rotten kid (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jadesprite) wrote2012-02-09 06:52 pm
jadesprite) wrote2012-02-09 06:52 pm
#13: the heart
wow this got a bit rambly!! let's call it stream of consciousness i guess. so it's going to be valentines day in under a week now and we're getting all sappy in preparation and man maybe this doesn't look much like sap to everyone but it is to us ok ::')
i think a lot of people compare love to suffering or maybe various poisons so much so that it's a very cliché thing, now. but they tend to try to make it into something romantic again like that break of emotion can bring it back around into being beautiful but for us it never does -- perhaps mistaking heartache for a modern miracle, as many people do, i catch ourself sometimes thinking those little self-absorbed teenage things we'd never understand from anyone else's mind. we think that ours are unique. more beautiful, more pure, more genuine emotion, not as much of things that we'd look back on in shame as we think that anyone else ever would have but that's not true.
love is such an odd thing, to us. inexplicable and overexposing, it's almost degrading. it leaves us feeling things we'd never thought we would or saying things we still don't understand the shapes of, things that come from our hands or fit in our mouth clumsily, words too large for us to understand, words too much for us to stomach. like nausea it creeps into us and in the end we are left always ashamed and too-small to know the feelings of our own wants. we want things we don't understand, we understand things we don't want. we know both the intonations and the intentions of words like 'i love you' but do we want to say them? and so it goes.
it leaves us feeling so much. just feeling, really, all blind and incoherent and tender with its rawness. a closing wound and every day we attempt to bandage it over but every day we find ourself peeling them off again, brushing at that drying bruise-blood, that shuddering bud of a wound curled in its little stitched petals of scars; touching at it wondrously like once more a child, a child in all its sweet, naive curiosity. it flinches at the pain but it smiles for it too, soft lips, crooked white teeth, paling skin. it shows its wounds to others with undue pride and they coo over them all too like baby birds in the nest waiting to eat the maggots from that flesh one day as it rots and they grow up and that never comes but the wounds stay, and still you touch them. but it is a more private thing now -- you pull the bedcovers up over yourself shivering, with your feet kick them more tolerably into place, draw back your sleeves or pull up the legs of your trousers and your bruises are ever-strong, old ones maybe faded with time but you cover them up in patches of new ones, sweet and fresh and smarting. the blood of your old ones has dried crackling but you pick it away and let it drip wet again. you are in love and oh it hurts but the hurt stays still like yanking off a plaster, like peeling a scab. it hurts but you wouldn't give it up because what are you without that hurt? sometimes it is the only thing that lets you know you can feel at all, a slight dull aching reminder that you are alive and with-emotion. true maybe it is different for others but for us this is how it works.
sometimes we talk to them and our words bite at our hands. they form themselves without our input tearing themselves from the tips of our fingers like small ants from the mouth of a rotten-wound and we find ourself, blinking and breathless in the wake of our own shocking inadequacy, our own vulnerability, lost in it like shipwrecked out at sea. our words pull us under and our lungs blink out in our slow growing want, it swallows us whole, we do not know what we are looking for but in you both we have found it still; at night we wake from dreams we cannot remember in their entirety but fragments of them we know you broke clean for us. you two and your sweet words and your sweet hands that we dream of touching us and we know both of you will want to take us apart into pieces but is it in different ways? one day i'll know but not today. all i know today is you want to break me and i want to be broken, with grace or without.
it's just how it is with people like us, i guess. i could say to you: kiss me, or choke me, steal my breath away and eat it up and leave my throat itching with you, bite me open until my blood sings with the shine of your spit and enamel, it is all the same thing. i remember being afraid once upon a time, i remember saying to you in some idle conversation i can't quite recall the beginning or details of, "no but i love people all wrong, you know, i don't think it's the kind of love anyone would want if they knew how it really was," and you said "i would". i remember hitting up a confidant brother of ours one night to say "i think i am falling in love and i think i have it all backwards. i think i want to show someone my heart very literally because that is love to me, do you think that's ok?" and he told me it was still love and i went and thought for a long time and i came back and told you it all and you said it was still love, too. it still doesn't feel right but i guess it works. i just wish i could understand.
why does loving you feel like wanting you to eat me alive? but i suppose cannibalism is a hair's breadth away from wanting to have sex with someone really. consummation and consumption. i've dreamt about both and i can tell you how similar they feel. sometimes they blur, just a little. i dreamt one night before i met either of you of loving a young man with green hair and rough skin, very bony, very at-angles, a body like shards of glass stuck under his skin. he loved me and wanted to eat me and i let him, in the end. i remember it very well! i woke up feeling so small and vulnerable and like i'd just seen the shape of my own heart and it scared me. i told erin about it, later, but i never told her about love. i never told either of you about this dream but maybe i should. it might explain a little.
i remember being afraid once upon a time but i am not anymore, not really. just confused. confused and swallowed up in our own quiet sense of self-abasement and self-disgust and self-shaming -- all of it coming from the inside you can see! nobody ever told us to be ashamed but i guess we must have got it from somewhere. i just don't know where. why do we hate ourself? it's so strange when you think of it like that. i can say 'we hate ourself because we love all wrong' but when you say 'well why do you think you love wrong?' we don't know how to answer it. but still we hate. and you don't know why you hate either, you the king -- the knight hates also but not for the same reasons, not for the same things -- and you say that for anyone else you wouldn't but from yourself you do. you hate what you see in yourself so much more than what you see in anyone outside. i wish i could help you, so badly, i really do. i think maybe i could but i just can't see the way. still, would you let me? let me help you. i don't know what i can do, not yet, but hold me still by the edges so i can think, won't you? clear my mind. that's what both you two do. you take all that fog and haze in our mind and your words curl into it slow and easy like the breeze and brush it away and you leave us so clear and empty and humiliatingly without-words or coherent thought i don't know what to do but i'd let you fill that space, i'll give you it all. just promise to share, dears.
