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[FearfulJesuit]

(I wrote this last night in the midst of a depressive attack over a Brazilian girl from Finnish language camp I had a crush on. I was unable to connect to the internet until now, however.)

There is something very horribly wrong with me.

As I believe I have mentioned before, I tend to get crushes that for some reason or another end up being really quite emotionally painful. It is almost impossible to describe what that actually feels like, so I shall have to resort to often repetitive poetic imagery and ramble incoherently.

There are normal romantics, and then there are, I suppose, people like me. They want to be happy; theirs is a happy love. Chocolate and wine and strawberries. As lovers they delight in each other; they may long for each other when they are apart, but when they are together it is essentially joyous.

But I feel entirely different. True, this love is unrequited; but it is hard to imagine feeling much different if it were requited. For, you see, for us passion is unrequited by definition, at its core. It is no more malign than the love of others, I suppose. It is not evil. But it is dark; it is not happy; in place of joy there is melancholy. Others are lonely, perhaps, and then they find each other and their loneliness is gone; it has canceled each other out. But now you must imagine a horribly depressed little ball of loneliness which happens to consist of two people and not one; the respective lonesomenesses are added, not subtracted. To their "Love Me Do" or "Eight Days A Week" I shall play (in the very best of times) "Shelter from the Storm" or, indeed the rest of the time, Cash's "Hurt".

It has in it the addictiveness of heroin, not of a real euphoria or even a faux-euphoria, for it`s not pain masquerading as pleasure; it is pain which is horrible to experience but worse to escape. I have fantasized many times upon walking into my bedroom that she might be curled up shivering in a tiny little ball making quiet little noises and crying, and immediately looking upon her and climbing in bed to cuddle with her to cure her of her pain when I know that doing so would only make things worse; I myself would find her emotionally irresistable, as it is when I feel that way that I pine over her most and find myself most inclined to feeling in love (even this sort of dark love). But then I consider that I am also frightened of her, indeed more than anything in the world; and if she came upon me curled up and crying my eyes out over her and she climbed into bed and wrapped her arms around me, I might freak out and try to get away from the very reason I was panicking.

It's not that it's different in its reasons from normal love, far from it; I mean that it's still essentially born of sexual and emotional desire. But then you consider a couple that run into each other's arms after one had been on a long trip; they unpack and run upstairs and make love because they're really truly happy to see each other, and the consummation is a happy affair. But then consider another that after one of them has just been out running groceries on a cold, windy, wet evening, now comes in; and the other has been making dinner or cleaning or what have you, and immediately they look at each other in a way that says: I was lonely when you were gone; I'm scared of you; I want to make love to you not because it will be happy, but because what we are both really junkies for, what has not run through our veins since I went out and got groceries (and how bad was the withdrawl!) is the heroin of desire (and it is the only drug we will take, of course many people have sex with a bit of alcohol but we must remember that alcohol is a painkiller), the feeling of drowning in each other's clinginess, knowing that it is on my account that the well in your heart has been dug so deep yet, somehow, in trying to pull you out I only push you in deeper. Hoc est corpus teum; but where others smply partake of each other's bodies and souls, we have been baptized in each other's tears. That's not to say that the chocolate and wine and strawberries sort of passion, as I said, is devoid of emotion; but it is happy. It is still deep, it is still soulful, it is very deep happiness that pays mere cheeriness little mind.

And I imagine, too, making love to her and stopping halfway through and facing away from her curled up on the far side of the bed because I was too much in love with her, and because of that I was afraid of her, and it hurt. I ask too how people honeymoon in places like where I am now, a beach town in the tropics in the height of summer. Somehow now I did feel all of a sudden clung up and infatuated and cuddly. But it's sunny and especially it's warm; the perfect honeymoon I think would be a shack in south-eastern Alaska or Norway in November through February, with near-perpetual darkness broken only by periods of dim greyness, and constant rain or snow; when it's always below freezing, and your spirit has sunk so low that, in essence, you are lying with her in bed most of the day to keep your body from catching cold and your soul from imploding worse than it has. The both of you staring into each other's eyes (I have always found eye contact excruciatingly painful, as a child because of very mild Asperger's and now newly justified by the fact that I find it erotic in the extreme), until it becomes so painful that you must look away; cuddling, again until the softness and the calm has become so sharp and piercing that you must shift to the far side of the be; each hoping, not that this state of bliss would go on forever, but that the other would all of a sudden reach into the bedside cabinet and, pulling out not a volume of erotica but a sharp knife, stab them directly in the chest (and perhaps the only reason it doesn't happen is that neither could possibly bear to kill the innocent wreck lying beside them).

