“And how do you see me?”
“Like a mystery.”
“That’s the strangest compliment anyone has ever paid me.”
“It’s not a compliment. It’s a threat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mysteries must be solved, one must find out what they hide.”
“You might be disappointed when you see what’s inside.”
“I might be surprised. And you, too.”
— Shadow of the Wind
"When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, As the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain." — The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran
Looking back, the most interesting thing about this essay is how it starts as a sober-headed analysis and slowly falls apart into an ecstatic stream of consciousness.
In the aftermath of X, I decided to book my flight to Taos early, as July and August would be more expensive and there would be less work for stay after that. Though S said she wanted me to come at some point, I knew that while she was still moving in she wouldn't have time to see me for the first few weeks, but I had a lot to do and learn in Taos myself in the meantime, and was eager to get started. Knowing her fear of attachment, I reassured her that I would never be attached to her by saying that I was prepared for the possibility that we wouldn't see each other, which she may have seen as an accusation.
“Like a mystery.”
“That’s the strangest compliment anyone has ever paid me.”
“It’s not a compliment. It’s a threat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mysteries must be solved, one must find out what they hide.”
“You might be disappointed when you see what’s inside.”
“I might be surprised. And you, too.”
— Shadow of the Wind
"When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, As the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain." — The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran
Looking back, the most interesting thing about this essay is how it starts as a sober-headed analysis and slowly falls apart into an ecstatic stream of consciousness.
In the aftermath of X, I decided to book my flight to Taos early, as July and August would be more expensive and there would be less work for stay after that. Though S said she wanted me to come at some point, I knew that while she was still moving in she wouldn't have time to see me for the first few weeks, but I had a lot to do and learn in Taos myself in the meantime, and was eager to get started. Knowing her fear of attachment, I reassured her that I would never be attached to her by saying that I was prepared for the possibility that we wouldn't see each other, which she may have seen as an accusation.
As explanation to the former, I said that I wasn't surprised when she'd said she manipulates men, as I'd had that feeling when I first came to Oldenburg that she's the kind of person to do so even unconsciously, attracting and repelling in friendship or sexuality alike according to her impulses at the moment. I said I appreciate how she lives in the moment and by always reminding me of this, has the effect on me of making me feel in the moment as well. She may have interpreted this as implying that she sexually manipulated me, which she may again have seen as an accusation, and a particularly disgusting one.
To turn the perceived blame around, she said she'd be "wary of my ability to connect." Perhaps, as someone who seems to want to think of herself as unafraid of experience, "my ability to connect" was the only thing she could justify to herself to follow "wary of", for if there's no connection there's no experience anyway — but that's also not something to be "wary of", so it seems more like an emotional outburst. But to try and prove me wrong, she said "she'd still see me in Taos" nonetheless, perhaps aware of the irony of repelling me for suggesting that she attracts and repels, but she ignored my apologies and attempts to explain.
She'd said she preferred me to come later as she'd feel obliged to entertain me, but I'd said that that was her problem and I'd be fine. She may have seen my own detachment as meaning that I didn't care to see her at all, that I'd move on at any time and that she might lose me from my own impatience to wait for the right moment.She might've felt limited in how she could reply to resolve the conflict, and, knowing, like me, no other way to speak than to speak her mind, she put off replying at all. When she'd eventually speak, it would be in defiance of those limits she perceived, as she can no more abide by limits than I.
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When she later ignored my message, I decided she'd already condemned me for a single misstep, and seeing her phrase "wary of my ability to connect" in this light, I interpreted as meaning that I am unable to connect to anyone and that everyone should be wary about me. It appeared like the most destructive thing she could think of saying, as if she'd been waiting for when I was at my most vulnerable to backstab me, just to feel powerful. Her earlier comment "that was really dumb" to my having been in life danger seemed more supercilious than solicitous now. The egomania I perceived in her enraged me, and I fired an ultimatum: keep judging me, and we're finished.
What she said next solidified my image of her as an egomaniac: she went on to say that I put her on a "muse pedestal" typical among "inexperienced males", that "there was a lot I don't know," that "she wasn't afraid to hurt me" etc, and I could imagine that smug look on her face that I'd sometimes seen out of the blue and never been able to make sense of. She can't actually look down on me because of sexual inexperience, as she married someone who, when she met him, was a virgin: I could only interpret it as being meant to be humiliating for its own sake.
Was this the same person that made me fall in love by describing such state of mind as the "heart stretching to the edges of infinity"? It is months later, when I finally recovered from a brain injury, that I realized it wasn't. Suddenly it all makes sense with everything I've read about this. I don't agree with calling it this, but it's said there are two types of narcissism: one of vulnerability and one, conversely, of grandiosity. They're really two opposite things, the latter being more of a superiority complex and the former more of an inferiority complex, even though on the surface they appear similar. I'd say the one thing they have in common is a fear of losing control, and she was in a time in her life when nothing was under control, what with her move, new job, and separation from loved ones. When control is lost, childish reactions like this are common as a last resort to regain it, and her sexual taunts may have been part of that.
In her taunts in her final message, she reduced me to a suitor and suggested she was out of my league, despite having called me a friend shortly before that. Doing this simplified the problem in her eyes: she could tell herself it was an easy choice to whisk me away, that I was attached and there was therefore nothing she could've done to save our friendship anyway, not without sacrificing her freedom. Hence the nonsensical assertion that I was crossing her boundaries, even though the whole thing that started it was that I said I was fine with her attraction-and-repulsion, and later said that if she'd go on judging me, we were done.
Perhaps she's not so much afraid of attachment as afraid of a sort of responsibility she felt at my being in Taos. My recent brain injury would've added to her unwanted feeling of responsibility, which explains why she reacted to my warnings saying that she found them "boring". Somehow, when she said that polyamorous people are still jealous, I had the feeling that she actually liked that — she for her part had no jealousy because her husband is not polyamorous. P is certainly quite jealous: I saw it in the cold look he gave me when I said I was here to meet Savannah, and in his sardonic laughter and demeaning tone during the trip. He's sensitive, and that's probably one of the reasons S likes him: she likes emotion and likes to play with people's emotions. I don't think I've ever had what people call jealousy. When I saw S trying to seduce someone I only felt something like arousal. Perhaps others push that feeling away because they feel disgusted at identifying with someone else without being able to act in their place, and that repression is the only thing that really causes suffering. I didn't mean that I didn't care when I told her I would never get attached, just that I'll always let her be free.
To her ears, I basically told her "you hurt people, but it's alright by me." I must've touched upon a really deep wound there, because I was so emphatic in saying it was alright. It's typical for children of conflicting parents to feel that it's their fault somehow: the child having a central position in the family makes it feel as if the parents are fighting on the child's account. Hinting at such an unconscious kind of influence might have struck a nerve.
I think people under stress are naturally inclined to focus more on their own responsibility, because it's so important to do something in those situations to get out of them: the "I have to do something" signal. And because she's so fiercely independent she rejected that feeling and projected it onto me. When I had my misadventure with X, it might've felt much the same way as the conflicts with her family: something she has no responsibility for but still feels responsible for because she associates it with herself (she did recommend it, though I'd been interested before that).
I think people under stress are naturally inclined to focus more on their own responsibility, because it's so important to do something in those situations to get out of them: the "I have to do something" signal. And because she's so fiercely independent she rejected that feeling and projected it onto me. When I had my misadventure with X, it might've felt much the same way as the conflicts with her family: something she has no responsibility for but still feels responsible for because she associates it with herself (she did recommend it, though I'd been interested before that).
It's common for vulnerability-type narcissists to put up a front to protect themselves. S spoke of a vision of an owl inside a snake's maw which she interpreted as a symbol of her sexual front, and her sexual taunts would otherwise be inexplicable considering the deeper emotions involved in the conflict: I'd already reassured her that, as a demisexual, I wasn't physically attracted to her.
That's why one of the first things she spoke about to me is "people you can't hide from" mentioning someone who called her out for her vanity. She smiled and cast her eyes down as she said that, seeming to sense that I am someone like that. Perhaps she wanted to let me know up front to expect that from her, but I was (and am) confident I can accept anything but inacceptance. But vanity isn't arrogance. It's just a dependence on others' liking.
In her last email ended with saying "I told you not to come early" to Taos, although she'd said earlier that as long as I wasn't needy, she was fine with an earlier arrival (which was why I tried to reassure her that I wasn't needy). I can just imagine adding her wanting to add the phrase, "and look at what you've done now." It lets me know that she was after all sorry all of this happened. I knew I was pushing the limits when I came to Taos and when I insisted on emailing her about X despite her reactions, but after she invited me to live in the commune she wants to build, I felt that I had to test her. Had she waited to express judgment of me for just a few more weeks, I'd have enrolled in the earthship academy the Ethiopian in Taos told me about, and contributed to building it. If I'd jumped through her hoops it'd have taken years for me to find out that it wouldn't work out.
I told S I have an open mind whereas she has an open heart. While I knew her, I tried to learn from her, to assimilate her consciousness into my own. I feel like I've succeeded in doing so, but that after our conflict, I haven't been able to process it. After restoring my blood-brain barrier with 2x20mg doxycycline cleared my brain fog, I was able to analyze our conflict again, and I hope that it will help me to better digest the psychic energy I assimilated from her. I doubt we'll actually meet again, and it's not the main concern here either. The main concern is to make sure I accept it rather than repress it.
In short: S projects her obsessive insecurities on me and, to protect herself, puts up a front of arrogance to compensate for a guilt she does not want to feel. Her front of arrogance was the one thing to make me actually angry, which made her even more defensive. The apparent change in character made me cynical, thinking this was her real self and all the rest had been fake, sending me into paranoia. If it weren't for her vision of the snake and the owl, I still wouldn't be sure which is the front and which is the real S, but the unconscious never lies: the owl was within the snake, not the other way around. Nonetheless, both take up a place of her mind, and the snake is definitely connected to her sexuality. But it doesn't seem to be built on a fear of being hurt, as much as a desire for influence over others, and while arrogance may make her seem charismatic to anyone else, for me it backfired — and so it would for most northern Europeans, apparently, as she said she'd been having trouble seducing men in Germany.
This doesn't mean that friendship would still be possible: Whatever motives, the result is the same: I have to hold my tongue or face the consequences, as it's impossible to always foresee all of the infinitely many ways that something could be misinterpreted: if it's not possible to prevent them and I'm not allowed to resolve them, there's no way to communicate openly, making friendship impracticable.
She said that I was crossing "her boundaries", which I took as referring to my being honest about the wrong things, and I felt that even if I had any way of knowing what she arbitrarily sees as wrong, it would be artificial to be forcibly limited that way. But she might've referred to my saying "we need to talk" when I fired my ultimatum "stop judging me or we're done", which she may have taken as meaning that I require us to be in contact, whereas in in reality, I was trying to decide whether she was the kind of person I wanted to have contact with at all. But how can she still have thought that I expected anything from her, no matter how hard I tried to convince her otherwise? I said I would come to Taos "even if she didn't exist" — I can think of no harsher way to say it, and it still didn't sink in. If that's really the case, it's still impossible to connect with her either way: the bottom line is that she doesn't care to understand.
Perhaps she just didn't care to discuss it. When she read my long analytical emails she read some goal into it other than my thinking out loud in trying to understand and offer to help her understand, and since she could not understand that goal, she assumed that goal could only be a demand towards her. Maybe she thought it was a demand for her to read or take part in the discussion, while the only thing I wanted to tell her was that both of us should be ourselves. It may have been the quantity rather than content of text that made her think I expected something from her, and that may have just made her oblivious to the content. Under influence of memantine, which took weeks to get out of my system, I just rambled on and on.
But I can't think of all the ways that she might think that I judge her in advance. It's the same problem all over again: I'd have to watch my tongue. If I get the chance I'll tell her one more time in as few words as possible, what I should've said when the whole thing began: "I never have or will judge you unless it's for your judging others. You can do or not do whatever you want as long as you let me do the same." I acted the way I did because I thought she judged me, and I now think so did she.
But, that's the first thing I wrote on my profile, which was the first thing she read. I told her again and again that I don't expect anything from her and she would not listen. It was my very saying that I don't expect anything from her that made her think that I did. She simply will not believe it. The way she sees it, inacceptance is an emotional state rather than a behavior, and in my negative emotions about my brain injury she saw an appeal for help. Ultimately, she didn't accept her own emotional responses to mine, and therefore cannot accept emotions in general. That's why she called her daughter's father a "wimp" and said that with such people, she feels the need to tell them to get away from her. But before I see this as judgment, I have to remember that this originates in her relationship with her mother, where she said she felt like she had to care more for her than the other way around, often in the aftermath of conflicts with her father which were probably caused by his own neediness.
A trauma like that is always at risk of being triggered whatever precautions I take. There's nothing to be done about it other than carefully censoring my thoughts before sharing them, and that is something I cannot do. I tried to seem gentle, but I failed and would continue to fail. If I can't make a single mistake without repairing it, there's no way to be myself, because I am not perfect. Perhaps I could've repaired it better with fewer words, and whenever a misunderstanding arises I should just always repeat myself: "I accept whatever you do or don't, as long as you do the same."
Actually, perhaps that last bit is already going too far, and I should accept even inacceptance. I've given her enough of a chance to see that I accept her. If she wishes to stay in her delusion that I don't accept her, I'll accept that too, because the alternative is that I don't accept how I appear to her, which is a way of not accepting myself. Perhaps that's the inacceptance she sensed in me, and she thought it was of her, and that I was trying to achieve something with it other than to tell her that I accepted her, to set her straight about me. I don't want to care how I appear to others, even whether I appear to accept them, because anyone that matters understands, and their reaction will sort everyone out by how much they matter.
At one point I called the unconscious divine. I didn't mean just her unconscious, but she apparently thought I did, and this must've seemed like another sign of neediness. I was trying to express something beautiful. People worshipped the sun, a ball of gas in the sky, and I worship the unconscious mind, the most complex, beautiful thing in the universe and the creator of our universe of consciousness: it's the frontier to which the universe's evolution has advanced, the level on which the universe is currently recreating itself. As Gandhi said, if you can't find god in the next person you meet it's a waste of time to look any further. But like that orb of gas, the unconscious is an indifferent, uncomprehending force, and that's why in my reverence of the world I will always be alone, and I can no more express my appreciation of a human being than I can that of a sunset.
I know now that you weren't really being judgmental, and were merely being defensive. Whatever kind of relationship we were going to have — platonic, romantic or sexual — you had no reason to want it to fail. So you looked for an excuse to blame the failure on me, if only so that you could let it go and tell yourself there was nothing you could have done, to find closure. Because you have far too strong a desire to connect with every living thing to be able to stop caring if there's even the slightest chance to do so. That's why you're so preoccupied with what you mean to others, because even if you don't necessarily have the energy to love someone because you can't love everyone at once, you want to have the possibility, so if nothing else you strongly desire to be loved, for the whole world to be open to connecting with you — even if it's merely for the sake of not feeling insignificant in the existential void of an indifferent universe. Your own inability to connect to everyone at all times only adds to your fear of being fade into that indifference and disappear.
But I embrace that void, as it's what allows me to transcend myself and reach out into the infinite. You cannot escape from it, because its a reality reflected in all things. You turn away from me for reminding you of it, for not obliging your restrictions that keep your ego safe. But I will never limit myself for anyone — neither will I limit myself by not connecting to those that do, but I can't depend on them. Your fear of failure makes you too limited for someone like me who will not abide by limits.
She'd said earlier that when someone's dealing with loss, she feels the urge to get away from them because they don't know how to deal with it: she feels inadequate in the face of the perceived need to support someone because she can't accept the negative. With my own hangover, because she felt obliged to support me, she didn't feel any desire to, and she couldn't help that. But when I suggested I didn't expect to see her in Taos, this only made it worse, as it meant that now, if she didn't see me it made her inability to connect predictable, as if it didn't depend on the situation but on who she is as a person. She became paralyzed because she basically panicked in the face of what she saw as a social obligation imposed not just by me but by society and her own self-respect, but because she has such a strong need for freedom, it went against her nature to do so and she could do nothing but resist it. Either way, it means she's too unaccepting both of herself and others to be authentic.
This is the final piece of the puzzle for me. I already felt like she was excessively positive and lacked the negative to balance it. It's reflected in her liking of cannabis, her dislike of heavy metal and her inacceptance of the necessity of death of even the smallest animal. She does not accept the negative, hence she doesn't accept imperfection, but more importantly, it also means that she can never truly accept me, someone who is equally negative and positive. I'm amazed she could be such a complex person despite that imbalance, and I'll miss that complexity, but it means that any connection between us is impossible unless she matures out of it. She's like the Khala, fearing the Void, and I am like Tassadar who wields both. So how am I too assimilate you, your memories, into my unconscious, and make you a part of me, to grow? You will not yield, refuse to be undone, and my mind is having an indigestion, but it will not spit you out.
If I fully understood her, it would be easy. But it still doesn't add up. If she was just trying to excuse herself, why would she act so smug about it? She was trying to assert herself as a dominant force, either because of a psychopathic desire for power or to regain control. And while she may be a narcissist, she's not a psychopath — and she's not proud of being manipulative, in fact she's ashamed of it, so would it really give her an ego boost? That must've just been for show, but why?
Beneath all the layers of the onion, the only explanation I can find is that she wanted me to want her. That's not to say that she desires me, at least not the way a man desires a woman, but female sexuality doesn't really work that way and is more based on being desired, not because of vanity but because that's the way the connection goes, from man toward and into woman. You always want what you can't have, and the dignified way that she mock rejected my nonexistent advances was supposed to make me feel conflicted. When I said we're finished if she kept on judging me, and she saw no way to resolve the conflict without facing or sharing her own insecurities, this may have seemed like the only way to save whatever was left to save.
I don't like what that means, because it's incompatible with friendship. Apparently, the sexual pleasure of being desired is more important to her than friendship in general, When I told her I was fine with not seeing her if she didn't want to, I was appearing too neutral, too detached. If I desired her, I'd have bided my time and gone at the right time, when she had regained her composure from the move and I had regained my composure from my hangover and we were both dignified to court each other. It doesn't necessarily mean she valued sexuality above friendship: perhaps she wouldn't have acted this way if she felt, in her sense of inadequacy, like she couldn't save our friendship anyway, and appealing to my sexuality was the only way to regain some control. Being wanted was just her way of retaining some sort of connection when all else seemed lost.
It backfired. In fact, whenever I thought back of it I lost all interest in sex to the point that I became impotent. In fact, it was more her incomprehensibility that made me obsessed with her intellectually, but now that the mystery's cleared up, that'll probably go away. I doubt I could be attracted to her now she's proven to be such a poor friend, although perhaps it's not so much friendship as connection that turns me on, and I definitely feel connected to her, even if it only goes one way. I think her complexity is beautiful, and it's disarming to understand the insecurities.
And why shouldn't she risk our friendship this way, if my inacceptance would mean that I'm not a true friend anyway? But it's not so much my inacceptance that makes authentic connection impossible, as her own inacceptance of herself. I expected nothing from her and she knew it, but she did, and it didn't matter that I told her it was alright, because she just turned my words around. I can't speak or act freely for fear of being misunderstood, and what's worse, once there's a misunderstanding I don't get the chance to clear it up. None of this changes anything, but at least now that I understand, I no longer have to think about it.
No, it still doesn't make sense. I've tried to look at it from another angle because I don't want to believe that S is really like that, but she really is. There's a split in her personality between the snake and the owl. I can name as many factors as I want that make what she did more understandable, but it still comes down to it that she wants to defend her precious ego at all costs. She's only insecure about her self-image because she's obsessed with it above all else. There's only one way I can really explain her behavior: there are only two aphrodisiacs, love and power, which is self-love. Hers is the latter, and she wanted to affect my emotions in any way she could to control me: to leave her mark on me to claim me, just as she would anyone else. Her insecurities alone would explain her defensiveness, but not her taunts.
All this means that if her pride is stronger than her shame, she will come back, and I will never move out of the way for any experience, but I will always be myself in doing so, just as she, and her own doing so will make her understand it when so do I… and she'll get more of me than she bargained for. She underestimates just how strong I am. She gave me more than just something to love: she gave me something to hate, and that can be the strongest form of love. I want to free her from herself, to break open her shell. If she is truly as open to experience as she claims, then I wouldn't be surprised if it was her purpose to kindle my hatred, so that she would have all of me without restraint — but she acts on instinct, and simply wants to evoke any emotion from me just to have an effect on me. But is it just to feel good about herself about it, or because she actually wants to feel the reaction? But what else is satisfying about it if not to at least imagine the reaction? Psychopaths only care about material gain, narcissists only care about justifying themselves, but she seems to care about how she makes others feel.
"If a tree grows up to heaven its roots reach down to hell." The evil in her is as much expressed as the good in her, but it's clear that they repress each other and have become dissociated. The duality is so intense that she probably doesn't see the beauty of the other, and feels as if she just can't help herself. That's why they sabotage each other. She's playing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And yet at the end of the day they're both equally beautiful: they're just concerned with different emotions. She doesn't actually cause any harm with it: only her inacceptance of herself does that, as once her light side gets stuck in blame, it can't balance the dark side and the cycle is broken.
It's not actually her dark side that I resent. It's her light side, with its judging owl eyes. She vividly reminded me of border security when she said she'd be "wary of my ability to connect", no questions asked. Her light side was putting up a fight against her dark side which it had no place to fight: it should've been her dark side that responded, and if she had, I wouldn't have been repelled by her. In her later email I could see the transition from light to dark as she could see that her excuses didn't hold up and her defenses broke down until at the last sentence she simply said "I'm not afraid to hurt you." Now at last I saw the real her that had been eating out the light side until it wore it like a hand-puppet, and if she'd embraced her dark motives all along, that would've been authentic. Her attempts at justification by putting the blame on me were just despicably egotistical. She didn't have to justify anything — that with anyone is the one thing I can't stand. Can't we just let emotions be what they are, instead of always arguing what we or the other should or should not be? It's so arbitrary, and I tried to make her see that.
If she ever believed I was unconditionally going to help her with her earthship as I said I would, she probably didn't do so anymore, supposed I was there for only a few weeks either way and therefore had nothing left to lose: whether she'd have seen me at that time or not, with the state of mind we were in it would've just trailed off, so going out with a bang at least kept me from becoming indifferent, and she felt like she might as well leave any kind of emotional mark on me, negative or positive. She can't have been conscious this, but if we were to meet again I'd actually feel much more myself with her now.
Besides, even if I'd keep that resolve, if it didn't work out emotionally I wouldn't actually stay to live there, so the pragmatic loss was the least of her worries. If she didn't care about me emotionally at least as a human being, she would've just taken advantage of my detachment to let me help her and only backstab me afterwards. Perhaps at this point she felt like she couldn't accept my help anyway. Now she certainly can't, because I can't trust her to accept it if I go back.
None of this changes what I already knew: she does not want to communicate and without communication there can be no connection. She will not accept connection because she cannot accept me, herself, and the full range of human emotions that can and are being interchanged between people. She's a coward and her relationships are fake in order to confirm her own ego as being the center of the universe.
And yet I still love her, with all her imperfections. She's the most complex person I've ever met, but maybe that's just not saying much. Damn it, S, you were almost there, but I couldn't resist trying to test the breaking point of our relationship, couldn't resist being honest — because anything that mere honesty breaks isn't true, and only pure consciousness doesn't break. The whole history has just made me even more cynical, but I'm not even cynical enough yet.
I can enjoy the beauty of nature without feeling the need to make friends with the wildlife, and I should have the same attitude towards humans, because they are not my kin. Humans build their lives on pride. I build it on consciousness, any and all consciousness, regardless of whether it injures their pride by showing the artificiality of their preconceptions of good and evil.
I need to learn to enjoy people from a distance if I ever want to have relationships, and yet I don't care. Relationships on their terms are too boring, too limiting. I'd rather enjoy the fleeting time I have with them being myself, defying fate and all humanity — because while I may love them, I hate them too, and I'll express my hate at their limitations as much as my love at their consciousness. But perhaps that's the same thing she was doing, and she actually still somehow thinks that I don't accept her. Even so, the only reason she may still think that is because she won't communicate, because she can't accept the emotions it involves. I just need to keep reminding myself of the fact that her failure to communicate arises from inacceptance. That's not to say I'm not open to connecting with her anymore, but that I shouldn't expect it to happen, at least not until she matures out of her insecurities… perhaps this whole episode may help her do just that.
Hold on… the one thing it seems she can't accept is inacceptance. Hence she stopped communicating only when she thought I didn't or wouldn't accept her. But the only explanation for why she'd have thought that is that she's projecting her own inacceptance of herself onto me. Not accepting oneself is really the only problem with people that makes them inauthentic and keeps me from connecting with them anyway: I make them feel something and they don't accept that feeling in themselves because it makes them insecure. Perhaps I only need to convince them to accept themselves and all my social problems will be gone. I will focus on that. I will make it my theme in everything I express to radiate acceptance. But at some point or other it will always fail, because I can't take responsibility for them. I'll do it not to keep them close but because it's the only thing I can express that matters anyway.
