There is so much about you that means so much to me. The song says it, doesn't it? There isn't anything about you that doesn't do something for me. I'm not interested in fifteen minutes of fame, but you were my closest brush with divinity... and that's saying something. I have witnessed divinity standing in my kitchen. I have heard divinity in rain song. I have read divinity in ancient texts all but lost, all but censored and burned. But you were divinity in sensation, in heartbeat, in fingerprints left on my skin that I can never forget. Of all that we have shared, all the moments, all the crossroads and catalysts, fears and flashpoints, all the inspiration, discovery, and victory, everything we have held between us, sacred and alive, the hours I hold most reverent are the hours when there was nothing between us at all.
But you do not agree.
The hours you hold most holy is the long evening into night, twelve hours, maybe fourteen, when there was a polished cherry wood table, twenty d6, four number two pencils, a hole-punch and one graph paper notebook between us.
That difference in opinion has only stopped bothering me in the last two hundred and fifty-six days. But it was today, at first light, when I realized that acceptance was wrapped in a golden hallelujah.
“I look into your eyes
as you are saying goodbye
and I see for the first time
what I see for the last time
all the scars that I laid
all the price that you paid
but I swear I never saw it
until now...”
The sunlight is oppressive outside the arboretum greenhouse. Somewhere above and outside the thirty foot ceiling, the sharp blue sky is cloudless with summer heat. Perched forbidden in the tropical crook of a hardy, split trunk palm, I feel my spine and the tree become one thing, two separate entities blending seamlessly into one, and I close my eyes and muse on the vast variety of human experience... the myriad of ways the exact same event can be seen, felt, lived by a myriad of people.
I remember...
You undress slowly, by candlelight. You have dressed carefully, in perfect layers of emotion, only hours before, before we went to dinner. You stay just out of arm's reach. You will not allow my touch only my gaze and it will stay that way all night. My mind is drifting. That happens sometimes. You say it fascinates you that I'm always thinking something. I finally murmur to you as you lift silk over your head, “How do you feel right now? Be honest.” You smile at me. Honest is the only way you know how to be. “Powerful. In control. Pleased with myself,” you tell me, impressing me once again with your pure sense of self. “How do you feel?” you ask, not surprisingly. I smile back at you. “Powerless. Without control...” my smile changes. “Pleased with you.”
The smells of the flowers – sweet, elusive -- and the green, rare growing things – spicy, lingering, thick -- that fill this glass palace wash over me not unlike the sea spray at the oceanside. I hear children laughing and the low, comfortable voices of a man and woman. They are discussing the behavior of an older child, a teenager, who is not with them but is clearly their own. The way she's dressing is the topic of conversation. Mother says, “It's empowering.” Father says, “She looks like a whore.”
I remember...
Making a checklist of attributes my perfect partner would be required to have. It was an exercise more for myself than for anyone else (so said Cosmo) so that my mind was clear. You met my every desire – physical as well as behavioral – except for one. It seemed small. Maybe even something that could have changed, and I was so willing to overlook it. Not be too picky. Because you had a child. I would be walking into a ready-made family. A little family that needed my support – financially and spiritually and emotionally. It was like walking into a dream come true. And I was a dream-walker, deliriously happy even when I was huddled, crying, shaking, afraid, humiliated... telling myself over and over again that this was everything I wanted. The first and last time we had a friend over for dinner, she threw back her chair when you ridiculed my attempt to pray in your home, and she snarled with bared teeth, “I have never witnessed such abject cruelty.” But I had been so sure I was happy... so happy... perfectly happy.
Here I am. Sitting here now. There was perhaps twenty people in the massive greenhouse. Some walk the paths alone. Others are together. But either way, they each experience this place in their own way, on their own terms.
We want so badly to not be alone, to connect, to find those bonds that bind. And we believe so deeply, so fundamentally that to fit together we must have more common denominators than uncommon ones. We must share opinions, politics, skin color, religion, and more and more.
But what is interesting (what is *fascinating*) than if another is exactly as you are? Where is the wonder and discovery and spark of new possibilities and broader horizons then?
No where. If we surround ourselves with what is easy to get along with, with those who are so like us they almost cease to be individuals outside us, than there are only the possibilities that exist when we are alone. Our view of the horizon (of everything) is narrow.
Humanity can survive with an insular, isolationist approach, but it cannot grow. It cannot evolve and transform. Do we really want to stay *here*? Is this really as high as we think we can reach? God did not place us here, on this only green world, to wallow in petty, base animal instincts – eat, sleep, screw, fight. We are animals, yes, of course. We mirror nature just as our world mythologies mirror themselves and ourselves crossing all political borders. But we are the animal that God named steward of all others and the Earth itself. Connecting with one another beyond the primal needs for food, shelter and reproduction and is what God expects, demands and requires of us.
I tucked my hands behind my head. I imagine that no one will find me here ever. That I can exist indefinitely perched here in this cultivated garden of Eden. I imagine the faces of my comrades. Those men and women who are walking with me on a path I once walked alone. They are all... so different. Even those who, on the surface (their armor perhaps) appear so like me, experience life so very, very differently. Intrinsically different. We are not one race, religion, orientation, generation, political party. We do not all call each friends, call each other reliable, call each other at all. But we are together. We are, as a team, standing, fighting, working, all to create something beautiful, something with depth and breath and beating heart. Our differing experiences, even with the same event, the same facts, the same words and moments, combine and spill into our ideas forming a singular experience that becomes greater than any of us could create alone.
I am talking, of course, about Mardi Gras 3000.
This blog has become a place for me to bare my heart and talk to my friends, strangers searching, other fighters hoping. But I have to stop and remind myself that this blog would not be here if it weren't for MG3K. If it weren't for the encouragement, the focus, the support, I have found in that community. That community of dynamically different people.
There are people in my life – forces in my life – outside that network of comrades, who are trying their hardest to tear me down. Some say they love me. Some say they hate me. Some just insist I need them. They say: Look to your own. Look to those like you. Look to us. But they don't understand or know me. They herald the end times (little end times) because their own experience is failure. Their shared experiences are focused on their own losses and so that is all they have to project, to offer. They are little minds that surround themselves with little minds and they cannot understand that we celebrate that we are each different, with and without blame in every situation, above and beyond and beneath the work we must do, choose to do, avoid doing. We are realists and we dance in the face of our own imperfections.
“There is no way you'll make it. And when you fail, when you flame out in false glory, you'll come back to me because I know how to treat you.”
No, I won't.
And no, you don't.
But don't take my world on it. Because that's only my experience.
Just keep watching us reach.
EJ
