Pesheur

Unfinished Business
2005-04-12 05:23:47 (UTC)

In The Fire

12:45am 041205

I'm listening to Dinosaur Jr.'s "Where You Been" (1993)
for only the second time in my life and loving it and
feeling nostalgic and determined. Grace, my ex-girlfriend
used to listen to this stuff when we were in high school
and middle school, but never played it for me until last
summer, a month before we broke up. Songs that especially
ring true to me are "Out There" and "Not The Same" ...
haunting.

Today is Frances' birthday. She is the girl I lost my
virginity to in October 1998. She was the most beautiful
woman I knew. A year and a half later it was the most
painful breakup I've ever gone through ... back when I
could allow myself to feel such excruciating pain after a
thing like that; after she cheated on me and I cheated on
her. I don't know where she is now, I hear she's married
and fat somewhere in the southern United States.

Happy birthday Frances. I didn't forget. I truly hope you
are happy. Thank you for putting me in the forge ...

That's what a dear friend of mine said to me after that
break up when I was in a state of utter ruin and
depression. He said "You're in the fire now, Lee. When you
come out, you'll be something different. Something new."

There have been a slew of coincidences lately that have
brought me to this point. There is a kind of hermeneutic
circle that keeps me spiraling into different periods of
my self and contact with others and I feel like I've just
come around again. Spring, travel on the horizon, Fight
Club (the novel) influencing my thoughts, a good deal of
uncertainty about the future, desire for change, and a
will to let go of the discourses converging on me and
trying to keep me in place. I'm ready ...

My dreams lately have been long, colorful, changing scenes
of interactions with people traveling between positions of
power and those of subjugation, at the verge of choosing,
but not quite there at the moment of choice; ready to let
go, but not quite able to do it. I want to take that step
in-between and break it open. In the fissure in-between I
want to choose and keep choosing and keep fracturing and
choosing and transforming.

For a long time, I fully appreciated the benefits of
keeping my body fit and healthy while spending the minimum
possible amount of time on academics. Then, in college, I
realized the way that running and staying healthy gave me
greater clarity of mind and a feeling of peace. I've since
lost the motivation and as my body has become slower and
more bulky and awkward, so has my thinking, and my
confidence is all but gone. I'm starting to realize this
again and want to start re-defining my body as well as my
subjectivity.

I want to feel a sense of confidence again, and I want to
be quicker of mind again, but I also want to feel
attractive to women again. I feel a deep-seeded longing to
have a romantic encounter again and I know it won't happen
(either because of lack of attractiveness or because I
won't let it with my awkwardness) until I can get myself
together.

I miss the feeling of meeting someone out and hanging out
with them until sunrise. I miss the feeling of that first
kiss and the smell of the air that Spring or Summer
morning just after sunrise when I drive back to my own
place and fall asleep feeling a love of the circumstances
themselves and the culmination of connections made through
romance that could or could not come to something more.
All these memories are, of course, already attached to a
particular girl (Alyssa, I haven't forgotten you either:
the love-making, the flower petal softness of your skin,
the taste and texture of your lips, your laugh, your
music, or the hazy pink light of sunrise that last morning
when I woke up next to you in bed and smelled your hair)
whom I miss every time I think of her.

I can't help but feel like it's somehow wrong to chase
this feeling that I can barely identify. But I long for a
connection like that again and the feeling that once again
a million possibilities just opened like the doors to a
million new and unexplored golden dawns.




Ad: