Cruel Mistress

Lots of people love me, some more than I'm comfortable with. I don't know, it's just an effect I seem to have on people I meet in bus stations. It can be intense and scary, but I'm mature enough to know that phase of a relationship can't last forever. Eventually they get dragged to the ground by six security guards or their haldol kicks in and I'm all alone again.

No matter what the chemical cocktail involved, whether it's naturally hormonal or a state-mandated forced injection followed by a 48-hour involuntary hold for observation, at some point the untamed course of flowing time is going to smooth off those sharp edges of possession and lust until you're left with a perfectly round, mirror-smooth ball of glass-grade sand. And over time you'll collect several of those grains until you can use the relative heat of your passion to forge them into a jewel to dazzle all who could stand to stare at the animated, kaleidoscope refractive essence of your love in all it's light-bending glory. Or into a jagged shard just long and sharp enough to jam into one of your eye sockets. You know, depending on how things are going.

As another Valentine's Day arrives, it calls to mind for me all the times I've been on any of the various ends of the coupling spectrum: unloving and unloved; loving and unloved; unloving and loved; and, finally, loving and loved. I'll be forty this year, which means I've had the time to develop the experiential empathy to keep me perfectly aware of how much romantic happiness--like pretty much all happiness really--has to do with blind luck and the clumsy fumbling of rough-handed serendipity. Knowing that always makes me incredibly hesitant to run out and openly celebrate Valentine's Day in the rare and fantastical instances when the circumstances in my life merited celebration. No matter what level of ignorant bliss I'm in, there's always a part of me, like the third eye of a really cranky Hindu that can only see in the cosmic shades of pity and cynicism and sanctimony, that is always aware of another party out there, silently watching, being reminded by my happy, callous example of the aching open wound left in the shape of what is missing from their own lives.

So I'm not going to do that here. You're not going to hear anything on this blog about the root-level sympathetic resonance ringing down to the strings of my DNA helices, singing like Darwin's own tuning fork as I oscillate and hum at a harmonic frequency I had heretofore thought was only possible in quantum theory or in a sweet-ass Boyz II Men song.

Because I've been all those things. Unloving and unloved, just alone in the welcoming embrace of self-contained darkness. There can be happiness and actualization when your needs match your reality in this limited way, but for those of us north of Asperger's on the autism scale, this is a holding pattern, a healing state usually, while we recover from one interpersonal disaster and begin to dare again to looking for another.

Loving and unloved is probably the most common state and the way a lot of us spend our early teen years and maybe all the way through our 20s, willing to extend ourselves with emotional risk while the peer group we're digging through for partners isn't yet equipped to return what's offered in a way that's as profoundly meaningful as what's being offered. And sometimes he's just not that into you, am I right? Where my girls at? You know what I'm talking about.

Please note also that this is the worst way to be married to someone.

Unloving and loved is I think a rarer state but the most fraught. What's worse than bearing someone else's affection when you're incapable or unwilling to respond in kind? Probably vegemite is worse, from what I understand, but I can't really speak to that first-hand. And this has almost never happened to me either, to be fruitlessly pursued. I'm usually pretty happy to dole out some fruit. It seems like this would be exactly as common as loving-and-unloved, as a logical flip-side companion state, but I find that things rarely work in that kind of machine symmetry. Somewhere in the world there's a shit-ton of surplus of misused, deflected or neglected affection just laying around. Probably Amsterdam. I hear everything's really good there. You can pin it on the hookers and the hashish if you want to, cynic.

Loving and loved is a weird accident. I'm not sure how anyone ever does it, to be honest. My lady-companion now, whom I met online, tells me she was days away from withdrawing completely from the cyber-trawling pool when we stumbled across each other. Our single-ness had overlapped one another's for years prior to that, on the same sites and the exact same physical distance we are from each other right now, and we had never managed to meet. It was just the right random mouse click after the right random search string on the right random day that made it all possible. It was then of course my boundless sexual charisma that then made the outcome as certain as Calvinist predestiny, but that first thing, that pebble, that mote that unleashed the avalanche was just luck.

And I think that sums up the way I feel, at this point in my life, the way most people can identify with: lucky to be faced with an avalanche?

I may have gone one metaphor too far.

Love you guys.