I am running from what is real, afraid of memory and the promise it holds. I gave myself permission and now I am afraid of so much freedom. I am afraid to sink into what lives inside of me.
Unscrupulous greys, she called it, that moral compass inside of us that never points north.
It’s in my teeth; I can taste the distance and want to sink into something.
Desire. I feel desire in a way I have never felt before. I feel it sharply, poignantly, dangerously.
Getting closer.
I have been pulling back and can feel the tension, the strain. I feel the muddled sludge of uncertainty mixed with the surety that the old ways don’t work anymore.
I need to see your eyes looking at me.
This is old and new. I’m taking cues from stoplights, sputtering sentences if red lights allow enough of a pause to choke out whatever phrase made it way to the surface. Discrete moments. Flashbulb memories. Stops and starts. It is always the same.
And when everything dropped and I allowed myself to be exactly as I am, I found my strength. When I claimed the darkest parts of me, I grasped the rail of my own power.
Chaos. It swirls and builds in beautiful perfection. Movement and motion and haphazard steps placed without thought to then wake up here, wondering how do I choose to move forward?
We are extravagant messes, those of us built from scraps of chaos and knit together with the threads of stardust. We are the people you fall in love with because we are exactly the people you shouldn’t. We move the wind with our breath, mold fire from our eyes, carve river beds down mountains with fingertips. We thrive on the delicacies of impossibility and sustain on the thrill of suddenly finding all that we want within our grasp. We are- I am- the forces that move behind natural causes, beckoning: yes, everything is burning, but look at the blaze in the reflection of the stars.
I saw these pieces of myself tonight and grasped them, faced them, claimed them. There is no part of me that believes that you would chose to walk this road with me. I know who I am. You have barely scratched the surface.
I want to know your desire because it fuels my own. Tell me you see something worth loving in me; what I see is my capacity for destruction. The affirmations temper the need to burn, reckless hedonism that threatens these unsteady things that I build and pray won’t collapse. Can you withstand the force of me? Why would I even ask you to? You can have everything you want without risking anything you love.
But then, you cannot have me, this tempestuous, strong-willed, wild-eyed force that spins into your life and leaves you gasping for breath. I will leave quietly, only a whisper that tickles the back of your neck from time to time. We all heal, though the wounds I leave mark deeper than you know. It’s a near-miss, but still. A part of you wonders.
I choose you, and this, time and again, because I believe that we match, somehow. What you do not see is the ache in me, the hollow core that yearns for a place to sink my teeth into. What you do not see is that you, you are the when, and the why, but only because I was ready to claim that I am the how. You are yes because I am tired of saying no. I am tired of being what I am not, and if I am not fully ready, it is because we never can be.
I am not ready for this; how can you say that you are?
God, but it aches, and yet I have space for the chasm yearning in my heart because my heart has learned what it long ago forgot: that love, as reckless as it is, is never ready, never convenient, never small. That I am the whole of who I am, whether it is ever seen or not, and that I choose myself, time and again, when I could choose anyone or anything else.
I choose me, which is to say, over and over, that I choose you for each of these moments, small as they seem, insignificant and meaningless as they may feel. I choose this ache and the risks I take in every word that follows every word quickly placed. I am prepared for disaster, which is to say that losing you would mean losing a part of me, and yet I open this up again and again because it is who I was made to be. To carry this ferocity in tandem with ache. To risk my heart, again and again, for the moments that bring the sun. I have nothing left to lose but myself, and that self has already been remade, so there is no way to go but forward. Who have I lost to the wreckage, and how much that self did I toss in the flame myself?
Every piece. Every choice, mine, including the one to follow you into the darkness. And now I am here (are you still here with me? I thought I knew these shapes and shadows but fear is settling in, now, and I am more unsure than I was).
Fuck it. I have nothing left to lose.
Monomaniacism 