Made you look, you're a slave to a page in my rhymebook. That is correct, a slave to a page in thy rhymebook, a tepid note on an overall largely despondent version of oneself that is carefully conscripted by the one who has externally validated their internal moderations of who they believe you to be entirely. Potentially fictitious and likely salacious. In simple words, people are complicated, people are weird, people are nondescript, people are the centre of their universe, people are everything but predictable. When (if) we were written I sometimes pause and wonder if the weight of the many words conscripted in our DNA were measured with the understanding that they would carry so much of what defines us and what cannot be seen. Do they know their weight? Ruby Sparks. Who would we love if we had the chance to write the story all by ourselves? Who would they be and able to do had we the ability to just conceive them into a reality birthed by us? A human entirely dependent on your greatest ability and drastic lack of knowledge beyond the breadth/depth of your greatest aptitude. Who would we be if we were to discuss how we were loved, who they were able to love, what love is to them, why their background aligns with ours in a way that allows them to be with us, so many questions. If you were to ask me to write the descriptions of who I desire to be with and every part of their character, I would find myself gobsmacked and probably smacking you (imaginatively) for even suggesting that I could fathom the intricacies and unpredictability of human emotion. Maybe we try something easy, how about somebody who loves you unconditionally forever and forever? What does it mean to love unconditionally, and should it even be within the realm of worldly definition? If love can be described wholly and unconditionally, then can it be what it vows to be? Paradoxical potentially (or maybe my vocabulary is sorely limited). Are we prepared for the totality of what the spectrum of love may topple into, all that you must be prepared and unprepared to receive? Maybe that is a difficult one. An easier one may suffice, something inconsequential and not subject to the scorn of relativity/subjectivity (humanity). Somebody who is loyal to you, who stimulates you mentally with conversation, and makes you feel like the soil of conversation has made itself alive for this exact moment, every moment. What does that mean? I am not entirely sure. The allure on paper is magnificent, but once again as it shall remain a consistent theme within this arduously dull writing, we must ask what it means to encounter that. What it means to realize that in this multi dimensional world. To many of these inquiries, I remain as knowledgeable as this blank paper is to the next words that will be thrusted onto its ledgers. What do I know? I am aware that I have been hauntingly fraught by an image in my head which has plagued my ideals before seeing a human. In Florida, I dreamt of a love with red box braids, which coincided with the soul who I yearned to love (please, for the sake of this piece, allow the knowledge of confirmation bias to be suspended temporarily/tentatively) with that I had believed that our love would be inexorable, unending, inevitable, and all of the other non monocausal synonyms that mean timeless in an unending way, deeper than the breath we breathe. I sit behind this wall right now able to tell you that it did not work out, and not for the typically sought out reasons of allowing an ideal to blind you. It did not work out because I mentally broke down several times during the relationship and was met with an inevitability. What sustains/remains in the face of love when it changes its shape? Cathexis is a fancy word, so is infatuation, so is limerence, all very detailed words that are on the spectrum of love so that we do not conflate the all-seeing love with whatever we have when it ends. Disenchantment is the wrong word, I was given the reminder of what unending meant, and beyond that my heart which burnt so bright no longer had the same flame. I do not believe that somebody can fall out of love with somebody, because I love humans, and also because I do not think that we can just be propelled by fate upwards and downwards into arms of love and the lack of it (highly possible though, not counting it out). I do believe however that it changes shapes, we even have a whole phase classification for this type of thing. The honeymoon (never understood it, I would be irate if I saw a moon made out of honey. But I suppose it is an abstraction that allows two of nature's serenity and sweetness to share a jacket) phase being the easiest to experience, but definitely ending and very much bound to end. After that we must see what territory breath will allow us to fly into, how far will we go to continue to find the stars in the eyes of your universe even when space and time seem to be opposing you. When your mind is a whirlwind of calamity and uncertainty plagues you, is your love still there with you? To answer the question of how far, I soon discovered that I was not willing to go far at all to continue not just finding the stars in her eyes (I despise celestial abstractions for love, sometimes a little grounding would be nice, why is it always the moon and stars