Finally a good read
Love
by ezrael
More preaching. Sorry, Brooks. It's what I do. In all seriousness, I really don't think I'll stop being the electonic equivalent of that guy you see walking down the street wearing a sandwich board and screaming about all sorts of thing any time soon, bitching about my past, musing about my future, etc. I once said to a friend of mine that my blog was a complaint about everything by a man who had finally gotten his life to the point where there wasn't much to complain about. It's true enough. Compared to the way my life was when I was a kid, or even in my twenties, I live a cake life now.
However, from time to time I remember what it felt like to have someone I trusted sodomize me or someone else crush my skull, and it fills me with hate and loathing and rage. Since society won't let me go and kill people for things they did years ago, especially when they went and inconvieniently died on me already, it's rant or go mad. So I rant. I'm not telling anyone to skip it, either...if it makes you uncomfortable, good. If it bores you, hell, ain't the way I'm telling it because I'm a damn good writer, so I've got to wonder what happened to your empathy. If it turns you on, better pray I never get five minutes alone with you with a telephone book and a length of hose, because I know from experience how effective those are if used properly. I rant, because I don't want to run amok. I recommend ranting on your web-page for any overly tightly-wound individual with a bellyfull of angst and easy access to firearms...which is to say, almost anyone in the United States, it sometimes seems. Put down your 'fireworks collection' and sit down at the keyboard and bitch. It's easy, its fun, and if you get really good at it, people will actually tell you how cool you are for it. Much better than the alternative, I think. After all, one must release the tension from time to time, not just keep cramming the lid down on it...I wonder sometimes if the people who want to repress speech or discourage topics they find uncomfortable ever notice that when people can't talk anymore, they tend to act. But that's me, I'm weird that way, I see things from this whole weird angle.
Imagine when I started this particular screed: It's after two in the morning, and as is often the case, I am not sleeping. Indeed, I am doing the very opposite of sleep, which is not very smart of me, since Tara's in the bed and let me tell you, that makes the bed a whole lot better than either the cold floor of the living room or the hard plastic of the chair in the room with the new computer in it. However, I can't sleep at night, so I'd probably end up waking her up repeatedly and she needs to be awake tomorrow, so I'm out here.
Thinking about love.
One of my friends just finalized his divorce. Another of them just got married. A third lives on the Cape with someone who he's damn lucky to have. A fourth just told me he managed to make a connection with someone he's sought for months. An ex-lover of mine found this page recently (and is now safely IP blocked, because to be honest, I don't care what you think or what you do anymore...you had all of my heart you're going to get...related note: go say nice things to Jett who just had a similar experience, because karma likes to piss on us at the same time) and all of it has me thinking about love, about how fucking psychotic we are to go through with it. There are so many dangers to love. It falls apart all the damn time. We find ourselves hated by those that once whispered our names in the dark, we look back at those we once considered the other halves of our souls and realize we don't know what the hell happened to them. Love's hideous, and terrible, and horrifying.
More accurately, love is literally awesome. It is the whirlwind, the explosion of divine power, the only evidence I've ever seen in my entire life that there may be a God. I don't count the Bible. I don't buy the arguments of Priests and Pontiffs, televangelists and snake handlers. But to see two fragile humans risk the entirety of themselves on an emotion they can never verify, to see that shaky, tremulous trust take steps out onto a platform entirely dedicated towards tearing them apart? Shit, how can you look at that and not feel awe?
Even if it fails, the sheer brazen heroism of that risk sends me into babbling incoherence. To love is to defy odds, to oppose the very nature of the world and set out on an adventure madmen and poets couldn't dare. It's setting aside yourself in the hopes of building something greater. I sometimes lie awake in that bed, trying desperately to be still, just listening to the engine of her heart and the bellows of her lungs, knowing that I'll never know peace like I have when I've been loved.
It's not like I've been successful to date, either. Obviously, I've always screwed it up. I can't convey the fear I have of doing so again, the nightmare terror I feel clambering up my windpipe when I dwell, as I always do, on the prospect of losing this. On being hurled back down, after having crawled up. And yet it was worth it, even if I lost it tomorrow, it was worth it. It was worth a thousand years of agony, or being locked away with no one and nothing for company but the furies that scrape away at the inside of my skull, just to have said I was loved by her. I was loved. I had that, and you can't deprive me of what already happened. I got to steal my moments of warmth. I got to hear the voice of my beloved saying I love you so much. Lash me to a rock and let birds tear out my viscera, I already won. I had love. I defied solitude and fear and anger and self-loathing and all the other daemons and took fire from heaven.
Recently I've been made aware of how transient it all is, how it comes like a comet and goes just as quickly. I'm no poet, no scholar, and I hold no wisdom. All I have, ultimately, is the lunacy to defy the manifest truth and try and snatch a little heat and light and warmth for myself. God or Brahma or the Way or whatever you hold dear, do so as well. Be insane. Love. There's so much pain in the attempt, it fails and you have to try again, but the effort itself makes you understand glory and defiance, and the moments of success are like liquid light bubbling in your flesh and the mire of your blood.
It's love. Despite everything, we need it. And it makes us better than gods, who know not the dangers of failure and wasted effort. It makes us human, where otherwise we'd be just things. It's what balances out that simply hideous thing that inspires people to various and sundry acts that one reads about and shudders, turning away out of incomprehensibility. Well, those horrors are comprehensible. Hate is real, it is not weak, and it inspires a legion of travesties that could well drag our species, kicking and screaming, down the path to the black water. Every time you hear about some child being killed because her parents wanted a boy instead of a girl, every time someone blows up a host of disconnected people to make a statement, every time faceless men debase what is supposed to be the system of deriving the nation's will, every time a human being is left for dead because of their race or sexual identity, every time you read one of those news stories that stuns you and leaves you with a cold, clammy feeling about your fellow men and women...these things are real, and the only weapon against them is love.
It has been the hardest thing I have ever done to love myself. I falter. I look at who I have been and I shudder. But the actions of others to scar me have not killed me, and I am not their hate for all that I experienced it. It's hard to see yourself clearly. So I ultimately choose to defy the judgements of those who tried to steal my life and make it a tool for their own debased needs, and I choose to love myself, and I choose to love those who are important to me, those that I know I can trust. I choose to trust, despite the shrieking that I can't, despite the certain knowledge that some of those I trust will not prove worthy of it, and despite the knowledge that I have to live up to the trust of others and will not always make it.
Love is the miracle. Love is the fire that burns away the filth and makes for a private crucible. Love is hard, unweildy and a bitch to express properly, and it defies all logic. It's the craziest you can get. And it's the only thing we've ever come up with that makes us seem like more than demented primates, the saving grace for our whole crazy species.
For Tara, because she personifies it.
