the old-school guestbook archives
my amazon wish list... my favorite astrologer... my favorite artist... yerba mate revolution! erowid: a travel guide for interior journeys... no more war: MoveOn.org United for Peace and Justice True Majority seek the truth: Common Dreams Unamerican Activities The Nation people I adore, diaries I read: rev.raikes ariana cubiclegirl epiphany glitter333 laurakay wammo the music: the asylum street spankers backyard tire fire blue highway bill camplin wendy colonna freedom tribe joules graves guy forsyth band hamsa lila hanuman libby kirkpatrick leftover salmon pamela means medeski martin & wood the motet the nice outfit nickel creek open road rose polenzani railroad earth south austin jug band string cheese incident taarka tha musemeant the devil makes three tim o'brien band trolley wild sage keller williams yonder mountain string band |
love and heartache ~ November 27, 2002 - 11:58 p.m. I'm in oakland this week, house and dog sitting for ariana and andre. it's hard to tell you what I'm feeling, because I'm feeling too many things at once. it's like vietnam. how can I explain? I am swimming with words, but nothing comes clear. I have loved ariana for years now, from even before that first delirious hot summer night filled with poetry and potsmoke and thunderstorms. three of us that night, breathless and ecstatic and dripping wet, peeling off each other's soaked clothes and laughing as we fell joyfully into each other. that night. I still smile when I remember. and then she and I grew closer, close as sisters and then closer still. we could share all the secrets buried deep within our skins, we could trust each other with bruised and tender hearts. we were there, for each other, always. the first time since heather I've known a soul that resonated so deeply with mine. and there were hurt feelings and heartbreaks, but each time we healed; each time we found each other again. I was one of her forever people, one of only two. she called me home. I called her my heart. my touchstone. the one who saw in me all the best things I want to believe about myself. and then she fell in love. really, truly, deeply fell. and I was joyful, with her, for her. I delighted in her partner, in the radiance of them together. the day I met andre, I was sick and lying in ariana's bed. the day after my first date with ozone, the day I threw up all day long. andre put her hand on a pressure point just like that. she told me to eat rice. I loved her on sight. and then I became entangled with ozone, snarled in his sickness and a love like drowning. I fell into the darkness and I called for my sister, my love. and she wasn't there. for the first time ever, I called out through the pain and heard only the lonely sound of my own voice, boxed into the cold, hard place I couldn't seem to find the energy to break free of. and so my heart broke. and each time I reached out into nothingness, my heart broke some more. and I don't know how it is I'd come to believe that I wouldn't be alone down that road, because I always have been, and always will be, in the end. and there is that part of me that loves my solitary strength. the lioness stalking silently through the night. but there is also that bruised and tender corner of my heart, that aching and weary child who wishes, just wishes, that it didn't come down to all alone in the end, every time. and it must be that bruised and tender place that has allowed my heart to break again and again, every time I've reached out and had no answer. even long past my ability to hope for it. for eight months I tried to see ariana. and of course I did break free of his sickness after all, struck out for the mountains where I found family enough to hold my torn and tattered heart while I healed. I found breath and spirit and wild stretches of road, learned to love again, to laugh again, to trust. but always I've missed her, the absence like an ache that wouldn't be forgotten. eight months of unreturned phone calls, and the ever sharper soreness of heartbreak, until I couldn't think her name without tears catching in my throat. so much hurt, that even now as I sit writing in her room, I don't dare to call her found. can't find the faith to believe that there's an end to aloneness. but neither can I say that I don't understand, because I have, every moment of the way. because I am the same, because I disappear on those I love deeply again and again. and because I can't get a grip on time, eight months, ten months, years may pass before I call again. and the love is no less for silence, for distance, for time. and so. and so I don't know what to feel, with my heart so broken by a woman I do so love, in such a way as I have broken many hearts before. or imagine that I have. and I know it's just that I was attached to those days, that blessed stretch of time when I had my own keys and I was always welcomed into her heart, any time of the day or night. it felt like something more than alone. it felt like home. and now the road calls me, and calls me still, in spite of my efforts to slow the momentum, to find a place where I might, even for a moment, take root. so now I pace restlessly through the house of their love, too hard now to know what to feel, too filled with wild distances and heartache. and I'm missing her, it's true, as I've missed her for a year now-- but stranger still is the real and present ache for that scarred and tender land I've left barely a week behind me. I'm missing vietnam. and I don't know how to explain, except to tell you that I loved her on sight, the richness of her culture rolling on my tongue with the taste of her thick, black coffee. her scars and her strengths and her imperfections. I love vietnam, because her love for me is not unconditional, and because she is not mine to hold. I found a moment of peace in vietnam, floating in the middle of nowhere with a golden-brown boy who sang to me and told romantic stories so sweet that I didn't care if they were true. I found devastation there too, a history of pain so deep it laid waste to my emotional landscape, tore me open with unforgiving truths. I found sickness in vietnam, and heartache, love, beauty, survivor cunning and madness. I loved vietnam in a way I never expected to, and with a passion that surprised me. in spite of it all. because of it all. and I'm just now feeling all of this, as I walk through the clean and ordered streets of the new world in which I was born, the prettyfied plastic storefronts and carefully manicured lawns like something seen on tv. I'm feeling too much to know what it is I'm feeling. I'm watching movies: good morning vietnam, apocalypse now, and I'm looking for something, but I don't know what. something with substance; something I can put my arms around. something that moves me; the way vietnam moved me, the way ariana moved me. my back is strong, my feet are road-callused and tough, but still, I'm looking for something to hold on to. even knowing that everything falls apart, sooner or later, that everyone disappears one way or another. that my path will always lead me to walk alone again in the end. still and all, I can't seem to stop looking for something to call home.
(((rings))) |