and seldom grounded, mundane, quotidien things to enrich our descriptions of love...is everyday life/synecdoche not good enough for metaphor). I discovered quickly how little I was willing to do, I became a hurricane in every way, and eventually becoming latched to a connection that we clearly shared as platonic friends with additional benefits. Not too long after breaking up I had one of my usual latent emotional storms and blocked her everywhere, ridding (horrible word) my life of everything related to her (not the pictures or the letters, what does that say about me). The idea of striking first before you are struck is ingrained in my brain, preemptive, I have mistaken proactivity with constant reactivity, and when it comes to the mercurial nature of emotions it has been established that it is damn near impossible to prepare (snow may show up in the summer and the scorching hot sun may come in the fall, and then the earth may just open up and swallow your entire family on a random tuesday, and maybe a flower may grow in a headphone. Emotions are weird). I believe that we could have been good friends had I not been literal excrement embodied, or maybe just remained in each other's mental orbits (there I go again, Jamaica Kincaid does such a good job at grounding reality into her words), instead I not only blocked her but did not make any attempts to rectify it until a year later when AGAIN I HAD ANOTHER LATENT/DELAYED EMOTIONAL STORM OF GUILT and messaged her (unwise). Did not go well (as any sane/rational person would anticipate, we spoke, but it ended with me waking up the next day no longer feeling as contrite as I had felt the day before and then making her feel bad for what I did to her...seriously crazy). I left Florida with another ghoul/caricature who was less vivid than the last. Lightskin (notice how this time pigment came first and not hair colour like the last time) and a face that only a soul could try to decode. WELL...if the ferris wheel of life's cosmic joke remains consistent, this vision/ideal of a human would coincide with somebody who I liked, right...yes, it did. This one is difficult because I still love her and I am not out of this storm, nowhere near (a storm I caused, I blocked her, yeah, I could change that). Anywho, my soul did recognize her, what I forgot was that we are still bound to this body and that we are human, one can only spend so much time in the ideal divined for them. In this human skin, I was many things that cannot be described as positive at all, I let the wounds of my last relationship cut her. I became subject to treatment that I recognized so well because I WAS THE ONE DOING IT BEFORE. The only difference is that I always have this sneaking suspicion when anybody uses mental health as a reason for anything, because I have been known to strategically use my own instability as a crutch and an excuse to avoid accountability. Using the atmosphere of mental health awareness as a way to mitigate the vitriol felt towards me and increase sympathy for something that I cannot/could not control (one might fairly ascertain that it is beyond my control. That would be true, but what is equally as true is that I do have a choice to live with it, as opposed to allowing it to overtake me...at least that is what I hope). I did feel a little hurt because I did feel like I was extending myself to catch her wherever she may have believed herself to fall, but that whenever I tried to share something with her that I liked without sounding forceful hoping that she would want to do it with me, I would be turned down. Which is funny because it is best characterized by me always sharing food with her, but whenever she offered to share food with me or eat with me I constantly denied it, leaving her to feel like I was not in the waters of love with her and unwilling to share...basically the same way I felt. We both were mirrors for each other's best and worst qualities, you know how they say that breaking a mirror is bad luck, well, we might have been better off if one of us broke the mirror and bluntly expressed how we felt, because based on our history with one another it would have left us feeling closer to each other. Which was another issue, I do not open up at all, I told her more about anything than I have ever told another person ever, ever, but the things that she desired to meet me in, I could never find myself able to let her in. Which mirrored how I felt about her sharing certain (or not sharing certain things) things. She may have told me more about her comfortably than she has ever told anybody, but she was hamstrung constantly by my negative responses towards her positive reinforcement (which was her being honest about how she felt about me) and that made her have to second guess every breath she took before she uttered anything, nobody should ever have to be made to feel that way, ever. I still remember when we FaceTimed for hours like little kids, giggling about our jealousies (no matter how unreasonable they were), her telling me about what I had done to worsen her feeling of jealousy for a fellow poet in her community. It was the first time I ever heard her express jealousy, up until that facetime call she had masked it with jokes about other hoes or something else that I cannot remember at