We Were the Sunrise

Your room was cold when we sat down and decided to let each other in. You don't know this-- have no way to know-- but every man that has shared a bed with me has received similar words from me. We sit on the bed and not the couch. The room is never as cold, and I'm never as kind. But the message is the same. I have strict barriers, I am willing to let you partly in, nothing else is available for negotiation, take it or leave. They never leave. Not once. I didn't, either. I said what you wanted to hear even though I am irremediably open to you. You kissed me. It is once again you unto me. It is at this point that I usually already know how deep the other person will fall, and in response will take the necessary precautions, set up some contentions, shield them from unnecessary harm. I protect them from the unstoppable force I am. It is true that I sometimes miscalculate, underestimating at the earlier stages what will end up being, on their end, deeper and more involved than I initially thought. I regret the pain that follows, knowing that I could have avoided at least part of it, but also knowing that the heart is resilient, that they will eventually move on. What has never so far happened, M, is the opposite. I have never been unable to establish the temperature of someone's heart, and be able to estimate the potential for breaking it, the amount of care they will unleash on me, the extent to which they (and I) need to be safeguarded against. Until you.

I say that you are difficult to read, but what I mean is that I have not yet learned your language. I do not yet know how to translate your silences and pace into my own way of articulating the world, and so it all seems alien to me, unreachable. You say things, but not to me. Your voice is sheltered, kept safely tucked inside your fortress. And yet. I wonder if it’s this way with every one, with all bodies. It is childish and futile, and still, I wonder. You held me like I was a strand of silk so delicate that it could break at the lightest touch. You cherished me, praised in silence the complex creature that I am, drank me in, slowly and deliberately. You don’t yet love me, but you loved me that night. You were molten honey, warm gold trickling down my tongue, we were the sunrise. My body is a collection of musical notes that need to be sung in two voices. We were a melody, M, resonating in unison, reverberating off each other in perfect rhythm.

Utopia is not a place but a verb. There is no destination, only the daily journey, the restless work of building that other world. If love is not a goal but a work in progress, then we made love that night, M. And for that, I thank you.

On Turning Tables

It's been long. Long since I've been touched. We hadn't, not once. Do you want to come home with me, he said. I'm neither young nor prude, and yet. He is full of firsts. Like this question. In my strange corner of the universe, where normative protocols have been put to sleep and an altogether different set of rules applies, this question shocked me in its simplicity. Not for its content, but for the absolute unexpectedness of its implications. I wanted to say, boy I have not rehearsed this part of the script will you give me a few minutes to recompose myself. Boy please allow me to walk back, and in reverse learn to thread a narrative about you and I that logically leads to this moment so that I can fit it within my inner mechanisms of defense and control and fear. Am I fearful of coming home with you tonight, M, or am I afraid of the fact that it was you who asked the question? You see, I've been too used to being the pursuer, to dictating the confines and definitions, the boundaries and restrictions. I've been used to deciding, selecting, choosing, claiming. Love is exception-making, and I am lucky to at least have this maxim to lead me in the unexplored territory that this journey seems to paint. It is terrifying. It is also a quiet form of relief. For once, I will have to brake, to pause, to listen. Oh M, be careful with my heart dear boy, be careful with my love.

I said I'd love to. Your house was cold. You gave me water and talked about books. You said they felt like home. I know you one day will, to me. A says I should write this down to memorialize it, because one does not often find, despite spending a lifetime searching. I do. I find like I found you, M. Coming from the farthest extremes of life, said Baricco, we would have had to cross the entire universe by foot, and instead, we did not even have to look for each other. And this is the part I like, M, about Baricco. This is the part that still resonates with me, so many years later. All we had to do was recognize each other. This is the thing-- you are never too far, never, to find each other. We were, farther than any others. But I recognized you. This is almost all that I'm good at. Recognizing in someone else's gestures and words and silences the potential of a person I could love. It is not love at first sight-- love must of course be built, worked, shaped, kneaded, polished. It is recognition at first sight, and the rest of it is up to us. I recognized you at first sight. I knew from that first night that there was someone inside you I could one day love. And perhaps I won't, but more important than the uncertain and precarious future is this knowledge, that you and I crossed paths and across the room saw each other despite coming from the very opposite sides of existence.

Firsts

He kissed me before leaving. He kissed me twice and I didn't ask him to.

The night was long and my dreams peppered with visions of strangers. We had the fan on but it was not enough to fight off the impossible heat that has assaulted the streets of the city these past few summers. The dog woke us up more than once, his nametag hitting against the floor, a metallic screech that in the midnight stupor of sleeplessness sounded a lot like the little spoon in Ojos de Perro Azul. I looked at his eyes more than once. I even stared into them. What I never allowed myself to do with N, last night I did. And I found kindness. I found a tender question mark, a light and unserious realization that he liked me. It's been such a foreign feeling. Almost half a year of healing, and it still feels new and somewhat out of place, to be so liked so naturally and without conflict.

