Sometimes the people we love like to leave us. For new frontiers, lives, reasons. Of course, all that is broad and philosophical. Most people, you know, have a legitimate reason, and though we miss them terribly, we sacrifice our greater good and love for that future; their hopes, wishes, and dreams.
There isn't a lot we can do about it. When you're at a waterpark surrounded by other people's friends and turn around, realize your own aren't really there, your heart aches, but that doesn't matter. There are rides, slides, tubes, adventures everywhere. Sun embraces your face, rolling on your tongue like a wine you're too young to drink, and you realize that now is the moment.
This is now. Use today. Be useful, clever, beautiful. Make those other person's friends your own for wit or the siren-call to sex, Beauty. I am decently witty. I am also... beautiful. My heart... could warm.... your heart. I... can give you... myself.
Yet the wisdom does not end with realizing that people don't want you, or that we alone can accurately judge our own worth or value to others. If we think we are nothing, then we act like nothing, we live as nothing, and thus, are nothing. Similarly, if we believe ourselves to be everything, we fill our own worlds, win every battle, find every mistake a triumph, and generally make the world a horrible, us-filled place to be. Any place in-between these two extremes is possible, common, doable.
But not mine.
Mine is an alone place. I live in the world's shadow; and shadows are wonderful places for those whose minds are overstocked with treasure.
At least, that would be true, if I had treasure in my mind. I made that part up and stole a quote from Iva Ibbotson. That's what I am, also. I am a thief. I steal feelings from other people, I twist what they don't want into what they do while giving them what they should have. My every act of theft is not for self-serving purposes, but for them. I live for the hearts of other men, the wills of other's thralls, and so on. I am, essentially, selfless.
That selflessness brings me great pain and suffering, yet I persist in it. My selfless heart will be the bane of my existence for a very long time. So will my fear and vulnerability. So will becoming attached to those who wish to leave me, or never really loved me, or--worst of all--love me too much to stay. To know me truly is to love me. To TRUST me, is to love me. I am the breath of the moon on the water! I am the dust in your eyes, in your dreams! I swirl to new places. I whimper when you feel pain.
That isn't the end, either, because nobody cares.
I am also complex. After all, I spent years living as a stereotypically powerful archetype female. I was an elf, an enchantress. The words that riled from my honey were coupled airs of honey twining. I could enchant your soul, your sexual organs, and your heart; could wrap you around my fingers. I live to be the temptation of lesser men, if only to teach them quality and reassure myself that I am not a loss for my selflessness.
After all, I am also a poison. Knowledge is sometimes poison, too, twisting into shapes and goblets you drink from your table like it were sweet, dripping with perspiration, on a hot day. But I am not that heat, no sir. Not if you are too much a coward to turn! To face me, to see me.... because there is beauty in me. A rare, wild, enchanting beauty. I may be plain outside, may not have that sought-after twenty-inch waist. Needles are a balm to my pain daily.
But there's more to me than that. I have a life to live, loves to have and lost--oh alas, I have already lost my share of loves--such is the way. Such is the common occurrence; for if man has a common thing to gift one another, what would the cheapest gift be but pain?
Yet I know there is good in men, that is what I live on, those words. I have to believe that good can corrupt the hearts of those steadfastly evil, if only for our world. I want to believe my sincere smile is accepted sincerely. I want to believe when I stub my toe and swear bloody murder in front of an Amish family, they aren't leering at ME in horror; and more the guy next to me.
The secrecy to me is that I am a little common, too. Just enough to live on, perhaps, but common.
Mostly, I am not. I love listing the normal things about myself when I am confused, because I wear your thralls like armor against the hurt you bear unto me, merely for breathing. When I love, I love totally. When I am sad, I am hurt. My heart feels physical pain for you, that is the depth of my empathy. You don't know, and you don't care. In past experience, when I offer my heart to people, they politely offer it back. I wish I could offer you some vile story of villainy to win you to my side, but no such stereotype exists. I am so complex that people dismiss me as too common, my armor too thick, and leave me behind for my slow, grueling speed.
Like both my Kates. Schultz and Murley. I am too young or too old, too wrong or too right, and neither trusts me. I have to live with that, every moment of every day. It never quite goes away, because sometimes I wake up and it aches. It pinches at my heart like many bees in a glass cage surrounded by expectation and wear it like clothing when you walk away.
