Terrible

The time between lovers

There is a terrible openness to the times between lovers. I miss it a bit when I'm with another, remembering the painful giving up of possibility, the betrayal of everyone I silently promised to love, but I forget that it is a terrible openness.

My heart, who would otherwise drive me deep into another soul, begins to crack a little - leaning towards the light cast by everything.

I fall hopelessly in love with a passing woman on the street, the curfew of her jaw - an ending time set in flesh. The strut of her hips stepping on the street. She is beautiful, and then she is past and I am stumbling on caught heart strings until one by one they snap and I forget her. Because this lamp post before me has broken my heart anew.

I fall hopelessly in love with food, smelling of pepper and turmeric and onions edging past tears. I fall for the curve of my plate, and the expressions of my dinner guests. I crack open before a taste and after a trifle. I notice beauty in the moments before a glass hits the floor.

Shattered, I understand the urge behind monotheism. To love one thing. There is nothing I would love more than to be permitted to love a single beauty - to tie these threads to one person until they embody the sunset and the street lamp and the stinging nettle, and everything else that sings to my heart. I want so many threads tangled around her that her going rips open my ribcage. My heart. would dangle from a single capillary. Can I have that?

Not this polytheism of forms, each feeding at the need to understand but without a unifying metaphor. A woman, any woman, will focus me like a lighthouse standing on an unturned rock. I do not like this lack of dedication, this floating un-oathbound, flirting with the world. It is terrible.

Bestiality, necrophilia, pedophilia, masturbation - there is an overflow in the human condition that is permitted because to overflow you must be full. Maybe pleasuring yourself isn't making babies, but it lets go a valve that can be pressurized again. An ebb and flow of desire that makes mates a priority.

I imagine a bathtub, with water running left alone - there is that little hole at the top to keep the tub from flooding, but it is such a little hole. How long until it crests the top and runs across the floor, caressing each bathroom tile and telling it that it is beautiful. Down the steps stopping on each one to kiss the way it sparkles when wet, into the sidewalk where it falls in love with a stranger before she passes by.

It is worse with people you know though. A stranger is gone and you are left singing, but a friend is a repeated catastrophe. You look at her and wonder if she would fit, because theoretically any woman would do. Every woman contains the world in her belly, could have your baby, and it doesn't have to be a good metaphor. We can stretch.

Your mind has to stretch tight too now. Your heart dribbles around her shoes, the all of you germinating in this dance, or feminine interplay - and your mind has to mop it up. Not her. Too old. Not her. Too far away. Not her. Too dangerous. Not her - you don't even like her!

Tight, tight, tight - how tight can we wind a spring. How tight until the tension breaks or I break, and I end up with something I don't even like, just because she was there.

I lean towards the inaccessible ones, the ones I cannot cross or permeate, a premature pressure released by just feeling deeply. Do they know that they are doing me service by letting me love them? Thank you for witnessing my leakage. Thank you for being my little bathtub hole. It isn't enough, but it will slow me until I find the perfect metaphor.

There is a terrible tightness to the times between lovers. One I would rather avoid at all costs. Yet to soar the spring must be wound. To journey the wastes must be crossed. To love, the heart must be opened.

Gods grant me the power to hold this tension as long as I must.