Love:part one

I write. When I write, my preference is to reveal the character from the outside in, peel back the onion layers, lay bare the character with a slow strip-tease.

I am here as my own character, so I'll start with the crust, the superfluous, the most remote. Many would start shouting, "Love? That's not remote, that's the essence of life!" To clarify, Love: part one is about the absence of love, or rather, the absence of romantic love.

The last time I was kissed passionately, I was 30. I plan to live beyond 90. I could conceivably spend more than 60 years of my life in a wilderness, a void with no physical closeness, no sensual liaisons, no engulfing infatuations, no part of my animal passions sated. Is this a bad thing?

I am a truly consumate romantic. I romance all who come into contact with me with vigour. I romance animals large and small, I romance the moon, the earth, the sea, I romance friends, brief acquantances. Mostly, I romance my brilliant and overwhelmingly delightful daughter. But romance is as distant from love as Pluto from the sun. Romance is liking people to feel the rub of you; the chafing of gesture; enjoyment in themselves via you. It is a largely egotistical desire. YOU manifest as a smile (imagined, uncomfortable, self-conscious, ecstatic) a giddiness, an enjoyment. It is the knowledge that YOU MADE IT HAPPEN that brings pleasure. It is not neccessary to have romantic love to passionately romance.

Comfort is a different issue. My world has crumbled. Great craters have formed, apocalyptic rocks have been flung from the sky. I arrive at now with lava in my boots, dust in my lungs and a disease-ridden body. Throughout my ordeal, there has been no one to bolster me, no one whose arms I can fling myself into to weep uncontrollably, no one to restore my self-confidence as it has been crushed. Yet I emerge sane. I have longed - I have really longed - to be held, to be told simply "It will be okay". But there is no one. I have had small comfort, it is true, from the hands of a few good friends and received moral support from family. But no one is completely allied, busy as they are with their own lives. Yet I emerge sane. Perhaps I am wrong to assume comfort through love is a neccessity.

Physical intimacy goes beyond the rational. I am a "lady of a certain age", at the peak of my sexual longing. I have always been of a mind to believe that if prudishness, uncomfortableness. judgementalness about sex is supposed to rank us above mere animals, then I'm happier to be labelled "mere animal". And yet, I survive. All of my sex-drive is dissolved extra-consciously, that is to say through fantasy and imagination. I am more secure about my sexuality than I ever was when confronted with a real life person. In the cold light of day I learn the secrets of the night. I won't deny that the longing isn't there, but it is contained.

Love, reciprocal love, which makes you feel valued and special and gives value to another is a hole that cannot be filled by anything other than love. But I love.

I'm not sure I haven't driven up the defences so high that I'm a strange hybrid creature: a horn on my nose to scare and prod; prickles on my back to spike and deter anyone from getting close; a banshee howl to alarm people from miles away that my presence is threatening and terrible; a sting in my tail and a sharp tongue. I know that I need my space, and how can I give to others what is so precious to me? How can I let someone enter my world when I know that it is a mess? My baggage is huge and cumbersome. I may pretend it is light and invisible, I may laugh and poke fun at it. But it is real. That is to say, not neccessarily for me but for them.

And how to meet someone who can see past my resistance and yet are inspirational and vast? On internet sites people whom I may like search for "like-minded souls". I need someone with energy, with verve, who embraces spontaneity and for whom curiosity is a quest for knowledge. I can barely walk to the bus stop. Is it right to pursue someone because you wish to live vicariously through them?

My history of romamtic love is a torrid chronical of failure and misdeeds. I fall in love, I become almost completely acquiesent. As soon as I rear my actual head, I am put down by thunderous response. The poor fool believes in me as only the picture I have shown and is oblivious to the person I scream inside. My fault. And violence, anger and hopelessness are the closing ceremony of the sweet little love affair. They fall in love with my potential as much as with me and a self-righteous disappointment boils within them when I fail to satisfy. Yes, I have talent, yes I can, but it is who I am, not neccessarily what I do. I am an eternal disappointment to everyone, because I choose an existential, vertical path through life and don't follow their concept of linear success. Whatever success is.

No, perhaps it is better that I remain as I am, alone and mentally robust. The bubble won't burst. I will grow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6raVzrbqrM