When someone leaves you, you're never the same. No more making "we" memories. No it's just making memories of the ebullience of a place that was magical even on uneven days. We'd have coffee in the mornings with newspapers waiting on a table in a place we both knew would be gone before too long.
So you think you can tell blue skies from pain? She'll be gone before too long. The places she takes from me! I can't be in the wrong place before too long. Surrounded by cold steel rails, don't leave me in the wrong place for too long. Those I love! Loved ones. Memories, just memories of looking at photos of something that happened when I wasn't there. Can you tell a smile from a veil?
"What you want right now?" Do you think you can tell? She looked at me, puzzled. I took the glasses to the bathroom to fill them with water. I returned and gave her one. She gulped it down in a few swallows. I held out the other and she took just one drink before handing it back to me. I put the glass down and looked at her. Her eyes were misty as she looked up at me. "Why you ask that? Why you want know?" I felt sad, ashamed.
Braving the rain on a gray day. Loneliness was giving way to despair as my awareness of an impending loss grew. How do you add? Anticipatory grieving. A nice phrase, user friendly. Means I know shit is about to suck. Before too long.
Are friendships a salve for pain? Yes, if they're worth anything at all. Laugh and smile more often than not? That's a friend. Preferable to isolation. You'd think I was talking about COVID. Maybe it's the same. What happens if I say, "I love myself"? Not much. As a mantra? I'll let you know in three years, once the chanting finally takes hold. Ain't no quick fixes.
She was smiling when she returned. A relaxed smile, the smile of a young woman who knew who she was and what she wanted. She had earned all of her confidence, the hard way. Now she could thrive. She was a survivor, a person deserving of a special type of respect, a respect reserved for anyone who's suffered too much indignity while somehow maintaining dignity in forms that are otherworldly.
When we were young, we were led to places we understood would be gone. Too many places. Sights to see. Experiences to have. Photos to take. Goodbye Mary, goodbye Jane. Braved the rain on the grayest of days. When does loneliness cross over to despair? "I love myself." Before too long. Does it feel different to love oneself in paradise instead of a dumpster? Shall I accept hot ashes for trees.
I was invited to a chanting meditation in an upstairs room at a Thai restaurant. A tentative engagement, to be sure. I had to buy mangoes. I nodded to the stairs in a prayer pose as I didn't know the owners. An elderly woman tilted her head that way then went back to cleaning. Shouts of "Krishna!" followed by what I presume were Hindi prayers. A man in front was playing bongo drums. I saw Anna. Straight-backed, cross-legged, hands on knees, broad smile, euphoric eyes. Among the thirty or so people crammed into the room I appeared to be the only white male middle-class American. I was crazy so I figured that might give me some credibility in this place.
I remembered being at Gard du Nord, watching the departure sign clickety-clack different destinations leaving different tracks at different times. Like being Santa Claus instead of just having him visit. The world, my fingertips. One connection here another there then it's Berlin, Prague, Barcelona, Rome, Budapest, ... It was disappointing to choose one destination at a time and have to go just one way yet again once there. To go anywhere at any time is not enough; I want to be anyone I want to be.
Incense was strong. Normally I would say too much, but there were many who seemed to have shunned bathing and there were several naked bodies in states of grace. Couples and throuples were making out. The space was tight. In addition to incense, I inhaled the occasional waft of cannabis. And a half hour earlier I'd eaten a dose of shrooms. Some guy handed me a Hindi version of a hymnal which was in either Hindi or Sanskrit; impossible for me to know. Could have been Arabic or Aramaic. I just followed the sounds and made my own sounds about a beat later than everyone else.
"You do not belong here!" Very well, sir. Euros. Several Euros. Jagging with the chauffer on the hood, loud-barking death threat orders on fictional animated characters. Made me say, "I belong here, motherfucker. Ten times twenty roll a hundred, unpack, and shave something. Or get a tattoo." Your name is Delilah? Or Missy? Do you name your lingerie? Has your partner named it? Will someone name them in the future?
As good a question as it was, what does it say about me if I lose someone's heart through no fault of my own? Isolation station. Confidence shattered. Hey, remember yourself at your heights: painting, researching, traveling, hiking, dancing, Tai Chi, contemplation, meditation, and expanded awareness. And as you rose back from the depths: greeter, short-order cook, mining, agricultural migrant worker. And the depths: being kidnapped, homelessness, psychosis, involuntary commitment, isolation room without light, catatonia.
As I looked up and down two streets, I realized I was looking at a sign clickety-clacking. I decided to stand there and just look, holding my decision back so I could savor the moment of choice. Oh, my head would turn.
Slight cough. Facemask on. Black fishnet stocking still sexy. Shimmering blackness, sight of sights. Gripping lobby fur while registering to voyage to the elevator before realizing the gravity of the situation. The interesting thing to me, besides my deteriorating hand writing, was that that is a similar version of what I might write in a sober and matter-of-fact fashion while in the midst of what they call mania. I start thinking, though, of binary oppositions as ordered into the hierarchy of the collective unconscious perhaps in search of a latent archetype or dialogism.
Roman Jakobson lobbed a tomato that got blistered down the third-base line. Defamiliarize yourself with that.
As I was chanting, I noticed the mixture of dreads and shaved heads, the robes and the quasi-hippie gear. Some wore saris and some were shirtless. Abundant smiles and spontaneous laughter. Eyes were skyward in reverie; others closed in contemplation or deep prayer. Lovingness was outwardly manifest. There were breakouts of group love. As the shrooms took hold, I felt the electricity within my body and wiggled to get it out. I could do anything and it would look like a prayer to everyone else. And as I thought about it, isn't everything I do a prayer? Yes.
ooh, my back would burn.
Passionate kisses, clenched embraces; energy healings and massages. Anna left after what might have been an hour. Two? I tried harder and harder to find the "I love myself" mantra, but it was not working. Something about Anna's presence? Something about the shrooms? The incense? I left then and there.
I sat on a bench looking at what might have been stars, but unlikely with the dense cloud cover. Embracing group prayer while watching group love making is ... I didn't know how to understand it let alone describe it. Moments of self-love and self-discovery? A distraction from the emotional roil of love lost. Maybe a blessing. Is empathy the expansion of self engulfing the experience of another or the expansion of the other into the experience of oneself? I didn't like what I was feeling.