i think a lot of people compare love to suffering or maybe various poisons so much so that it's a very cliché thing, now. but they tend to try to make it into something romantic again like that break of emotion can bring it back around into being beautiful but for us it never does -- perhaps mistaking heartache for a modern miracle, as many people do, i catch ourself sometimes thinking those little self-absorbed teenage things we'd never understand from anyone else's mind. we think that ours are unique. more beautiful, more pure, more genuine emotion, not as much of things that we'd look back on in shame as we think that anyone else ever would have but that's not true.
love is such an odd thing, to us. inexplicable and overexposing, it's almost degrading. it leaves us feeling things we'd never thought we would or saying things we still don't understand the shapes of, things that come from our hands or fit in our mouth clumsily, words too large for us to understand, words too much for us to stomach. like nausea it creeps into us and in the end we are left always ashamed and too-small to know the feelings of our own wants. we want things we don't understand, we understand things we don't want. we know both the intonations and the intentions of words like 'i love you' but do we want to say them? and so it goes.
it leaves us feeling so much. just feeling, really, all blind and incoherent and tender with its rawness. a closing wound and every day we attempt to bandage it over but every day we find ourself peeling them off again, brushing at that drying bruise-blood, that shuddering bud of a wound curled in its little stitched petals of scars; touching at it wondrously like once more a child, a child in all its sweet, naive curiosity. it flinches at the pain but it smiles for it too, soft lips, crooked white teeth, paling skin. it shows its wounds to others with undue pride and they coo over them all too like baby birds in the nest waiting to eat the maggots from that flesh one day as it rots and they grow up and that never comes but the wounds stay, and still you touch them. but it is a more private thing now -- you pull the bedcovers up over yourself shivering, with your feet kick them more tolerably into place, draw back your sleeves or pull up the legs of your trousers and your bruises are ever-strong, old ones maybe faded with time but you cover them up in patches of new ones, sweet and fresh and smarting. the blood of your old ones has dried crackling but you pick it away and let it drip wet again. you are in love and oh it hurts but the hurt stays still like yanking off a plaster, like peeling a scab. it hurts but you wouldn't give it up because what are you without that hurt? sometimes it is the only thing that lets you know you can feel at all, a slight dull aching reminder that you are alive and with-emotion. true maybe it is different for others but for us this is how it works.
sometimes we talk to them and our words bite at our hands. they form themselves without our input tearing themselves from the tips of our fingers like small ants from the mouth of a rotten-wound and we find ourself, blinking and breathless in the wake of our own shocking inadequacy, our own vulnerability, lost in it like shipwrecked out at sea. our words pull us under and our lungs blink out in our slow growing want, it swallows us whole, we do not know what we are looking for but in you both we have found it still; at night we wake from dreams we cannot remember in their entirety but fragments of them we know you broke clean for us. you two and your sweet words and your sweet hands that we dream of touching us and we know both of you will want to take us apart into pieces but is it in different ways? one day i'll know but not today. all i know today is you want to break me and i want to be broken, with grace or without.
it's just how it is with people like us, i guess. i could say to you: kiss me, or choke me, steal my breath away and eat it up and leave my throat itching with you, bite me open until my blood sings with the shine of your spit and enamel, it is all the same thing. i remember being afraid once upon a time, i remember saying to you in some idle conversation i can't quite recall the beginning or details of, "no but i love people all wrong, you know, i don't think it's the kind of love anyone would want if they knew how it really was," and you said "i would". i remember hitting up a confidant brother of ours one night to say "i think i am falling in love and i think i have it all backwards. i think i want to show someone my heart very literally because that is love to me, do you think that's ok?" and he told me it was still love and i went and thought for a long time and i came back and told you it all and you said it was still love, too. it still doesn't feel right but i guess it works. i just wish i could understand.
why does loving you feel like wanting you to eat me alive? but i suppose cannibalism is a hair's breadth away from wanting to have sex with someone really. consummation and consumption. i've dreamt about both and i can tell you how similar they feel. sometimes they blur, just a little. i dreamt one night before i met either of you of loving a young man with green hair and rough skin, very bony, very at-angles, a body like shards of glass stuck under his skin. he loved me and wanted to eat me and i let him, in the end. i remember it very well! i woke up feeling so small and vulnerable and like i'd just seen the shape of my own heart and it scared me. i told erin about it, later, but i never told her about love. i never told either of you about this dream but maybe i should. it might explain a little.
i remember being afraid once upon a time but i am not anymore, not really. just confused. confused and swallowed up in our own quiet sense of self-abasement and self-disgust and self-shaming -- all of it coming from the inside you can see! nobody ever told us to be ashamed but i guess we must have got it from somewhere. i just don't know where. why do we hate ourself? it's so strange when you think of it like that. i can say 'we hate ourself because we love all wrong' but when you say 'well why do you think you love wrong?' we don't know how to answer it. but still we hate. and you don't know why you hate either, you the king -- the knight hates also but not for the same reasons, not for the same things -- and you say that for anyone else you wouldn't but from yourself you do. you hate what you see in yourself so much more than what you see in anyone outside. i wish i could help you, so badly, i really do. i think maybe i could but i just can't see the way. still, would you let me? let me help you. i don't know what i can do, not yet, but hold me still by the edges so i can think, won't you? clear my mind. that's what both you two do. you take all that fog and haze in our mind and your words curl into it slow and easy like the breeze and brush it away and you leave us so clear and empty and humiliatingly without-words or coherent thought i don't know what to do but i'd let you fill that space, i'll give you it all. just promise to share, dears.
Hallodgw
(Anonymous) 2020-11-12 03:50 pm (UTC)(link)