Here's a pic of zoo
Writing poems is cheesy tho
…so I’ll have to end here and return to prose…..
this pikki of Zoo – is coz it was bastille day and she was in red white and blue (ok – red and blue and black – but with her white skin – she looked a tricolour treat)
and zoo was part of the late nite- early morning fun and madness at kooky , and zoo write things on her blog as I think them and vice versa – and zoo is my favourite breakup buddy and we have this strange crossover of words, and dressups and tears and absolute silliness that is divinely beautiful, and helps me to love my life.
At the moment I love my life and my friends so desperately that my mouth waters. At times my life is more brilliant and brave than any of my wildest dreams – and its not so much me – as having good – no great people around me. And my world is filled with colour and light and madness and hugs and sheer mad joy…. A lot of the time.
And so I’m sad and shocked to spend so much time feeling so incredibly sad – which is how I have felt in the past week. As soon as I stop the mad whirl, the crazed rush into the light, I sit and get filled with gloom and hell and sobs. I spent the past week hibernating. Sleeping 12 hours a day, I dreamt about waking up on the Boulevard Michel with blocked ears and my backpack – looking for ear candles and finding only bookshops. Wondering why the fuck I was in Paris, where I don’t want to be, don’t want to remember, don’t want to return to….
When I woke up from the dream above, my ear left ear was blocked and I thought of My Favourite Consort Cure – and beery ear candling in blighty – where my ears and chest were blocked with phlegm so much of the time…. Yesterday, my chest was blocked again. My Favourite Consort Cure put her hand on my chest and felt the grief, tried to massage it out and felt her own eyes fill with tears. I was blocked, numb, dumb with pain. Eyes just sad, mumbling…. Eventually I shed a few tears and we cried and cuddled and slept.. then we woke up, hung out with the posse, freaked up, went out dancing and laughing.
Me: madly - when life is unbearable I 'cope' by putting on a mask - by pushing myself in extremis into something else... wearing a wild and scary mask, dancing out every fukking fibre of pain. No I wasn't drunk, I wasn't high, I don't need to be - I just need movement, madness, to be suspended in something while my own dervish tears itself apart.
And so, today i woke up with a rash on my chest where her hand had been, and a nasty sinus migraine from where i should have cried. I walked into the sunshine, went to a rally, chatted with friends, bought fruit at paddies, came home and collapsed.
tonight - another nice synchronicity. zoo's latest posting strangely echoed my own dillemma. One would think that being held in such an incredible network of sexy brilliant freaks, of close human contact, of being able to fuck people I love, and love people I fuck and not be jealous or neurotic but happy and open and confident, and be surrounded by people who i love - and no I don't have to fuck all of them or even most of them, and no - i'm not sex addicted either - but just lucky enough to be in a very nice couple of spaces at the moment - that I'd be *happy* and not pining after something that in many many ways I was glad to get out of.
then i wonder what it was that My Favourite Consort Cure cured me of in the first place, and why she can't cure me of this other thing - the wife life syndrome - this old scarred shadow under my skin, in my hands, in my mouth, in my tits, sometimes even in my vagina - that as much as I try to shake, fuck, dance, kiss, fantasize, laugh, shit and weep it out of me is still there.
I associate My Favourite Consort Cure with relief, with movement, with life and my sheer joy to be no longer in love with or heartbroken by the consort - to be unrebounding - to no longer be flailing in the space of heartbreak and lurching into another one. I am so glad to share sex and friendship and intimacy and honesty and pain in a SANE way - that is caring, that is intimate, that IS trusting and intense but doesn't have this clinging girl need to be taken and fused and remade with someone else. I can and do walk and dance on my own feet, and so do my other lovers. we don't hold hands in the street. this is a relief. we do dirty dance and pash on the dance floor. (sometimes wiht each other) this is a delight.
and i wonder how the hell Abel got so deeply inside of me, - actually no i don't I remember how - and I vow - please god don't let that happen ever again.... or at least not to me....
then I get scared and sad and scared again that i'll never get over her unless I do fall for someone like that again - that I do open up and fuse myself into another mummy/baby dyad. As much as my ovaries are screaming at me to breed - and my uterus twitches at the smell of lactation and the sight of infants - the fact is, I feel incredibly releived NOT to have or be anyone else's 'baby' at the moment.
