loose change

the following words were madly scribbled in my journal on 6 July 2023 and are published here, unabridged aside from added paragraph breaks, at the behest of Claire, who never fails to make me believe in the power of my own words!

feeling nervous today in terms of having feelings. feeling toooooo vulnerable and out there. too few defenses. i could so easily be completely decimated in terms of the heart. what a terrifying feeling. everything so ripe and new that it’s still green. you don’t know if it’ll make it off of the vine. it’s horrific. and the great irony of it all is that if i were a friend of mine i’d say it’s okay. i’d say this is okay, it could be good, no matter what happens you’ll surely survive it. your heart can withstand it. the benefit outweighs the cost.

most recently, in the throes (deeply) of my infatuation with s, I’ve said all of this to claire. i know that somewhere in me i believe it because i would never lie to a friend—i would never lie to somebody i love beyond quantification. the question is whether or not i’ve been lying to myself. all i’ll be able to do for the next indefinite amount of time is listen to bob dylan and write until i don’t feel horrified.

it isn’t in this journal but i know i’ve said it before: i said it to faye, i said it adamantly to katie—i’m ruined. from the first week i knew i was ruined. this would ruin me. and i don’t think i even knew, or could know, the context in which i meant it. oftentimes i think the connotation was really and genuinely good. i think i wanted to be ruined. i think i was excited to be ruined. i was ready and willing to let this destroy the wall I’d fortified around myself, around my heart. i was excited to be seen. to be understood. to be wanted. to be wanted for the same reasons i was sure would isolate me from being wanted again.

and this aforementioned wall—i’ve known for some time that it’s destruction is entirely out of my hands. if this wall goes down, it’ll be at the hands of somebody else. all i have the power to do is rebuild it. the scariest part is that every time the wall comes down, the price of rebuilding it gets higher. the materials become more painstaking to source, in spite of their renewed abundance. it hurts to build it back up.

i don’t know if that pain is worse than living in recurring trepidation of love. i don’t think you can know that sort of thing. i don’t know if matters of the heart will ever be easy for me. or i don’t know when they will. i don’t know that they’re easy for anyone. i want to know what i am afraid of.

i’m afraid of doing things all over again. i’m afraid of repeating history. both my history, and the histories my heart has studied. i’m afraid of getting it wrong. i’m afraid of being hurt. i’m afraid because i know that if i do get hurt, there will be nobody to blame but me. this is the foundation i’ve laid that once supported my recently-demolished wall.

i could never will s to feel a certain way about me. i will never be able to control his feelings. these are two things that i know. these feelings are what necessitate the wall that i no longer have. i feel like a frog on a table in a biology lab the night before the day of dissection. what a visceral vulnerability. tomorrow they’ll take out my heart that’s stopped beating. and then my guts, the ones that i struggle to trust. and then, the resolve, for practice, for the sake of repetition, they’ll suture me up. out of spite. or for nothing other than self-improvement. and i’ll have no heart, no guts, so i won’t be able to be mad. i’ll think only in terms of black and white. the only gray area i’ll know of will be of the matter that composes my brain. these are all things that scare me. i’ve been on this operating table before; i’ve begged to keep my heart, i’ve begged to keep my guts. if i lose them now i don’t know how i’ll get them back.

the word ruin has nine syntactical definitions:

1. (n) the physical destruction or disintegration of something, or the state of disintegrating or being destroyed
2. (n) the remains of a building, typically an old one that has suffered much damage or disintegration
3. (n) the disastrous disintegration of someone’s life
4. (n) the complete loss of one’s money and other assets
5. (n) something that causes the disintegration of a person’s life, or the complete loss of their assets
6. (v) to reduce to a state of decay, collapse, or disintegration
7. (v) to cause great and usually irreparable damage or harm; have a disastrous effect on
8. (v) to reduce to a state of poverty
9. (v) to fall headlong, or with a crash

it’s not a word you’d look up expecting such an array of definitions. it’s not a word i expected to apply so literally to the context in which i’ve been using it. i’m ruined. i’ve fallen headlong. headlong has two definitions:

