Delusions

 Note: When you have nothing to lose, everything's a win, right? All you have to do is say, well, I'm done pussyfooting around; let's lose the ornaments and tassles and get down to green trees.

So: no need to dress it up; make it softer; less complicated; fewer words. Just—exactly the words needed to fill the space allotted. I guess sad will just have to be sad. Angry will no doubt be the lowest, most pervasive basso profundo, but if that's the way it is, that's the way it will be.

So:

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 From Movie Night—later, middle of the night

I guess I should really make up my mind—be entirely serious, be entirely stupid, or call the whole thing off. Because in the end, being stupid pollutes the waters of being serious enough to damage all integrity. If I could be joking about something, how the fuck are you ever going to know the difference? I know you usually know when I *am* joking, but sometimes, you seem to miss it enough that I worry. Is it only in my own mind that I'm being funny? Where does it change from "teasing" to being "misleading"?

Even *I* don't know. You leave me tongue-tied in ways that separate me from rational thought. Your idea of moving things from writing to speaking were noble, but then I'm deprived of my wits, which isn't good when I'm supposed to be telling you how much I love you. 

But I'm terrified of scaring you. Putting you on the spot. AGAIN. Then what the fuck do I do? 

Just knowing that it's insincere in so many mouths I've known tells me, then why would *I* ever do it? Why the fuck should she ever believe a thing like that? Maybe you tell every fucking woman you meet that. How should she know? Maybe you're just another prick like so many she's known before . . . that YOU've known before.

And it's the doubts that paralyse me. They're moving in big time now. It's hard to concentrate on movies with you so near. But what can I do? I can't—won't—make the first move. But again it gnaws away at me . . . one more day under the bridge. Won't be getting that one back.

(Fuck, get a hold of yourself, dude—thinking this way will not win you her heart any quicker. In fact, it's almost guaranteed to drive her away. Who wants some lovesick psycho for a soulmate?)

That's the word we were looking for. Soulmate.

If it were the simple matter of my believing I had jumped some imaginary gun; that you had some timetable saying "if a man wants to court me, then he'll give me roses on the third Friday, then an engagement band the next blah blah blah"—then at least I would have that as a yardstick to use to measure just how badly I was miscalculating.

But of course you have no such idiocies garlanding your front door. I know you don't.

I know what one major fear probably is, and I have no idea how to solve it. 

You're afraid of yourself.

I don't mean that as a criticism. Being afraid of what you might do—how you might react—to things in your life is just defensive thinking. It's actually standing in for a "guardian angel," which, of course, doesn't exist. The guardian angel is you.

It could be saying "You've been here before, and last time things didn't work out so well, did they?"

(And now the risks of shooting my mouth off come home to roost: paranoia. You don't send me an email for over 24 hours . . . is this really cause for concern? She's busy!)

But in the end, it's just common sense to shut the fuck up, ditch the fancy words, and just say the truth—because it's really so simple! My love, you know you don't have anything to fear from me. I might be overthinking things a tad, but it just means your amazing presence has thrown me upside down and all around.

The words are so easy to embroider, but the message really is, god, it's been so long since I have known someone, someone so mind-blowingly amazing—see? Again, it's useless. Useless to put into words how much you have changed every atom of my perceptions in this short but unforgettable time.

I just want it to continue . . . 

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Tue. Mar 31 11:42 am

 

Is it possible to not know what love is? That seems like a ridiculously stupid question, but the problem with it is that defining "love" would require a Moonshot equal to the sequencing of the human genome. And they'd still end up with a question mark.

Love is many things to many people. The word is bandied about—possibly being the most loosely-deployed noun ever created by humans, so why would even saying it have any meaning? Your love is not my love. As discussed, the Japanese avoid the word altogether. But do people there love each other? Of course they do. 

But what do they say instead of "I love you?" Well, here's the secret . . . although the translation is seemingly evasive—"Like you greatly"—大好きdai suki—the meaning is identical to "I love you."

For example, the Sprtxli word, "Ttctvixil" actually translates roughly as you bastard, but is what couples seeking to cement their union say to each other during the Ceremony of the Bats.

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3:10 pm

 

But over the last few days, another thought—a disturbing thought—has crept into the general background noise of the thoughts currently crowding my head with you.

It's a thought that, if correct, would bring my entire house of cards—already wobbling in the slipstream of emergent realities—table-flat; and as we know, castles built of cards that collapse into a generally flat arrangement rarely take it upon their damn 2D selves to rebuild.

At first, I rejected it out of hand. It's not possible, my logical brain protested. No one does not like to be touched.

But then I flashed back to Leah . . . seemingly normal in every way—assertive, confident, intelligent, feisty—but couldn't stand to be touched. Anywhere.

Baffled, one day I asked her—a shot in the dark. Was it maybe something that had happened to her as a kid? *Bingo* . . . first try and I'd won the Lincoln Town Car. Although the story didn't exactly come spilling out in breathless gasps, yeah, someone somewhere had abused her.