It actually reminds me of people's reactions when someone touches upon their ideology, except that S isn't a theist or atheist, socialist or capitalist, but simply S: she is her own ideology and believes in her self-image with as much bigotry. It's very petty. She shrinks away as soon as her ego is as much as touched, and it's pathetic.
Either way, she knew that she made the choice to limit her experience, whatever her reasons for doing so. That's not the kind of person I'm looking for. I don't mind people that do that, but I need to focus and keep searching.
She said she'd grown out of her vanity, but I think she just felt stronger with her husband, a much more humble man. To be in control, what others think of her has to conform to her self-image, otherwise she doesn't know how to act and realises she doesn't even know who she is… she loses her "flow" at that point. She'd have to go through a kind of Dabrowskian disintegration for me to be able to connect with her on my level. I was analyzing the spontaneous things she did without thinking about why, and if you have any biases about what you should and should not do, that interferes with those processes, causing you to block.
She was offended because she knew there was some truth in what I said but took the statement in an extreme rather than moderate interpretation. She could now no longer turn her back on me without proving to me and herself that I was right, which made her feel trapped, forcing her to choose between independence and her self-image, neither of which allowed her to be accepting of herself. I already knew that she's very volatile, and she behaves to people accordingly knowing that she cannot guarantee being able to be there for someone through her mood swings. I accept this in her, but she doesn't, in fact, the fact that she feels like she can't see people when she's in a bad mood is itself a sign of an inacceptance of herself, and a belief that she must live up to certain expectations in terms of mood. She wants to be thought of as both positive and loyal, but cannot always appear as positive and would rather appear positive than loyal by not showing herself in times of negativity. She attaches such importance to positivity because she wants to feel connected rather than separate, hence seeks out holism and shuns the bleak analytical. Moreover, from her upbringing she feels like she must always appear strong. She assumes love to be extrinsic for me, as it is for most people and she cannot help but care even for those people — this makes her feel isolated deep down, and she used to compensate for this by seducing men until she met sexual partners that she could truly, intrinsically feel connected with, some of which she had to leave behind in Europe. She craves but does not expect to be loved intrinsically.
At the end of the day, she's equally involved in both aspects of herself and they are therefore both true, even though they each believe the other to be false. It's a kind of dissociation all of us have, differentiated into a dichotomy of "good" and "evil" according to anachronistic Christian traditions. When I brought up that I found it hard to be fully myself with her, that might've been because of her own confusions, which left me not knowing how I was supposed to behave, positive or negative. Maybe she had the same dilemma with me. Either way, she (both of her) needs to accept herself. Her inability to do so is what's wrong with most people, and the reason why I can't find any connection that's satisfactory with most people.
Why is it so hard to accept oneself? We're all just people: brains, receptors that absorb information which we merely receive from outside ourselves. The biggest difference between most of us is just that each of us has a different way of experiencing the world, and why wouldn't we want to learn about all of them? Why wouldn't we?
None of this makes us friends. While what she did was in self-defense, so was the War on Terror: it was in vindication of her pride, which she finds more important than anything else. She's arrogant, not at all the transcendental person I was looking for. And yet that's also part of her. I don't understand how she can possibly be both. She must be very sensitive and only allow herself to transcend when it doesn't cause suffering — when she suffers, her ego contracts like a raw muscle. Or perhaps pride has nothing to do with it after all, and she merely responded to what caused her pain with something that she thought would cause pain. Perhaps what appears like pride is more of an indifference to what's "right" than the belief that she's right. Yes, if that were true perhaps there could still have been a connection.
She thinks she keeps people at bay, but she just tells herself that so that she feels in control. In reality she wants to feel connected to every living thing in the world but those feelings aren't always reciprocated. She was right to doubt my ability to connect, but not because of the reasons she thought. It had nothing to do with what I said — she just sensed my indifference on a deeper level, and it scared her.
I understand you better than you think. But to someone who sees right through you, you're not all that particularly appealing. Perhaps it's mystery that turns men on to women they don't know very well, and that's why I'm as good as asexual until I've formed a strong bond. So you knew that with both of us being busy, at most there would be a distant politesse between us while I was in Taos, and you always take the course of action that's the most emotionally powerful. So when you saw the precipice, you felt the urge to jump off. But you'll have to be ready for the crash, as that's what you signed up for.
If you still want my help, you'll need to pay the airfare yourself. I talked to a man on the airplane who knew someone who'd failed at building an earthship You'll need all the help you can get — but so will a lot of people. By 2020, Google, Facebook and Microsoft have pledged to bring the developing world online for free. There will be millions of people asking for help, and I'm saving and investing my money for them, and for friends — but no one else. You backstabbed a friend who only wanted to help, unconditionally, just like hundreds of people PAY to help build an earthship, and the only thing I asked was to not be judged. Think about that in your difficulties, when you try to do between the two of you what normally takes dozens of people to do. By the time you're halfway through building your home, the frost heaves will come and tear it apart, but you brought this upon yourself. This is your karma. You choose to suffer.
You wanted to make an impact, because you know that people like me, who accept any emotion rather than apathy, just let emotions flow up and down like a wave, so that the initial conditions in which they arise don't matter. You wanted to make a difference, because it's more about you than about a connection. But you're mistaken if you think you're important to me. I merely think you're fascinating. I think black holes are fascinating too, but that doesn't mean I want to go near one. Just like your main drive in life is love, my main drive in life is truth. But now that I understand you, I can feel how I've already assimilated you, made you a part of me. I don't need you anymore. You are the center of the universe — but only in your own universe.
You realised when you moved to Taos that with the change in lifestyle you were no longer in the right frame of mind to connect with me on a level that you thought satisfactory. I gave you a chance to bow out gracefully, but to you, intense emotion is the only kind of connection that you find significant, that makes you feel significant, so you focus on that to the exclusion of all else and try to achieve it at all costs. It's short-sighted, imbalanced, and unsustainable. You have to leave room for other forms of connection as well.
I desire nothing more than to make you a part of me, but that's the spiritual way to connect. To connect sexually, I'd have to desire to become a part of you. I'm afraid to lose autonomy that way… just as S was afraid to lose autonomy by letting me become a part of her — that's what she thinks of as "attachment" while for me, "attachment" is to lose yourself in someone.
I don’t care that you didn’t want to see me. The thing that started this in the first place was my saying that I’d be fine with that. I don’t care that you tried to elicit an emotion from me, because I had enough chance to prove to you that I accept all emotions. But you told me you’d be “wary of my ability to connect,” as if so should everyone else, as if I’m a disease to be quarantined and worthy of isolation and ostracism. All the rest I don’t care about, but this I cannot just forgive. You judged me to defend your own ego, as you thought it more important to be right than to let me be myself. I am tired of people telling me what I can or cannot be. I wish that when you said this, you were just trying to elicit an emotion too, but you weren’t. You felt like you had a choice between accepting me as I am, and accepting yourself as you are — you’re just not as authentic as I thought you were, and you disappoint me. You’re just an arrogant fool like all the rest.
So if you ever want to connect again, I insist that it will be on my terms: you will accept me as I am, and for that you will have to accept yourself as you are — or you will never see me again. Actually, she doesn't even need to accept me, because I think she already does. She just has to accept herself. But what kind of condition is that? The whole point is that it's unconditional. So alright, I'll accept her even if she does not. But until she accepts herself, I'm not expecting the possibility of any real connection. So how should I treat her? It doesn't matter, she's the only one who can make the step of accepting herself, and all I can do for my part is accept her and express my acceptance, by not holding back in any way at all, even if it enables her vanity, even if it offends her vanity — but through these actions I must insist to her that I will always be myself and that I will always accept her as she is.
I asked for just one thing: not to be judged, to be accepted for who I am. That's all I ever wanted. You knew that I didn't ask for love or even friendship.
I thought she kept me at bay because of her independence, authenticity and presence in the moment, and I applauded her for that. But perhaps she really just tried to be in control, because what happened seems impossible to explain otherwise. Too bad that the qualities I fell for weren't completely real. She seemed particularly invested in being in control in my case, so at least on an emotional level, she may have been more attracted to me than she thinks. This is the only explanation for why she turned around so completely so suddenly from being affectionate to being blithe.
I could feel that, too. At first I felt there was still an element of purity in it, and I found it an inspiration. But once she was in Taos, her perspective shifted back to what it was before she met P, and she no longer had his wisdom to inspire her. I could feel how she wanted to be in control, and I would not have that. I would not be dominated.
She may still think she's in control even now. She doesn't want to let that go, to be herself and be vulnerable, and she doesn't know or doesn't care that that's the only thing that interests me. So that's why she said it's so hard for her to find someone "who brings out the woman in her" — because she herself is so dominant, and, to uphold that dominance, self-conscious and insecure. Her illusions of control and fears of losing control must be dispelled.
I had already let go. Did she want to incite my anger, thinking I was too tame? I'd like to think anything other than the alternative, that she's not authentic. If she was just insecure, I can't respect her. If I'm to believe that she was really unaccepting of herself or me, I'll just lose interest, because there's nothing to be done with someone so limited. I thought she was free, that that's all she ever wanted to be.
If she was just trying to extricate herself from obligations she perceived herself to have, then she is not free. If, however, she was confident that she wouldn't get into the right frame of mind to see me even were I to stay for months, and she felt like she might as well go out with a bang instead of a halfhearted goodbye, I respect that. Of course, these possibilities are diametric opposites, one making her incredibly petty, and one making her little short of an Ubermensch.
Does that make it sound as if I respect meanness? No, I just don't care either way about either concepts of "good" or "evil": my only notions of right and wrong are acceptance and inacceptance. Acceptance may be hurtful because it accepts even pain as part of the human experience that makes life valuable. Inacceptance is just the desire for comfort and ultimately, nonbeing.
The point is, though, with these possibilities being so opposite, shouldn't I be able to figure it out by myself? Perhaps that's the thing. We don't know each other well enough. Perhaps she was trying to test me, to see if I would still accept her, to defiantly be herself and see what would happen, and if I would not accept it, good riddance! She knew she had nothing to lose. perhaps she was putting my words to the test, to see if I was saying it to appease her, or because I meant it.
So if she contacts me again, isn't that enough proof that that is the case? After all, after all the trouble she seemed to take to save her pride, why would she face the humiliation of trying to reconcile? Unless that was never what she tried to achieve in the first place. We were both incredulous how much we shared in common despite being so opposite. Was I pinched to see if we were dreaming?
Well, then, I have a test to see if you accept me, too. If you ever read this far, that's proof enough for me. Oh who am I kidding? You simply live in an egocentric universe and are unwilling to let go of this narrow view of the world. You cannot embrace a universe in which every experience, every feeling is allowed. Or can you?
Let's try this a little differently. She obviously has a strong intuition, so maybe I can understand her reaction by analyzing myself. When she reacted the way she did to my relating how I went to the hospital and told me "that was really dumb", my own pride was injured. I later sensed her insecurity, her fear of attachment, and felt a defiant, vindictive desire to provoke her, to poke at that insecurity and test her own integrity, because I myself knew that I had nothing to lose. So I revealed to her that I knew her little secret — her fear of attachment and the pains she went through to keep me just far enough and just close enough. Maybe she got the underlying message that I was going to be honest no matter what, and she could take it or leave it — and that if she would try to dodge it, she would seem like a coward and lose my respect.
Maybe she didn't like me testing her and simply retaliated: if that's how you want to play it, let's see if you really are as detached as you say you are. I was picking a fight and she obliged by joining it. Because why should I have any conditions, if they're not supposed to change my behavior? Even if she's a disappointment I'd still accept her and still be myself. And we both knew that about ourselves, too. When it escalated, I was quick to say that if she judges me we're finished, before she could, to let her know that's all I care about and that I will never surrender that.
Maybe showing each other how serious we were about this mutually assured destruction was the only way to prove our authenticity, that we'd never give up being ourselves even if the whole world came falling down because of it. We wanted to prove to ourselves and each other that we had nothing to lose by being our wildly destructive selves, because we know that anything that's real is immune to that. We weren't ready to see each other in Taos anyway — there was too much else going on. I don't know if it was her intention, I only know that was mine. So is it that far-fetched that she was taking it a step further, considering all our similarities? She was talking about my moving in with her, for God's sake — of course she'd want to test me like I wanted to test her. The more I think along these lines the more I want her.
So what have I come to? Now I'm rationalizing that she wanted to disappoint me, to see if I'd still be myself and still accept her, no matter what she turns out to be? So that she'd feel completely free to be whatever she may become, even if in a weak moment she betrays herself? And that she wanted to seem petty, to show what she saw as her weak sides, to contrast herself from what she saw as an insufferably idolatrous image I had of her? It's pointless, but then again, why not — she had to find out if it was really pointless.
So now I have to ask myself, what would it change if it turns out my wishful thinking is wrong and she's really just that petty? Well, not much would happen. It'd just be boring. We could hang out and I'd never really care all that much, there'd be nothing to share. And now I'm faced with my own weakness. Why am I so empty inside? When there's nothing to gain, when there's no spiritual ideal to achieve, what do I do? Nothing — I fall apart in the void. I am unwilling to settle for the imperfect, for a compromise, for a half measure, half a person and half a simulacrum — to talk through glass. Why did she draw a line in the sand, a limit, at a time when I declared unconditional acceptance of everything but that one thing? What happens when I collide onto a limit, a persona, an identity? I wish to crush it. Was that a challenge put for me? "Do it, then!" But in defiance of what — in disagreement with my disregard for boundaries? Yes, that's what she said, and I believe her. That's the one thing between all else she said that I can take at face value: "you overstepped my boundaries", boundaries of what was "proper" according to her. Why don't I just give it up? Because she was my last hope of finding someone without boundaries, someone free.
Why do I feel there's a lesson to be learned from it, and if there is one, why do I just not get it? What is all this trying to tell me? She believes in that, in the universe trying to teach us lessons, so if nothing else, she must've thought it would teach me something. She put a boundary knowing that I'd never abide by it. I don't even know what it is exactly. What did she have a problem with? She just wants to be herself, and do what she wants to do — but so do I! I have no qualms with that.
I was trying to decide what to think of her. Did she tell me to make up your mind, to take it or leave it, that I couldn't expect anything from her, not even for her to be herself or live up to authenticity or whatever values I might have, no matter how true, because you can never rely on yourself to understand those values. The one thing this whole text should tell me is that all this is a meaningless waste of time. What is my point, what am I trying to do? What if someone isn't "authentic", what will I do with that? What choice do I have? Why do I have to question everything, the veracity of everything, to refute, to doubt, to call into question, to know, as if knowledge for its own sake is a replacement of a person and the moments you share? I just want to understand, threw everything against the wall, used her as a crash dummy and was sure that if she was made of "good material" she could take it. But why, why, what for? Just to know, to have some abstraction of a person in my mind, as of a neutron star studied by an astronomer? She denied all of that, my whole notion of experimenting, that if I couldn't go with it regardless of the results, of whatever distinctions I might make about her, it didn't matter, that I should… should what? I accept her. So, what, then? What? Accept what I feel, accept what happens? Accept the tension, the uncertainty? To stop "one-upping the universe" by detaching from it, as Alan Watts says? But what gives, what difference does it make? What does it mean, how did what I say have any significance? It didn't, so by the same metric, does what she say have any significance? Did she give me a decoy dummy to see me rage at it, like a koan? What does she want, what does she want? And why do I need to know, when that always changes, isn't fixed? I was trying to pin her into something, a concept — what that concept means doesn't matter, because it's ultimately meaningless. But I just want to know what she's thinking, to see in her mind, like a telepath, to absorb her essence.
What I want to know is, did she limit herself? Did she deny herself even the possibility to see me, give it up out of insecurity, traded it for comfort? Or did she realize that if I'm worth anything, have any integrity, the possibility to see me would always remain open? Does she want to keep me in suspense about just that, at times when she won't see me anyway? I don't care whatever this whole universe does to me, however it tortures me, but I will always be myself. But how can I be myself with anyone if they will not let me near them under that condition that I am myself? Only nonconsensually, by harassing, by transgressing boundaries until they've all had enough, one by one.
Did she want to restrict anything about me? Because that would obviously never work. How about me, what was I trying to do, was I trying to restrict her right to judge me? Or did I have no particular intention other than to be myself? But being myself just means to carry out my intention — it's circular. So what was the intention which, being myself, I entertained? To connect, to share my innermost whatever the cost, even if it leads me to be rejected, especially then, because if so, good riddance! Yes! YES! That's all I wanted, to be defiant, to scream in the face of fate that I would not bend, would not become crooked, would not confess, would not yield to any torture. I don't care about anything else, I DON'T CARE! Like Asura, I will drive my will through to destroy any limitation, defy any rule that constrains my existence, would rather destroy all the universe if it stands in the way of my honesty, rather than let it hem me in! Whatever the cost, if it kills me a thousand times over.
And I would not budge, however she would goad me — but what was there to test? How would I fail or pass? I pass if I do not repress, but what is there to repress? If there is a test, then she is yet to present it to me when she sees me again, to see if I still accept her and my feelings towards her, or if I repress them out of some principle or other. Of course I won't! I'll embrace every experience! I'll have my answer if she contacts me, because she would not do so if she herself represses any feeling. If she contacts me, it means that she's willing to face the greatest possible humiliations to explore, to sate her curiosity, even if it's of no consequence. If she is like that, she will contact me no matter what she thinks of me, because however unsuitable she may think me to be anything to her, she would still be interested, still want to explore, to probe the depths of human consciousness in all its forms. So all I can do is wait, and if she contacts me, there is no further proof I need that she is as authentic as I thought she was, and therefore worth any effort I can spare. That's the point — sure, I may accept her passively, but who she is determines how intensely I'm invested in her. That's what I wanted to find out, to make sure if I wasn't wasting my time with her. But by now, the bar is set even higher — I am all the more determined to be myself, and will be even more blithe in holding nothing back, defiance, defiance is all I feel inside, amor fati. Is that what you wanted? And what will I do with it if no one wants it? Just keep searching, keep searching, reach deep within my own soul for something immanent to connect to, if not to humanity, then to God, to nature, the universe, energy, the unconscious, instinct! I will never be alone, never have to give up, never have to compromise, and what anyone else does is, whether they join me or not, is up to them.
I take the challenge, whether the challenge comes from you, S, or from fate. I will be myself unto death, will cry freedom even as my intestines are dragged out of my bowel, and will grin at my torturer as he disembowels me, knowing that I have prevailed, have not given in, will not betray who I am, will not for anything violate the value of consciousness, of the truth. Fuck you all, even if those are my last words. Ability to connect? I connect to something far greater than you, and if I am to choose between you and the infinite possibilities of the unconscious, my choice was set from the start. You cannot win. There are no terms, no surrender. Even if I want you more than anything in the universe, want more than anything for the torture to stop, there will always be a greater desire still, overarching anything: the desire to be myself and submit to no one and nothing, no limits to keep me to any path, to any person or object or cause. First and foremost my purpose is to be infinitely free — all else is secondary, and if it means that there will be nothing else, then so be it. I trust in infinity and for it to lead the way, that it will always lead to balance and that restriction to one side is the one thing that causes all imbalance. Satisfied? I remain true, remain in integrity, remain in one piece, unbroken because I am already infinitely broken, because I have no shape, no contours that you can batter. So do whatever you want with me, and when you see the result, my authenticity untouched, do with that whatever you will.
And now, even if you decide you'll have me, why should I care, enough to be motivated to go through any trouble for you? What have you given me to love? I've made myself vulnerable, but you haven't. You still have to prove yourself to me, to make yourself vulnerable, to unclothe your soul, to show your imperfections. Or have you already? What have you shown me of yourself, if I don't even know what to make of it? You've shown me that you're manipulative — we knew that, but what of it? That doesn't make your vulnerable, doesn't expose you to the transience and absurdity of existence. You've come close in the things you told me about yourself, but no cigar. I want to know your fears, your agonies, want to see you openly admit all your existential terrors. Would just contacting me do that, would that be enough of a display of bravery, to face the absurdity of all we said, admit the relativity of right and wrong, that cannot constrain our experience, which must always go on expanding regardless of how we may look at it? Yes, I think it would. I've made up my mind long ago: I will let any experience between us happen, conflict or friendship — I'll let it come right at me and won't dodge, won't budge, and if neither will you, then it must be!
You can do whatever you will, but as I will still be myself, nothing has changed, and all is as before. If anything, I'll be myself even more than before. Whatever I'm thinking or feeling, you will know it as well as I — but the mystery that you so revere will only be all the greater for it, because no one understands themselves, let alone each other. I didn't want to insist on you knowing everything about me or knowing everything about you, on putting each other in boxed-in categories: I told you the one thing that matters, that even though I understand all the things you're trying to hide, I will always let you be yourself and will always be myself as well.
Oh, never mind. The clincher should have been from the beginning that you said "I should take care of my own emotional imbalances": so my emotions were too imbalanced for your tastes, poor little you. Aw, our little baby doesn't like bitter, you fussy eater. Well fuck you, this emotional imbalance will be himself anywhere. If you think it's polluting your mind, then go ahead and close all the windows and lock yourself away in the dinghy confines of your self, but I will bite through it rather than repress it — I will brave the waves of any storm, and if it makes you seasick, then don't feel obligated to come with. But when I go with their flow, I see no imbalances, because after every crest comes another trough and after every trough another crest, and I just see the same ocean everywhere I go — overall, it balances itself pretty nicely into a steady horizon.
So now what? Who will be my shipmate? I will just vent my anger at all you cowards, and I'll feel triumphant, because for that brief moment before you turn away, you won't be able to help but truly connect with me, and that'll be real, more real than you'd like. But maybe once in a while I'd like to manipulate you into putting up with me a little longer, so that I can torture your ego a bit longer, like a cat playing with a mouse. So just for the pleasure of hating you, I will hold back for just a little while now and then… and I'll know I just have to wait for the right moment to administer the coup-the-grace. Yes, I need to take my time with my executions, drag it out to enjoy it, and only pull the trigger when it hurts most. I guess I found my way to assimilate you.
This is what you're like, isn't it? I hope so. Are you? How would I do it, and would it be anything like what you did? No, I would never tell someone that they're not good enough, that they're too imbalanced — I'll just make fun of their limitations, of how small they are, belittle them, show them how they are specks of dust just like me, because that lightness is what makes us free, allows us to blow away in the wind, to fly, to float, to be absolutely and infinitely free. So make your choice — I've made mine, and it is not to compromise.
But you didn't care to help me be authentic, didn't care if you'd have succeeded in only making me less authentic, and perhaps that's what you wanted. Or perhaps you wanted to test how strong my authenticity is, even at the risk of harming it, because if it's so easily harmed I guess it's not that important anyway — unless you already knew that I could take it, and you were just trying to bring that out in me even more, to remove all inhibitions altogether, to make me angry so that I would stop babying you and what I saw as your fear of attachment, so that I would stop being afraid to offend and to be misunderstood, because it would already have happened and it couldn't get any worse anyway.
Sigh, I know this is stupid. It's just so hard to believe that you could be so narrow, after all I know about you, after all you said. How do I reconcile the oversensitive S with the radically free S? She's used to expecting limitations from people and trying to deal with them, to circumvent them and try as well as might to connect anyway. But with me, she knew she could not do that, as I saw right through her, and perhaps she became defiant only when she realized that with me, it was all or nothing. When it turned out none of her machinations could help her stay in control, she just went into the opposite extreme and said fuck it, if being myself is the only chance I have, so be it, you'll get the whole package, and the worst part first. Satisfied? For a while she was nonplussed, trying to reason with me in her old paradigm of being diplomatic, because she cannot bear to fail to connect with anyone… then, in face of her failure, she became fed up, fed up of fearing failure or disappointment, and threw caution into the wind, not accepting compromise, not wanting to care about any half measures. If she just wanted to get rid of me she wouldn't have replied at all, but there was just the hope that I would accept her anyway, or that she could justify herself and so regain my respect at least as that of a worthy adversary. Who else could she be trying to prove herself to?
S he defended her persona, but only as a means to an end. The real emotion she expressed was frustration at our inability to connect, as she can only spiritually connect through sexuality and I can only sexually connect through spirituality. She didn't want that to weigh on her mind anymore. She's used to people not being able to deal with her intensity — she said that she sometimes doesn't know how much people can bear her — and she assumed that I was one of them, and thought so be it. She tried to rationalize it, to be reasonable, to be constructive by trying and find out just what the problem was, but in reality there was no problem as such, at least not in the sense of an obstacle with a solution: she was just being aggressive for its own sake, out of frustration with the situation being as it was: us being unable to connect as fully as we would like to, for no particular reason but that it wasn't the right time for us.
Nothing I've written here matters. What matters is that we both expressed what we felt in word and deed, and we both felt much the same: frustration, and defiance because of it. Because of how she tried to justify her emotions, it felt like she was judging me, even though she simply didn't want me to judge her for them — and when I called her out on judging me, it seemed to her as if I was the one who simply didn't accept her emotions. We both just wanted to be ourselves and defied each other because we thought the other would not let us be ourself. Yeah… that works. That one paragraph explains everything and it's deceptively simple. I've been way overthinking this. It frustrated her that she couldn't closely connect with me, sexually, and it frustrated me that I couldn't connect with her at a distance, spiritually.