1. with the head first, foremost
2. in a rush, with reckless haste

i’ve fallen headlong. i’m the remains of a building, but not typically—i’m not old, and i don’t know how to quantify whatever damage i might have suffered, maybe because the large part of it has occurred by my own hand. i’m in a state of disintegrating, if my wall is equal to my self. i’m reduced to a state of poverty if i cannot afford the emotional means necessary to rebuild my wall. can i not afford to rebuild it? or is it that the cost is unknowable?

and if the wall is around my heart, where does my head fit into the equation? can you fall heartlong? are the head and the heart synonymous? or did i truly fall headlong, in full consciousness, and if so, was it with or without awareness of the risks posed? and if it was with full knowledge, was it worth it? did i feel beautiful? did i think beautiful thoughts? yes, kind of. and surely yes to the latter. but do beautiful thoughts have a shelf life? if you think a beautiful thought once, do you think it in perpetuity?

surely not. everything evolves. but not everything is made anew. and not everything has a definable cost/benefit analysis, at least not at first. and if all thoughts can evolve, then there is never one true answer to the question of value: was it worth it? and writing about it is never guaranteed to bring answers to any of the questions posed, but we write fruitlessly in search of them. it is the kind of writing that demands other eyes, other ears, other hearts, other guts. reading it is hardly a sacrifice of anything but time. writing it is surely no sacrifice of anything but time. and even then, it’s a sacrifice well worth making.

writing has a cost/benefit analysis. the benefit isn’t necessarily tactile or even necessarily acknowledgeable at times, but there is no question that it exists. and the key word is necessarily. because somehow now i’m feeling hopeful.

there are a lot of moving parts but i think they culminate in a larger conclusion, a part of which i’ve already fleshed out and blown right by: i want to know what i am afraid of—it isn’t s. it hardly has anything to do with him.

i could never be mad at s if his feelings or his mindset changed; i could never hold that against him. everything evolves as it will, and i’ll never have control over anybody else’s evolution. i’m not afraid of love. i’m afraid of my own vast and seemingly bottomless capacity for emotion.

it’s easy to be alone. i believe in few blanket statements as vehemently as i believe in this one. and maybe that belief is subject to change, though i have no interest in forcing it to. it’s simply what i know. it’s easy to be alone. the controls are different—i know what to expect. i have only myself to thank or to blame. but there is proof in every facet of life that easy does not equate to good, or right. there is proof that our capacity to learn, about ourselves and about the world, inflates when we do hard things, when we challenge our beliefs. and there is evidence that we grow stronger through trial and error—through failure. maybe we even grow bolder. increased repetition leads to decreased fear. i want to believe this. i want to embody it.

i do not want to deny myself love—to deny someone else my love—for fear of failure. i want love to be a practice, not a game. i want the stakes to be improvement, not victory. i would never encourage somebody i love to be embarrassed by the depth of their emotions, i would do the opposite: encourage them to be proud. i want to be proud of how deeply i can love. and maybe, if i can be confident in that, i won’t need a wall. fuck a wall. because at the end of the day, wall or not, i know that i’ll be okay if i’m alone. i know that i’m good at being alone. and what kind of person would i be if i settled for being good at one thing? and i’m not discounting myself—i’m only thinking in terms of love.

some people love and love again and again and again because they don’t know how to be alone. that is what it is. there has to be a balance between the two extremes. the way that two things can be true at once. i can love myself and i can love s. i can practice loving myself and i can practice loving s. i can practice loving myself by letting myself love him. there is little reward in being demure. and learning to fall for him to the small, unripe degree that i have thus far—for the short amount of time that we’ve spent practicing love—has been rewarding in ways i couldn’t have dreamed. i wrote a fucking poem. i’m learning that i can love. i’m learning that i can be afraid, and that when i am, i can talk myself off of the ledge. maybe there is a cost/benefit analysis. maybe the cost is humility, openness. maybe the reward is poetry.

