Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Interlude: Pretenders and the Same Old Ba-Doom

A (Necessary?) Detour, in the midst of the most productive spell of writing in my life, for we cannot always awaken with the one story in our mind, alone, when we are keeping another haunting one at bay.
You have to be grateful of each person who stays in your iife to keep the circulation of memories, for it is difficult when someone partakes of feelings and experiences with you and then leaves without keeping the circuit alive. It can be so much more difficult to accept those things, so warm and beautiful to you, the foundation, you think, of lasting lifelong associations and emotions, has siphoned your generation of that light, gobbled it down, and vanished into darkness with their false pretenses.
It’s June 5, 2013 and I am about to write the section of our romance novel/ memoir where love is made for the first time, and I am glad that person’s still here to share that part of our lives and make love anew. That is such a treasure! The 18,000 words written for this book are the culmination and integral part of a healing process, by which the emptiness inside me, from having this lover-to-be ripped out of my phenomena, has lost its depressive grip and by now, my desperate efforts to make something more of the girl than the stubborn, lazy , selfish liar she proved to be. I’m sorry that it is my sleep that was disturbed, broken by lying awake, even as I try to fix that schedule, but I realize the keyboard may well have been my ally more quickly, save that I did not wish to ruminate on rueful realizations. If that dose of alliteration does not reveal the lightness and strength that has come to replace that lengthy sadness, let me assure the reader that Dawn’s awakening and kisses and imitation of the bear that copies Finn in the Adventure Time episode, and really, her smile as I kissed her so many times over, has set a tone by which I am less the sufferer and more the witness.
From a wider vantage point of life, I see much more unhappy results pursuant to romance, and must admit that love, so important to me, is not a safe haven for many people, on one hand. Those people may not have the depth to provide such a harbor, and it is difficult for those who wish to make it so but suffer from the inconstant choice of a partner. This happens in person, in relationships that tie up years of experience. So, to have lost a love who was more of an idea (and a love existing as an ideal can be indefatigable in persistence, such as in the mind of Fiorentina Ariza in Love in the Time of Cholera ; not every Fermina Daza pays off at the end of a long wait), who may have never fooled us so in person for very long, whose reality may not have resulted in such a lingering hangover for me as I tried to persuade her better angels, is something of an indictment of Internet “love”, yet no less a result of my overactive imagination, and practically, a mid-life crisis, generated by both hope to reach people and live a dream and share love in a unique and empowering way that’s almost never seen, and an irrational touch of envy for that experience.
It’s obvious that experience is the wealth I crave most of all, yet, in appreciation and evaluation, the methods of truth, I have to take it for what it really is. The time will come that a new book will blossom forth from the roots of the one I write these days, the essential tree of love that allowed this failed effort to flourish for a time and not cost us the life of the tree itself. It will only succeed if I wrap my words in the illusion and its beautiful potential, as well as the reality, so beautiful yet tinged with bitterness. The sincerity of Kaja has been very nearly erased, unless she is mad, and it seems a form of insanity nonetheless to put on such a love and then leave it untouched like so much rotting fruit on the vine. However, the lies with which she nourished its existence---and there has been, upon so very many pleas, a parsimony of words on her behalf to explain it otherwise---meant that fruit would never be tasted, and worse, no seed could be culled from that fruit, with which to grow something more lasting. Such is the experience of love for so many.
Still, I have painfully relived the joys of those times for the sake of reviving in her the desire to make it so, all-too-many times by now, and held on through what was very nearly a nervous breakdown for both Anj and I. She was alert to the falsity of the situation and accepted this quickly, however much she would miss what she thought, was. How maddening it was for her that I so longed to defeat that astral parasite that Kaja will not shed. She does, it seems, prefer to play with it and give her the good bed while she sleeps beside it on the cold floor.
For Kaja, it was a relationship made of too many lies and too little care, for her investment to require its salvation. Not enough time has passed for me to relive the arc of our converged existence as I felt it. She seems to view any wisdom in redemption of this thing as without value, an experience easily forgotten and replaced by something that may yet be undermined by these same character defects, such as we all discover until we complete some of the stages of this work upon ourselves. I can’t claim to be a paragon, myself. For all my studied seriousness, I haven’t always had the optimism for the task itself, or the hunger for its rewards. We have to snap out of the funk, though!
The more fruitful experience, meanwhile, has been to revisit the origins of our love and make it my imaginary existence, hoping to envelop my time more with that and less with my recriminations or evaluations of what was, in essence, a kind of robbery and inspiration and overall tease of cruel proportions, alleviated only somewhat by the banishment of desire.
The lovely girl she pretended to be for us remains ensconced, for now, in memory, where she retains her powers delegated to her being by our shared love. The headstrong person of that uncharitable description I made earlier proves to this day to be not someone capable of participating in our happiness, and, I suspect, diabolically and diametrically opposed to her own, which seems to be based on an unassailable passion for accepting her own perfection, so common to we creatures. Some measure of doubt and examination persuades soul, that intangible quality that carries with it love and enriches the quality that suffuses talents, but there are many people in this world whose greed and mendacity craves fleeting satisfactions. It’s endemic to the animal nature, I suppose.
The value of building character to be something more, with humility and honesty about the pain that went into that building, will I hope resonate in what more I have to say and show. Forgiveness granted with the desperate wish for a better person is a common form of existential crisis, and if it’s invested in a person ready to see the light, its rewards are practically divine. Only when the redeeming qualities of a person simply cannot be turned your way, by their own choice, should you grant the forgiveness---to cease your own torment at that part of yourself in them that you despise, and hatred of yourself for giving it---then busy yourself with more productive associations and activities, including simple meditation and opening to purpose.

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