Thursday, September 30, 2010


Frances

I'm not sure you'll understand.

Frances didn't know what hit her. She was feeble. Bones, teeth, calcified.

Should I have felt guilty? Her haunches, sharp, near breaking, their fleshlessness . . . Old Woman that she was, my fingers on her bones.

Forget all of that. When the vet returned with her Frances entrusted herself to the warmth of my lap, the familiar warmth of my touch on her cheek, she cooed, she purred, safe in my arms. She resumed an entitled position of confidence, a respite returned, solid. I held her waning in my hands. I held her with the muchness of love. The drugs were injected through an I.V.

So strange, her absence upon my return home.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Feels Like Home To Me

You know . . . i've been thinking of you since we spoke yesterday, and how inconsistent, how crazy, or worse, how insincere you must think i am.

that is why i repeat the words--often i have repeated them--i do not think you realize, understand, know . . . .

how very much you feel like home.

because i know you as well as i do, though not as well as i wish i might, i do believe with all my heart that you need to take a stand. you need to become alive.

i've glimpsed the life in you longing to be lived. That, my love, has been your great gift to me.

i am happy with my lot, though that lot feels dwarfed and insignificant whenever i allow you to come near . . . which i do for about an hour, sometimes more, every waking day.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

The Torture Never Stops

The idea of a lover (a small hesitancy rises in my throat), of being loved, raises for me a space that feels comfortable, unchallenged, like “home” . . . a little infantile, vulnerable, at the same time safe.

But Allison, she was a woman who professed no love but the Platonic where I was concerned. So then, how may I—how can I—account for the undeniable fact that she remains a touchstone for me? Her very inaccessibility, her many complications, on a subconscious, even perhaps an unconscious level—something in her speaks to my own ineffable self-ebulliences, speaks not so much to the things I “do” in the world as much as to my own unjustifiable presence in the world as it is.

I do not—have never—fit.

Allison, her irresistible symmetries (I can hear her protests), raise in me feelings that speak to my own inscribed sense of unworthiness. I feel her to be “something” (there may reside my "fatal flaw") unattainable. I live in unceasing pain. I’d have it no other way. I beg for the powerful denial of Her. I am happily tortured, prefer nothing else at all. When I repeat the cliche, “I am madly in love,” I’m nearly certain that I am more mad than in love. Nearly.