Curious inquiry revisited.
And you think to yourself: "Will she ever stop?"
"Won't she just look around to see all her success, all that abundance; and just be happy?"
Because my obsession with finding answers to inevitable questions disturbs you.
(it déranges you, as the French would say)
But this is not about happiness or sorrow, unless it's about both and everything in between.
It's about finding the meaning of that story.
A story with infinitesimal variations, yet always the same,
surviving centuries, unadulterated, untarnished, ever elusive.
You know the story.
Boy meets girl, serendipity, attraction, happiness, complication, inevitable doom.
Relapse, zemblanity, loss and then; perhaps regret, perhaps nostalgia.
It's the average love story. Yes, we call it love, even if most of the elements are anything but.
Did you ever stop and contemplate this:
In an age of technology, science and capitalism,
- all realms pertaining to the rational mind, reality and trust in the market to make the right decision,
What dictates our lives are still the woes caused by the quest for- or the loss of- love.
So, is desire all about loss? Is love all about desire?
Why is the measure of love loss?
Why aren't you asking yourself these questions, too?
What do you use to seal illogic?
I recognize the signs, see the clouds gathering. Ominously
Catch myself doing the same thing, over and over.
Expecting a different result? - I am not even sure that I do.
But I keep on doing it. I keep doing it.
Is this really my pattern?
All those adjectives I've been told; were they just euphemisms?
How was I supposed to know they meant something else entirely?
It's me, I guess. It was always me.
I break the rules.
I invent stories, I wreck things that others have built.
And in the end, when all is shattered, I blame you.
Like a child, I wave my broken toy in your face,
I push until you feel the guilt.
Do you feel it?
Everything is too simple, nothing ever measures up.
I need the impossible to stare me in the face and say: take a punch!
Knowing I will never be able to, is what keeps me going.
Do you get it? Do you see?
How can I explain that things have no value until they are out of my reach?
How do I tell you these things without making you walk away.
Making me want you, finally.
Favourite mistakes.
It makes me laugh, sometimes, how easily you forget.
And how simple it is for me to evoke those memories in you, with violent clarity.
We judge ourselves harder than anybody else.
There's no need for me to say anything. No reproach, no judgement.
You keep hitting yourself with a hammer. Perhaps because it feels so good when you stop.
When you forget again.
When you re-forget.
I know I am not the one provoking your anger.
I never was.
I cannot hurt you, enrage you, anymore than you do yourself.
But I do know this:
Everything is imprinted with what it once was.
I was that huge mistake you made.
And you are still not done repenting.
Zemblanity revisited
A familiar tug at the heart. A well-known feeling of restlessness.
I cannot know if it's doubt, regret or just the attempt to recapture something lost.
Perhaps nothing but the inexorable discovery of what I did not want to know.
I put you away- all of you, the whole package-
in a glass jar labelled "Do not open until..."
I erased the end of the sentence. Just to be sure.
Every time I moved, I took the jar with me.
Not wanting to relinquish it, feeling safer to be in control of you.
- Don't I know we can never be in control?
So, you got out. Or was that me?
How do we ever know who is on the outside, looking in?
What if I was the one stuck in a jar, running in circles around the lid?
Reminding myself not to let you out, I did not realize I kept myself in.
I kept myself down so that you would stay away.
And here you are. Defying gravity.
Breaking all the rules I wrote in stone.
The glass is shattered, the spell broken.
Just like us.
