eros, logos: Jealousy

Friday, June 09, 2006

Jealousy

It's not my fault.

You're my best friend
I miss you
I think of you every day.
I still love you.

You say these things at the end of every call, and it's why I don't speak to you every day now, nor even every week. Don't speak to me about meeting in Paris in a month or in Prague in two months; don't say you think maybe we'll wind up together, don't make me these promises you can't keep and make only because you are jealous and want to keep me for yourself.

In my head I see your house. I see the rooms. I see the garden. I can close my eyes, and I could find those paths in the dark. I did find them. I can smell the air, I can hear rain dripping off the trees as we walked home late at night. I see where I lived once, I see the only place that has ever, ever felt like any sort of home to me . . . but I also always knew I was transient. I close my eyes and I see the country that isn't home now. I see you. I see where you are when you call me. I see it all.

I see the room I stayed in when I came back to tell you we were done. It was the room I first slept in there but you slept with me. We did not sleep. Later we slept in your room, with a bed that was now a double, for us.

The very first night we fucked you gently took my hand away from my mouth and you offered me your own to bite. I did, but I couldn't bear to bite you that hard, though I didn't want to wake your flatmates. Some hours later I had to bite your shoulder to muffle my sounds and we didn't know it; you had that bruise for days.

Once I knelt on your bed and said, I want you like this, here, I leant against the window. My hands against the glass and outside it smeary night rain, city lights and traffic far below us, I haven't done that before you said to me already on your knees behind me, you'd never even fucked a girl from behind. I know, I said, --I did know,-- here. I reached back and guided your cock into me, I could see your shadow in the window, my hands on your reflection's shoulders in the window.
Now all of you is a ghost to me.
You couldnt call it fucking even, I had to teach you that too, to teach you to say you wanted to fuck me.

That same bed the last time, the one I'd only slept in the first night, now I was staying in that room again but alone. The symmetry and asymmetry of it alone almost undid me; I shut the door. That bed seemed to me now like a nun's bed, clean tight sheets and virtuous duvet and flowers placed neatly on the middle of it, like a grave, like the false grass they cover an open grave with for the funeral and you arent supposed to look up and see the waiting workers, but that's always where I've fixed my eyes before at a funeral. When they say those words about dust and perpetual light shining, I see only the waiting shovels, the payloader, the workmen.

I sat and picked up your flowers. I touched them gently, they reminded me of you, of how I used to touch the head of your cock, that fleshy and springy texture. At the foot of that bed that last time were all my books. stacked up. Books I read or gave you and some of them were your books, ones you no longer cared for. You didn't remeber now which were mine and which were yours and some were ones I'd given you and not written in. You did not remember anymore the difference, and here was this stack, it was a careful stack of things to which you were ultimately indifferent. Like me.

In the drawers my clothing was folded neatly. I was back in the room I first stayed in, and all the signs of me have been moved to it, I am as I always felt myself to be, I am outside.
I sat with your flowers in my lap and took careful breaths until I felt I could move without breaking.

The clock rings and has been ringing, and I cannot ignore that. It's that inner sound that tells me this is truth, and though I loved you more than anyone I have ever loved, -though I believe no one will ever love me as you have, ---although I am quite certain I do not deserve love and that I will find no one like you to love, who will love me first and not second or fifth,--- I love and know truth better even than I do you.

I know you don't love me though you say you do, I know you can't love me as I need anymore. I know it in the way I know that nothing can be in two places at once, in the way I know that a thing must always be identical to itself, in the way I know that nothing can both be and not be. I know it like I know those eternal certainties. I hear that inner ringing, I hear that truth like I hear those others, I hear that ring of crystal certainty and I cannot unhear that sound.

posted by O @ 14:51


1 Comments:
At 27 June, 2006, O said… Dear A, You're right, and put it very well, these ways that can make it impossible to stay the same, or to change together. That wasn't our story, really....depression took away what he once was, and he cannot love anyone, not now. Nor is he the man I fell in love with. I still love him, but I am in love with a ghost, though i love still what he is now it is "only" as my friend...and this also is the way he has loved me, for a long time now. i'm not sure if this certainty you've described is very beautiful, or very terrible, or both. "Beauty is terror" --isn't that Aristotle's claim in the Poetics? i would probably come down on the side of 'both'. It's a terrible truth, but one would still rather have truth than not.... Thank you for reading me, and commenting so thoughtfully. Best O
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