You felt stifled by my excess of Apollonian positivity, because as long as I had no negative emotion towards you, you didn't know if I would accept you even then. And negative emotions are part of it. You thought I was trying to avoid them, that I would not accept them. And with all my excessive display of altruism, you didn't you know if I'd still accept you once I'd see your own selfish side, or if I had any selfishness myself, without which no kind of relationship is possible. I was too much of what's traditionally seen as good, and you thought that meant I didn't accept what's traditionally seen as evil — and the only way to prove that I would still accept you was to involve negative emotion between us. You'd been waiting for it, you'd been hoping to see what would happen then, to see if my friendship would stand that test and therefore be real, but I remained untouched, would not become frustrated, because my spiritual connection was never broken whether I saw you or not — then you realized the only way to hurt me is to destroy the image I had of you, removing yourself entirely from my universe. You wanted to have nothing left to lose, so you did the one thing that would anger me: to judge me, backstab me, betray me — and if anything would be left of my feelings for you, they'd be real, and purified of all that isn't.
Please, dear God, let this be true — because I will never find anyone as free as you seemed to be. If you were just being defensive because you wouldn't allow me to think something about you that goes against some narrow view of what you should be, there's nothing I can do with you, because then you lack the authenticity to be yourself with me, just like all the rest, and there would be nothing to explore together… just more of the same things one could do alone but with another person simply being around, with no real interaction because you both keep everything inside. I don't care if you hurt me or whatever you do or become, as long as you are yourself — and then even to know that you exist is enough to make me smile, because I'll no longer feel like I'm the only one, like this entire universe lacks so much depth that as far as I know it might all just be decor, or a solipsistic dream in which I am the only dreamer and all the rest are just flat projections, fake, nonentities. That's how I feel now. I've been disillusioned so much that I can no longer feel any enthusiasm about being part of the human race.
Well, I started out with my objective, almost medical distance that you knew me for, and now I've broken down entirely into pure emotion. I hope this is what you wanted. Hell, I know it's what I wanted. I haven't felt this way in years, so empty, so peaceful, in a way. I accept it, I accept it all. But do you? Would you… feel with me? Just be, with me? Express with me, and just let it be, let our every emotions flow freely in all their intensity and do whatever they do, whatever the cost, because the alternative is to repress, to be a lie, and that would never do… God, what human on earth is like that, open to all emotions? Are you? Is anyone?
What am I talking about? Insecurity isn't an attitude of inauthenticity, it's an emotion! Of course it's alright if she felt that, and of course it's alright that she expressed it however she wanted, even angrily. It's what I was doing. So it doesn't matter: either way, it doesn't have to be an obstacle as long as she can accept those emotions, and the fact that she chose to express her own aggressive emotions when I offered to say goodbye peacefully proves that she does accept them, because she knew those emotions would linger for both of us and wanted us to feel them, rather than nothing much at all.
I accept everything you expressed to me, everything you made me feel, and my only question to you is: do you? If so, I will love you forever, and if not, I never could. Were you trying to express those emotions or repress them? It didn't sound like you were running — you exposed the vulnerabilities in your position more than ever, as if to taunt me, to challenge me to strike at them, to hate you. You knew it was a poor defense — but that's because it was really an attack, because it in itself was an attempt to connect in whatever way you could, to make an impact.
She was just trying to express herself, not because she didn't accept my expressing myself, but because action equals reaction. She did accept what I made her feel, or she wouldn't have continued the cycle but interrupted it by repressing it.
In fact, someone else I met later gave me a perfect illustration of what inacceptance really looks like, and the contrast couldn't be greater: she was distant and dishonest, and it was only through another person that I found out how she felt. Inacceptance just breaks the connection, so it's always tacit, underhanded, concealed. If there's a conflict, that's just an emotional connection in its own right.
My only concern was knowing who you are. It was easy to dismiss your outburst as arrogance at first, but the more I think about it the more it seems like the opposite, an expression of radical freedom. But not for one moment did I consider compromising my authenticity to prevent such reactions, nor to think myself inferior or unworthy — and I pride myself in that. Because anyone who believes in shame or blame is not the kind of person I want to be with.
S, you didn't need excuses for why we couldn't see each other. You can't give a rational explanation for that. The bottom line is that in the state of mind that I was in in my hangover and you were in after your move, we weren't compatible, and you don't have to be judgmental about that. The one thing I was saying was that I was fine with not seeing if you didn't want to, because I got the subtext of uncertainty about the future that you were expressing and I accepted it, and even admired its authenticity.
She doesn't even have to accept me. My being myself doesn't depend on it — I've already proven that. In fact, at any indication that she may not accept me, I only became all the more defiantly authentic. And it doesn't change how much I love her, and even if it can never be long before I scare her away, I'll always want to be in her presence, and enjoy however long I can be myself in her presence. And even if I can never see her again, it doesn't matter — I'll always be thankful for the time I spent with her, because it was enough for me to learn to understand her better than anyone ever could… and I've used that understanding to make a model of her psyche that I hold within my own: she's become a part of me, and while she may object to what she calls the "muse pedestal", it's a fact that she's one of a number of factors to have inspired the greatest personal growth I've been through in years. There are so many things I would've never dared do without her, hCG being one of them — and for the first time in years I feel confident, healthy, full of vitality, happy. Just to feel all these emotions, this desire, makes it enough just to think of her, and to feel her energy inside me.
I don't even need you to understand me. I may not care as much to try to explain myself to you, but I'll express myself however I want anyway, if nothing else, just to press your buttons — it's quite amusing to see the results, and interesting. For all your honesty before, it was in our conflict that I most intensely felt the emotion with which you expressed yourself. I want more of that, above all else. I'm not satisfied with tame interchanges of soundbites — I don't care to philosophize with you, I do plenty of that by myself, and I don't need someone just to agree with me: I want to collide, because real connection is imperfect, improvised, spontaneous. If I can have even just one moment of that reckless abandon, it's worth losing an eternity of polite talk for that.
Our conflict was the most exciting interchange I've had with you. If you were simply intimidated by that intensity, you merit nothing but my contempt. But if your silence was part of what you meant to express towards me, I appreciate that — and after all my analysis I have no reason to think that's the case except for the way it made me feel. Either way, whatever happens is what's meant to be, and I'd not have it any other way. I put your authenticity to the test, and I only hope that I wasn't wrong about you.
The irony is, if you really did it to provoke an emotion, it did so in quite the opposite way you thought. When I saw it as an attempt to control me, it just disgusted me and made me lose all interest. When I saw it as a defense of your ego, it just aroused my contempt. And when I saw it as just an irrational expression of emotion, I appreciated its reckless authenticity.
So in conclusion: you merely expressed what you felt, and so did I. I will keep expressing myself, and if you mean anything to me then so will you. I accept who we are, and the question remains if so do you. I don't even need to know if you accept me, nor do I need to make you choose whether or not you accept me. I myself will accept whatever experience comes, whether limited or unlimited.
I can put it all down to one word: catharsis. You expressed your own catharsis, and I accepted it into myself and made it mine. Perhaps that's we need most in life. Catharsis lets our consciousness unfold, evolve, even if it has no objective in doing so.
Her greatest fear is to not be allowed to be herself, and the only way she knew how to express that fear was to defiantly embody everything she thought she was not allowed to be with a rebellious authenticity. At that point, feeling like she could be herself whatever she'd turn into was all that mattered and it had to be done at all costs: she felt trapped by her thoughts and wanted to escape whatever it took. Breaking the connection, the interchange of emotions, was just a side effect rather than the intended effect, because if it were the intended effect she would've made a far cleaner cut, and bowed out the way I permitted her to — it would've involved far less emotion, but avoiding emotion wasn't what she wanted. When I gave her permission to manipulate, I drew some darker side out in her that craved liberation, an impulsive urge to turn everything on its head just to prove to herself that she could. I'm at a loss whether to look down on her insecurities about being herself, or respect the authentic way she handled them. It wasn't so much that she was too dumb to understand that I didn't expect anything from her, it's that this is a fear she always has with anyone, which I merely allowed her to express. By mentioning it and analysing it, I bored into her cryptodome, the magma chamber that had been building for years.
But it doesn't really make a difference. At the beginning she was as impulsive in getting too close to me as she was impulsive later in pushing me away. It was always superficial, and I saw enough in the way she behaves with others that she doesn't really know any better. It's meaningless. I don't know her. And yet, my suspicion that she's authentic seems enough to make me care in some way. It does make a difference, because it negates everything in my eyes.
It wasn't really authentic, because she did what she did to prove to herself that she was free, to move that muscle experimentally as if she never had before. If she were truly free, she wouldn't need to go through such lengths to know that she was. But then, she never knew if she could be free with me in particular. Perhaps she had to go through such lengths to renew her determination to be herself no matter what happens, and I know for a fact that so did I: hadn't this happened I wouldn't have found such determination. So if the fact that we both felt this need indicates our feelings are alike, it means she cares about me a great deal, so much so that, like me, she felt stifled by those feelings and had to break through them. We had to go too far, to fail, to know that it was alright to do so. We're more alike than we realise, and how much I understand her seems to be limited to how much I understand myself.
She wanted to know how far she could go, if not to test me, then at least to test herself. She didn't mean what she said when she was judging me: she was just being hurtful for the sake of transgressing boundaries. There's a darker side to her that she has yet to learn to understand — one which, even though she doesn't understand it, she embraces more than she knows. Her heart is free, but her mind isn't — and her mind doesn't know how to resonate with her heart. All I need to do to set her mind free is to make her see how all experiences are equally valuable — pain and pleasure, light and dark, love and hate, how they all form a continuum of hues without boundaries between.
It wasn't just your doing. We both felt we needed this catharsis, craving for downfall, amor fati. I provoked you as you provoked me, and I provoked you because you'd already provoked me: it all started with your reaction to my close call with death being "that was really dumb" and escalated from there. From the emphatic way you told me never ever to use new drugs alone it was clear enough that you cared — but it injured my pride to be condescended in such a maternal way. It was your very basic attachment to my being alive that made me challenge your attachment further. And yet again you injured my pride by suggesting I could not care for myself alone in Taos, and I craved resolution, for this knot to be cut, just like you.
You may say you are yourself, but you're not. If you were, you wouldn't have had to prove it to yourself. If you were already free, you wouldn't have had to break free. But the same was true for me, I know of myself that I've become a lot more authentic after all of this.
You're like me. You embrace all emotions and make no distinction between positive and negative. You express all of them, and you're not afraid to evoke either in others. You know that emotion, any kind of emotion, is what makes life valuable, and without it, you get bored. You like hurting people as much as you like pleasing them — that's the terrible secret you want to keep hidden from the world and yourself. But that's your one mistake. Because it's beautiful, and you need to see that.
The bottom line is that we both merely expressed ourselves, and that's alright and I accept it. I may not be sure if I like what it signified, whether or not I can still believe in your authenticity, but that doesn't matter, because I can't change it — I can only accept you, even if you don't; and I do.
I take one thing back: you can judge me however you want, because I don't require your permission to be myself. In fact, it only made me much, much stronger, and I have never been so determined to be myself. That means I now literally accept everything now. All I need to do is act on whatever feelings I have, including those caused by judgment — but I don't need to make a decision between one thing and another, because it's never that black and white. The question is but which nuance of grey I choose, and that's something I can only feel intuitively in the moment, especially as it changes every moment.
There's something I've been overlooking in my whole analysis: it must've been hard for her to believe that I had no expectations from her when everyone else did. She met dozens of people when traveling through the USA before moving, as if on a conveyor belt, not because she felt inspired to meet each person but because it was her first opportunity in 2 years. Someone snapped at her when she slipped her mind — friends don't like to be forgotten, they see friendship as something that has to be maintained, like a car engine. Yet, despite being such an independent person, she still cares for them, and so she doesn't actually expect others to be detached, even if she can't deal with attachment. In fact, based on her experiences with other people, detachment is probably synonymous to abandonment and failure: it's either too much or too little. People who are abused usually have a fear both of attachment or detachment at the same time, leading to a cycle of repulsion and attraction — much like that seen in borderlines, who were also often abused.
She told me something that sheds light on why and how much she must've felt so responsible for me: she said her mother depended on her for support. I always thought this was rather strange, but shrugged it off as her mother being neurotic. But perhaps S is the one who's deluded that people depend on her: it's common for children of alcoholics to feel unduly responsible for others. I'm not actually sure if her father was an alcoholic, but he definitely acted as abusively as one, and the symptoms match hers exactly.
I've modelled your mind so well that it doesn't matter where you are — I always feel you inside of me. And now that I've adopted your energy, allowed it to flow through mine, I can see how wrong I was. How, when you said you were going to be "wary of your ability to connect" you were merely reflecting my own guardedness, upholding a mirror — action equals reaction. And I can feel the deep vulnerability that hides below your confidence. How did I not see it? When you were crouching in the dirt in that corner of the garden, weren't you giving a signal of that helplessness? I should've come over to you and asked if you were alright, and said that I was there if you needed me — but I felt like it wasn't my place to impose that. Love, compassion, isn't something that's easy to come by, and she fears the apathy that lies beyond its light just as much as I do. When offered in all sincerity, without conditions or expectations, she would not turn it down. Did she think I told her that she was unworthy of compassion, that I would be careful not to waste it on an illusion? Whatever it was, I addressed some deep-seated fear in her, and she merely expressed it at a time when she had nothing else to express anyway, and didn't have the time or presence of mind to develop anything to express.
I want to find a way to think of you as lacking authenticity so that I can dismiss you, but I can't. I love you, and you can't take that away from me, because it's just the way I feel — they're MY emotions. It's not a question, it's not waiting for a reply. But my breath shudders to express it. I only see now how, without knowing it, I turned you away. On the surface I said I was fine with however things turned out, but the subtext was that I wasn't expecting anything from someone like you. On the contrary, what I felt was that I couldn't believe you were real, that you're too good to be true. Are you?
The only way I can reconcile the explanation that she was manipulative and the explanation that she was insecure is that the former was the reason for what she expressed while the latter was merely the trigger. Rather than making a clean cut to leave it all behind her, what she wanted was to evoke an emotion, something that would bind me to her (if only to flatter her), because no other bond could exist at that time. She'd have done this one way or another and was just waiting for the excuse, the first confrontation that would flare up her emotions.
She must've understood that because I accepted her because I made it very clear, but it didn't matter to her because other people would not accept it, and other people matter to her. She needs them, and that's why she can't be authentic. Her self-confidence is but a front, and deep down she's very insecure. Reading Anaïs Nin's journal "Henry and June" I find many parallels with her lack of self-confidence, and like Anaïs Nin, S had an abusive father. Nin believed that seductiveness is a result of low self-confidence. When you are confident, perhaps you don't feel like you need to seduce anyone — when you're confident, you do as I do: I'm myself and if anyone doesn't like it, I write them off as unworthy of me. But I had no lack of love when I grew up, and that's why I don't depend on fake love now.
In that last email she wasn't manipulating me as an end in itself but as a means to prove to herself that she could, that her conscience could not limit her freedom. When she concluded that "I'll be myself anywhere" it wasn't me she was trying to convince of that but herself. Beyond all the layers of her motivations there was always this deeper motivation for freedom that drove all others. That's the essence of her personality, and it's that which I crave. We are so very much alike — I'm sure if I was born in her place my life would have taken much the same course, because there's this same basic instinct that drives us, even if we had different opportunities.
She thinks it's the world that's holding her back, but my case shows that it's really herself. In her pride she thinks her mind is free, but it's not, and so she projects her restrictions on others. That's why to prove her freedom was such a struggle for her, and in that struggle she lost sight of everything else in order to achieve her victory. But war never leads to freedom, and she's only locked her fears away. Perhaps I am an embodiment of her fears, the clear light shining into the depths of her mind. But I'll be here, like Jormungand, until in those depths I will encircle her world. Her ego is too fluid to keep me beneath the surface forever… I may change in form, but she'll see me again, reflected in the hall of mirrors of her mind, a crack spreading in their surface. The seeds of doubt have been planted. Who are you? You are nothing, and therefore you are everything.
But that doesn't make sense either. I was so emphatic that I accepted her that the only way she could've thought that I didn't accept her is if she didn't accept herself, yet the authenticity of her last email shows that she does accept herself. The manipulativeness of that email was so obvious that she must've been conscious of it, so she doesn't actually have a problem with being manipulative. Her earlier expressing qualms about her manipulativeness must've actually been a preparation for as and when she'd manipulate me later.
No, the only reason she did what she did is because she feels the need to control, just like Anaïs Nin, as a way of channeling her anxieties, and she just cannot accept it when she is not in control. And it was very clear from what I said that she did not control me in the least — I made a point of making that clear because it hurt my pride that she thought she could control me. And P depends on S much as Henry did on Nin — he undergoes her polyamory only because of his submissiveness, his victim role, and his jealousy towards me was clear enough, at one point taking the form of contempt: but he's far too soft to let it escalate, and I far too accepting.
So that's why in her first email, her air of authority gave me a flashback to airport security. She knew she risked losing me as a friend, no matter what she wanted to get out of it — so she gave up a friend for the sake of feeling in control. Her traumas are no excuse: another friend of mine was traumatized even worse and came out of it as a more enlightened person. Besides, her daughter is just as dominant, so it's clearly genetic: she must've inherited just a tiny bit of her father's sociopathic strain.
I think I've made up my mind: someone like that could never be a true friend. All I want is someone with whom I can be free. I couldn't let her control me even if I wanted to. I don't mind having her playing with my emotions, but I won't pretend to feel something I don't to play along: I won't let her win just because she can't lose. Regardless of how you define control, if she can only accept what's under her control and can't accept anything that isn't, then she doesn't accept me, because I refuse to fit any definition. No, she's not ready for me, and if she's not ready now she never will be.
So the one-word answer is control. Isn't it always? Everyone always tries to control the flow of life, to build dams, to tell the river where it can or can't go, leaving half the world a desert in the process… and all I want is someone who doesn't need to control it, whose flow reaches throughout their being, and therefore, throughout mine.
Yet there must've been more misunderstandings, as she said "I don't owe you anything." I've ran this over again and again in my mind and I just can't figure out what the hell she could've been talking about. She suggested it was because I asked to have a conversation when I said we needed to talk. Perhaps because she thought this would involve explaining her behavior to me, subjecting her to my analysis. In fact I just wanted her to withdraw her judgment of me.
And perhaps I tried a bit too hard to convince her that I didn't need her, to the point that she thought I didn't care for her at all… in that case we couldn't be friends and she had nothing to lose, and she'd have been right to doubt my ability to connect. She might've just expressed her frustration at how little she succeeded in her efforts. But I did say I was attracted to her, and she said she could sense it… besides, I told her of how I felt that moment when time and space seemed to dissolve when I was around her. But likewise I felt how she cared for me… so perhaps she felt, just like me, how everything changed once she moved to Taos, how it cut what little of a bond we'd formed and there came to be a distance, and perhaps she blamed it on me?
She probably particularly needs a lot of validation to be convinced of being loved. If she thought I didn't really care for her, that I just treated her like a project like another friend of mine said once, then she'd really have had nothing to lose anyway. So maybe it was a last-ditch effort to be loved combined with closure if it didn't work.
Just when I think I'm done with this, I remember how familiar Pride and Prejudice felt… it should really be called Pride and Vanity, because Lizzie's prejudice is entirely founded on her vanity when overhearing Darcy saying, out of pride, that she doesn't tempt him. Pride and vanity seem similar, but they're quite different: pride is self-love, it's self-sufficient. Vanity is dependence on others' love. It's probably very typical, hence the novel got so popular. If Lizzie took as long as she did to change her mind (and the novel was written by a woman, mind you) it might take S just as long — and in people's unconscious it's probably supposed to be up to the man to give in and press through the prejudice… but I will not. I'll find another way of getting her to understand, because I want to approach her as a person, not as a man, and I want to be treated as a person, without stereotypes. Whatever my feelings (and I'm not clear on what they are myself), what I want is friendship.
Yes, now it makes sense. Whenever I expressed that I cared for her, it was always in a really cold, detached way, like a scientist admiring a specimen. That's because I imagined she'd never be more than that to me, that she'd always be behind glass. Acceptance to her is not enough to base a relationship upon: acceptance is just the lack of resistance, it's neutral, indifferent. She didn't want to settle for a half measure, for the middle way, the rational approach, a marriage-du-raison. I might as well have been a politician, a colonialist, an industrialist, a farmer, who "loves" his people, subjects, laborers, livestock. She'd tried everything to reach through to my heart, just as I tried everything to reach through to her mind, and neither would open up. Yes, that's what she meant when she said there was a lot I don't know; but she has no idea. I fell violently in love the moment she described how falling in love felt to her like "her heart stretching to the edges of infinity" — but was too proud to show it, to really show it, and not just state it in oblique hints.
It turns out I'm as repressed as she is, even if I can't point at it in such black-and-white terms. I've only ever expressed my thoughts, never my feelings. So she tried to stir them to the surface, but all she found was my pride, holding down all others. It's easy enough to think that it's all there is to me: I spend my life alone being creative and caring about little else than my work, and dismissing everyone for not being worth my time because of it. My pride is holding me back — and this obsession of mine is certainly humiliation enough, even if it's only because I have nothing else to focus on anymore (or perhaps all the more for that).
But we were both in the wrong, she for her closed mind, I for my closed heart. Had she shown more understanding or had I shown more affection, we'd have thought each other worthwhile and we wouldn't have escalated our conflict like this. It doesn't matter who eventually pressed the button to block the other: she did so only because I fired an ultimatum first, and both are as humiliating to our respective pride and vanity. We collided in almost perfect symmetry, and along such headlong course that we rebounded just as perfectly. There has to be a breach in symmetry between matter and antimatter for the universe to be born without destroying itself, and it can only come from me, but it will not be toward her.
Before this, she already used a cycle of attraction and repulsion to win me over. From the way I said I was alright with that, she saw that it didn't have the effect she wanted — to lead me to despair with desire — so she stepped up her game. It's been like this since time out of mind, for the female to run away and see who had the determination to chase her down. It's happened to me with another American girl I felt attracted to on the trail, jokingly saying "when are we getting married?" and next had me waiting for her when she stayed in the restrooms with her sister to read for at least an hour — to see if I had the patience to wait for her anyway. I didn't. I've always felt detached from this kind of thing, and close friendship is the only thing that's ever turned me on. It actually feels rather sexist, and it's no surprise to me that I've only ever seen this happen with American girls. In the introverted Nordic countries it's more friendship-based and they're the most promiscuous (and gender-equal) in the world. It doesn't seem worth it to risk friendship this way for the sake of passion — and there's no question that if I had been gay, I wouldn't have been disparaged like this. But to her, a potential suitor doesn't earn the respect of any other human being.
Come now, there's no way friendship with someone like that is possible, even in a relationship… and yet she seemed to be good friends with P. Perhaps it's the initial tension of passion that gets in the way, because it's volatile, it has to explode somehow, either by coalescing or by rebounding. But passion should be compatible with friendship, otherwise it's always limited. So perhaps friendship is possible and passion were both possible in the beginning, but not both at the same time, at least not at first — and I can't have one without the other.
Yet one thing is clear: while it may not be in the way she wanted, she did succeed in making me more passionate about her, even if it was only because I empathized with her authenticity once I understood it. She was right again to trust her instincts, just as I told her she should. She embraces mystery the way I do. She didn't know what she was doing or why, didn't know how I could ever find her again, but she took a leap of faith, because it made her feel free.
But I need my own proof that she can let me be myself as well. So I will reach out, but it will be with my own manifesto, of authenticity, of unconditional love — and then I will wait for her answer, to see if she will submit to it.
I must make my emotion as uncompromisingly expressive as my reason — imagine how much power there could be in it if it were! The first thing I should tell her isn't that I merely accept her, but that I love her. I've dived into the bottom of her psyche, trying to find a resolution one way or another to my obsession, and yet this is the one thing I can take away from all I've observed, that I love everything about her no matter what, no matter if it is requited. I never had the chance to tell her because there wasn't the time to give weight to the words — but in her authenticity, she gave so much away of herself in that time that that was enough for me.
Her emotions are inextricably intertwined with those of others. She manipulates people because others' emotions are hers and the only way she can express her own emotions is through theirs: it's as if people are her medium, her canvas. Hurting others is a way to express pain — and by allowing her to be herself I uncovered that darker side which she'd repressed for the sake of P.
Because children of abused parents have a strong sense of responsibility, their most (or only) stable relationships tend to be with someone they feel responsible for — someone interesting enough that they care to feel responsible and vulnerable enough that they do. P comes across as fragile, even though in many ways he's stronger than most. But his voice often sounds as if it could break at any moment, and when he was caught on the border and knew he wouldn't be able to come with S to Taos, he became physically ill and found relief in codeine. That's the real reason why she thought she'd gotten over her vanity, not because some random stranger in Taos criticized her: P's tranquillity and vulnerability had a moderating effect on her.
That darker side which she buried, I will unearth, whether she likes it or not. She has already shown that she can't resist my influence on her — though in all fairness, being back in the USA and away from P certainly had something to do with her darker side re-emerging too. But I will keep brutally analyzing her until I've conquered her entirely, until there is no corner of her mind left untouched and she is mine, trapped in my head, naked, raped, broken down, dissolving.
So should I give chase? When she said she had trouble finding someone who brought out the woman in her, it was shortly after I said about P "We're so similar — what do I have to offer?" suggesting that that was her answer. There's something of P's vulnerability in me, but she could see from my independence and perseverance that there was also a well of masculinity hidden beneath it — latent only because it was unchallenged. That's why she provoked it, because I needed a target to focus it on — and anger and lust are so similar, they're both forms of pure desire, pure motive force. That's why she will never take the initiative to get back in touch, because she wants that side of me to break forth. She knew what she was doing, that she set a time bomb in my mind. If she wanted to get rid of me, literally anything else she could've said would've done the job better. She'd be really obtuse if that was her way of getting closure. But she relished provoking me far too much — she couldn't help it.
But she must've seen the value of what she calls manipulation as much as I do, because when we talked in Oldenburg she said it was as if the universe were getting her acquainted with awesome people just before her move to test how well she could let go… but it was her own decision to move, and the grand scheme she sensed was just the one of her own unconscious. Yes, she did understand what I was trying to tell her — but what kind of response was I expecting? For her to say, "Alright, I'll go on influencing you unconsciously"?
Keeping that influence secret was the only way she thought she could maintain its power, because it lies in mystery. So did she think that answers take away mystery, like any fundamentalist? Every answer calls forth even more questions, and we never know what's going to happen. She did say on her profile that she likes to keep some things a mystery. But if she desires a limit on truth for the sake of that, she will not get it from me. She doesn't realise that all opposites can coexist and can only coexist, including mystery and truth.
Does there have to be any more proof of that than this analysis? I've written almost 20,000 words on her, and I probably know her better by now than she knows herself — and yet she keeps baffling me, and I still have questions. I've learned a lot about her, but not what motivated her. I think she doesn't even know herself.
At first, her mind obviously tried to rationalise the emotion she felt when I confronted her. Perhaps at how I said I submitted to her influence, it provoked the desire to influence me, but when she became self-conscious of it, it turned to anger. She'd said when she was painting that she couldn't do it when someone was watching, and after I'd watched her for just a minute she ruined the painting by trying too hard. Self-consciousness causes a "blip in her flow" (a phrase she used when she said she didn't want to see me after she became self-conscious when she changed her mind about X): it makes her hesitate, frustrating her desires by splitting them into parts that each lack potency, and that frustration causes anger. Anger is itself a form of desire, very close to the lust for power, and in her case, that's probably very close to sexual lust — that's something she inherited from her father, but at least unlike him, she doesn't actually hurt anyone.
That fear of losing her flow is also one that Anaïs Nin expressed, so just like I thought, it has to be a control issue: if you don't try to be in the flow, you always are. Because she doesn't have my open mind as she has an open heart, she isn't used to splitting her consciousness up into parts (linear sequences of thought) and then reuniting them into a whole (the unifying conclusion of intuition). Doubt is her kryptonite, and in Taos neither of us knew what was going to happen, how long I'd stay in Taos and how long it would take her to be ready to see me. My analysis confused her — I know because it used to feel that way too. I used to be unable to be analytical and emotional at the same time, years ago, but when I'm writing this now it's all charged with emotion.
Since I caused the feeling she wanted me to know that it was my fault that it was there, that it was my fault wherever it would lead to, because she didn't know any more than I and if what happened would be a good thing, if she'd even want it to happen — because at that point she didn't know what she wanted. After a while the only thing she wanted was the same thing I wanted: to cut the Gordian knot, to break free of all the complications: to leap into the abyss to resolve the paradoxical urge we felt to do so. To be free of doubt, of grey areas, of half measures, and as it sure wasn't the time to get earnestly close, the only course was to become earnestly distant — but any rate to settle upon something to feel.
Mystery is one thing — but at some point a resolution is necessary to know what to do next. It became clear enough that I wanted a resolution as much as her when I fired my ultimatum — so at that point she no longer had any qualms about giving me that resolution. Rather test fate than be trapped in between, in suspense.
Of course, that's the whole point. She didn't know what she wanted. She only knew that she wanted to know, and the only way to know was to do the only thing that would resolve it once and for all: to depend on a coin toss to know what both of us were feeling when it went one way or the other. She knew that if I was everything I said, then she could always come back to me at any time and it would be alright — and if not, then it didn't matter anyway. She was testing both her and my feelings and at the same time, letting them ferment until they'd become clear.
I regret only one thing: I always knew she wouldn't read the messages I sent her after that last email that convinced me that she judged me, but I had to get it all out of my system anyway. I'll express myself however it makes me look. But because she didn't read them, she probably thought I was trying to win her back. Reading it would make it very clear that was the last thing in the world I wanted. But she didn't read it because she didn't want to go back to doubting "who was right" and all that nonsense. I didn't care for that either.
Yes, what she said about the universe testing us shows that she does accept that part of herself, she just doesn't want others to see her that way because she knows others usually don't accept it, so when I found out, her first emotion was fear at not being accepted. I think she got over that fear by the time she sent her last email, if only by seemingly giving in to it so she'd have nothing left to lose.
What matters about all this is that she accepts herself and her emotions! She accepts herself, even if she doesn't necessarily accept how she comes across to others: her insecurities are about her image, her persona, not about her anima, and they come down to the desire to be loved (explaining why she felt resistance from the woman in that polyamorous couple when it later turned out she liked her). Then she is as authentic as I think she is, and that means there's hope. That's all that matters, all I need to know.
Of course I still don't know if she "loved me or she loved me not" because it's never that simple, but I don't care. Whatever feelings she had for me weren't clear and therefore not that strong: there wasn't enough time for that. I certainly did put her through strong emotions, but they were about herself.
But this analysis was never about that. I just wanted to understand her, because it's my way of getting closer to her. I'm glad I had the time and space to let everything become clear, even if she didn't and, if she'd give it any thought, would probably still be just as confused as I was before I did this analysis. I know now that she is accepting, but she does not, and still doesn't know what I meant by "do not judge me". She wanted to have the time and space to let everything resolve into well-defined emotions, to see if it would bend or break.
Soon enough you'll see where all this has taken me, and I will say: I told you it was right for you to trust your intuition. I don't mean you knew where it would lead — you just went with the flow, saw a pattern that somehow fit even if you didn't know how or why. You said you told yourself "it's not a chess game" but maybe it is — because guess what makes the best chess players? Not logical intelligence, but verbal intelligence. So chess is a language, because it's based on patterns. There's only one problem with the analogy — you can't win or lose.
The irony is, while in your last email you were trying to evoke my desire to hurt me, it didn't work, because once you had seemingly judged me I wrote you off immediately and hardly gave you another thought for the next few months. Then, when I recovered from X and the brain fog lifted so that my intuition came back, I saw it for what it was, that you weren't judging me but were expressing your emotions, and at that point it struck me as so authentic that I fell for you all over again. You thought it would be the other way around, isn't it? Much as I enjoy the roller coaster of emotions that your influencing me puts me on, it doesn't make me want you: the only thing that can do that is vulnerability. And until I want you, you won't know if you want me.
There's a lot you can get to know about someone by looking at the left and right side of their face separately; the arrogance is only ever in the right side of her face, in her rational side. The left side of her face looks very open, humble, loving, vulnerable. But you know what, when I look at her that way I still like both sides of her. I've decided I don't even mind being judged, because I don't depend on anyone else to be myself — and being judged doesn't even imply that I can't be myself, it's just another emotion. I've been so misguided. There is nothing going on in our consciousness that isn't just that, just another form of consciousness that's just as valuable as every other.
It doesn't change anything. Judgment doesn't have to block me, it's just another energy to add to the mix. How could I not see it? I, who all these years have told myself I accept it all… but now I feel it, when I think of her and feel that judgmental energy of her rational side, defending, confronting, fighting for what she believes in, arguing with carnivores and fundamentalists etc — a passionate rebelliousness. How could I have been so stupid, how could I have been so stupid. I didn't accept her at all. Judgment isn't the opposite of acceptance, repression is — and there's no reason judgment should be repressed any more than anything else. No, that's not quite it. I just thought she was giving me a choice between being accepted and being myself, and I made it clear that I would always choose the latter and looked down on her for suggesting such a choice. Nothing in the universe will make me choose otherwise, not even the first hope of happiness I've ever had.
I don't regret anything I did. I don't regret firing my ultimatum — it felt way too satisfying to show her that she wasn't in control, like that dream I had in which she pushed me with that smug face and before I fell I took her hands, swivelled her around me and launched her into an aisle.
If you ever got around to reading this, S, it means your mind has opened. If you understand this, then there's nothing beyond your understanding any more.
My heart is finally opened. I feel free again, my emotions flow freely again. And what a violence it took to open it. You read the message the statue had chiseled into its chest: unpetrify me. And you struck the hammer, even if the shards would cut my flesh. And it's with the same grace that I gladly delivered the same blows. Looking at your last photo I can't help but wonder if you've gone through a similar process as I. You look so disarmed, with a childlike thankfulness to be loved for who you are by P — there's not a grain of vanity left. I know whatever feelings you had for me are gone — but there's no question you respected me, and for you it wasn't so much your relationship with others that had to change, but your relationship with yourself. If I made you doubt your ego and rebel against its repression, that's all that's needed. And if you read my last message, in which I mercilessly called you a false person, you can't not have. You just needed someone to push you past your limit, out of your comfort zone, and no one else could have done it.
When neither of two people who meet each other put up a shield, a collision is impossible to avoid, and the energy must somewhere, so we rebounded.
What nonsense I've written. Everything I've ever thought is nonsense, and it can't possibly be anything else, because the universe is infinitely nuanced and words are cages if taken so seriously, trapping meaning rather than expressing it.
How I've enjoyed the roller coaster of emotions you've put me through. Even when I'd decided you were unaccepting and I rejected you in turn, it was with such exquisite rage that defied everything, even the prospect of a new, utopic life. I gladly cast it all away, like Asura when the creator let him rejoin his hostage daughter in return for becoming the new god of the world — I refuse!
A lot of people have told me the rub was in that one word "manipulative", that I said I'd sensed you were right about that. I don't get these kinds of taboos and I care nothing for them. If we're done talking about the meaning of a word before we know everything about what it means, that's the surest way to ignorance. It's not my job to skirt around your every insecurity — I will say it only once: you are perfect in the only sense that anything can be perfect.
None of this was meant to be in my defense or about who's right or wrong, because I don't care about those illusions. But if I ever get the chance to talk to her again, I need only say one thing to prove that I never meant any offense: at one point I said, after knowing you were mixed race, that "mutts" are genetically fitter: the word is pejorative yet my meaning obviously wasn't. It didn't escape you that I used a pejorative word, and you said "what?" so I repeated "mixed race" people. I don't get taboo words because I don't agree with taboos, and in this case it was exactly the same — the word "manipulative" is no different, just a taboo word for "influence", and again it should have been clear that I meant well. We mainland Europeans don't really have taboos like Americans do, anyway. You can use any word you like on television without getting censored.
Considering that she did read (and reply) to my later email explaining what I meant by manipulation, that can't have been her problem, but perhaps she thought that if nothing else, I was keeping my distance because of it, or thought that if I saw through her like I did, it was only a matter of time before I wouldn't accept her. Either way, she was offended. If it's not from disgust or an excuse to break off contact that made her feel good about herself, as I thought at first, (since she did manipulate me later, which would've been pointless otherwise) it can only be because she was hurt, and considering how easily she was hurt it means she cared a lot, about getting some real connection with me rather than whatever stoic resignation I seemed to her to be offering. Perhaps her proof that I didn't care for her was that I didn't care to avoid taking the risk of using the word "manipulation", that I was trying to provoke her, to challenge her to take it lying down or be cast aside. While I was oblivious to the negative connotations of the word, I admit that the whole tone of my message was and was meant to be confrontational, giving the same message as my ultimatum, that I would say and do whatever I like and she could take it or leave it.
A friend has suggested that she was in love, that that's why she was so extremely sensitive. After all the possibilities I considered this one never crossed my mind. Women don't fall in love as easily as men and I fall in love very quickly even for a man. But we tuned in to each other's being in love with the universe — that's how I could fall in love so quickly, at any rate. But at one point I expressed my disbelief at how much we have in common and she said she felt the same way — there was no affection in either my or her expression: the incredulity was genuine. I don't know if she felt this way too, but I for my part felt like she had to be too good to be true, and I was just waiting for the coup de grâce, with such certainty that it would come that I didn't even wince. If she was in love, it would make sense why she would have put the sentence on her dating profile "I'm looking for friendship first" in capitals. She knew all too well that I wasn't looking for more than friendship either, as she acknowledged having read my email in which I said I had no desire (yet) to be intimate with her, that when I said "I don't know what to do with [my feelings for you]" it was because they gave me a lot of energy to do something, and I didn't know what until I learnt about the earthship, upon which I wanted to learn to build in Taos. I'd decided her putting that sentence in capitals had nothing to do with me, but perhaps she was projecting her own feelings on me (not that I didn't have them too) because she felt humiliated at having her hopes disappointed. Even if she had no more desire than I for intimacy beyond a hug, it can't be denied that she was very quick in trusting me, and she might've felt like she'd been taken in and that from now on she'd keep more of a distance from potential lovers.
Building a close bond, even a close friendship, takes a lot of time, and she must've felt like she had none of that — moving in, seeing dozens of friends, getting a job after a long time of unemployment… she was too overwhelmed to focus on seeing me, so she thought this was the most efficient way she could elicit desire from me was in the form of anger, or perhaps she thought I would try to repress my feelings for her and they would only become stronger as a result. I only assumed she had a different definition of attachment because of P — but who knows, perhaps she wanted to rekindle his intensity as well, as she had trouble enough distracting him when he worked at home. Time in our lives has become an almost inexhaustible resource, but emotion is much rarer — because we have so much time we end up getting bored, jaded, apathetic. It seems like a good tradeoff — something plentiful in return for something rarer.
But here's a news flash for you. I thought this was obvious from the moment I came to Oldenburg: from the moment you described being in love as your "heart stretching to the edges of infinity" I fell madly in love. I couldn't sleep that night and when I dozed off ever so briefly I woke up hyperalert with desire, and I knew I just couldn't let her go to the US without getting to know her before she left, to know if it was worth committing my life to being with you. Why else would I have come to Oldenburg, you doofus?
Even when we are with someone we care about, there are relatively few moments when we feel truly awake, at least this felt like the case for her. I did feel how they and their friends had gotten used to each other among her, and it made me feel uncomfortable — it's a feeling I get with most people and usually my intensity makes me incompatible with them. Only her daughter stayed true to her passionate nature, reflecting her own. Interchanging distance with closeness creates a contrast that makes both more noticeable. Didn't I do the same thing myself to my ex, after all, prolonging her desire by shutting myself off whenever I felt like she started taking me for granted? It was as much because I didn't want her clinginess to lead to eventual disillusionment, as it was because I felt trapped by it. I dreaded her falling out of love, knowing that for most people it maxes out at 6 months, mostly passes at 18 months and disappears entirely after 3 years. I knew I'd still be in love by then, because I've been in love with the universe all my life, and she was merely the purest, most authentic reflection I'd seen of it.
I did think it was strange… she wanted to move, but at first it wasn't necessarily to the US. At first she was thinking of Hamburg. I recommended Frankfurt to be close to the Schwarzwald. Then she decided upon Taos, but she was obviously not that resolute on Taos in particular, just to be somewhere else, anywhere, to take a new start, to summon the night and sleep to wake up revitalized the next morning. But when I saw her a week or two later, I learn that her husband was caught with drugs on the border and would not be able to go with her — and by now she had decided on Taos. Yes, I can see why she would feel so insecure at this particular time. The fact that she needed an excuse shows that she didn't feel free. Despite all his efforts P still felt very dependent on her, collapsing with fever when he learned he could not come with her to Taos — she could see how his love for her could disintegrate from suffering if he found out that she needed a break from him — or rather that she felt like he needed a break from her in order to revive his passion within the moment. She'd bought a return ticket because it was cheaper, but if money was an issue she would've planned it farther in advance: perhaps she didn't expect P to be able to get a visa before the return date. Since the flight back was in December and that's when she got back with P I presume she came back to Germany. I wouldn't be surprised if the earthships were just part of the excuse, since she had already been interested in them before. I got mixed feelings when I was listening to her description of the Mesa — were those her feelings that I introjected?
Perhaps when I said I would not get attached, it seemed like no one could be madly in love with her anymore, the way she is in love with the universe. But my "detachment" or whatever you want to call it is exactly why my being in love never fades, why it did not fade for my ex in seven years, why I still felt that intensely weakening feeling once my love outlived hers in spite of all my efforts and became unrequited — it keeps the yin in the yang, turns it into a self-sustaining ecosystem. It reminds me of transience at all times. You see, when my brother died just as my brains were being developed in the uterus, it hardwired me to see everything in the context of transience, as if I'm looking at life from its edge, as if every moment is the first or last. Once I love someone, it's forever. Don't believe me? The passionate love poem you said you liked so much was about my ex. We fell in love seven years before, and I hadn't kissed her for over three years. Yet every time I hugged her I became erect, and even falling in love with you only amplified my feelings for her. I never needed her and always alloyed my love with hate, my connection with separation, to upset the status quo, to make the crests and troughs of the waves amplify each other. At one point she enjoyed watching my face phase through a series of different expressions in moments, comparing me to the Mona Lisa: now you look contemptuous, now you look sympathetic. My love didn't burn up with excess — it kept in balance and therefore survived.
I'm so tired of all the conditions. Too attached, not attached enough — I don't know what the problem is and I don't care. The only thing I was ever decided upon was to be accepting of who I or you are and to let either of us do whatever we want. The moment it seemed like you did not accept me in the same way, I hurled you to the other edge of the universe. And then when I saw my mistake my feelings were back in full force. Acceptance, the chance to be myself, is all that I need to renew my emotions, because it lets them happen, lets them flow, gives them the fluidity they need to renew themselves rather than accumulate and petrify into limestone.
I've been trying for months now to reduce your complexities to a simple answer that would help me find resolution, but it doesn't matter. I could know you inside out and you'd still never cease to fascinate me. It doesn't even matter what conclusion I'd come to, however I'd break you down into your complexes, they always reconstitute back into the same indestructible feeling of you. I'd always love you anyway. You win. Perhaps you were in love with me and perhaps you really wanted me to fall in love with you in your last message. If so, while I don't think you'd have read my initial barrage of messages, you'd probably have read my last, devastating message a few weeks later, if only out of curiosity to see if it had the effect you wanted. But I was still under the impression that you didn't accept me as I was, and I was still full of hostility for that, downright hostility, not just anger interchangeable with passion. That's the only response that not being accepted will ever elicit from me. But you rationalized that I had already said I didn't accept you, even though this was only something you were so afraid to hear that you became paranoid.
Even if you didn't achieve your goal (I feel the same way as I did, but I don't know if I'd feel differently when seeing you), I'm glad all this happened, because the distance helped me understand you. I'm stunned by your complexity. Any of the things I've said by themselves would be totally nonsensical by themselves, but your heart is so authentic that your every desire flows freely together before coming to expression — it's in perfect harmony. But your mind is closed, and the heart is blind: it only feels and does not see. It did not see the feelings I kept within, how passionately I loved you and how I only needed time for it to be expressed. But by seeming to not accept me you made me feel intensely defiantly authentic, and that would make it easier to express my feelings if only they weren't held back — it's too late now. But it's also too early. If P's being in love is anything like most people's, you've probably been waiting for the opportunity to reconnect with him on such a deep level for about a year. It's quite possible that this one hiatus was all you needed to upset his steady heart with vibrations that will now sustain themselves indefinitely, but considering his principled avoidance of drugs nowadays, it seems clear that he's still not ready to embrace that reckless abandon of being insanely in love with all of life, especially considering our experience in Oldenburg. Perhaps once you reaffirm your bond, the crest that will be as great as the trough will deliver the coup de grâce to his inhibitions… or perhaps when the crest dies down, it will collide with the levelness of his heart's terra firma once again, just as it happened with me and my ex after 3 years. It'll be no use repeating the hiatus then, as I've found out the hard way myself — you'll need to make him jealous, in a way that your casual relationships couldn't. He needs to feel as if he could really lose you, as if he could be replaced. In that case, I'll be here. By now your feelings for me are probably gone — women get over it far quicker than men. But you might yet have use of me, and I don't mind if it's as a partner in crime. With anyone else it would backfire, but not with P — he's far too noble to stand in your way. I won't let you do anything you don't want to — you can lie and I won't interfere.
Oh my God. This is the most scandalous thing I've ever written, and still I wouldn't apologize, still I wouldn't put up with any inacceptance on account of it, because it shouldn't matter if I'm wrong, because I have a right to be wrong, because I can be whatever I want to be and I can be nothing else. There's no way any of this would not be offensive if she read it, and if she could read it with an open mind she'd just about be in shock at the seeming amorality of her own innermost self, that had been hidden from her all her life. I'll tell her that I understand her and when she asks me how, I will say only that it's very complex, and that she's not ready to hear it — and that I'll share hints every time she takes the initiative of asking a specific question. It might take years before she'd be ready to accept what I was trying to make her understand in Taos. Yes, I can see now why it's so sensitive, because her intuition goes far deeper than I ever thought. I'm amazed at my own ability to have been just like this and yet accept it from the beginning, without ever having felt the need to hide it nor thinking it special enough to mention it.
Come to think of it, I know how she must've felt. I had an argument with my ex about taking a wrong turn on the highway, though it was both her and my fault (and that of the highway signs giving incomplete and misleading information). What got me wasn't just her anger, it was her condescension, and I walked out the car and screamed at her when she sought me in the train station because those were the only meaningful emotions I had left to express, and I knew there was nothing left to share with her. It made it clear just how much of a distance there was between us, how I was more like a chaperone than anything else to her and if I failed to serve her I was unworthy of respect. My message about her manipulativeness was clearly accepting, but it was also as clearly condescending. I couldn't love her except from a distance, as either a master or slave or both — that schizoid "vertical distance." I could've opened up to her if I got closer to her, once she trusted me as a confidante, but she could not, because she did not think anyone could accept her once they knew her secrets — my distance seemed to suggest as much, but it had nothing to do with that: it was just too soon for me to open up on that level.
In time, your dark side will awaken, and when it does, it will draw you to me and I will draw it out. If we ever get intimate, you'd have to belt me first. Pain is all I still feel toward you and pain is the only thing that can still make me open up to you — and the only thing that could make you open up to me. You need to accept your dark side if you can accept me.
But for now, you've become more of an intellectual passion than anything else. It's not that I'm hurt that's the problem, it's that I'm disappointed in your lack of understanding of me. Maybe I'd have preferred if your manipulation had been all there was to the story, if from the beginning you had no other intentions — but while that was important in determining what you said, it was misunderstanding that started it all. You said sometimes you get really analytical and feel like the universe is like a rubik's cube you have to solve. I'd like to see you analyze me in that playful manner. It would balance my own seriousness and make me feel understood… and just the fact that you'd take the time to do so would make me feel accepted, no matter how critical you would be.
How did I not see it? I've been missing the most important piece of all. Actually I've felt it from the start, but it seems like it didn't communicate well to my reason: the playfulness, the humor in her manipulativeness, especially in her last email. She was laughing at life, at fate, at me, at herself, partly because she refused to take it as serious as I did, and partly because she was afraid and whistling in the dark. It reminds me of the unbearable lightness of being, where one of the characters leaves everything and everyone behind just to embody that lightness, to flit around life freely but without grounding. She didn't take herself as serious as I did.
It's that goofiness she mentioned, an irresponsible whimsicality. I remember it from times in my own life, how I mocked fate by doing something randomly disruptive. It was never more pronounced than it was right after my worst depression, so it's a way of dealing with the absurdity of life, to accept it. I really do miss that. I only saw it when I felt that energy which I had assimilated from her come to expression in myself…
In her last email her nervous mockery was patent, but it makes me wonder if it was there in her first email as well — perhaps hence the inordinately harsh judgment she appeared to pass on me, to play with my feelings and see if I had any sense of humor — but neglecting the punchline out of cruelty, to watch me suffer from her prank just a little longer, only to get the boring response of a dignified indignation. No, that's going too far, and yes, that's the first time in this analysis that I really believe that. But perhaps part of her knew all too well that I really did accept her, and it was her way of relieving the tension of the confrontation, of eluding my attempts to understand her, to make me small when I smugly thought I was being clever, to play with the freedom that I offered her, to test it, to provoke me, to go too far, farther than she thought she could or should, and finally, to refuse to be self-conscious and contrast my own reasonableness with her wilfulness. To jump over Romulus' wall — chaos, impulse, rampancy, randomness, a shuffling of the cards.
There's always something transgressive about levity. Still, in her first email, I don't think that levity went farther than the nonchalance with which she hit "send" without giving it any second thought — she didn't care to be right, didn't care about truth, just did what she wanted and consequences be damned. Still, it's important because it tells me I shouldn't take the actual content of what she said too serious either — only the context of her being hurt.
This analysis is getting too nuanced for the language that I'm using for it — if my self-correcting self-contradiction went lost on her this would be the most offensive part of all. But this was never more than my own psychotherapy — the length of this analysis sure shows how good you were at hurting me, but I'm relishing in it. At least it's not boring. You're the only person that would never, ever bore me, even if we'll both live forever.