the other great irony of it all is this: if the answer to what i am afraid of is myself, or some variation of this—being left alone to myself, which can be the same thing as losing love, or failing at love—then i am merely afraid of something that i know i am capable of doing. and so maybe i’ve not been loving myself in the way i need to. it isn’t even a maybe—i know i’ve not. all of this writing to walk straight into the adage we all know so well: you must love yourself so that you can love others. love is so confounding, both of the self and of the world. in order to love, you need to trust. in order to trust, you must trust yourself.

i understood this reciprocity well at one point, after alex and before andrew. albeit i was alone. and somewhere, in a stint of being unalone, i lost sight of it. and somehow, now far less alone than i’ve ever been, i’m relearning it.

if there is a cost/benefit analysis to love—to learning love—it’s surely subjective. meaning that it is something that i can control. i get to decide if the reward outweighs the risk. and, as all thoughts are, it can be subject to change. but when we think things with deliberation, with real intention, they’re less susceptible to change on a whim. and there’s the question of: what do i have to lose by opening myself up to love? and we can ponder gains and losses and costs and benefits for a lifetime, maybe even to no avail.

i see no reason why one day’s loss cannot be the next day’s gain, or one week’s or month’s or year’s or lifetime’s, which—who’s to say how long a lifetime is? who’s to say how time functions in love, or how love functions in time? i still have my heart. i still have my guts. i can afford to think in a full spectrum of color. there’s no reason to be confined to the black and the white. i do not want to love defensively. nor do i want to love offensively; it cannot be a game. i want to love temperately: in a calm way, and with control. and i want to learn to love without necessitating control. not in the sense that i’m leaving things up to fate, but with the resolute knowledge that some things we just can’t control. i want to love like i have all the time in the world to do it, and simultaneously like i’ll be okay if my time gets cut short—i’ll know that i’ve loved the best i could.

i’m thinking about maurice sendak’s NPR interview:

“I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. What I dread is isolation…there are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

and i’m thinking about meanwhile, by Richard Siken:

there’s a note in my phone from 30 september 2017, which would have been my parents’ 22nd wedding anniversary. it reads:

“one day i wanna be married and we will go out to a bar with our friends and in the morning we’ll be hungover together and we’ll go to work and we’ll come home and tell each other about our days and go to bed and have amazing sex before bed and i would be loved just as much as i am capable of loving”

i would be loved just as much as i am capable of loving.

this desire is not something i would readily admit. it isn’t even something i’ve been cognizant of on a daily basis—it’s commendable that i had the foresight to write it down at all, and six years ago, no less. but after the writing i’ve done today, the soul-seeking, the intentional thought, the attention to empathy—for others, for s, for myself—this note feels just a degree more attainable. and i don’t want to be ashamed to admit that it’s something i could still want.

i want to be proud that the definition of marriage in my head has evolved into something larger than what my parents failed to sustain. i want to be rid of the notion that not being alone makes me weak. i can believe that not being alone makes me strong. loving somebody is brave. loving yourself requires strength. i can be that kind of strong. maybe the future that i want for myself depends on it.

and, finally, true to my word, i’ve been listening to bob dylan all day. it’s 2:44p and i’ve been either writing or in deep reflection of how and what to write since 7 this morning. the same songs that emphatically resounded my sadness, my confusion, my shame earlier are now providing euphoric solidarity to my revelations. i am a hundred times more myself now than i was this morning. how lucky am i to have had the time today to sort this all through, the privilege of sorting through it in such an idyllic place. i’m maybe more myself than i have been in months! & it begs the question: how much of my identity hinges on bob dylan? maybe not my identity, but certainly a good deal of my sanity relies!

i think that this is the perfect stopping point. what an absolute 180 we were able to reach. i wonder if any of these thoughts should resonate with claire. i love that scott newman calls her clairice. i wonder if i should have her read this entry in full. i think i might. i think it’s rather a feat within itself and if anybody in the world could understand all of these ramblings it would be c. i cannot believe we get to reunite in paris of all places. claire—if you are reading this i love you deeply! in the month of july and all the others! and thank you for your sacrifice of time.

anyway—now i’ll sign off—surely more soon—proud of you—xxo, R