But of course we are both of us killing each other a thousand times in an instant, and as much as I desire that she pull out a weapon and slay me in my bed I pray in vain that her gigantic, soft, sad brown eyes won't slay my soul, which the gods of desire see fit to deny every time I look at them. It's hardly enough, however, to keep us away from each other; if being together is killing us, then seperation might be the fabled fate worse than death. You cannot get close enough to her. You may open the window and climb into bed with her in the total darkness of a rainy four PM, the room near freezing, curled up snuggling into a little cinnamon bun under five comforters and squeezing each other so tightly you cannot breathe and still, then, it will be torture not only because you are too painfully intimate but also because you are not intimate enough- you cannot hold each other tightly enough- your souls gaze at each other across an uncrossable emotional and mental gap which grows as your bodies eliminate the physical and corporal one.

And maybe if she is gracious and good and kind in the extreme she will slide the knife in and kill you with her arms wrapped around you. But she loves you too much, and so it will be tomorrow night. Unless, of course, you feel emotionally dull that night, as sometimes I do. Sometimes for a few days on end and it has been more so in Brazil (because of the climate) I go nights without feeling any twinge of this- feeling like the dull edge of an old knife. And then, like tonight, it rushes back, a needle the temperature of lightning and as sharp as a new razor. And I can lie back, not happy or even satisfied but in some way relieved, whispering, simply, "Nice eyes...soft eyes...please don't hurt me...", imagining her eyes (for I have seen them all already, seen them all but I have not known any of them, you cannot hope to know them) and watching my heart break into a thousand tiny shards of broken glass as they quietly but forcefully advertise that she is as broken as a cheap watch at the bottom of the ocean.

And so you snuggle up to her to pour gasoline on the fires of the emotional hell the two of you have carved out, in the hope that tonight, at last, this will put it out. (And it is the two of you; I am as a result of this very monogamous by nature- I do not think I would be able to take otherwise. It is the aesthete in me; I am personally unnerved by cheap sex for the sake of cheap sex, as I am disgusted by the pure carnality of the act and hold it holy only in the emotional bond. But this is the complaint of a pretentious artiste reacting as he might upon seeing a Brutalist building, not a puritanical fundamentalist).

I don't know who she is, out there, whether you believe in soul-mates or simply eventually settling down with someone Good Enough, but I hope either I'm less of a wreck by the time I meet her or that she's more or less exactly the same (this is a Bad Thing, but clingy paired with non-clingy is worse).

And Now Presenting: A (Will Have Been) Found Play in Three Acts
CAST
A member (1) of a couple
The other half (2) of the couple
A member (3) of another couple
The other half (4) of this second couple
A psychologist

Act I
At IKEA.
1: Which queen bed should we buy? This one is cheaper, but it doesn't look as sturdy as the other one.
2: Do we need a queen bed? I think a twin is fine.
Act II
Psychologist: Could it be that you don't connect enough as a couple-
Couple: NO
Psychologist: Heh...how much time do the two of you spend alone intimately, you know, sex or cuddling?
1: Anywhere from one-
2: One and a half to maybe three hours a day, mostly cuddling.
1: Not too much sex.
Act III
3: I have something to tell you.
4: What?
3: I've... been having an affair.
4: ...Oh.
4 starts tearing up quietly and embraces 3.
4: Please don't.
CURTAIN

Reviews were mixed, divided on the unresolved response of the psychologist (to be supplied by the audience) at the end of act II.

That all being said, I woke up feeling much the same way this morning and had ice cream at lunch, and since then I've been fine. Hedonism, especially eating sugary things, does wonders for this sort of mood, though I can't figure out why.

[edit: put in paragraph breaks. I feel rather ashamed of it now, actually...well not ashamed but embarrassed. But when I posted it I felt like a wreck.]