How much she both needs and could be destroyed by someone like me, her opposite, steadfast as a rock, as a black hole, as an infinite well of gravity that would consume her whole. God help me, I want you. I'd destroy the whole world until nothing stood between us, weren't it that it would kill you too. Don't take it serious — I won't do it. Or perhaps I will. The world itself is a joke, after all — everything in the world except you is a banality. Perhaps I'm already doing it. There won't be much left of it once I'm done with what I'm doing behind the scenes right now, once this supervolcano has ejaculated its contents across the noosphere. Just you wait. Just wait, just a little longer. Don't you dare get in touch again, not now, not yet. Let the tension hanging between us create an arc of lightning and catalyse the explosion, the supernova that will create new worlds.
I've never felt this way before. Any other time I was in love, the person was just a trigger, and the feeling didn't remain anchored to them: they were too small to contain such intense emotion, and so it dissolved into something greater, a love for the universe. Somehow you can contain that, because you're so close to your own nature that you are part of nature: in your authenticity you reflect the universe to me, its mystery, its ambiguity. I see the universe through you and my love flow through you out into it. Since I began to understand you in November, not a day has gone by that I haven't thought about you, and for the past month I invariably woke up thinking about you. Winter has always been a time for me when I delved deeper into my unconscious, and with every layer I let go I reached a layer deeper until I reached the bottom and nothing was left but an emptiness from where everything was possible. Now it is you who I find beneath the seabed of my mind, burning, melting into my core.
I'll let you in on a secret (and that's sarcastic, for I've made it clear enough that I have no secret. When you said I was projecting when I thought you manipulative you were only half wrong. That is to say, I didn't manipulate you as such because I didn't mean to influence you to stir in any particular direction, but nonetheless I wanted to make you stir. But in that I wasn't unlike you — I let you be free as you let me be free, influenced you only towards freedom, to come closer to yourself. The only difference is that your influence was towards ambiguity, towards the Dionysian, and mine was towards transparency, towards the Apollonian. I didn't mind your ambiguity — but I wondered what would happen if it were to combine with my transparency, how it could find expression in it, as it could not but be expressed — because it's so powerful that it has to be expressed, and yet I put you before an impossibility to express it, forced you to do the impossible. I was intensely curious how you would react, I wanted to know, because I knew the answer would have to be ambiguous and yet it could not escape its transparency. The two are not mutually exclusive and even express each other, just as the clear night sky opens us to the mystery of the stars: and in that paradox itself there is ambiguity. I brought your ambiguity into clarity, and how could you be ambiguous if your ambiguity itself became clarity? You didn't know how to react to such transparency in keeping with your own ambiguity, nor I the other way around — and so our universe exploded and imploded from sheer contradiction.
I was testing you, to see if you could still accept me and yourself when faced with that part of you that you are hiding from yourself and others. And perhaps you made the mistake of thinking that there was a right or wrong answer to my koan — but it's not what you answered but how you answer that matters. So will you pass my test in the end? It remains to be seen. Like you, I influenced you, but I didn't want to make you express anything in a particular in you — rather I wanted to know if you could express yourself in any way at all. And there's the reversal: in that, it is I who am ambiguous and you who are transparent. Your goal in everything you say is clear, mine is not: you guide emotions this way and that, like a dancer who wants to express freedom — and I follow your lead. But I want to make you move in all directions, any direction, like a magician who wants to impress mystery — pick a card, any card. And you don't want to be fooled, so you think you have to pick the right card in order to win. I just want to humble you. I just want you to take a chance and trust that the conjuring trick will work out just fine either way.
I still don't know how our energies combine. I think they can do just about anything and I will just keep trusting my intuition, because I don't care just which way you go as long as you stay true to yourself. I will challenge your feeling into the ambiguity of truth, just as you challenge mine into the ambiguity of love — and all you need to do is follow it just as I do. Truth and love are too nuanced to be understood in any formula, and I will not seek it — we find it in the moment, in the effervescent waves that we only see once we can no longer steer clear of them, so that we must be ever ready to meet them however we find them in the moment. Nothing can prepare me. I will feel the wind, and tap into that vast reservoir of my unconscious and I swear I will no more know that you if I will love you forever or never see you again, or both — and any of those will do, because it's enough to love you or whatever beautiful, beautiful apparition you summoned in my mind.
I want us to become one. You, me, P, everyone we love, so that I am you and you are me, and we will love all of us through each other, because we'll have assimilated each other. Our brain's bandwidth is inexhaustible — they say our memory capacity is ten times what they thought it was — when telepathy comes along, I want to absorb your essence and that of anyone closest to us, and we will be inside each other, interpenetrating the way some say divinity interpenetrates the universe. The world will shake underneath us.
I've got a lot of pieces of the puzzle that I can recite as if at an exam, but their diversity only gives me a hint of how vastly incomprehensible your complexity is. I don't understand you because you're too great to absorb in any one thought — but feeling your energy I feel as if I've been wrong about everything in my whole damn life, that I've made every possible mistake because I didn't become like you, didn't embody that kind of energy. I want it. I submit myself to it. I don't care that's it beyond my understanding, I just know I need it. It makes me live as I've never lived. It makes me feel as if everything in my life, every memory and experience I've accumulated, is nothing but infrastructure, a frame to uphold you and that divine energy of yours — a vessel to be filled with it, to give it room to expand at will inside me. Burn me down, the riots in my mind shout, as they rebel against everything I've ever stood for — stability, to make sense of the universe, to feel right in my place in it. Throw it all away, cast it away into chaos, destruction, and intuition alone will guide the way through the tumbling darkness. Burn it all down. I know nothing, I've been wrong in every possible way. You were right. I don't know what it's like to truly live, desire, to go mad with passion and emotion — I treated you like some algorithm, and that's what insulted you, the distanced reasoning, like input to be given in a computer to make it calculate data, and then I act indignant when you don't understand, when you refuse to compute it because it doesn't matter how good my intentions are, it doesn't matter how right I might be if that's the way I do it, so inhumanly, without feeling. It's not analysis but analysis without feeling that you resist.
How are any words supposed to contain truth? How is an entire universe to fit into their confines? It's the greatest reductionism ever invented and it's what we started our whole culture with. I've devoted my life to a religion, a false god. It needs to burn, and when it's burned down all that's left is pure madness. I can see that madness in you, a madness that's allowed because it's wordless, because it doesn't proclaim mad prophecies or delusions, but just as mad nonetheless. Looking at your picture it strikes me like a bullet: you're completely insane. And it's just as you should be, because to not going mad with awe and passion at life is the worst kind of insanity.
True love does not let its existence depend on an answer: it's happy to merely exist, and reflect on the beauty that it has found, which it can never lose as long as it does not forget. By all means leave, and the distance will just give me a wider perspective of your world, but I cannot lose you from view, for you are everywhere, and now that I've once seen you I know where to look. You're not unique — you're an energy that courses through nature, and if you will not follow its course, I will, and it will lead me further than you've ever been. I will leave you behind to find who you truly are, what you reflect however dimly. Perhaps you only had one of the ingredients. The psyche's energy is fluid — if you will not take up this flame, then all the love I thought I knew for you will just pass to whoever will. You've had your chance. You thought you had to stay in control and with anyone else you might've been right, but it backfired because you underestimated how strong I am. Given the choice between freedom and happiness I will always choose freedom, in a heartbeat. Soon you're going to be beat at your own game, and you'll need me more than I need you. I'll find people like me, people who accept all experiences, and I will deny you, I will denounce you, I will make you beg for forgiveness and make you swear to your unconditional surrender to the infinite. I will see it through, and nothing in the world can stop me. You infected me with your madness, and combined with my wisdom there are no lengths to which I will not go. I'll be seeing you.
Now an emptiness is settling in me. I don’t know why, but I feel like even if you requite my feelings we could not love each other. Whenever I imagine being with you I just can’t imagine being intimate with you. We are worlds apart. And when I analyse myself like I do you, I find that I was being just as manipulative and pushing you away too, because even though I came to Taos for you, I wasn’t sure if I actually wanted to see you. I coaxed you into rejecting me. My feelings were strongest when I was near you but not with you, because that’s what you are to me — near and yet always just out of reach, a mystery, someone I enjoy wanting but wouldn’t know what to do with.
I’d been wanting to say earlier that there’s nothing wrong with your manipulative side, but didn’t know how to do it in the right way. But when I finally got around to sending that email it was malice that made me do so. You’d hurt my pride, made me cynical and disappointed me when you said you found my warnings about X “boring.” I didn’t realise you were being flippant because you were feeling upset and insecure. I just saw it as you not accepting my nerdiness, my being analytical — and it’s a fact that you are afraid of going too far in analyzing, as you indicated when you said “shut up, brain.” And you’re right, you made me aware of that again… I can analyse everything into smaller and smaller details until I lose perspective. But this was just you not taking it serious because you felt afraid, afraid of how I’d react. You thought I took X because you recommended it (I already wanted to) and you probably thought I drank a lot of water, which can be fatal, because you recommended it (I didn’t). After all, I felt just as afraid of how you’d react to my having made a mistake about the dosage of memantine and almost poisoned you… In fact for that reason I’m glad you recommended I drink a lot, because it makes us even.
Anyway, while explicitly the email I sent you was accepting, implicitly it was confrontational, just for the sake of pushing the envelope and seeing if you really accepted me. I didn’t care anymore if you wouldn’t accept me. I was tired of caring too much and I needed a break from that, from you, if necessary. When I said “I’ve been trying to get used to not seeing you in Taos,” I felt how accusative that sounded. When I said I was fine with you manipulating me, the vibe was partly appreciative in a cold spiritual manner, but also partly condescending and contemptuous: “Haha, busted. I didn’t fall for that. I’m too smart for you.” And by saying I didn’t care how crude you thought my openness next to your subtlety, I said that I dominated it, and didn’t allow your intuition to run its course. On the whole, the vibe was one of cold indifference. I wasn’t ready for you, for someone so much my opposite.
But damn it, I don’t want anyone else unless they have your kind of energy, I don’t want anyone who’s like me, I hate myself, I hate everything and everyone in this universe for not being like you, for not being you, for standing between me and you, for taking up space through which I would otherwise see nothing else but you. And I know this world without you will have to do for now, because it’s the niche that I evolved for and I can’t leave without going extinct. So be it, I’d rather die than be trapped here. If you don’t object to seeing me crawl in agony, I’d gladly come into your world. But the only way that our worlds are ever really going to collide is if you hurt me. Deep down I’m just like you, you just need to dig pretty deep. So hurt me, break me, tear me open, rip me apart, spill me out. I’m too cold to share pleasure with someone like you until you give me pain, because pain is all you make me feel, pain at the infinite distance, the vast cold dead empty space between us. I might as well be from another planet, another species, a schizoid Dr. Manhattan. And yet I’m not like that, I know from my previous relationships that I’m incredibly romantic and passionate and inexhaustibly sensual. But you’re so far away from me, so separate, different, alien. I don’t know if we can combine such vastly different psyches of such complexity into harmony — we clash, we’re dissonant, we collide awkwardly, trying to find a way to click and we just can’t, not unless one or both of us completely change shape to fit together. Perhaps that’s the change I’ve been undergoing, but it’s taking forever. It feels like I can’t possibly transform any further and still it keeps going, all the way into my core, until everything is different. Everything that interested me seems stale now, even though I’ve gotten better at it than ever before. I’m only interested now in anything that reminds me of your energy.
I knew it would be all too easy to provoke a breach, and that just made it all the more tempting. I'd been waiting for it to happen and I couldn't wait any longer. I knew it was inevitable, what with your vanity and my roughness (I'm not nearly as gentle as P) so I just wanted to get it over with and see if we could withstand conflict, because with someone like me it's inevitable, especially with someone like you, someone just as proud as I am. I didn't feel like waiting for it or avoiding it any longer. I'd felt it had been coming on for a while, and I just wanted to get it over with: to fast forward to where the problem would begin to see if I could solve it. Something so easily broken just feels like it's meant to be broken, and I couldn't help but pick the dirty scabs to make the wound clean. I gave you some tough love because I wanted you to be able to deal with that. It wasn't the initial provocations I wanted you to deal with either, but the full on conflict that was to come. I'm the one who leapt into the abyss. If I've been projecting this I wonder how much else I've been projecting.
How am I that different from you? My average relationships have been every bit as unstable as yours, and I've discovered as many people's minds as you have their hearts and bodies, only to cast them aside once they were of no more interest to me. You felt that as well. I'm just as judgmental and demanding as you are. You felt how I'd cut our ties in an instant if I felt like you tried to force me to compromise. You've met your match in me, someone as stubborn as you. I have all the qualities you hate about yourself, and I only discovered I had them when I met you. Now you have no choice but to accept those qualities in yourself if we ever get back in touch — your vanity, your manipulativeness. Because you may think I'm compromising if I accept them in you, but you know I'm serious about it if I refuse to reject them in myself. I did what I had to do. I tested you, to see if you're worthy of me. If we can last through this we can last through anything and we'll never have anything to fear ever again.
So how do you know I'm earnest and not just desperately clinging on to anyone? Well, when I used automation on the dating site, it was right after I'd told my ex I would commit to a monogamous relationship "for at least the next ten years." That wasn't enough for her. But it seemed like she was the only one I was ever going to love anyway. So I wanted to make sure, by trying one last time to find someone else, by spending weeks sampling through the energies I can instantly feel of at least a million people. And when I came back from the US, I was convinced that she really was the only one, and I was about to buy the only accommodation that I could afford in her home town, a little cabin in an ideal location, but it turned out it had been sold — which devastated me, because everything else was too expensive. Good thing I didn't buy it. Because just a month or so later, my feelings for you came back, and I knew that I couldn't commit to a monogamous relationship anyway. I'm pretty sure the X had everything to do with the break in my being in love that made me so careless with you in the first place.
There's no way I will ever be able to explain all this to you. I can just assure you that everything is alright, and even if you don't understand it, you have to accept that. If you can't, then in spite of everything you're not the kind of person that I'm looking for. You should know by now that it's always alright, that any experience is.
But looking back I become more and more convinced that I didn't accept you at all, and I feel so disappointed in myself for that. It's not enough to be accepting in principle. And I rejected all your qualities that I ASSOCIATED with your own inacceptance along with that inacceptance itself. I remember thinking afterward that perhaps your vanity was a dealbreaker after all. I completely overlooked the elements of pride, fear, need and love that make up the energy of that vanity and simply thought of it as a synonym for inacceptance. The same goes for judgment. These things CONTAINED your inacceptance but weren't equivalent to it, and my violence was to throw these away along with the inacceptance itself — and that's where I was unaccepting. I'm disgusted at having made this mistake. I don't want to live with inacceptance anymore. I just want us all to be free.
But now I am not afraid to be myself anymore. You will understand me if you give me a chance, and if you don't, so be it. Just remember that there is a lot that you, too, do not know, just like any of us. There are infinite worlds beyond worlds still untouched. Let us explore each others', and together we will create worlds that never were.
I went through a similar scenario with L, but the difference is that she was not manipulative: as with S, everything appeared perfect between us and yet in the middle of this she turned against me for no reason at all, other than not being able to accept my intensity. Since I could feel very clearly that L was not manipulative, I know that this appearance of perfection was artificial, and because of this, I can no longer see the appearance of perfection in the case of S as a basis to assume that her own, similar reversal was manipulative. Americans are simply shallow, and are quick to call the most ordinary things "awesome", a word that once meant awe-inspiring. They genuinely want to connect on a superficial level but are afraid of depth, so at the first confrontation they drop the veil of perfection — just like M and Sh did.
The possibility that she was manipulating me was the only thing that could excuse her behaviour, because the alternative is that she is a coward, as was clearly the case with L, and there is nothing I can do with a coward. This has given me closure once and for all: were I to desire either of them again, the first thing I'd desire to do with them, the only thing I could, would be to break their ego, so that I could pick their psyche from within its shell. I am not yet ready for that. No matter — I need to find my equals first.
S' unconscious did try to manipulate me in her last email, did try to make me want her, but it doesn't matter, because her conscious did not accept it, did not accept me, did not accept herself. It was only her unconscious that I loved, only that part of her that is free. That's not enough.
It's just that one sentence, "I am not afraid of hurting you," that kept haunting me. It was clear that it was more than that: she relished in hurting me. It aroused me to no end, stuck its barbs in my flesh. And they don't sound like the words of a coward. It makes it hard to dismiss her along with all the others. But even if she wasn't afraid of hurting me, it's all too clear she was afraid of being hurt, hence "Whoa, whoa, you really need to chill", when I said something that hurt her — something she said because she wanted to keep her emotions under control. Maybe she's not afraid of pain in itself but of imperfection, of not being good enough, of inadequacy, failure, rejection, insecurity, loss of control, vulnerability. She could express herself but could not let others do the same, could not expose herself to the expression of others, and so worked best with people who are reserved about their emotions: as such, she got halfway to what I was looking for, and that's closer than anyone else ever came, tantalisingly close compared to anyone else, in whom I only detected glimpses of authenticity. And I will not give up on her — but she has much to learn if we are to be ourselves together, and if anyone can teach her it would be me, and my kin when I find them. And it will motivate me to find them.
It would be so simple for her to grow, simple, but not easy. She thinks she's a bad person to want to hurt others. She doesn't want to be like her father, but she has something of his violence inside her, so she tries to negate it by trying to love everything and everyone. But the only reason she thinks that is that she doesn't like being hurt, and the only reason she doesn't like being hurt is because it makes her hurtful to others… it's a vicious circle. One gets stuck in the other. When her being hurtful is accepted, she will accept her own hurting, and the hurtful force it awakens in her. I don't need to teach her; I need to corrupt her. And I've already planted the seeds.
At any rate, it's clear that she's not there already, so the important thing is I don't need to expect her ever getting in touch again, at least not until she's changed. But I'm the only one that can change her. Perhaps I should plant another seed once every year… it's been such a long time ago, and she's had so many lovers, that she'd never know where the words whispered into her unconscious came from. Oh, I could have such fun with you, terrorising your mind, mysterious letters confronting you with your darker side — but you're not worth the time and I just don't feel like it.
When you hurt me, you opened my heart. Perhaps someday I'll return the favour and make you open your mind, because it's easy not to care about someone with a closed mind, when I'm with someone who opens both her heart and mind to me. In my demisexuality I would be incapable of being intimate with you, because all my energy would be transferred into her instead. I wouldn't even have to cut you off the way you did to expose you to the same lesson: I'd just have to be myself, expressing what I feel, cold and distant, until you open your mind to me. I don't want to repeat your mistakes just for the sake of revenge, and I'd always be there to connect with you as I am, because unlike you, I don't run. But would that be enough? I doubt I could make you happy, and yet my acceptance would be so clear that you could only look for the cause in yourself, until you realise it's you who is resisting me, not the other way around. But I know you'll grow restless, as you always do. Where will you go? You want to grow, reach beyond your boundaries, and it will lead you to me. That's how I will teach you. My demisexuality will force you to change. Your repressed darker side will crave to be expressed, and it will need someone like me who accepts it to do it.
I keep seeing the change in you — it wasn't just a fluke. You look disarmed, childlike, confused, pure, content. The streak of vanity still isn't there. I wouldn't be surprised if the way you hurt me when I gave you permission to do so gave you a catharsis that burnt it all out, at least for a while. But in time it will be back, and until then, I will be waiting to feed off of it.
You will be my first convert. If I ever find a way to transform people, it will begin with you. And if I manage to create an environment of other people who accept all forms of expression, I will have found a way.
For now, you've had your chance. I tried to explain but you didn't even try to understand me. Now I've found someone who does understand me, and I am leaving. I won't be back for a year.
I’ll be across the world for at least a year as of the 3rd. I just want you to know that when I felt that ambiguity in you, it was one of the most BEAUTIFUL things I’d ever felt, and I can’t endure that you don’t accept that very aspect of yourself. No matter what you meant by your manipulating of others, it cannot be a bad thing, because all you’re doing to people is MAKE THEM FEEL, and EVERY feeling is valuable — we both know there’s far too little of it in the world. I tried to explain but I’ve given up trying to describe that ambiguity, because even the Mona Lisa falls short in doing so. It’s why Da Vinci lamented his failure on his deathbed, after spending the last ten years of his life driven to insanity trying to express what you embody, that line where pain and pleasure are one transcendence. I just want you to accept yourself, because as long as you limit yourself, I know you’ll never accept me either, because I'll always refuse to limit myself even for your sake, and I’ve never known I was so determined as when I paid the ultimate price in confronting you. I love you, Savannah, and I always will. I don’t need your love in return, because by understanding you I’ve made you a part of me. I just wish you would love yourself as fully. Be yourself as you said you would. Don't be afraid of hurting people; be afraid of leaving them in apathy.
I found someone who does understand me, and I'll be moving in with her in Australia in two weeks. And even now I find that I'm still madly in love with Savannah. I can see now what she sees in polyamory. We’re never alone because we’re always deeply connected with ourselves, but it’s hard to get excited about that, and Linda feels like that too, so close to me that she’s like a part of me. She makes me feel peaceful, but it’s in conflict that we find excitement. We told each other we’re looking forward to our first fight but I can’t think of what we could possibly fight about. Savannah always looked peaceful when she was with you too. You must’ve asked yourself at some point if you just weren’t enough for her, but it’s more like you’re too perfect. I must admit that I was looking for soulmates in you at one point, because I needed that so much that I couldn’t focus on anything else. Maybe now that’s out of the way, we could try again someday, though I’m no longer sure if either of you could deal with my intensity. I still haven’t given up on founding my own commune, but it will be one founded on the acceptance of all consciousness. I will always be myself and let you be yourselves. Do with that what you will.
It's absolutely magical how you and P have achieved that openness. You both exude that ambiguity and it's always intensely moved me. I think it's an appreciation of the mystery in everything and everyone that makes it possible to remain passionate about someone seemingly familiar. We don't know what we'll feel the next moment, who we will be the next moment, because the mind is the most complex, chaotic thing in the universe. When neither of you is resisting that flux, you're always rediscovering each other as if you're still strangers. I think Savannah understands this better than either of us on an intuitive level, but I don't think she does on a rational level. I thought what she called her "manipulativeness" is just that ambiguity, the constant cycle of positive and negative that most people would see as "leading them on". And I'm sure my saying that wasn't why we broke off contact. I feel like that was itself part of the flux, the next stage in our evolution. The past year has been the most transitional of my life and I think she was in a transition too, and we'd just have been in each other's way. I think we both knew that deep down, even if we didn't know why. Last year I was feeling that sense of mystery very strongly, even before I met you. Maybe that's why we clicked at all. I don't know why I lost it. Maybe it was the MDMA. Maybe that mystery itself became familiar after a while. Or maybe I'm still just arrogant in trying to pin everything down like I was doing just now, when everything's a confluence of waves with which we must dance. Life's a chaotic interplay of infinitely many factors and that's why it's impossible to control it.
P, I had the feeling like your repressed jealousy came to surface then, and that that was the imperfection in the wall you were talking about. But why do you need a wall at all? You're free. Jealousy itself isn't possessiveness, it's just an emotion and no emotion is in itself good or bad. I think jealousy is actually arousal, just like food makes your mouth water a lot faster when you see someone else eat it. But arousal is already such an intense emotion that this this effect makes it feel overwhelming, so most people push it away, and that's what makes it unpleasant. But I think that's one way to keep passion alive, and maybe just one of the reasons why S is polyamorous, to be more desired. Until recently this was just speculation, because I never really felt jealousy until I fell in love with another polyamorous woman, Laura. She drove me completely insane with desire, until the slightest touch from her made me close my eyes with a blissful smile. Maybe jealousy is something we should embrace.
You're the only one who can make her see that everything's alright, and that everything she makes others feel is beautiful, even the pain. My platonic soulmate and I were talking about polyamory yesterday. She thinks there's not enough time to love several people at once — but the limiting factor will always be desire. I even think she desires you more than you desire her, just as any of her lovers. She gets bored because she's faced with the normalcy of their emotions, so she does everything she can to inflame their desire, so that they can follow her into her madness. And when they can't, they tell her she's a bad person, over and over until part of her believes it. She thought I did so too because she'd been waiting for me to do so, like dozens of people before. Please help her. Don't let yourself be her shelter from her fears: face her with them. You're the only one she trusts enough, because I'm sure it's connected to traumas: by venting to her, her mother made her feel like the fights with her father were her responsibility.
S he defended her persona, but only as a means to an end. The real emotion she expressed was frustration at our inability to connect, as she can only spiritually connect through sexuality and I can only sexually connect through spirituality. She didn't want that to weigh on her mind anymore. She's used to people not being able to deal with her intensity — she said that she sometimes doesn't know how much people can bear her — and she assumed that I was one of them, and thought so be it. She tried to rationalize it, to be reasonable, to be constructive by trying and find out just what the problem was, but in reality there was no problem as such, at least not in the sense of an obstacle with a solution: she was just being aggressive for its own sake, out of frustration with the situation being as it was: us being unable to connect as fully as we would like to, for no particular reason but that it wasn't the right time for us.
