the emptiness of perfection

When I encountered him, the physical being I have come to know as perfection, I was busy, busy being happy, busy not caring about anything; I walked in and owned the place, arms flung out in greeting, joy and liveliness bursting from me. I was a flower, he was drawn to me, he searched me with his eyes and words before he approached me, and I tolerated him the way a flower would allow a bee to explore its parts, I didn't resist or put up a fight, which had little to do with his perfection, or our interaction, it just felt right. When his eyes stared into mine, I felt no spirit, no connection, nothing, just emptiness, just the clang of two beings doing what nature had decreed.

And there is him, the intellectual being I have come to know as perfection, and in his exploratory and drowsy circles above me, I felt the flutter of his wings, I feel the way he bends the air with his existence, he makes me as alert as the sun, I flush into crispness. I have nothing much to give but he takes it all. I had previously been floundering in a lazy gauzy fallow time, feeling content, even happy with all around me, a lovely complacency. And somehow, in his insistence that I was important to him, I felt nothing, not a glimmer of hope or joy, but a confusion that I cannot shake.

In their perfection, they lack the necessary humbleness I look for in any and every person, the moments when the mask falls and the truth tumbles from their lips; they should hurt and have humanness spewing from them, instead it only glints across their solid form.

The one least likely [the antidote/my centaur] somehow manages for fleeting moments to impact me (physically, intellectually, emotionally). I wonder sometimes how he seems to fumble so mightily, but so often get it right when so many others have failed at me. He may be a new bee, but he keeps trying and when I look into his eyes, I see pain, sadness, vulnerability and happiness. Even when we are off and out of it, he is still pleased at the chance to explore me.

A year ago, celibacy loomed in my life not like a punishment, but as a relief, a sturdy place to rest from the exertions that had been my relationships. I touched my toe to its surface the way one tests water, and I took slow gulps of it, feeling it out, considering how much of it to impose on myself. It happened that my declaration didn't hold up against many different circumstances (the centaur, for one, has turned touch into an art form; and some I will never see again), but in the end, it has helped me further define just what it is I need and want. In finding pleasure in [my centaur] his arms (strong branches, he has), feeling the hot tickle of joy from his knowing and wanting me and our idle talking on the phone for hours, I found my law of threes.

I want to be with someone that has a complete mastery of the law of threes. Until then, I will tolerate them, parceling myself out, always wondering.

the final nail

Oh what a burial it has been. It began over a year ago:

I was in the shitty apartment that I enjoyed, despite the fact that I kept denying it was shitty (nothing really worked, things broke down and stayed broke, it was small and cramped and I slept on the floor, heard my neighbors' conversations and hoped they heard mine, felt for the first time that I not only lived like I was in a hotel, I lived like I was in a men's residence). I don't remember when it was exactly, because those months after that shock were a zombiefied blur (it could have been November or January), but there was a point when I excavated all the things he gave me over the years, the things I hadn't even thrown out the first time we broke up (because yes, I am a sentimental fool and I cherished them even though we were broken up) and I made the first tiny steps to a recovery. Gathered around me were the remnants of the life I used to live, squished up on me like I was riding in a cramped subway car and there were boxes everywhere, my stuff was all over, jutting, scraping, pushing against me. I couldn't take it anymore, I had to start living there, even if I didn't feel alive.

So I emptied a big black garbage bag I had either been using in lieu of a dresser or had been too vacant to empty and began filling it with all the items that had his mark on them, his childish scrawl across a paper for "Valetine's Day," the first year, that good year, when he gave me a record of a band I liked (happily, I cannot recall which band), scraps of papers, folded over papers, letters, cards--all perused thoroughly with a sense of mockery (love me forever, my ass!), and a heap of detritus that held some significance at some point, a rock for skipping from the cape, a ticket stub for Bright Eyes, a silver quarter he found.

When I was done, I considered burning the thing so that I would not rifle through the trash bin behind the apartment building the next day in hopes of retrieving the bag. I chided myself for being silly and fell asleep, emotionally burned out, the way he always predicted I'd be, but I never listened:

He said it in a poem that I wrote on the back of a photograph that he took of a beautiful white gerber daisy that had a purple iris and a dark purple bud for a pupil.

I pulled that picture out of the thousands he had in his vast collection of cast-offs (to be a good photographer, one must learn to take a thousand pictures and hope one hundred of them are decent; it is the ten percent rule) and immediately fell in love with how tender a man he was to stare at that particular flower and render it so beautifully; he managed to blur out the greenery and create a medallion out of it, each petal was a brilliant three dimensional feather, that plucked, looked like they would be wonderful to stroke against a cheek.

The poem itself is gone. I am trying to remember how it went, I remember the way it looked on the back of that photograph, because I studied it when I was sad about us, I used it as a bookmark so that I would see it and remember his ability to see the beauty in anything. It was short. Five lines. To not be able to remember is probably a good thing, so I will leave it at the essence or what I thought I understood it to be.

It was about a fight we had, early on in that first year, a fight that left us both worn out and exhausted, a fight that we didn't hold back on our feelings; like a fire raged between us, but in the end we were still standing.

Is it any wonder I fell head over heels for a guy who could take a fight and make poetry out of it? He managed to make the ten percent rule work in his behavior, for every thousand acts, a hundred of them burned brightly and brilliantly for me.

Except maybe he meant that the passion between us would burn us out until all that was left was the somewhat shoddy foundation of our love (its shoddiness finally unearthed by that last thing, the shock), the hollowness was felt down to the earth.

So the garbage bag was the beginning, and as I look back, it was the easiest thing, if you can imagine that, because those things are gone, and I can't ever get them back. Still, there are the memories of them, of him, of us.

Last week, at my mother's, going through photographs (in an attempt to rid her life of clutter) and I saw so many pictures of us that she had (because he was not just a part of my life, but a part of all of our lives). Next, it was seeing his coworker and wondering if she remembered me (she was there for some small fires, things that, at that time, happened so often that it took next to nothing to ignite us: a look, a word, a tone, a tenseness; he had me wired like a booby trap. Or as Fiona Apple once said it better, "He fondled my trigger then he blamed my gun," from the song "Limp.") and feeling the hot shame of public indiscretions and wanting to say sorry to her. Then it was while I was with a client, I came across an order he'd processed for her, and that same scrawl pierced my body, in one swoop I was turned inside out and realizing how he was still a part of my life, even in these little ways, that the roots of it had gone so far and so wide.

And yet, the girl in the photographs isn't me anymore. And the rest of it, it's been long enough. So I might occasionally encounter reminders of him, but I'm done mourning, it's time to throw away my memories and bury everything I knew.

Goodbye, to you the Burnham, Mr Burnham, Mr ______ Pants (an endless array of choices there were), then simply Pants. Thank you for playing.