And you don't care when you find out I'm not allergic. The moment the danger ends, you flee my life. When I could help you, you realize it, and you run, like cowards.
You are too brave to be a coward.
In other words, you are too cowardly to be anything, other than brave, and I know in my heart you will suffer for it someday. I will be waiting on that day, and mark you, both, for those words, my friends.
And then there's you, Katie. I say, 'I love you as much as I love Finley', but I can't put what I have for you in your soul. I can't touch you like you touch me, whenever I am sad. I have no real reason for it other than I have seen some of your darkest places and there is no true evil there. There is hurt, there is fear, there is vulnerability. There is also brilliance, like the sun dripping into our skin. There is that smile I can't make with pencils or MS paint. There are the trees trapped in your eyes that never shed their leaves. There is goodness and kindness and love.
You are everything to me. You are every friend I've ever wanted. You have many, many friends, and many, many, many you's. I have you, though. I have every you, and love you--them?--cherish you. I can't impress that on you without making it sound like obsession, because that isn't what this is. I'm just trying to tell you... I don't know. What you mean to me. Because you mean... so... much. Things like making me happy enough to cry, just because you could have walked away AGAIN and didn't, crying because you're there.... Katie, no one else can do that. I say you're my sun and light, and those are true. Do you understand why?
Do you understand that when you are with me, -I- glow? -I- shine? I sing, and dance and play and smile. Your lips form words to me, your breath forms air in my lungs. You make my life dance for happiness, and you are my music. When I am sad, I can tell you, and you make it better, even though we both know that Kate is right and I am crazy.
That is also a lesson, brothers. Love can make you crazy.
Finley.... You know. You know every time I look at you how much hope I have for our flaws and beauty and perfection. We are the remainder of a lost world, and we live it together. When I look at you with tears in my eyes, when I feel trapped, you save your money--fuck whatever else--and take me somewhere else. You hold me and make me safe. You want to beat up small black children who knock glasses from my face by rear-ending me into a rail on a go-kart track. (There's a story there. Trust me.) I say you are my moon, but I don't tell you why you are the moon. It's because I see just as much of who I COULD be as you as in Katie. I love you... I love you so much that when I wake up to cry over people who've left me--my true weakness--it is your face that first comes to mind. Forcing me to eat when all I want to do is throw up my everything onto their welcome mats.... just to prove I'm there.
I never...feel... that I am... real.
I feel immaterial. I fear not belonging because I don't, and it's what I've known.
God, I love you two. I love you two so much, I can't find words for it that mean the right things, no matter how much I try.
I could tell you that if you both were gone, the me you know would die. That is entirely, utterly, completely true. I would be destroyed if I lost either of you, possibly in an irreparable sense. You balance each other, and therefore me. My angels. My happiness. It's all in you.
I'm also overfond of the ellipsis character. Then, that's nothing to do with this.
I don't know how the three of us will change, but I will never let you go. No matter what you do to me, I'm holding on. Fin, if you leave me and have children with some Swedish supermodel, I'll send them money. I'll sit in my closet and count the thread of every sweater and fill each one with a memory of you; I'll prick my finger a hundred times with my poker and watch the blood leak out if I thought it'd bring you back. I'd scream and run everywhere. I wouldn't be... able... to.... breathe.
But I'd still love you, Finley.
Katie, if you say the words I fear you will someday--ones I am too afraid too write, even here, even for you--I will seriously curl up into a ball and cry. Fetal position all the way. I'll find you in every glance at every object, from a globe to old cartoons, and my eyes will well up. I will draw my bitten-down nails over my arms, just trying to find what leaning against you when I was lost felt like--because Finley, no matter how I love him, is and always will be different. I would not see or hear, or want to do so.
But I'd still love you, Katie.
I wanted to write about me today. I wanted to write about so much, but looking back, I don't know what to say. I can't offer myself in a box, prettily wrapped. That's the trouble with boxes; no matter how lovely they are decorated, it's what's on the inside that counts.
What do I have on the inside, Katie? Finley? Finley? Katie?
....If you don't know, then I never will.
And nobody else does aside from God--who, as I understand, will be a glorious secret keeper for a very, very long time.
What is my soul REALLY like....?
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