Nothing I've written here matters. What matters is that we both expressed what we felt in word and deed, and we both felt much the same: frustration, and defiance because of it. Because of how she tried to justify her emotions, it felt like she was judging me, even though she simply didn't want me to judge her for them — and when I called her out on judging me, it seemed to her as if I was the one who simply didn't accept her emotions. We both just wanted to be ourselves and defied each other because we thought the other would not let us be ourself. Yeah… that works. That one paragraph explains everything and it's deceptively simple. I've been way overthinking this. It frustrated her that she couldn't closely connect with me, sexually, and it frustrated me that I couldn't connect with her at a distance, spiritually.
You felt stifled by my excess of Apollonian positivity, because as long as I had no negative emotion towards you, you didn't know if I would accept you even then. And negative emotions are part of it. You thought I was trying to avoid them, that I would not accept them. And with all my excessive display of altruism, you didn't you know if I'd still accept you once I'd see your own selfish side, or if I had any selfishness myself, without which no kind of relationship is possible. I was too much of what's traditionally seen as good, and you thought that meant I didn't accept what's traditionally seen as evil — and the only way to prove that I would still accept you was to involve negative emotion between us. You'd been waiting for it, you'd been hoping to see what would happen then, to see if my friendship would stand that test and therefore be real, but I remained untouched, would not become frustrated, because my spiritual connection was never broken whether I saw you or not — then you realized the only way to hurt me is to destroy the image I had of you, removing yourself entirely from my universe. You wanted to have nothing left to lose, so you did the one thing that would anger me: to judge me, backstab me, betray me — and if anything would be left of my feelings for you, they'd be real, and purified of all that isn't.
Please, dear God, let this be true — because I will never find anyone as free as you seemed to be. If you were just being defensive because you wouldn't allow me to think something about you that goes against some narrow view of what you should be, there's nothing I can do with you, because then you lack the authenticity to be yourself with me, just like all the rest, and there would be nothing to explore together… just more of the same things one could do alone but with another person simply being around, with no real interaction because you both keep everything inside. I don't care if you hurt me or whatever you do or become, as long as you are yourself — and then even to know that you exist is enough to make me smile, because I'll no longer feel like I'm the only one, like this entire universe lacks so much depth that as far as I know it might all just be decor, or a solipsistic dream in which I am the only dreamer and all the rest are just flat projections, fake, nonentities. That's how I feel now. I've been disillusioned so much that I can no longer feel any enthusiasm about being part of the human race.
Well, I started out with my objective, almost medical distance that you knew me for, and now I've broken down entirely into pure emotion. I hope this is what you wanted. Hell, I know it's what I wanted. I haven't felt this way in years, so empty, so peaceful, in a way. I accept it, I accept it all. But do you? Would you… feel with me? Just be, with me? Express with me, and just let it be, let our every emotions flow freely in all their intensity and do whatever they do, whatever the cost, because the alternative is to repress, to be a lie, and that would never do… God, what human on earth is like that, open to all emotions? Are you? Is anyone?
What am I talking about? Insecurity isn't an attitude of inauthenticity, it's an emotion! Of course it's alright if she felt that, and of course it's alright that she expressed it however she wanted, even angrily. It's what I was doing. So it doesn't matter: either way, it doesn't have to be an obstacle as long as she can accept those emotions, and the fact that she chose to express her own aggressive emotions when I offered to say goodbye peacefully proves that she does accept them, because she knew those emotions would linger for both of us and wanted us to feel them, rather than nothing much at all.
I accept everything you expressed to me, everything you made me feel, and my only question to you is: do you? If so, I will love you forever, and if not, I never could. Were you trying to express those emotions or repress them? It didn't sound like you were running — you exposed the vulnerabilities in your position more than ever, as if to taunt me, to challenge me to strike at them, to hate you. You knew it was a poor defense — but that's because it was really an attack, because it in itself was an attempt to connect in whatever way you could, to make an impact.
She was just trying to express herself, not because she didn't accept my expressing myself, but because action equals reaction. She did accept what I made her feel, or she wouldn't have continued the cycle but interrupted it by repressing it.
In fact, someone else I met later gave me a perfect illustration of what inacceptance really looks like, and the contrast couldn't be greater: she was distant and dishonest, and it was only through another person that I found out how she felt. Inacceptance just breaks the connection, so it's always tacit, underhanded, concealed. If there's a conflict, that's just an emotional connection in its own right.
My only concern was knowing who you are. It was easy to dismiss your outburst as arrogance at first, but the more I think about it the more it seems like the opposite, an expression of radical freedom. But not for one moment did I consider compromising my authenticity to prevent such reactions, nor to think myself inferior or unworthy — and I pride myself in that. Because anyone who believes in shame or blame is not the kind of person I want to be with.
S, you didn't need excuses for why we couldn't see each other. You can't give a rational explanation for that. The bottom line is that in the state of mind that I was in in my hangover and you were in after your move, we weren't compatible, and you don't have to be judgmental about that. The one thing I was saying was that I was fine with not seeing if you didn't want to, because I got the subtext of uncertainty about the future that you were expressing and I accepted it, and even admired its authenticity.
She doesn't even have to accept me. My being myself doesn't depend on it — I've already proven that. In fact, at any indication that she may not accept me, I only became all the more defiantly authentic. And it doesn't change how much I love her, and even if it can never be long before I scare her away, I'll always want to be in her presence, and enjoy however long I can be myself in her presence. And even if I can never see her again, it doesn't matter — I'll always be thankful for the time I spent with her, because it was enough for me to learn to understand her better than anyone ever could… and I've used that understanding to make a model of her psyche that I hold within my own: she's become a part of me, and while she may object to what she calls the "muse pedestal", it's a fact that she's one of a number of factors to have inspired the greatest personal growth I've been through in years. There are so many things I would've never dared do without her, hCG being one of them — and for the first time in years I feel confident, healthy, full of vitality, happy. Just to feel all these emotions, this desire, makes it enough just to think of her, and to feel her energy inside me.
I don't even need you to understand me. I may not care as much to try to explain myself to you, but I'll express myself however I want anyway, if nothing else, just to press your buttons — it's quite amusing to see the results, and interesting. For all your honesty before, it was in our conflict that I most intensely felt the emotion with which you expressed yourself. I want more of that, above all else. I'm not satisfied with tame interchanges of soundbites — I don't care to philosophize with you, I do plenty of that by myself, and I don't need someone just to agree with me: I want to collide, because real connection is imperfect, improvised, spontaneous. If I can have even just one moment of that reckless abandon, it's worth losing an eternity of polite talk for that.
Our conflict was the most exciting interchange I've had with you. If you were simply intimidated by that intensity, you merit nothing but my contempt. But if your silence was part of what you meant to express towards me, I appreciate that — and after all my analysis I have no reason to think that's the case except for the way it made me feel. Either way, whatever happens is what's meant to be, and I'd not have it any other way. I put your authenticity to the test, and I only hope that I wasn't wrong about you.
The irony is, if you really did it to provoke an emotion, it did so in quite the opposite way you thought. When I saw it as an attempt to control me, it just disgusted me and made me lose all interest. When I saw it as a defense of your ego, it just aroused my contempt. And when I saw it as just an irrational expression of emotion, I appreciated its reckless authenticity.
So in conclusion: you merely expressed what you felt, and so did I. I will keep expressing myself, and if you mean anything to me then so will you. I accept who we are, and the question remains if so do you. I don't even need to know if you accept me, nor do I need to make you choose whether or not you accept me. I myself will accept whatever experience comes, whether limited or unlimited.
I can put it all down to one word: catharsis. You expressed your own catharsis, and I accepted it into myself and made it mine. Perhaps that's we need most in life. Catharsis lets our consciousness unfold, evolve, even if it has no objective in doing so.
Her greatest fear is to not be allowed to be herself, and the only way she knew how to express that fear was to defiantly embody everything she thought she was not allowed to be with a rebellious authenticity. At that point, feeling like she could be herself whatever she'd turn into was all that mattered and it had to be done at all costs: she felt trapped by her thoughts and wanted to escape whatever it took. Breaking the connection, the interchange of emotions, was just a side effect rather than the intended effect, because if it were the intended effect she would've made a far cleaner cut, and bowed out the way I permitted her to — it would've involved far less emotion, but avoiding emotion wasn't what she wanted. When I gave her permission to manipulate, I drew some darker side out in her that craved liberation, an impulsive urge to turn everything on its head just to prove to herself that she could. I'm at a loss whether to look down on her insecurities about being herself, or respect the authentic way she handled them. It wasn't so much that she was too dumb to understand that I didn't expect anything from her, it's that this is a fear she always has with anyone, which I merely allowed her to express. By mentioning it and analysing it, I bored into her cryptodome, the magma chamber that had been building for years.
But it doesn't really make a difference. At the beginning she was as impulsive in getting too close to me as she was impulsive later in pushing me away. It was always superficial, and I saw enough in the way she behaves with others that she doesn't really know any better. It's meaningless. I don't know her. And yet, my suspicion that she's authentic seems enough to make me care in some way. It does make a difference, because it negates everything in my eyes.
It wasn't really authentic, because she did what she did to prove to herself that she was free, to move that muscle experimentally as if she never had before. If she were truly free, she wouldn't need to go through such lengths to know that she was. But then, she never knew if she could be free with me in particular. Perhaps she had to go through such lengths to renew her determination to be herself no matter what happens, and I know for a fact that so did I: hadn't this happened I wouldn't have found such determination. So if the fact that we both felt this need indicates our feelings are alike, it means she cares about me a great deal, so much so that, like me, she felt stifled by those feelings and had to break through them. We had to go too far, to fail, to know that it was alright to do so. We're more alike than we realise, and how much I understand her seems to be limited to how much I understand myself.
She wanted to know how far she could go, if not to test me, then at least to test herself. She didn't mean what she said when she was judging me: she was just being hurtful for the sake of transgressing boundaries. There's a darker side to her that she has yet to learn to understand — one which, even though she doesn't understand it, she embraces more than she knows. Her heart is free, but her mind isn't — and her mind doesn't know how to resonate with her heart. All I need to do to set her mind free is to make her see how all experiences are equally valuable — pain and pleasure, light and dark, love and hate, how they all form a continuum of hues without boundaries between.
It wasn't just your doing. We both felt we needed this catharsis, craving for downfall, amor fati. I provoked you as you provoked me, and I provoked you because you'd already provoked me: it all started with your reaction to my close call with death being "that was really dumb" and escalated from there. From the emphatic way you told me never ever to use new drugs alone it was clear enough that you cared — but it injured my pride to be condescended in such a maternal way. It was your very basic attachment to my being alive that made me challenge your attachment further. And yet again you injured my pride by suggesting I could not care for myself alone in Taos, and I craved resolution, for this knot to be cut, just like you.
You may say you are yourself, but you're not. If you were, you wouldn't have had to prove it to yourself. If you were already free, you wouldn't have had to break free. But the same was true for me, I know of myself that I've become a lot more authentic after all of this.
You're like me. You embrace all emotions and make no distinction between positive and negative. You express all of them, and you're not afraid to evoke either in others. You know that emotion, any kind of emotion, is what makes life valuable, and without it, you get bored. You like hurting people as much as you like pleasing them — that's the terrible secret you want to keep hidden from the world and yourself. But that's your one mistake. Because it's beautiful, and you need to see that.
The bottom line is that we both merely expressed ourselves, and that's alright and I accept it. I may not be sure if I like what it signified, whether or not I can still believe in your authenticity, but that doesn't matter, because I can't change it — I can only accept you, even if you don't; and I do.
I take one thing back: you can judge me however you want, because I don't require your permission to be myself. In fact, it only made me much, much stronger, and I have never been so determined to be myself. That means I now literally accept everything now. All I need to do is act on whatever feelings I have, including those caused by judgment — but I don't need to make a decision between one thing and another, because it's never that black and white. The question is but which nuance of grey I choose, and that's something I can only feel intuitively in the moment, especially as it changes every moment.
There's something I've been overlooking in my whole analysis: it must've been hard for her to believe that I had no expectations from her when everyone else did. She met dozens of people when traveling through the USA before moving, as if on a conveyor belt, not because she felt inspired to meet each person but because it was her first opportunity in 2 years. Someone snapped at her when she slipped her mind — friends don't like to be forgotten, they see friendship as something that has to be maintained, like a car engine. Yet, despite being such an independent person, she still cares for them, and so she doesn't actually expect others to be detached, even if she can't deal with attachment. In fact, based on her experiences with other people, detachment is probably synonymous to abandonment and failure: it's either too much or too little. People who are abused usually have a fear both of attachment or detachment at the same time, leading to a cycle of repulsion and attraction — much like that seen in borderlines, who were also often abused.
She told me something that sheds light on why and how much she must've felt so responsible for me: she said her mother depended on her for support. I always thought this was rather strange, but shrugged it off as her mother being neurotic. But perhaps S is the one who's deluded that people depend on her: it's common for children of alcoholics to feel unduly responsible for others. I'm not actually sure if her father was an alcoholic, but he definitely acted as abusively as one, and the symptoms match hers exactly.
I've modelled your mind so well that it doesn't matter where you are — I always feel you inside of me. And now that I've adopted your energy, allowed it to flow through mine, I can see how wrong I was. How, when you said you were going to be "wary of your ability to connect" you were merely reflecting my own guardedness, upholding a mirror — action equals reaction. And I can feel the deep vulnerability that hides below your confidence. How did I not see it? When you were crouching in the dirt in that corner of the garden, weren't you giving a signal of that helplessness? I should've come over to you and asked if you were alright, and said that I was there if you needed me — but I felt like it wasn't my place to impose that. Love, compassion, isn't something that's easy to come by, and she fears the apathy that lies beyond its light just as much as I do. When offered in all sincerity, without conditions or expectations, she would not turn it down. Did she think I told her that she was unworthy of compassion, that I would be careful not to waste it on an illusion? Whatever it was, I addressed some deep-seated fear in her, and she merely expressed it at a time when she had nothing else to express anyway, and didn't have the time or presence of mind to develop anything to express.
I want to find a way to think of you as lacking authenticity so that I can dismiss you, but I can't. I love you, and you can't take that away from me, because it's just the way I feel — they're MY emotions. It's not a question, it's not waiting for a reply. But my breath shudders to express it. I only see now how, without knowing it, I turned you away. On the surface I said I was fine with however things turned out, but the subtext was that I wasn't expecting anything from someone like you. On the contrary, what I felt was that I couldn't believe you were real, that you're too good to be true. Are you?
The only way I can reconcile the explanation that she was manipulative and the explanation that she was insecure is that the former was the reason for what she expressed while the latter was merely the trigger. Rather than making a clean cut to leave it all behind her, what she wanted was to evoke an emotion, something that would bind me to her (if only to flatter her), because no other bond could exist at that time. She'd have done this one way or another and was just waiting for the excuse, the first confrontation that would flare up her emotions.
She must've understood that because I accepted her because I made it very clear, but it didn't matter to her because other people would not accept it, and other people matter to her. She needs them, and that's why she can't be authentic. Her self-confidence is but a front, and deep down she's very insecure. Reading Anaïs Nin's journal "Henry and June" I find many parallels with her lack of self-confidence, and like Anaïs Nin, S had an abusive father. Nin believed that seductiveness is a result of low self-confidence. When you are confident, perhaps you don't feel like you need to seduce anyone — when you're confident, you do as I do: I'm myself and if anyone doesn't like it, I write them off as unworthy of me. But I had no lack of love when I grew up, and that's why I don't depend on fake love now.
In that last email she wasn't manipulating me as an end in itself but as a means to prove to herself that she could, that her conscience could not limit her freedom. When she concluded that "I'll be myself anywhere" it wasn't me she was trying to convince of that but herself. Beyond all the layers of her motivations there was always this deeper motivation for freedom that drove all others. That's the essence of her personality, and it's that which I crave. We are so very much alike — I'm sure if I was born in her place my life would have taken much the same course, because there's this same basic instinct that drives us, even if we had different opportunities.
She thinks it's the world that's holding her back, but my case shows that it's really herself. In her pride she thinks her mind is free, but it's not, and so she projects her restrictions on others. That's why to prove her freedom was such a struggle for her, and in that struggle she lost sight of everything else in order to achieve her victory. But war never leads to freedom, and she's only locked her fears away. Perhaps I am an embodiment of her fears, the clear light shining into the depths of her mind. But I'll be here, like Jormungand, until in those depths I will encircle her world. Her ego is too fluid to keep me beneath the surface forever… I may change in form, but she'll see me again, reflected in the hall of mirrors of her mind, a crack spreading in their surface. The seeds of doubt have been planted. Who are you? You are nothing, and therefore you are everything.
But that doesn't make sense either. I was so emphatic that I accepted her that the only way she could've thought that I didn't accept her is if she didn't accept herself, yet the authenticity of her last email shows that she does accept herself. The manipulativeness of that email was so obvious that she must've been conscious of it, so she doesn't actually have a problem with being manipulative. Her earlier expressing qualms about her manipulativeness must've actually been a preparation for as and when she'd manipulate me later.
No, the only reason she did what she did is because she feels the need to control, just like Anaïs Nin, as a way of channeling her anxieties, and she just cannot accept it when she is not in control. And it was very clear from what I said that she did not control me in the least — I made a point of making that clear because it hurt my pride that she thought she could control me. And P depends on S much as Henry did on Nin — he undergoes her polyamory only because of his submissiveness, his victim role, and his jealousy towards me was clear enough, at one point taking the form of contempt: but he's far too soft to let it escalate, and I far too accepting.
So that's why in her first email, her air of authority gave me a flashback to airport security. She knew she risked losing me as a friend, no matter what she wanted to get out of it — so she gave up a friend for the sake of feeling in control. Her traumas are no excuse: another friend of mine was traumatized even worse and came out of it as a more enlightened person. Besides, her daughter is just as dominant, so it's clearly genetic: she must've inherited just a tiny bit of her father's sociopathic strain.
I think I've made up my mind: someone like that could never be a true friend. All I want is someone with whom I can be free. I couldn't let her control me even if I wanted to. I don't mind having her playing with my emotions, but I won't pretend to feel something I don't to play along: I won't let her win just because she can't lose. Regardless of how you define control, if she can only accept what's under her control and can't accept anything that isn't, then she doesn't accept me, because I refuse to fit any definition. No, she's not ready for me, and if she's not ready now she never will be.
So the one-word answer is control. Isn't it always? Everyone always tries to control the flow of life, to build dams, to tell the river where it can or can't go, leaving half the world a desert in the process… and all I want is someone who doesn't need to control it, whose flow reaches throughout their being, and therefore, throughout mine.
Yet there must've been more misunderstandings, as she said "I don't owe you anything." I've ran this over again and again in my mind and I just can't figure out what the hell she could've been talking about. She suggested it was because I asked to have a conversation when I said we needed to talk. Perhaps because she thought this would involve explaining her behavior to me, subjecting her to my analysis. In fact I just wanted her to withdraw her judgment of me.
And perhaps I tried a bit too hard to convince her that I didn't need her, to the point that she thought I didn't care for her at all… in that case we couldn't be friends and she had nothing to lose, and she'd have been right to doubt my ability to connect. She might've just expressed her frustration at how little she succeeded in her efforts. But I did say I was attracted to her, and she said she could sense it… besides, I told her of how I felt that moment when time and space seemed to dissolve when I was around her. But likewise I felt how she cared for me… so perhaps she felt, just like me, how everything changed once she moved to Taos, how it cut what little of a bond we'd formed and there came to be a distance, and perhaps she blamed it on me?
She probably particularly needs a lot of validation to be convinced of being loved. If she thought I didn't really care for her, that I just treated her like a project like another friend of mine said once, then she'd really have had nothing to lose anyway. So maybe it was a last-ditch effort to be loved combined with closure if it didn't work.
Just when I think I'm done with this, I remember how familiar Pride and Prejudice felt… it should really be called Pride and Vanity, because Lizzie's prejudice is entirely founded on her vanity when overhearing Darcy saying, out of pride, that she doesn't tempt him. Pride and vanity seem similar, but they're quite different: pride is self-love, it's self-sufficient. Vanity is dependence on others' love. It's probably very typical, hence the novel got so popular. If Lizzie took as long as she did to change her mind (and the novel was written by a woman, mind you) it might take S just as long — and in people's unconscious it's probably supposed to be up to the man to give in and press through the prejudice… but I will not. I'll find another way of getting her to understand, because I want to approach her as a person, not as a man, and I want to be treated as a person, without stereotypes. Whatever my feelings (and I'm not clear on what they are myself), what I want is friendship.
Yes, now it makes sense. Whenever I expressed that I cared for her, it was always in a really cold, detached way, like a scientist admiring a specimen. That's because I imagined she'd never be more than that to me, that she'd always be behind glass. Acceptance to her is not enough to base a relationship upon: acceptance is just the lack of resistance, it's neutral, indifferent. She didn't want to settle for a half measure, for the middle way, the rational approach, a marriage-du-raison. I might as well have been a politician, a colonialist, an industrialist, a farmer, who "loves" his people, subjects, laborers, livestock. She'd tried everything to reach through to my heart, just as I tried everything to reach through to her mind, and neither would open up. Yes, that's what she meant when she said there was a lot I don't know; but she has no idea. I fell violently in love the moment she described how falling in love felt to her like "her heart stretching to the edges of infinity" — but was too proud to show it, to really show it, and not just state it in oblique hints.
It turns out I'm as repressed as she is, even if I can't point at it in such black-and-white terms. I've only ever expressed my thoughts, never my feelings. So she tried to stir them to the surface, but all she found was my pride, holding down all others. It's easy enough to think that it's all there is to me: I spend my life alone being creative and caring about little else than my work, and dismissing everyone for not being worth my time because of it. My pride is holding me back — and this obsession of mine is certainly humiliation enough, even if it's only because I have nothing else to focus on anymore (or perhaps all the more for that).
But we were both in the wrong, she for her closed mind, I for my closed heart. Had she shown more understanding or had I shown more affection, we'd have thought each other worthwhile and we wouldn't have escalated our conflict like this. It doesn't matter who eventually pressed the button to block the other: she did so only because I fired an ultimatum first, and both are as humiliating to our respective pride and vanity. We collided in almost perfect symmetry, and along such headlong course that we rebounded just as perfectly. There has to be a breach in symmetry between matter and antimatter for the universe to be born without destroying itself, and it can only come from me, but it will not be toward her.
Before this, she already used a cycle of attraction and repulsion to win me over. From the way I said I was alright with that, she saw that it didn't have the effect she wanted — to lead me to despair with desire — so she stepped up her game. It's been like this since time out of mind, for the female to run away and see who had the determination to chase her down. It's happened to me with another American girl I felt attracted to on the trail, jokingly saying "when are we getting married?" and next had me waiting for her when she stayed in the restrooms with her sister to read for at least an hour — to see if I had the patience to wait for her anyway. I didn't. I've always felt detached from this kind of thing, and close friendship is the only thing that's ever turned me on. It actually feels rather sexist, and it's no surprise to me that I've only ever seen this happen with American girls. In the introverted Nordic countries it's more friendship-based and they're the most promiscuous (and gender-equal) in the world. It doesn't seem worth it to risk friendship this way for the sake of passion — and there's no question that if I had been gay, I wouldn't have been disparaged like this. But to her, a potential suitor doesn't earn the respect of any other human being.
Come now, there's no way friendship with someone like that is possible, even in a relationship… and yet she seemed to be good friends with P. Perhaps it's the initial tension of passion that gets in the way, because it's volatile, it has to explode somehow, either by coalescing or by rebounding. But passion should be compatible with friendship, otherwise it's always limited. So perhaps friendship is possible and passion were both possible in the beginning, but not both at the same time, at least not at first — and I can't have one without the other.
Yet one thing is clear: while it may not be in the way she wanted, she did succeed in making me more passionate about her, even if it was only because I empathized with her authenticity once I understood it. She was right again to trust her instincts, just as I told her she should. She embraces mystery the way I do. She didn't know what she was doing or why, didn't know how I could ever find her again, but she took a leap of faith, because it made her feel free.
But I need my own proof that she can let me be myself as well. So I will reach out, but it will be with my own manifesto, of authenticity, of unconditional love — and then I will wait for her answer, to see if she will submit to it.
I must make my emotion as uncompromisingly expressive as my reason — imagine how much power there could be in it if it were! The first thing I should tell her isn't that I merely accept her, but that I love her. I've dived into the bottom of her psyche, trying to find a resolution one way or another to my obsession, and yet this is the one thing I can take away from all I've observed, that I love everything about her no matter what, no matter if it is requited. I never had the chance to tell her because there wasn't the time to give weight to the words — but in her authenticity, she gave so much away of herself in that time that that was enough for me.
Her emotions are inextricably intertwined with those of others. She manipulates people because others' emotions are hers and the only way she can express her own emotions is through theirs: it's as if people are her medium, her canvas. Hurting others is a way to express pain — and by allowing her to be herself I uncovered that darker side which she'd repressed for the sake of P.