Well, that was easy! It didn't suddenly make her like to be touched, but it at least explained to me why my perfectly innocent (by any standards, not my imaginary standards) overtures had been summarily rejected.

So there are most assuredly people like that. I knew one.

Could it now be two?

For me, one of the most terrible parts about being alone is the removal of all human contact. Not only no one touching me, but not being able to touch someone in anything more than the usual social situations. In my mind, I was seeing you down through the years—now I know that there was at least someone, but for how long, and to what degree of intimacy? Obviously the romance tends to fade with the passing years, but it was always there once—but I was seeing you, unloved, untouched.

For me, it has been so long now I can no longer remember the last person I touched in such a fashion, or who touched me. Brigitte, due to her various afflictions, was, from the outset, not exactly one with whom to cuddle with in front of the fire. Twenty years seems like a good round figure, although I can't even think of who it was before that. 

So, although I had methodically sublimated it—bludgeoned it into submission, more like—the ache was somehow never far.

But it wasn't like I yearned for just anyone's touch; it had to be the touch of someone I trusted, who trusted me back. And I knew that finding a strawberry growing on an elm branch in January was gonna happen before that person finally showed her sorry ass up.

Something that seems to rarely occur to most people is the degree to which people, if they so wish, can hide the most incredible "little secrets" that defy the wildest imagination. It always seems to surprise people—how many times have you heard the old "I had no idea he was like that" or "She never gave any inkling of her blah blah blah" . . . ? 

People can go through their lives from childhood to death harbouring fears/anxieties/fantasies/thoughts that, it  almost goes without saying, they fiercely hide with as much effort as they devote to presenting their "everyday" faces to the world.

So nothing is off the table as far as "complexes"—that's what they used to call them isn't it?—as far as people's elaborate complexes go.

Sometimes it's tragic. I once knew a very pleasant girl whose father ran the trade division in Canada  for a popular Japanese candy, who was an avant-garde composer. Yet she had a fear of being in crowds and enclosed spaces that was so great that to even attend a performance of her own pieces constituted a superhuman effort for her.

"But Keiko," I unthinkingly said to her one night at the theatre, "you don't look nervous at all!"

How would I ever know that you disliked immensely being touched if you didn't tell me? Short answer: I wouldn't. More disturbing answer: even if I knew, it wouldn't suddenly make you like being touched.

We all have fears with our dealings with people, and how we deal with them is a matter of our upbringings, experiences and role models. I once knew a girl who was obviously anorexic. Yet she tried desperately to convince me that she was a foodie, because she knew I was one. I never knew if her "foodie" plea was her shield to fend off intrusive questions, but as it happens, she went on to be a pastry chef at a fancy restaurant.

So there.

Which brings me to you. As you knew it would.

No doubt what's going through your mind right at this moment is equal parts indignation and fascination. Who does this fucker think he is? Diagnosing me like some lab specimen. What the fuck is his diagnosis?

Well, sometimes my "people-guessing"—an activity I actually practised, for some years with my brother, on the long flights back and forth from various places to England (although I didn't call it practising, even though that's what it was) and later to entertain myself—can be quite uncannily correct. 

A lot of reading of Sherlock Holmes helped, and it helped that I paid close attention to Watson's unpacking of Holmes's process of deduction-making ("I noticed that there was some mud on the lower part of his left shoe . . ."  etc.) until it almost became second-nature.

Except it was not the physical characteristics I was trying to perceive; it was the person within. Of course, we all do this to a certain degree . . . I like to think that I'm better than others, but that probably is just another of my happy delusions.

And as my Jacqueline-guessing has unerringly uncovered, you dislike intensely being the object being dissected in any form by anyone. Relax. I'm with the Allies.

More seriously, if you couldn't trust me at this point not to betray you in even the slightest quanticity of partitions, I would have received that particular telepathogram. Lying, even fibbing—unless it is to the greater good—is not a part of my nature and all the associated patterns of deception/misrepresentation are as alien to me as the crystalline structures that form on the sides of blast craters on the opposite side from the sun of Pluto.

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Later—Just came back from you 8:07 pm

 

Again, the disconnect! Jacqueline that lives in your head vs. Jacqueline that lives downstairs! She is one and the same, yet—I tell myself, She was standing right in front of you! What's wrong with you? and I reply Yeah, gorgeous, ain't she?

And I realise that all my theories are as grains of sand to the stars in the night sky . . . many, but not exactly intelligent.

My theory about being touched. Great theory! Except she LOVES being touched. Just not by me! Plus, the last guy that touched her is still recovering . . . he doesn't look good, but he'll be okay.

*Sparkling* . . . it's what your eyes do. They light up like tiny furnaces that take their power from the stars. You don't know this, but I do. 

And y'know, I don't for a moment think that all this is normal. Some girl going all moon-eyed over me for seemingly no reason, writing all sorts of shit about me that's half way between "Teenage Pleasures" and Byron, well, I'd be concerned, too. Trouble is, you're talking to the wrong guy. *I* don't  know how to shut him up, either!

*Sigh* what on god-who-isn't-there's green earth to do . . .