There was no mystery tonight. There was no pretending or calculated contentions or fenced off areas that I could distractedly wander into and then find myself being interrogated by a firing squad, tried and charged and prosecuted for wanting to feel close to another human being. I never felt undeserving. The idea had not even entered my thoughts until now that I write these lines and remember the world I used to live in. Remember the deep uneasiness of knowing that in his mind I was not, ever, deserving of closeness, condemned to be eternally out of place, always aiming too high, out of bounds, daring to ask for something that was beneath him.

I had forgotten what it was like. To be held like I'm a piece of precious china. To have every inch of my body treasured, explored almost with a sense of reverence. To cherish the skin I inhabit and never tire of it. I feel grateful and it feels strange to feel grateful for being treated with tenderness. It feels strange to have been walking around in pieces for so long and realize that I feel whole again, that I can be whole with myself in the company of another and I will not break in the process. There is still so much I don't understand, so many spaces that remain dark and so few words to name them, that I am often only guided by my intuition and the irremediable need to have confidence that others will fill the blanks for me.

I am still not able to trust and I doubt I ever will like I used to. I doubt I should. But I also don't want to make my way through life in that untrustworthy and ever-suspicious way of N's, assuming culpability where there was no act to judge to begin with, always looking over one's shoulder, doubtful of every word and every step and every action even of the person closest to you. It is sickening. It is toxic. He may call it safe but I have the unarticulated and unexplored sensation that to carry such deep distrust pollutes the mind to a point where it is unable to establish healthy and sustainable relationships with self and others. This is still a crude reflection, one of the many lacunae in my understanding of what happened these past years, but I want to hold on to it as the sun begins to rise on this, the first day that I woke up next to a man other than N. I want to hold on to it because last night felt lighter and healthier and more loving than our whole relationship did, and there's a lesson hidden in there that I am yet too blind and hurt to see. I received, in the course of a day, more affirmation and validation and care and consideration and tenderness than I did for months with N, perhaps for the whole time we were together. He, E, said things that I never once heard during that time. Never, not once. He said them with no shame or guilt and it is strange to be liked without shame or guilt.

I am not looking for love. My heart is not yet ready to love again. But this brings me one step closer to healing. This sharing myself and seeing in the eyes of another person the things I can not yet see in myself. Loving myself through their reflection, because self-love has been denied to me for so long that I am relearning it from others. Unlearning the hurtful practices I adopted as only means to defend what little I has left of me.

Oh dear, the path of recovery seems so long and windy. I'm terrified. There is no roadmap to heal from abuse, is there? Only lighthouses here and there, kind hands and warm hearts, lucid allies, and sometimes, loving lips that kiss you even when you've forgotten how to ask for it.

To Fenix Luna,

It's time for me to write again. I lost practice years ago, perhaps since that exercise with J in 2012, finally my brother J. It has been, then, almost three years since I last gave voice to my words. Nothing to do but go back to daily discipline. I tend to think that time has somehow slipped by, and it's true: some of it is irretrievable, but perhaps I'm still on time, Fenix, on time to reopen that conduct. It's not so much that my voice asks for it, but that today I can find the words. It has been a while since I last felt them flow with such lightness, time since I last felt such consistent access to that well that expands far within me. Expectedly, just like in the past, the trigger of this moving period of inspiration is a man. Practice has taught me that these things never last, that all clouds are destined to dissolve, eventually, into water, into storm or light rain, it doesn't matter, but one must eventually land on firm ground again. I then want to--have to-- seize this moment of stillness, this space on the border of time, this line on the limits of experience, to express to myself certain affirmations that will one day be reminders. So that I know that it is true, that it is possible, that it is worth it, that the world can be--sometimes is-- beautiful. Beautiful. I want to ensure that, on the day I look back, once this is all over, I will be unable to deny any part of it. I want to ensure that when that day comes, I will have no option but to feel, more than any other thing, gratitude. It has been a gift, life of mine, a privilege of indescribable dimensions. And it all starts with a man named N.

Equal.

For N.

Truth is, I want to chain you to my body. Since day One. It's true, there's no such thing as love at first sight. It's not love. It's something more akin to recognition. So what about changing the old "I fell in love with you at first sight" for a "I recognized you at first sight"? It's prettier, simpler, truer. I did, I recognized you at first sight. In the course of an instant. I recognized the way you talked, the way you walked, the things you said. There are no surprises in life is my new motto. There are only surprised people. From then on, after Day One, it was all pretty much announced. This letter that I never wrote and the ones that will follow. The nights spent breathing in your pheromones, those that you warned me, since the start, that I'd become addicted to. Oh, and I did. But not then, N. I did so much earlier, since the very beginning, since that first night drinking chai tea and giving you an unnecessary ride home, because you lived so close anyway. It was hanging there behind every silence, awkward, latent, waiting. I knew it, you knew it, we each knew that the other knew it. And yet. Latent, waiting. I see you. It is less terrifying than I thought it'd be. It feels. Lighter. Like a resolution. Like a sigh of relief. It feels light. N, I say to myself. Just that, just your name. N. And somehow, I am able to face the world again with strength. So I have to thank you. For the mere fact of your impossible existence. For the eyes of green silence that see so many things invisible to me. For your hands. For your quietude. For allowing me to care for you in the smallest, least intrusive way I could find. For the gift that it is to know that I've met my equal.