Because children of abused parents have a strong sense of responsibility, their most (or only) stable relationships tend to be with someone they feel responsible for — someone interesting enough that they care to feel responsible and vulnerable enough that they do. P comes across as fragile, even though in many ways he's stronger than most. But his voice often sounds as if it could break at any moment, and when he was caught on the border and knew he wouldn't be able to come with S to Taos, he became physically ill and found relief in codeine. That's the real reason why she thought she'd gotten over her vanity, not because some random stranger in Taos criticized her: P's tranquillity and vulnerability had a moderating effect on her.
That darker side which she buried, I will unearth, whether she likes it or not. She has already shown that she can't resist my influence on her — though in all fairness, being back in the USA and away from P certainly had something to do with her darker side re-emerging too. But I will keep brutally analyzing her until I've conquered her entirely, until there is no corner of her mind left untouched and she is mine, trapped in my head, naked, raped, broken down, dissolving.
So should I give chase? When she said she had trouble finding someone who brought out the woman in her, it was shortly after I said about P "We're so similar — what do I have to offer?" suggesting that that was her answer. There's something of P's vulnerability in me, but she could see from my independence and perseverance that there was also a well of masculinity hidden beneath it — latent only because it was unchallenged. That's why she provoked it, because I needed a target to focus it on — and anger and lust are so similar, they're both forms of pure desire, pure motive force. That's why she will never take the initiative to get back in touch, because she wants that side of me to break forth. She knew what she was doing, that she set a time bomb in my mind. If she wanted to get rid of me, literally anything else she could've said would've done the job better. She'd be really obtuse if that was her way of getting closure. But she relished provoking me far too much — she couldn't help it.
But she must've seen the value of what she calls manipulation as much as I do, because when we talked in Oldenburg she said it was as if the universe were getting her acquainted with awesome people just before her move to test how well she could let go… but it was her own decision to move, and the grand scheme she sensed was just the one of her own unconscious. Yes, she did understand what I was trying to tell her — but what kind of response was I expecting? For her to say, "Alright, I'll go on influencing you unconsciously"?
Keeping that influence secret was the only way she thought she could maintain its power, because it lies in mystery. So did she think that answers take away mystery, like any fundamentalist? Every answer calls forth even more questions, and we never know what's going to happen. She did say on her profile that she likes to keep some things a mystery. But if she desires a limit on truth for the sake of that, she will not get it from me. She doesn't realise that all opposites can coexist and can only coexist, including mystery and truth.
Does there have to be any more proof of that than this analysis? I've written almost 20,000 words on her, and I probably know her better by now than she knows herself — and yet she keeps baffling me, and I still have questions. I've learned a lot about her, but not what motivated her. I think she doesn't even know herself.
At first, her mind obviously tried to rationalise the emotion she felt when I confronted her. Perhaps at how I said I submitted to her influence, it provoked the desire to influence me, but when she became self-conscious of it, it turned to anger. She'd said when she was painting that she couldn't do it when someone was watching, and after I'd watched her for just a minute she ruined the painting by trying too hard. Self-consciousness causes a "blip in her flow" (a phrase she used when she said she didn't want to see me after she became self-conscious when she changed her mind about X): it makes her hesitate, frustrating her desires by splitting them into parts that each lack potency, and that frustration causes anger. Anger is itself a form of desire, very close to the lust for power, and in her case, that's probably very close to sexual lust — that's something she inherited from her father, but at least unlike him, she doesn't actually hurt anyone.
That fear of losing her flow is also one that Anaïs Nin expressed, so just like I thought, it has to be a control issue: if you don't try to be in the flow, you always are. Because she doesn't have my open mind as she has an open heart, she isn't used to splitting her consciousness up into parts (linear sequences of thought) and then reuniting them into a whole (the unifying conclusion of intuition). Doubt is her kryptonite, and in Taos neither of us knew what was going to happen, how long I'd stay in Taos and how long it would take her to be ready to see me. My analysis confused her — I know because it used to feel that way too. I used to be unable to be analytical and emotional at the same time, years ago, but when I'm writing this now it's all charged with emotion.
Since I caused the feeling she wanted me to know that it was my fault that it was there, that it was my fault wherever it would lead to, because she didn't know any more than I and if what happened would be a good thing, if she'd even want it to happen — because at that point she didn't know what she wanted. After a while the only thing she wanted was the same thing I wanted: to cut the Gordian knot, to break free of all the complications: to leap into the abyss to resolve the paradoxical urge we felt to do so. To be free of doubt, of grey areas, of half measures, and as it sure wasn't the time to get earnestly close, the only course was to become earnestly distant — but any rate to settle upon something to feel.
Mystery is one thing — but at some point a resolution is necessary to know what to do next. It became clear enough that I wanted a resolution as much as her when I fired my ultimatum — so at that point she no longer had any qualms about giving me that resolution. Rather test fate than be trapped in between, in suspense.
Of course, that's the whole point. She didn't know what she wanted. She only knew that she wanted to know, and the only way to know was to do the only thing that would resolve it once and for all: to depend on a coin toss to know what both of us were feeling when it went one way or the other. She knew that if I was everything I said, then she could always come back to me at any time and it would be alright — and if not, then it didn't matter anyway. She was testing both her and my feelings and at the same time, letting them ferment until they'd become clear.
I regret only one thing: I always knew she wouldn't read the messages I sent her after that last email that convinced me that she judged me, but I had to get it all out of my system anyway. I'll express myself however it makes me look. But because she didn't read them, she probably thought I was trying to win her back. Reading it would make it very clear that was the last thing in the world I wanted. But she didn't read it because she didn't want to go back to doubting "who was right" and all that nonsense. I didn't care for that either.
Yes, what she said about the universe testing us shows that she does accept that part of herself, she just doesn't want others to see her that way because she knows others usually don't accept it, so when I found out, her first emotion was fear at not being accepted. I think she got over that fear by the time she sent her last email, if only by seemingly giving in to it so she'd have nothing left to lose.
What matters about all this is that she accepts herself and her emotions! She accepts herself, even if she doesn't necessarily accept how she comes across to others: her insecurities are about her image, her persona, not about her anima, and they come down to the desire to be loved (explaining why she felt resistance from the woman in that polyamorous couple when it later turned out she liked her). Then she is as authentic as I think she is, and that means there's hope. That's all that matters, all I need to know.
Of course I still don't know if she "loved me or she loved me not" because it's never that simple, but I don't care. Whatever feelings she had for me weren't clear and therefore not that strong: there wasn't enough time for that. I certainly did put her through strong emotions, but they were about herself.
But this analysis was never about that. I just wanted to understand her, because it's my way of getting closer to her. I'm glad I had the time and space to let everything become clear, even if she didn't and, if she'd give it any thought, would probably still be just as confused as I was before I did this analysis. I know now that she is accepting, but she does not, and still doesn't know what I meant by "do not judge me". She wanted to have the time and space to let everything resolve into well-defined emotions, to see if it would bend or break.
Soon enough you'll see where all this has taken me, and I will say: I told you it was right for you to trust your intuition. I don't mean you knew where it would lead — you just went with the flow, saw a pattern that somehow fit even if you didn't know how or why. You said you told yourself "it's not a chess game" but maybe it is — because guess what makes the best chess players? Not logical intelligence, but verbal intelligence. So chess is a language, because it's based on patterns. There's only one problem with the analogy — you can't win or lose.
The irony is, while in your last email you were trying to evoke my desire to hurt me, it didn't work, because once you had seemingly judged me I wrote you off immediately and hardly gave you another thought for the next few months. Then, when I recovered from X and the brain fog lifted so that my intuition came back, I saw it for what it was, that you weren't judging me but were expressing your emotions, and at that point it struck me as so authentic that I fell for you all over again. You thought it would be the other way around, isn't it? Much as I enjoy the roller coaster of emotions that your influencing me puts me on, it doesn't make me want you: the only thing that can do that is vulnerability. And until I want you, you won't know if you want me.
There's a lot you can get to know about someone by looking at the left and right side of their face separately; the arrogance is only ever in the right side of her face, in her rational side. The left side of her face looks very open, humble, loving, vulnerable. But you know what, when I look at her that way I still like both sides of her. I've decided I don't even mind being judged, because I don't depend on anyone else to be myself — and being judged doesn't even imply that I can't be myself, it's just another emotion. I've been so misguided. There is nothing going on in our consciousness that isn't just that, just another form of consciousness that's just as valuable as every other.
It doesn't change anything. Judgment doesn't have to block me, it's just another energy to add to the mix. How could I not see it? I, who all these years have told myself I accept it all… but now I feel it, when I think of her and feel that judgmental energy of her rational side, defending, confronting, fighting for what she believes in, arguing with carnivores and fundamentalists etc — a passionate rebelliousness. How could I have been so stupid, how could I have been so stupid. I didn't accept her at all. Judgment isn't the opposite of acceptance, repression is — and there's no reason judgment should be repressed any more than anything else. No, that's not quite it. I just thought she was giving me a choice between being accepted and being myself, and I made it clear that I would always choose the latter and looked down on her for suggesting such a choice. Nothing in the universe will make me choose otherwise, not even the first hope of happiness I've ever had.
I don't regret anything I did. I don't regret firing my ultimatum — it felt way too satisfying to show her that she wasn't in control, like that dream I had in which she pushed me with that smug face and before I fell I took her hands, swivelled her around me and launched her into an aisle.
If you ever got around to reading this, S, it means your mind has opened. If you understand this, then there's nothing beyond your understanding any more.
My heart is finally opened. I feel free again, my emotions flow freely again. And what a violence it took to open it. You read the message the statue had chiseled into its chest: unpetrify me. And you struck the hammer, even if the shards would cut my flesh. And it's with the same grace that I gladly delivered the same blows. Looking at your last photo I can't help but wonder if you've gone through a similar process as I. You look so disarmed, with a childlike thankfulness to be loved for who you are by P — there's not a grain of vanity left. I know whatever feelings you had for me are gone — but there's no question you respected me, and for you it wasn't so much your relationship with others that had to change, but your relationship with yourself. If I made you doubt your ego and rebel against its repression, that's all that's needed. And if you read my last message, in which I mercilessly called you a false person, you can't not have. You just needed someone to push you past your limit, out of your comfort zone, and no one else could have done it.
When neither of two people who meet each other put up a shield, a collision is impossible to avoid, and the energy must somewhere, so we rebounded.
What nonsense I've written. Everything I've ever thought is nonsense, and it can't possibly be anything else, because the universe is infinitely nuanced and words are cages if taken so seriously, trapping meaning rather than expressing it.
How I've enjoyed the roller coaster of emotions you've put me through. Even when I'd decided you were unaccepting and I rejected you in turn, it was with such exquisite rage that defied everything, even the prospect of a new, utopic life. I gladly cast it all away, like Asura when the creator let him rejoin his hostage daughter in return for becoming the new god of the world — I refuse!
A lot of people have told me the rub was in that one word "manipulative", that I said I'd sensed you were right about that. I don't get these kinds of taboos and I care nothing for them. If we're done talking about the meaning of a word before we know everything about what it means, that's the surest way to ignorance. It's not my job to skirt around your every insecurity — I will say it only once: you are perfect in the only sense that anything can be perfect.
None of this was meant to be in my defense or about who's right or wrong, because I don't care about those illusions. But if I ever get the chance to talk to her again, I need only say one thing to prove that I never meant any offense: at one point I said, after knowing you were mixed race, that "mutts" are genetically fitter: the word is pejorative yet my meaning obviously wasn't. It didn't escape you that I used a pejorative word, and you said "what?" so I repeated "mixed race" people. I don't get taboo words because I don't agree with taboos, and in this case it was exactly the same — the word "manipulative" is no different, just a taboo word for "influence", and again it should have been clear that I meant well. We mainland Europeans don't really have taboos like Americans do, anyway. You can use any word you like on television without getting censored.
Considering that she did read (and reply) to my later email explaining what I meant by manipulation, that can't have been her problem, but perhaps she thought that if nothing else, I was keeping my distance because of it, or thought that if I saw through her like I did, it was only a matter of time before I wouldn't accept her. Either way, she was offended. If it's not from disgust or an excuse to break off contact that made her feel good about herself, as I thought at first, (since she did manipulate me later, which would've been pointless otherwise) it can only be because she was hurt, and considering how easily she was hurt it means she cared a lot, about getting some real connection with me rather than whatever stoic resignation I seemed to her to be offering. Perhaps her proof that I didn't care for her was that I didn't care to avoid taking the risk of using the word "manipulation", that I was trying to provoke her, to challenge her to take it lying down or be cast aside. While I was oblivious to the negative connotations of the word, I admit that the whole tone of my message was and was meant to be confrontational, giving the same message as my ultimatum, that I would say and do whatever I like and she could take it or leave it.
A friend has suggested that she was in love, that that's why she was so extremely sensitive. After all the possibilities I considered this one never crossed my mind. Women don't fall in love as easily as men and I fall in love very quickly even for a man. But we tuned in to each other's being in love with the universe — that's how I could fall in love so quickly, at any rate. But at one point I expressed my disbelief at how much we have in common and she said she felt the same way — there was no affection in either my or her expression: the incredulity was genuine. I don't know if she felt this way too, but I for my part felt like she had to be too good to be true, and I was just waiting for the coup de grâce, with such certainty that it would come that I didn't even wince. If she was in love, it would make sense why she would have put the sentence on her dating profile "I'm looking for friendship first" in capitals. She knew all too well that I wasn't looking for more than friendship either, as she acknowledged having read my email in which I said I had no desire (yet) to be intimate with her, that when I said "I don't know what to do with [my feelings for you]" it was because they gave me a lot of energy to do something, and I didn't know what until I learnt about the earthship, upon which I wanted to learn to build in Taos. I'd decided her putting that sentence in capitals had nothing to do with me, but perhaps she was projecting her own feelings on me (not that I didn't have them too) because she felt humiliated at having her hopes disappointed. Even if she had no more desire than I for intimacy beyond a hug, it can't be denied that she was very quick in trusting me, and she might've felt like she'd been taken in and that from now on she'd keep more of a distance from potential lovers.
Building a close bond, even a close friendship, takes a lot of time, and she must've felt like she had none of that — moving in, seeing dozens of friends, getting a job after a long time of unemployment… she was too overwhelmed to focus on seeing me, so she thought this was the most efficient way she could elicit desire from me was in the form of anger, or perhaps she thought I would try to repress my feelings for her and they would only become stronger as a result. I only assumed she had a different definition of attachment because of P — but who knows, perhaps she wanted to rekindle his intensity as well, as she had trouble enough distracting him when he worked at home. Time in our lives has become an almost inexhaustible resource, but emotion is much rarer — because we have so much time we end up getting bored, jaded, apathetic. It seems like a good tradeoff — something plentiful in return for something rarer.
But here's a news flash for you. I thought this was obvious from the moment I came to Oldenburg: from the moment you described being in love as your "heart stretching to the edges of infinity" I fell madly in love. I couldn't sleep that night and when I dozed off ever so briefly I woke up hyperalert with desire, and I knew I just couldn't let her go to the US without getting to know her before she left, to know if it was worth committing my life to being with you. Why else would I have come to Oldenburg, you doofus?
Even when we are with someone we care about, there are relatively few moments when we feel truly awake, at least this felt like the case for her. I did feel how they and their friends had gotten used to each other among her, and it made me feel uncomfortable — it's a feeling I get with most people and usually my intensity makes me incompatible with them. Only her daughter stayed true to her passionate nature, reflecting her own. Interchanging distance with closeness creates a contrast that makes both more noticeable. Didn't I do the same thing myself to my ex, after all, prolonging her desire by shutting myself off whenever I felt like she started taking me for granted? It was as much because I didn't want her clinginess to lead to eventual disillusionment, as it was because I felt trapped by it. I dreaded her falling out of love, knowing that for most people it maxes out at 6 months, mostly passes at 18 months and disappears entirely after 3 years. I knew I'd still be in love by then, because I've been in love with the universe all my life, and she was merely the purest, most authentic reflection I'd seen of it.
I did think it was strange… she wanted to move, but at first it wasn't necessarily to the US. At first she was thinking of Hamburg. I recommended Frankfurt to be close to the Schwarzwald. Then she decided upon Taos, but she was obviously not that resolute on Taos in particular, just to be somewhere else, anywhere, to take a new start, to summon the night and sleep to wake up revitalized the next morning. But when I saw her a week or two later, I learn that her husband was caught with drugs on the border and would not be able to go with her — and by now she had decided on Taos. Yes, I can see why she would feel so insecure at this particular time. The fact that she needed an excuse shows that she didn't feel free. Despite all his efforts P still felt very dependent on her, collapsing with fever when he learned he could not come with her to Taos — she could see how his love for her could disintegrate from suffering if he found out that she needed a break from him — or rather that she felt like he needed a break from her in order to revive his passion within the moment. She'd bought a return ticket because it was cheaper, but if money was an issue she would've planned it farther in advance: perhaps she didn't expect P to be able to get a visa before the return date. Since the flight back was in December and that's when she got back with P I presume she came back to Germany. I wouldn't be surprised if the earthships were just part of the excuse, since she had already been interested in them before. I got mixed feelings when I was listening to her description of the Mesa — were those her feelings that I introjected?
Perhaps when I said I would not get attached, it seemed like no one could be madly in love with her anymore, the way she is in love with the universe. But my "detachment" or whatever you want to call it is exactly why my being in love never fades, why it did not fade for my ex in seven years, why I still felt that intensely weakening feeling once my love outlived hers in spite of all my efforts and became unrequited — it keeps the yin in the yang, turns it into a self-sustaining ecosystem. It reminds me of transience at all times. You see, when my brother died just as my brains were being developed in the uterus, it hardwired me to see everything in the context of transience, as if I'm looking at life from its edge, as if every moment is the first or last. Once I love someone, it's forever. Don't believe me? The passionate love poem you said you liked so much was about my ex. We fell in love seven years before, and I hadn't kissed her for over three years. Yet every time I hugged her I became erect, and even falling in love with you only amplified my feelings for her. I never needed her and always alloyed my love with hate, my connection with separation, to upset the status quo, to make the crests and troughs of the waves amplify each other. At one point she enjoyed watching my face phase through a series of different expressions in moments, comparing me to the Mona Lisa: now you look contemptuous, now you look sympathetic. My love didn't burn up with excess — it kept in balance and therefore survived.
I'm so tired of all the conditions. Too attached, not attached enough — I don't know what the problem is and I don't care. The only thing I was ever decided upon was to be accepting of who I or you are and to let either of us do whatever we want. The moment it seemed like you did not accept me in the same way, I hurled you to the other edge of the universe. And then when I saw my mistake my feelings were back in full force. Acceptance, the chance to be myself, is all that I need to renew my emotions, because it lets them happen, lets them flow, gives them the fluidity they need to renew themselves rather than accumulate and petrify into limestone.
I've been trying for months now to reduce your complexities to a simple answer that would help me find resolution, but it doesn't matter. I could know you inside out and you'd still never cease to fascinate me. It doesn't even matter what conclusion I'd come to, however I'd break you down into your complexes, they always reconstitute back into the same indestructible feeling of you. I'd always love you anyway. You win. Perhaps you were in love with me and perhaps you really wanted me to fall in love with you in your last message. If so, while I don't think you'd have read my initial barrage of messages, you'd probably have read my last, devastating message a few weeks later, if only out of curiosity to see if it had the effect you wanted. But I was still under the impression that you didn't accept me as I was, and I was still full of hostility for that, downright hostility, not just anger interchangeable with passion. That's the only response that not being accepted will ever elicit from me. But you rationalized that I had already said I didn't accept you, even though this was only something you were so afraid to hear that you became paranoid.
Even if you didn't achieve your goal (I feel the same way as I did, but I don't know if I'd feel differently when seeing you), I'm glad all this happened, because the distance helped me understand you. I'm stunned by your complexity. Any of the things I've said by themselves would be totally nonsensical by themselves, but your heart is so authentic that your every desire flows freely together before coming to expression — it's in perfect harmony. But your mind is closed, and the heart is blind: it only feels and does not see. It did not see the feelings I kept within, how passionately I loved you and how I only needed time for it to be expressed. But by seeming to not accept me you made me feel intensely defiantly authentic, and that would make it easier to express my feelings if only they weren't held back — it's too late now. But it's also too early. If P's being in love is anything like most people's, you've probably been waiting for the opportunity to reconnect with him on such a deep level for about a year. It's quite possible that this one hiatus was all you needed to upset his steady heart with vibrations that will now sustain themselves indefinitely, but considering his principled avoidance of drugs nowadays, it seems clear that he's still not ready to embrace that reckless abandon of being insanely in love with all of life, especially considering our experience in Oldenburg. Perhaps once you reaffirm your bond, the crest that will be as great as the trough will deliver the coup de grâce to his inhibitions… or perhaps when the crest dies down, it will collide with the levelness of his heart's terra firma once again, just as it happened with me and my ex after 3 years. It'll be no use repeating the hiatus then, as I've found out the hard way myself — you'll need to make him jealous, in a way that your casual relationships couldn't. He needs to feel as if he could really lose you, as if he could be replaced. In that case, I'll be here. By now your feelings for me are probably gone — women get over it far quicker than men. But you might yet have use of me, and I don't mind if it's as a partner in crime. With anyone else it would backfire, but not with P — he's far too noble to stand in your way. I won't let you do anything you don't want to — you can lie and I won't interfere.
Oh my God. This is the most scandalous thing I've ever written, and still I wouldn't apologize, still I wouldn't put up with any inacceptance on account of it, because it shouldn't matter if I'm wrong, because I have a right to be wrong, because I can be whatever I want to be and I can be nothing else. There's no way any of this would not be offensive if she read it, and if she could read it with an open mind she'd just about be in shock at the seeming amorality of her own innermost self, that had been hidden from her all her life. I'll tell her that I understand her and when she asks me how, I will say only that it's very complex, and that she's not ready to hear it — and that I'll share hints every time she takes the initiative of asking a specific question. It might take years before she'd be ready to accept what I was trying to make her understand in Taos. Yes, I can see now why it's so sensitive, because her intuition goes far deeper than I ever thought. I'm amazed at my own ability to have been just like this and yet accept it from the beginning, without ever having felt the need to hide it nor thinking it special enough to mention it.
Come to think of it, I know how she must've felt. I had an argument with my ex about taking a wrong turn on the highway, though it was both her and my fault (and that of the highway signs giving incomplete and misleading information). What got me wasn't just her anger, it was her condescension, and I walked out the car and screamed at her when she sought me in the train station because those were the only meaningful emotions I had left to express, and I knew there was nothing left to share with her. It made it clear just how much of a distance there was between us, how I was more like a chaperone than anything else to her and if I failed to serve her I was unworthy of respect. My message about her manipulativeness was clearly accepting, but it was also as clearly condescending. I couldn't love her except from a distance, as either a master or slave or both — that schizoid "vertical distance." I could've opened up to her if I got closer to her, once she trusted me as a confidante, but she could not, because she did not think anyone could accept her once they knew her secrets — my distance seemed to suggest as much, but it had nothing to do with that: it was just too soon for me to open up on that level.
In time, your dark side will awaken, and when it does, it will draw you to me and I will draw it out. If we ever get intimate, you'd have to belt me first. Pain is all I still feel toward you and pain is the only thing that can still make me open up to you — and the only thing that could make you open up to me. You need to accept your dark side if you can accept me.
But for now, you've become more of an intellectual passion than anything else. It's not that I'm hurt that's the problem, it's that I'm disappointed in your lack of understanding of me. Maybe I'd have preferred if your manipulation had been all there was to the story, if from the beginning you had no other intentions — but while that was important in determining what you said, it was misunderstanding that started it all. You said sometimes you get really analytical and feel like the universe is like a rubik's cube you have to solve. I'd like to see you analyze me in that playful manner. It would balance my own seriousness and make me feel understood… and just the fact that you'd take the time to do so would make me feel accepted, no matter how critical you would be.
How did I not see it? I've been missing the most important piece of all. Actually I've felt it from the start, but it seems like it didn't communicate well to my reason: the playfulness, the humor in her manipulativeness, especially in her last email. She was laughing at life, at fate, at me, at herself, partly because she refused to take it as serious as I did, and partly because she was afraid and whistling in the dark. It reminds me of the unbearable lightness of being, where one of the characters leaves everything and everyone behind just to embody that lightness, to flit around life freely but without grounding. She didn't take herself as serious as I did.
It's that goofiness she mentioned, an irresponsible whimsicality. I remember it from times in my own life, how I mocked fate by doing something randomly disruptive. It was never more pronounced than it was right after my worst depression, so it's a way of dealing with the absurdity of life, to accept it. I really do miss that. I only saw it when I felt that energy which I had assimilated from her come to expression in myself…
In her last email her nervous mockery was patent, but it makes me wonder if it was there in her first email as well — perhaps hence the inordinately harsh judgment she appeared to pass on me, to play with my feelings and see if I had any sense of humor — but neglecting the punchline out of cruelty, to watch me suffer from her prank just a little longer, only to get the boring response of a dignified indignation. No, that's going too far, and yes, that's the first time in this analysis that I really believe that. But perhaps part of her knew all too well that I really did accept her, and it was her way of relieving the tension of the confrontation, of eluding my attempts to understand her, to make me small when I smugly thought I was being clever, to play with the freedom that I offered her, to test it, to provoke me, to go too far, farther than she thought she could or should, and finally, to refuse to be self-conscious and contrast my own reasonableness with her wilfulness. To jump over Romulus' wall — chaos, impulse, rampancy, randomness, a shuffling of the cards.
