, racial profiling in an interracial relationship that had so many very real and genuine moments, denial, lovers leaving town on a plane they booked three weeks in advance of the date they said they'd always be there, taking a partner for granted and justifying behavior with a holier than thou victimization complex. There are no victims in this world, Only people who can feel and people who don't.
The people who don't, can, they choose not to. Like me they have tried to put the pain of experience away in lock boxes. We look for explanations, reasons, lists, mantras, disorders, generalizations, rule books, objects, objectification, grasping at straws when we all got the last one and they're all up a tortoises nostrel. Something to make sure the pain won't happen again because it's impossible to feel like it's not your fault to be so wronged, at least that way we'd have some control over it. The pain would be slightly less than knowing that a person could be so sincere and truly wonderful in one moment, so horrible in the next, and those moments could expand across nights, weeks, or even years.
The only comfort or soulus is maybe that if someone can be so beautiful in one moment and terrible in the next; then anyone whose been terrible could be beautiful in the same fluid motion. But that's an optimistic shift, a gun shot through a pillow. It may be true but it can't heal us. The only true cure is knowing that no matter what someone does we have all felt this way, felt this pain, been the rat in the water maze swimming up to it's provider, namesake and caretaker. Been the rat begging for help as the scientists watch it drown just to educate themselves on how much humans and rats are alike only to deny it when they're cruelty is questioned. The cure is the day we stop denying we have all been scientists. I have been a scientist, I've put people in water mazes without meaning to. And again I've been in a watermaze without admitting it. We have to recognize it in a moment, be inside eachother in every present waking moment of everyday, not just when we're sleeping with each other or on too many drugs.
The people who can feel often shove it in a lock box as I have. The alternatives often feeling the pain all the time, being open all the time. I've lived in either a state of paranoia and misinterpretation, or a state of utter acceptance of the absurd brutality that befalls myself or another. This is entirely owed to the fact that it's easier to feel the pain of that disconnect with empathy then it is to recognize the pain that we are all truly doomed to feel so much pain. Slowly over time all of us who choose to feel all of ourselves, make the only apparent choice to respond to how we feel, and we begin to distance ourselves from anyone who could make us feel that way again. As if love were toxic.
Love is not toxic. Love is the moment when we are truly connected. It is the map on my back I wanted to draw as some compensation for my inability to unjam the key in the box on my feeling. Just like how alcohol allows water ways to stop the damning and the flooding in the corners of my memory. But it isn't a painting, an image, or words for me, it is only the feeling I get from a hug, dancing, connecting, and knowing that someone has accepted this pain is real. That knowledge and honesty is all we have to protect ourselves from being damned ourselves in one moment when we know damn well how not to be. It is the subservience to pain with disregard for how it looks on display or behind a hard cover. It is love without ego. The toxins of this universe, the duplicity, the mantras, the blogs, the manifestos like this one corrupt that law with some wrongful artificial flavor and cheap hot sauce. But the toxins aren't the love. The love between us is real, built on the connections from pain, from a mutual response, from an acknowledgement of how much we want to think of how our actions against each other would make us feel, of what it feels like when we listen to how our actions make our loved ones feel.
Love is not toxic, it is an antidote that loans itself to discovering all the corners of human nature with utter acceptance... a fluidity that is ignored in the face of stability. But that fluidity will always be there no matter what any of us do. It's too cruel to offer these explanations, or to simply remark "shit happens" or "damn dude" or "I don't know what that feels like". That's fucking bullshit. All we can hold on to is our feeling, as a reminder of ourselves and the only way my awareness has any chance of discontinuing awareness of the pain of those around me and myself. The pain that reminds me of what it feels like when the pains not there. When you're there. I trust you more than I wish I trusted myself. I can't really trust anyone until I trust myself though. To remember this when words don't just pass across my screen but when my tattoos comes to life and walk off my skin... I jump out of my skin and lie on the ground. Exposed, vulnerable, depraved, but part of a substance that does not unify people but exposes unification. Across nations, cultures, values, status,through words and heady explanations, through bullshit conversations at parties and self involved narcissistic sly commentary or quick comebacks. it is a notion that we all share.
I may have a magnetized lock box with a keybroken off inside deepthroating a refrigerator magnet from a fringe fest vernacular set, but I will never pull the schizophrenic card. It is not a card, nothing is, it is a state of being. There are no cards in anyone's deck unless they make a play. The voices melt away with the paranoia when I remember my choice should be to pay attention to someone else as much as to myself. Stop talking my way through that which cannot by said, the lotus sutra, snide commentary about and martha and snoop dog, through this computer program.
To say love is a self defense mechanism is a cruel joke. It's sick and twisted joke that is played out before me nearly everyday. None of us ever fall in love with each other to right ourselves, we fall in love with each other because it is the only way to remember that within the pain we are humans who by force or through our own actions have to come know the pain in each other, and all of its relief.
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