The Stockdale Paradox. The crucible, the signpost, the guide. How do you hope and yearn to sustain life, just enough to stay alive, without wanting so much that your heart breaks when you hit the rough patches, the shifting crevasses. How can you keep yourself from taking your heart and putting it somewhere safe, in a jewelry boxed tight, in the gauzy future, wishing and hoping and praying that the sadness will end? How to take the localized hope that you'll realize your goal, and pull it so wide across the rest of time that you can hope beyond the dashing of your hope? How do you do that without ripping it, and tearing at yourself in the process?
How can you possibly have enough strength to hold onto your faith in the face of evidence that your faith is meaningless and always was? A dull and terrifying void. How do you hate just enough to stay alive, but love just enough to be human in the end? How to walk the edge of the razor without becoming one; to burn off your loss without burning off your soul in the process? When they take away even the idea of completion, commencement, the lie of meaning, the black stone and the white; when you're looking at the negative space where the future used to be, how do you remember how to stay alive? What do you do when you can't get out? You climb.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
The lock and the key
You change, he changes; maybe it was this way, always.
When it’s over you can never quite remember how you ended up all alone again. Where you began, and he ended. The slippery jagged parts in between.
You can’t recall the precise details, the slivered daggers of the exchange: you are left with the bloodied hands of one who has hit unfairly and without impunity. It feels dirty; it feels raw. But at least you feel.
And then one day you can't remember the smell of his workout t-shirt, much less why you fell so hard in the first place. Your murmuring dialogue, your witty repartee, they exist nowhere- they are ghostlike- party to only your wandering, singular, and desparately alone mind.
But sometimes, just in a wondrous, heartbreaking moment, you remember his long slender fingers on the piano, or his devilish smile, or the night you went skinnydipping (twice), and discovered a magical forest coming alive at dawn. But these, like all precious things, become fewer and farther in between.
And somehow that sweat-stained tshirt is (somehow) locked in the chest underneath your bed: that prized relic, that cherished memory.
When it’s over you can never quite remember how you ended up all alone again. Where you began, and he ended. The slippery jagged parts in between.
You can’t recall the precise details, the slivered daggers of the exchange: you are left with the bloodied hands of one who has hit unfairly and without impunity. It feels dirty; it feels raw. But at least you feel.
And then one day you can't remember the smell of his workout t-shirt, much less why you fell so hard in the first place. Your murmuring dialogue, your witty repartee, they exist nowhere- they are ghostlike- party to only your wandering, singular, and desparately alone mind.
But sometimes, just in a wondrous, heartbreaking moment, you remember his long slender fingers on the piano, or his devilish smile, or the night you went skinnydipping (twice), and discovered a magical forest coming alive at dawn. But these, like all precious things, become fewer and farther in between.
And somehow that sweat-stained tshirt is (somehow) locked in the chest underneath your bed: that prized relic, that cherished memory.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
nails hammer heart
I think that true, deep love doesn't make you act crazy. Or insane or infatuated or tear-your-hair out jubilant. The reason we act crazy when we are infatuated is because we want it to be authentic so terribly - if we could, we would jump over the distance of wrenching time that makes real love what it is. We would dismiss the desperate clawings of the heart, the jealous sudokus of the mind- we would tear through painful barriers with a trapeze artist's sense of artistry. It both blinds and pulls at us so urgently, so insistently.
Maybe this is just a want and desire to catapult oneself into the future. Maybe that's the trick of romance: that crazy infatuation love is so much brighter and captivating and turns so many more sharp corners so quickly.
The headshaking exhilaration of bumper cars, did I just do THAT? You, 19, and I am 22. Now. I love you, you love me. Easy. I am here, now.
Much more exciting than the real thing. But I think real love, at its finest, makes you feel like you are bursting open, like this. Like hearing a beautiful song, or reading a beautiful poem, or hearing a wonderful story, and the tears come and you don't know precisely why.
It doesn't hurt; it hurts in a way that isn't hurting, that we don't have a word for. Largeness. Enormity. Expansive beauty. It takes a real strength, a real grace, to stand up straight in the face of that. Especially if you're not familiar with it. And I am not, but somehow in losing you, my love, I can see it so sharply and clearly, and it burns my eyes and sears my heart: I love you, I love you, I love you.
Maybe this is just a want and desire to catapult oneself into the future. Maybe that's the trick of romance: that crazy infatuation love is so much brighter and captivating and turns so many more sharp corners so quickly.
The headshaking exhilaration of bumper cars, did I just do THAT? You, 19, and I am 22. Now. I love you, you love me. Easy. I am here, now.
Much more exciting than the real thing. But I think real love, at its finest, makes you feel like you are bursting open, like this. Like hearing a beautiful song, or reading a beautiful poem, or hearing a wonderful story, and the tears come and you don't know precisely why.
It doesn't hurt; it hurts in a way that isn't hurting, that we don't have a word for. Largeness. Enormity. Expansive beauty. It takes a real strength, a real grace, to stand up straight in the face of that. Especially if you're not familiar with it. And I am not, but somehow in losing you, my love, I can see it so sharply and clearly, and it burns my eyes and sears my heart: I love you, I love you, I love you.
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