“How does it feel, watching them?” he asked, studying my face intently.
She is poetry; he is sensation. She looks strong, a strength I knew she carried but hadn’t seen in this same way. She never looks weak, but here, he brings out something different in her, and I can’t help watching, seeing her out of the context of me. A different side, a new angle, an unfamiliar plane. They weave together seamlessly, different and mesmerizing.
“Would we be friends, do you think?”
They are so similar, and yet vastly, discordantly different. One thinks abstractions with clean precision; the other thinks with technical purpose. Red and green, complimentary colors. I can picture them, foreheads pressed together, palms flush to one another’s cheeks, intimacy and build before catalyzed movement where they climb to the sky in tandem. Sensation and intensity. They meet one another in flowing rhythm, the echoing pulse of heartbeats meeting.
“I love him,” I said.
“I know.” He paused. “He loves you too.”
I nodded. “I know.”
Did I tell him or did he already know? He has always read the words between my skin and held the space for me to claim them. Reframe them. It feels right to be here with him and so I sink into it, loving him, loving her, loving him, very distinct sensations that weave together and create a fabric of colors, reds and greens and blues shifting in patterns that move too quickly to follow. Her face is clear, now. His eyes on her. Our eyes on them, watching, whispering, naming sensations and thoughts as they rise to the surface. Here, I claim what I have been too uncertain to trust (only I trust each of them intrinsically; it is myself I do not). I belong here, beside him, watching them. I reach out and grasp his hand briefly, soak into the feelings that almost always feel like too much but in this moment, I drench myself in loving recklessly, extravagantly, differently, wholly present and aware of the heat of his skin as we sit together in stillness.
“I’m using the wrong words, but it’s the only words I have. But it felt… I felt like we were sitting together, talking and watching our partners tying.”
Words are beautiful and inherently flawed. The failing of language has never been more poignant than it is here, trying to describe the sensation of feeling intricately linked into something that I have never had to describe before. We exist in perpetual motion, a gravitational orbit that breaks off bits and pieces into separate spaces but inevitably pulls us back into the realms of one another. It is dynamic and fluid and does not lend itself to easy answers. What it looks like, what it feels like is not what it is, but what is is directly impacted by sensation, intensity, movement. What is springs forth from how it feels, and how it feels is connective in a way that words fail to describe. Solid, not tenuous, but intricate and strong as lace.
I was encouraged to finish writing this by someone who told me to “let what leaks out of your eyes come into the piece.” Hence the title. I’m bad at naming things.
Monomaniacism 