the moment, but when we spoke she was so open with her words. Allowing herself to love in a way that she had vowed not to again, in a way that reminded her of her humanity and how much love does to her (sound familiar...sounds like another layer to the mirror). We spoke for so long that day, not using masking words, we even admitted to some toxic things that we felt towards other things or people (I even preposterously said that I was jealous of her bed because it got to be her rest for the night, that type of thing), we laughed for so long, but the best part was not just being honest, but allowing ourselves to be hurt by love, to express our hurt with love, and to be the best and worst of what love brings out of a person. I say this from afar (due to her being blocked) knowing that I do love her, but I am not good at consistently acting on a soulful knowing as opposed to emotion. If I do not FEEL like doing something, I will not do it. Remember that thing I said about relocating the stars in the eyes over and over and my unwillingness to do much there...here we are again, this time it was my realization that the stars do not always show themselves and with a person who is as emotionally unstable at times as I am, it is essential to not ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU FEEL. I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH, DISCERNMENT IS NECESSARY. Because feeling is so important to intuition and so much of what keeps us alive, the barrier between life and death. But it is also the carrier of the sword for your own heart, it can hold you hostage just as easily as it can liberate you. No better thing captures this than my dilemma with being able to see her, it was constant heartache and back and forth and back and forth, and I recognize that at the beginning of our friendship she always had to reach out to me in order to take adventures and I appreciated that because I am seldom capable of reaching out to people to go out with them. I hope that she knows how much that meant to me, and sadly when she got really busy and consumed with work, not as able to take those adventures as much and life just being life, slowly she stopped being able to reach out whimsically as she once did to meet up, and at a time when I should have been able to pick up for where she was struggling and plan meetups and seeing her I failed, or left things very vague and general allowing myself to say that FATE WILL FAVOUR US. I forgot that fortune tends to favour the bold (I THINK), and I was cowardly at every turn. The last thing I wanted was to become one of those friends who annoyed her like a kid always beckoning for her presence, ultimately for her to just want to rest, but she should have been comfortable enough being honest with me about when she did and did not want to see me because of her being too busy or just wanting to sleep or just being too busy and I should have been okay with understanding that and not taking it personally (very canadian thing to do) thinking that it was a sign of cascading demise that she would no longer love me and whatnot, and that like me not recognizing signs in my first relationship, I would see these ones too late and before I knew it she no longer wanted to see me and no longer loved me. I am not good at consistently feeling the desire to live, the desire to get out of bed, and the desire to do things or the desire to love...however, that cannot determine how I live my life and I want to do better for myself in living with my instability so that I allow my mind to be stronger than my emotions, consciously (whatever this means, because even in this we are littered with a plethora of subconscious phenomena that we cannot even process...let me stop, I have enough poetry about that already) making decisions even when I do not feel like it. I am sure that she would have understood and appreciated me more for doing so or even being honest about it...want to know why BECAUSE SHE WAS FORCED TO LEARN HOW TO HOLD SAND IN HER HAND AND CATCH THE RAINDROPS OF HER EMOTIONS TO GIVE HERSELF AND FAMILY WATER. OH MY GOSH WE ARE SIMILAR. Even if we never are anything more than (than) again, I love her. Making the effort is oftentimes hard. Very hard. Making conscious choices with what you do not know, or what you think you know, even harder. Falling on your hopefully caked and thick ass when life sits you down so that you can humble yourself is hard. Not anticipating swords in the place of loving fingers is hard. I will never be able to promise anybody that I will be able to be the epitome of neurotypical male hormone patterns (up during day and down during night), consistent, and I have to try to work with myself to be that person even when it hurts, especially when it hurts. Because it is in those moments that I struggle most. What if we wrote our lover and all that we wanted them to be, well, we might wind up writing everything that we lack within ourselves and need to love some more. Maybe. Again, I do not know. This is just a letter to be better. To be better. And a reminder, that it is hard to write people, our consistencies are riddled with inconsistencies and our inconsistencies...well, they are inconsistently inconsistent. Humans are weird.
ruby sparks is a dang horror movie disguised as a romance.