Pepper

For P.

I packed your spices today. I wrapped them in that scarf your sister gave me last winter, a discarded gift that someone else gave her over the holidays and she did't want to keep. In their place, the place where the spices used to stand, across from my bed, first thing I saw in the morning, in their place I put The Fountainhead. I pinned it to the wall, so that it's floating, half open, staring at me before going to bed, the first thing I see when I wake up. I packed away your letters and the few things you still left behind after our final farewell. Plane tickets. Those cheap earrings you got for my sisters at the artisans market because I refused to let you buy something expensive. The postcard that your lover, the one who triggered the end of us, sent me as a response to the gift I got her, those expensive earrings I got for the woman you shared a bed with during my absence. She got those earrings from me, and a few hours later went to bed with you, and a few days later wrote me a thank you note, and a few months later we broke. Funny, how life operates. The box is sitting outside my door. I still haven't decided what to do with it. Who knows, one night I might feel adding some extra pepper to my stew.

Beyond the Looking Glass

Beautiful man, eyes of an epistolary castaway,

I have to let you go. And you are entitled to know why. There are many things you don't know about me, partly because I don't let you see them and partly because the time we've spent together has been so short, so short-lived. The truth is that I had no plans for your snowy beard to bring winter home so early in my life. That I am not as strong as I let other people see, that I was born a nocturnal butterfly and I have not yet understood how to turn back into a human. I am fragile, breakable, easy to dismantle into black pieces like the ones in that puzzle we have been unable to put back together. I am too selfish to share my universe with someone else, too caught up in my own insanity, too afraid of being alive. I have no place for you in my world. It is a world of shadows where I've given up the prospect of hope. It is a world of loneliness and late nights, of waking up to an empty bed and a single breakfast. This is the life I have chosen. A life too small to share with someone else. And you are big, beautiful man, larger than I can be. You are made of one piece, and this is what I like of you. You are not pretentious in the knowledge of your greatness like I am; you strive to be better every day. These are things that I have given up as lost for myself, and I don't have the energy or the heart to look for them again. I, Angela Anais Nin, am the most tired woman in the world, and you require an effort that I cannot make. 

I want to sleep alone again, beautiful man, without the warmth of your body to keep my delirious nightmares at bay. I want to see the world on my own again, without the map of possibilities printed on your lips. I want to stay in a library until midnight until my eyes are drunk with ink, and come home tired but fulfilled. I am living a half, a double life, and I am not large enough a person to contain it within myself. I have to let you and your beauty go. If this had been different, if my purpose in life was other, if anything but committing fully to my path could make me feel at peace. In that world, you and I would have loved each other. In a world in which I deserved and looked for happiness, in which I was entitled to it, you and I would have made each other happy. We would have gone together anywhere we wanted. We would have had a family if I loved the world enough to believe in them. We would have laughed at the past and wondered at the future. I would not have held back any words, any gestures, any thoughts. We would have known it all. In a different world you were meant for me and I for you, like those silly stories that I've always made fun of. In a world that I will not let myself know. But that is not the world or the life I have chosen for myself. So I must let you go, you, the most beautiful man I've come across.

I will not lie to you in this, the farewell letter that you will never read. I will say, then, that it's true that I need to be loved, even though I was unable to admit it before. I am too used to being loved to understand this new place where I am not. I have been too spoiled, too cared for by past lovers, to settle for less than what I've had. I have seen eyes dark as a wolf's mouth that say they'll go insane if they lose me. And they will not, but they think they will, and that's enough. I have kissed mouths fragile as a city of glass that say I'm The One. Like in those silly stories I make fun of. And I'm not, and there's not a One Perfect Half waiting for you behind the next door. But they swear to themselves that I am, and it's enough. See, I love myself too much, beautiful man, to let you get away with not loving me. I never needed you to give anything up for me, but knowing that you would, that you would be willing to, would have been enough. It is easy, really: I deserve to be loved. And knowing this soothes, somewhat, the premonitory pain of knowing I'll lose you, you the one that turned the tables on me, the one who makes me believe that there's something worth fighting for when I wake next to you and see that there's still beauty in this broken world of ours.

So goodbye, beautiful man eyes of a wounded star.