I feel relieved to stand on my own feet - not to cling or be clung to - that i want to have this, hold this, enjoy this sensation for just a little bit longer, while I grow just a little bit older.
but growing older *hurts*. If I sit still, I fall back into memory, sensation and loss. I sit mired in the past and this stupid, stupid state that I wish I didn’t feel anymore. sometimes I feel so much pain that I don't know where it ends and where I begin. I don't know how to end the marraige - how to move on and separate her from my being. It's not only the joint wills and immigration files under the bed, it's not only the boxes and boxes and cupboards of photos, letters, notes, drawings, postcards, objects accumulated together. It's not only the music, the language, the injokes - the mad flights between languages. It's not only clothes that I've worn that she's worn, the sheets, the furniture, the objects the spaces.... everything here that is linked to our shared life.that's OK - TEDG has broght in new furnishings and objects, we've moved the furniture, I changed the bed and brought others onto my sheets, into the bath onto the furniture....
but there's my thesis - which started out of working as a life model - which was intimately connected with Abel - she also worked as a model - my major argument - the major raison d'etre - comes out of a performance piece we did together 5 years ago. Each time i sit in my intellectual blankness - I'm returned to this connection, and it aches. There is also the ART, and the fact that I haven't painted since we broke up. Every vulva, every painting on the wall is about her, her body, our conversations, our desires, my desire, her soul, this desperate love that I felt with every breathe. and I wonder - do I have to throw out every single painting, every vulva I'm made? how do I exorcise her out of me?
and then if I do - what will she do in return? how will she punish me?
ex-catholic me - fears this the most. I don't trust that she will let me go - I'm scared of being haunted by desire, by sadness, by guilt, by a sense of responsibility - for the rest of my life. given that I've known her for 9 years - given that it took her 6 months to move out of the house - given that she didn't 'break up' with me - just kind of said -that she was in love with someone else and didn't want to fuck me - this is understandable.
given that she lives so close and so easy to touch and so nice to touch and hold and talk to. given that she gets along so well with my other lovers/friends/flatties - given that she so often, so easily - fits in - I want to keep her in - to keep whatever silly shred of nostalgia and connection we've got let - to feed the fantasy that we can have could have did have the great relationship - and that it can continue - as something open and expanded and we can walk on our own two feet -and only sometimes hold hands....
which is a myth - a nice little story that i tell myself, while ignoring the nasty gaping heartbreak/terror/guilt ghost.
Meanwhile i try so desperately to invent and live out other stories - for the way if might have been. My long distance affair with the brixton cowboy - a litany of phone calls and correspondence almost as lengthy as that between abel and I - my own girlie musings over photos and gushing at the sound of his voice - trying to live out a long distance affair - not as a craving for contact - not as a demand to move - but as a sharing of distance - as an enjoyment of the possibilities that distance provides - and the freedom - that if we don't ever see each other again - then certain things don't matter - and we are free to reinvent ourselves and our desires and share our own mad desires and mad affairs and adventures. Making the gap into a space of possibility instead of loss.
this is all philosophically sound and sexually inspiring and ethically noble and will make a great novel one day - but day to day my life is as pathetic and tragic as any sod with a broken heart. I fantasize about an elaborate ritual, some incredible performace that will break this spell of longing and love that I have for her. then i imagine how I'd rope her into it. then I realise what the problme is. which is, in these scenarios - she doesn't exist, move, negoitate or articulate her own condition or desires - that I project onto her - the stuff that is within *me* - and it is this that I have to exorcise and leave behind or bury or burn...
that i fuse her with mine - with my demands, ideas and needs and she doesn't resist. or she runs away. this is the nasty rub. this has to end. I have to make my own ending for this story - and one that has a more delightful twist than me navigating the brixton cowboy around the marais by text.... but one that involves me being able to walk away from abel and my sad stupid crushing longing.
so much of me clings to the past, I recite and remember and rehearse old anniversaries - so so scared of letting go and losing the past. If i was a better buddhist - I'd embrace the immanence of death - and the necessity of loss for life to continue - but i've still got far too much catholicism on the inside. I still want to light a candle to my grief, my longing, my pain - to make a little shrine to it, to embellish it - to not let it go and walk away.
Like i said - it's about me, and not about her. and i'm still just a sad silly thing a lot of the time. Grief is just slow and sad and hard.
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