I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each
I do not think they will sing for me....
nonsense and the lovely, part of the parcel
Postcards. Drips and drops of a visit, a holiday, a missed connection, a made connection, images and words, mostly fragments, vignettes rather than complete thoughts or stories.
Finally, off on the road. The long haul to Portland. Lock the imp in a carseat for 10 hours, drive like a bat out of hell. funhouse. Road jitters, tea, and wine. Hot food, a reduction in the feeling of disconnection, the hollowness that I get while driving. I love to drive, the journey, but if I go too long, I lose my humanity - I can no longer talk, interact, relate. I stop, and eat, silent, distracted, the people around me only two dimensional. I cannot talk to them. Laurel reconnects me. Quiet, we don't bounce at each other as we tend to do in another dimension, but the very gentleness of the conversation reassures me, brings me back to life. A wandering dialogue, punctuated by the whirlwind of a released imp, building an island, bouncing, climbing up and down us.
The question I have for you:
Does love, becoming dependent on someone, lead to loss of self?
Time in purgatory. Limbo. Neither her nor there. My family, still with a hole where the center is missing, although we don't talk about her absence so much anymore. A string of satellites that revolve around a sun that's gone, but we still rotate in the same orbits from habit, now, rather than attraction. Loss of breath, voice, inertia. Why does it feel like I'm three-dimensional, but being squeezed into a two-dimensional space? They don't see me, they see a construct of me from age 2 age 5 age 15 age 22. Not as I am now. No time, no time, we do not take the time to know each other, to listen to each other, to know each other now.
The question I have for you: Does love lead to loss of self?
Journeying home. A stop in Cottage Grove a chance to be seen and heard. I feel the greyness fade, color coming back into my cheeks, my mind. I can breathe, my throat opens again, I can say how I feel, what I'm thinking about. Now.
You used the word immersion, speaking of love. This word terrifies me. I think of drowning, suffocating, losing my breath, my voice, my self. The light fading from white to pale green to turquoise to dark, as I slide down below the water. To be subsumed, absorbed, erased, eclipsed........I've heard this word used this way before, and apparently it has a positive connotation. I have heard those mermaids singing, but I do not want them to sing to me.
Really home. Going through the portal of the Golden Gate Bridge. What is the difference between family of birth and the constructed family that I live within? Is it impossible for a family to keep up, to recognize, and honor, change? I hope not.
So I build the eternal you, not looking for all of it in one, but taking pieces from multiple friends and places. How could any one person meet me in my multifarious needs and wants? To meet me intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, physically? Impossible. I believe this to be impossible, which is probably why it is so. But I sink back into my constructed family, so grateful for their myriad arms around me.....
And it is, nonsense, and lovely.
The question I have for you: Does love lead to a loss of self?
nonsense and the lovely, part of the parcel
For ideath: Something a bit odd and eerie to fill out a phrase that caught on a splinter of my imagination.
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