There's always something transgressive about levity. Still, in her first email, I don't think that levity went farther than the nonchalance with which she hit "send" without giving it any second thought — she didn't care to be right, didn't care about truth, just did what she wanted and consequences be damned. Still, it's important because it tells me I shouldn't take the actual content of what she said too serious either — only the context of her being hurt.
This analysis is getting too nuanced for the language that I'm using for it — if my self-correcting self-contradiction went lost on her this would be the most offensive part of all. But this was never more than my own psychotherapy — the length of this analysis sure shows how good you were at hurting me, but I'm relishing in it. At least it's not boring. You're the only person that would never, ever bore me, even if we'll both live forever.
How much she both needs and could be destroyed by someone like me, her opposite, steadfast as a rock, as a black hole, as an infinite well of gravity that would consume her whole. God help me, I want you. I'd destroy the whole world until nothing stood between us, weren't it that it would kill you too. Don't take it serious — I won't do it. Or perhaps I will. The world itself is a joke, after all — everything in the world except you is a banality. Perhaps I'm already doing it. There won't be much left of it once I'm done with what I'm doing behind the scenes right now, once this supervolcano has ejaculated its contents across the noosphere. Just you wait. Just wait, just a little longer. Don't you dare get in touch again, not now, not yet. Let the tension hanging between us create an arc of lightning and catalyse the explosion, the supernova that will create new worlds.
I've never felt this way before. Any other time I was in love, the person was just a trigger, and the feeling didn't remain anchored to them: they were too small to contain such intense emotion, and so it dissolved into something greater, a love for the universe. Somehow you can contain that, because you're so close to your own nature that you are part of nature: in your authenticity you reflect the universe to me, its mystery, its ambiguity. I see the universe through you and my love flow through you out into it. Since I began to understand you in November, not a day has gone by that I haven't thought about you, and for the past month I invariably woke up thinking about you. Winter has always been a time for me when I delved deeper into my unconscious, and with every layer I let go I reached a layer deeper until I reached the bottom and nothing was left but an emptiness from where everything was possible. Now it is you who I find beneath the seabed of my mind, burning, melting into my core.
I'll let you in on a secret (and that's sarcastic, for I've made it clear enough that I have no secret. When you said I was projecting when I thought you manipulative you were only half wrong. That is to say, I didn't manipulate you as such because I didn't mean to influence you to stir in any particular direction, but nonetheless I wanted to make you stir. But in that I wasn't unlike you — I let you be free as you let me be free, influenced you only towards freedom, to come closer to yourself. The only difference is that your influence was towards ambiguity, towards the Dionysian, and mine was towards transparency, towards the Apollonian. I didn't mind your ambiguity — but I wondered what would happen if it were to combine with my transparency, how it could find expression in it, as it could not but be expressed — because it's so powerful that it has to be expressed, and yet I put you before an impossibility to express it, forced you to do the impossible. I was intensely curious how you would react, I wanted to know, because I knew the answer would have to be ambiguous and yet it could not escape its transparency. The two are not mutually exclusive and even express each other, just as the clear night sky opens us to the mystery of the stars: and in that paradox itself there is ambiguity. I brought your ambiguity into clarity, and how could you be ambiguous if your ambiguity itself became clarity? You didn't know how to react to such transparency in keeping with your own ambiguity, nor I the other way around — and so our universe exploded and imploded from sheer contradiction.
I was testing you, to see if you could still accept me and yourself when faced with that part of you that you are hiding from yourself and others. And perhaps you made the mistake of thinking that there was a right or wrong answer to my koan — but it's not what you answered but how you answer that matters. So will you pass my test in the end? It remains to be seen. Like you, I influenced you, but I didn't want to make you express anything in a particular in you — rather I wanted to know if you could express yourself in any way at all. And there's the reversal: in that, it is I who am ambiguous and you who are transparent. Your goal in everything you say is clear, mine is not: you guide emotions this way and that, like a dancer who wants to express freedom — and I follow your lead. But I want to make you move in all directions, any direction, like a magician who wants to impress mystery — pick a card, any card. And you don't want to be fooled, so you think you have to pick the right card in order to win. I just want to humble you. I just want you to take a chance and trust that the conjuring trick will work out just fine either way.
I still don't know how our energies combine. I think they can do just about anything and I will just keep trusting my intuition, because I don't care just which way you go as long as you stay true to yourself. I will challenge your feeling into the ambiguity of truth, just as you challenge mine into the ambiguity of love — and all you need to do is follow it just as I do. Truth and love are too nuanced to be understood in any formula, and I will not seek it — we find it in the moment, in the effervescent waves that we only see once we can no longer steer clear of them, so that we must be ever ready to meet them however we find them in the moment. Nothing can prepare me. I will feel the wind, and tap into that vast reservoir of my unconscious and I swear I will no more know that you if I will love you forever or never see you again, or both — and any of those will do, because it's enough to love you or whatever beautiful, beautiful apparition you summoned in my mind.
I want us to become one. You, me, P, everyone we love, so that I am you and you are me, and we will love all of us through each other, because we'll have assimilated each other. Our brain's bandwidth is inexhaustible — they say our memory capacity is ten times what they thought it was — when telepathy comes along, I want to absorb your essence and that of anyone closest to us, and we will be inside each other, interpenetrating the way some say divinity interpenetrates the universe. The world will shake underneath us.
I've got a lot of pieces of the puzzle that I can recite as if at an exam, but their diversity only gives me a hint of how vastly incomprehensible your complexity is. I don't understand you because you're too great to absorb in any one thought — but feeling your energy I feel as if I've been wrong about everything in my whole damn life, that I've made every possible mistake because I didn't become like you, didn't embody that kind of energy. I want it. I submit myself to it. I don't care that's it beyond my understanding, I just know I need it. It makes me live as I've never lived. It makes me feel as if everything in my life, every memory and experience I've accumulated, is nothing but infrastructure, a frame to uphold you and that divine energy of yours — a vessel to be filled with it, to give it room to expand at will inside me. Burn me down, the riots in my mind shout, as they rebel against everything I've ever stood for — stability, to make sense of the universe, to feel right in my place in it. Throw it all away, cast it away into chaos, destruction, and intuition alone will guide the way through the tumbling darkness. Burn it all down. I know nothing, I've been wrong in every possible way. You were right. I don't know what it's like to truly live, desire, to go mad with passion and emotion — I treated you like some algorithm, and that's what insulted you, the distanced reasoning, like input to be given in a computer to make it calculate data, and then I act indignant when you don't understand, when you refuse to compute it because it doesn't matter how good my intentions are, it doesn't matter how right I might be if that's the way I do it, so inhumanly, without feeling. It's not analysis but analysis without feeling that you resist.
How are any words supposed to contain truth? How is an entire universe to fit into their confines? It's the greatest reductionism ever invented and it's what we started our whole culture with. I've devoted my life to a religion, a false god. It needs to burn, and when it's burned down all that's left is pure madness. I can see that madness in you, a madness that's allowed because it's wordless, because it doesn't proclaim mad prophecies or delusions, but just as mad nonetheless. Looking at your picture it strikes me like a bullet: you're completely insane. And it's just as you should be, because to not going mad with awe and passion at life is the worst kind of insanity.
True love does not let its existence depend on an answer: it's happy to merely exist, and reflect on the beauty that it has found, which it can never lose as long as it does not forget. By all means leave, and the distance will just give me a wider perspective of your world, but I cannot lose you from view, for you are everywhere, and now that I've once seen you I know where to look. You're not unique — you're an energy that courses through nature, and if you will not follow its course, I will, and it will lead me further than you've ever been. I will leave you behind to find who you truly are, what you reflect however dimly. Perhaps you only had one of the ingredients. The psyche's energy is fluid — if you will not take up this flame, then all the love I thought I knew for you will just pass to whoever will. You've had your chance. You thought you had to stay in control and with anyone else you might've been right, but it backfired because you underestimated how strong I am. Given the choice between freedom and happiness I will always choose freedom, in a heartbeat. Soon you're going to be beat at your own game, and you'll need me more than I need you. I'll find people like me, people who accept all experiences, and I will deny you, I will denounce you, I will make you beg for forgiveness and make you swear to your unconditional surrender to the infinite. I will see it through, and nothing in the world can stop me. You infected me with your madness, and combined with my wisdom there are no lengths to which I will not go. I'll be seeing you.
Now an emptiness is settling in me. I don’t know why, but I feel like even if you requite my feelings we could not love each other. Whenever I imagine being with you I just can’t imagine being intimate with you. We are worlds apart. And when I analyse myself like I do you, I find that I was being just as manipulative and pushing you away too, because even though I came to Taos for you, I wasn’t sure if I actually wanted to see you. I coaxed you into rejecting me. My feelings were strongest when I was near you but not with you, because that’s what you are to me — near and yet always just out of reach, a mystery, someone I enjoy wanting but wouldn’t know what to do with.
I’d been wanting to say earlier that there’s nothing wrong with your manipulative side, but didn’t know how to do it in the right way. But when I finally got around to sending that email it was malice that made me do so. You’d hurt my pride, made me cynical and disappointed me when you said you found my warnings about X “boring.” I didn’t realise you were being flippant because you were feeling upset and insecure. I just saw it as you not accepting my nerdiness, my being analytical — and it’s a fact that you are afraid of going too far in analyzing, as you indicated when you said “shut up, brain.” And you’re right, you made me aware of that again… I can analyse everything into smaller and smaller details until I lose perspective. But this was just you not taking it serious because you felt afraid, afraid of how I’d react. You thought I took X because you recommended it (I already wanted to) and you probably thought I drank a lot of water, which can be fatal, because you recommended it (I didn’t). After all, I felt just as afraid of how you’d react to my having made a mistake about the dosage of memantine and almost poisoned you… In fact for that reason I’m glad you recommended I drink a lot, because it makes us even.
Anyway, while explicitly the email I sent you was accepting, implicitly it was confrontational, just for the sake of pushing the envelope and seeing if you really accepted me. I didn’t care anymore if you wouldn’t accept me. I was tired of caring too much and I needed a break from that, from you, if necessary. When I said “I’ve been trying to get used to not seeing you in Taos,” I felt how accusative that sounded. When I said I was fine with you manipulating me, the vibe was partly appreciative in a cold spiritual manner, but also partly condescending and contemptuous: “Haha, busted. I didn’t fall for that. I’m too smart for you.” And by saying I didn’t care how crude you thought my openness next to your subtlety, I said that I dominated it, and didn’t allow your intuition to run its course. On the whole, the vibe was one of cold indifference. I wasn’t ready for you, for someone so much my opposite.
But damn it, I don’t want anyone else unless they have your kind of energy, I don’t want anyone who’s like me, I hate myself, I hate everything and everyone in this universe for not being like you, for not being you, for standing between me and you, for taking up space through which I would otherwise see nothing else but you. And I know this world without you will have to do for now, because it’s the niche that I evolved for and I can’t leave without going extinct. So be it, I’d rather die than be trapped here. If you don’t object to seeing me crawl in agony, I’d gladly come into your world. But the only way that our worlds are ever really going to collide is if you hurt me. Deep down I’m just like you, you just need to dig pretty deep. So hurt me, break me, tear me open, rip me apart, spill me out. I’m too cold to share pleasure with someone like you until you give me pain, because pain is all you make me feel, pain at the infinite distance, the vast cold dead empty space between us. I might as well be from another planet, another species, a schizoid Dr. Manhattan. And yet I’m not like that, I know from my previous relationships that I’m incredibly romantic and passionate and inexhaustibly sensual. But you’re so far away from me, so separate, different, alien. I don’t know if we can combine such vastly different psyches of such complexity into harmony — we clash, we’re dissonant, we collide awkwardly, trying to find a way to click and we just can’t, not unless one or both of us completely change shape to fit together. Perhaps that’s the change I’ve been undergoing, but it’s taking forever. It feels like I can’t possibly transform any further and still it keeps going, all the way into my core, until everything is different. Everything that interested me seems stale now, even though I’ve gotten better at it than ever before. I’m only interested now in anything that reminds me of your energy.
I knew it would be all too easy to provoke a breach, and that just made it all the more tempting. I'd been waiting for it to happen and I couldn't wait any longer. I knew it was inevitable, what with your vanity and my roughness (I'm not nearly as gentle as P) so I just wanted to get it over with and see if we could withstand conflict, because with someone like me it's inevitable, especially with someone like you, someone just as proud as I am. I didn't feel like waiting for it or avoiding it any longer. I'd felt it had been coming on for a while, and I just wanted to get it over with: to fast forward to where the problem would begin to see if I could solve it. Something so easily broken just feels like it's meant to be broken, and I couldn't help but pick the dirty scabs to make the wound clean. I gave you some tough love because I wanted you to be able to deal with that. It wasn't the initial provocations I wanted you to deal with either, but the full on conflict that was to come. I'm the one who leapt into the abyss. If I've been projecting this I wonder how much else I've been projecting.
How am I that different from you? My average relationships have been every bit as unstable as yours, and I've discovered as many people's minds as you have their hearts and bodies, only to cast them aside once they were of no more interest to me. You felt that as well. I'm just as judgmental and demanding as you are. You felt how I'd cut our ties in an instant if I felt like you tried to force me to compromise. You've met your match in me, someone as stubborn as you. I have all the qualities you hate about yourself, and I only discovered I had them when I met you. Now you have no choice but to accept those qualities in yourself if we ever get back in touch — your vanity, your manipulativeness. Because you may think I'm compromising if I accept them in you, but you know I'm serious about it if I refuse to reject them in myself. I did what I had to do. I tested you, to see if you're worthy of me. If we can last through this we can last through anything and we'll never have anything to fear ever again.
So how do you know I'm earnest and not just desperately clinging on to anyone? Well, when I used automation on the dating site, it was right after I'd told my ex I would commit to a monogamous relationship "for at least the next ten years." That wasn't enough for her. But it seemed like she was the only one I was ever going to love anyway. So I wanted to make sure, by trying one last time to find someone else, by spending weeks sampling through the energies I can instantly feel of at least a million people. And when I came back from the US, I was convinced that she really was the only one, and I was about to buy the only accommodation that I could afford in her home town, a little cabin in an ideal location, but it turned out it had been sold — which devastated me, because everything else was too expensive. Good thing I didn't buy it. Because just a month or so later, my feelings for you came back, and I knew that I couldn't commit to a monogamous relationship anyway. I'm pretty sure the X had everything to do with the break in my being in love that made me so careless with you in the first place.
There's no way I will ever be able to explain all this to you. I can just assure you that everything is alright, and even if you don't understand it, you have to accept that. If you can't, then in spite of everything you're not the kind of person that I'm looking for. You should know by now that it's always alright, that any experience is.
But looking back I become more and more convinced that I didn't accept you at all, and I feel so disappointed in myself for that. It's not enough to be accepting in principle. And I rejected all your qualities that I ASSOCIATED with your own inacceptance along with that inacceptance itself. I remember thinking afterward that perhaps your vanity was a dealbreaker after all. I completely overlooked the elements of pride, fear, need and love that make up the energy of that vanity and simply thought of it as a synonym for inacceptance. The same goes for judgment. These things CONTAINED your inacceptance but weren't equivalent to it, and my violence was to throw these away along with the inacceptance itself — and that's where I was unaccepting. I'm disgusted at having made this mistake. I don't want to live with inacceptance anymore. I just want us all to be free.
But now I am not afraid to be myself anymore. You will understand me if you give me a chance, and if you don't, so be it. Just remember that there is a lot that you, too, do not know, just like any of us. There are infinite worlds beyond worlds still untouched. Let us explore each others', and together we will create worlds that never were.
I went through a similar scenario with L, but the difference is that she was not manipulative: as with S, everything appeared perfect between us and yet in the middle of this she turned against me for no reason at all, other than not being able to accept my intensity. Since I could feel very clearly that L was not manipulative, I know that this appearance of perfection was artificial, and because of this, I can no longer see the appearance of perfection in the case of S as a basis to assume that her own, similar reversal was manipulative. Americans are simply shallow, and are quick to call the most ordinary things "awesome", a word that once meant awe-inspiring. They genuinely want to connect on a superficial level but are afraid of depth, so at the first confrontation they drop the veil of perfection — just like M and Sh did.
The possibility that she was manipulating me was the only thing that could excuse her behaviour, because the alternative is that she is a coward, as was clearly the case with L, and there is nothing I can do with a coward. This has given me closure once and for all: were I to desire either of them again, the first thing I'd desire to do with them, the only thing I could, would be to break their ego, so that I could pick their psyche from within its shell. I am not yet ready for that. No matter — I need to find my equals first.
S' unconscious did try to manipulate me in her last email, did try to make me want her, but it doesn't matter, because her conscious did not accept it, did not accept me, did not accept herself. It was only her unconscious that I loved, only that part of her that is free. That's not enough.
It's just that one sentence, "I am not afraid of hurting you," that kept haunting me. It was clear that it was more than that: she relished in hurting me. It aroused me to no end, stuck its barbs in my flesh. And they don't sound like the words of a coward. It makes it hard to dismiss her along with all the others. But even if she wasn't afraid of hurting me, it's all too clear she was afraid of being hurt, hence "Whoa, whoa, you really need to chill", when I said something that hurt her — something she said because she wanted to keep her emotions under control. Maybe she's not afraid of pain in itself but of imperfection, of not being good enough, of inadequacy, failure, rejection, insecurity, loss of control, vulnerability. She could express herself but could not let others do the same, could not expose herself to the expression of others, and so worked best with people who are reserved about their emotions: as such, she got halfway to what I was looking for, and that's closer than anyone else ever came, tantalisingly close compared to anyone else, in whom I only detected glimpses of authenticity. And I will not give up on her — but she has much to learn if we are to be ourselves together, and if anyone can teach her it would be me, and my kin when I find them. And it will motivate me to find them.
It would be so simple for her to grow, simple, but not easy. She thinks she's a bad person to want to hurt others. She doesn't want to be like her father, but she has something of his violence inside her, so she tries to negate it by trying to love everything and everyone. But the only reason she thinks that is that she doesn't like being hurt, and the only reason she doesn't like being hurt is because it makes her hurtful to others… it's a vicious circle. One gets stuck in the other. When her being hurtful is accepted, she will accept her own hurting, and the hurtful force it awakens in her. I don't need to teach her; I need to corrupt her. And I've already planted the seeds.
At any rate, it's clear that she's not there already, so the important thing is I don't need to expect her ever getting in touch again, at least not until she's changed. But I'm the only one that can change her. Perhaps I should plant another seed once every year… it's been such a long time ago, and she's had so many lovers, that she'd never know where the words whispered into her unconscious came from. Oh, I could have such fun with you, terrorising your mind, mysterious letters confronting you with your darker side — but you're not worth the time and I just don't feel like it.
When you hurt me, you opened my heart. Perhaps someday I'll return the favour and make you open your mind, because it's easy not to care about someone with a closed mind, when I'm with someone who opens both her heart and mind to me. In my demisexuality I would be incapable of being intimate with you, because all my energy would be transferred into her instead. I wouldn't even have to cut you off the way you did to expose you to the same lesson: I'd just have to be myself, expressing what I feel, cold and distant, until you open your mind to me. I don't want to repeat your mistakes just for the sake of revenge, and I'd always be there to connect with you as I am, because unlike you, I don't run. But would that be enough? I doubt I could make you happy, and yet my acceptance would be so clear that you could only look for the cause in yourself, until you realise it's you who is resisting me, not the other way around. But I know you'll grow restless, as you always do. Where will you go? You want to grow, reach beyond your boundaries, and it will lead you to me. That's how I will teach you. My demisexuality will force you to change. Your repressed darker side will crave to be expressed, and it will need someone like me who accepts it to do it.
I keep seeing the change in you — it wasn't just a fluke. You look disarmed, childlike, confused, pure, content. The streak of vanity still isn't there. I wouldn't be surprised if the way you hurt me when I gave you permission to do so gave you a catharsis that burnt it all out, at least for a while. But in time it will be back, and until then, I will be waiting to feed off of it.
You will be my first convert. If I ever find a way to transform people, it will begin with you. And if I manage to create an environment of other people who accept all forms of expression, I will have found a way.
For now, you've had your chance. I tried to explain but you didn't even try to understand me. Now I've found someone who does understand me, and I am leaving. I won't be back for a year.
I’ll be across the world for at least a year as of the 3rd. I just want you to know that when I felt that ambiguity in you, it was one of the most BEAUTIFUL things I’d ever felt, and I can’t endure that you don’t accept that very aspect of yourself. No matter what you meant by your manipulating of others, it cannot be a bad thing, because all you’re doing to people is MAKE THEM FEEL, and EVERY feeling is valuable — we both know there’s far too little of it in the world. I tried to explain but I’ve given up trying to describe that ambiguity, because even the Mona Lisa falls short in doing so. It’s why Da Vinci lamented his failure on his deathbed, after spending the last ten years of his life driven to insanity trying to express what you embody, that line where pain and pleasure are one transcendence. I just want you to accept yourself, because as long as you limit yourself, I know you’ll never accept me either, because I'll always refuse to limit myself even for your sake, and I’ve never known I was so determined as when I paid the ultimate price in confronting you. I love you, Savannah, and I always will. I don’t need your love in return, because by understanding you I’ve made you a part of me. I just wish you would love yourself as fully. Be yourself as you said you would. Don't be afraid of hurting people; be afraid of leaving them in apathy.
I found someone who does understand me, and I'll be moving in with her in Australia in two weeks. And even now I find that I'm still madly in love with Savannah. I can see now what she sees in polyamory. We’re never alone because we’re always deeply connected with ourselves, but it’s hard to get excited about that, and Linda feels like that too, so close to me that she’s like a part of me. She makes me feel peaceful, but it’s in conflict that we find excitement. We told each other we’re looking forward to our first fight but I can’t think of what we could possibly fight about. Savannah always looked peaceful when she was with you too. You must’ve asked yourself at some point if you just weren’t enough for her, but it’s more like you’re too perfect. I must admit that I was looking for soulmates in you at one point, because I needed that so much that I couldn’t focus on anything else. Maybe now that’s out of the way, we could try again someday, though I’m no longer sure if either of you could deal with my intensity. I still haven’t given up on founding my own commune, but it will be one founded on the acceptance of all consciousness. I will always be myself and let you be yourselves. Do with that what you will.
It's absolutely magical how you and P have achieved that openness. You both exude that ambiguity and it's always intensely moved me. I think it's an appreciation of the mystery in everything and everyone that makes it possible to remain passionate about someone seemingly familiar. We don't know what we'll feel the next moment, who we will be the next moment, because the mind is the most complex, chaotic thing in the universe. When neither of you is resisting that flux, you're always rediscovering each other as if you're still strangers. I think Savannah understands this better than either of us on an intuitive level, but I don't think she does on a rational level. I thought what she called her "manipulativeness" is just that ambiguity, the constant cycle of positive and negative that most people would see as "leading them on". And I'm sure my saying that wasn't why we broke off contact. I feel like that was itself part of the flux, the next stage in our evolution. The past year has been the most transitional of my life and I think she was in a transition too, and we'd just have been in each other's way. I think we both knew that deep down, even if we didn't know why. Last year I was feeling that sense of mystery very strongly, even before I met you. Maybe that's why we clicked at all. I don't know why I lost it. Maybe it was the MDMA. Maybe that mystery itself became familiar after a while. Or maybe I'm still just arrogant in trying to pin everything down like I was doing just now, when everything's a confluence of waves with which we must dance. Life's a chaotic interplay of infinitely many factors and that's why it's impossible to control it.
P, I had the feeling like your repressed jealousy came to surface then, and that that was the imperfection in the wall you were talking about. But why do you need a wall at all? You're free. Jealousy itself isn't possessiveness, it's just an emotion and no emotion is in itself good or bad. I think jealousy is actually arousal, just like food makes your mouth water a lot faster when you see someone else eat it. But arousal is already such an intense emotion that this this effect makes it feel overwhelming, so most people push it away, and that's what makes it unpleasant. But I think that's one way to keep passion alive, and maybe just one of the reasons why S is polyamorous, to be more desired. Until recently this was just speculation, because I never really felt jealousy until I fell in love with another polyamorous woman, Laura. She drove me completely insane with desire, until the slightest touch from her made me close my eyes with a blissful smile. Maybe jealousy is something we should embrace.
You're the only one who can make her see that everything's alright, and that everything she makes others feel is beautiful, even the pain. My platonic soulmate and I were talking about polyamory yesterday. She thinks there's not enough time to love several people at once — but the limiting factor will always be desire. I even think she desires you more than you desire her, just as any of her lovers. She gets bored because she's faced with the normalcy of their emotions, so she does everything she can to inflame their desire, so that they can follow her into her madness. And when they can't, they tell her she's a bad person, over and over until part of her believes it. She thought I did so too because she'd been waiting for me to do so, like dozens of people before. Please help her. Don't let yourself be her shelter from her fears: face her with them. You're the only one she trusts enough, because I'm sure it's connected to traumas: by venting to her, her mother made her feel like the fights with her father were her responsibility.
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