On The Edge

 

My life is not the particular life that I have lived but the one that I remember, the one that I dreamed here and there, the one that I created out of nothingness; it resides in the way I remember it, the images that swirl through my mind as I look back on what I now call the past, the sounds, the people, the landscapes, the rooms, the words, the songs… all those visions I have somehow recorded within me or I create them again from scratch in the moment that I invoke them, and I only invoke them so that I can tell the same stories over and over, even if only to myself… Sometimes I attempt to push the past aside, to make it go away, to erase it completely and leave me alone with the quiet present; and sometimes I try to cling to it with a kind of uncomfortable desperation, I attempt to force it to stay with me forever, I cling to the remains, the books, the photographs, the pieces of art, the recordings, and to the emptiness left behind by the mementos that have been lost forever… For brief moments, I can see that the two habits are the same: the clinging and the banishment; both I see as secret methods I acquired long ago to make myself disappear, to hide from what is right in front of me and fade away into a private exile. Whether I focus on banishing the detritus of my particular history or I attach myself uncontrollably to every last bit of what has been left behind, I am no longer present, I am no longer the “I” that writes these words, as in that moment of determined projection I identify completely with what I once did, with what I once saw, or with the hopeless effort to stop being attached to it, to make it vanish… The first time I saw her, she was running towards a dark corner in a large room full of people, laughter and movement, a loud party, people in brightly colored costumes, thick deep bass making the walls tremble, colorful visuals projected on the walls, the smells of incense and marijuana and sweat mingling into one… I saw her leaning over in the corner of the room, away from the dancing and from her circle of friends, with her right hand she held onto the wall, her left hand was pressing against the center of her chest; she was clearly hurt, they had laughed at her over a simple comment, a generous offering of honest advice; I came in at the tail end of the interaction, she was warning them about what she called energy vampires, evil embodied entities that were all around us but may not be easy to detect, she was saying that we must be careful to protect ourselves from their influence and they made a joke out of it, they laughed and did impressions of old movie monsters and went off on tangents about discredited fears and paranoia and she walked away from them holding back tears and trembling with anger, they went back to dancing and laughing and drinking, not even taking note of what had happened; they didn’t realize she was sincere in her warning, they didn’t understand that it all came from lived experience and a heartfelt wish to help… I walked towards her and stood a couple of feet away, watching her tremble slightly as she cried alone, bent over towards the wall; she was wearing a kind of black tank top, army style pants and black boots; without thinking, I placed my hand on her back, along the line of her spine, this was not something I would usually do but somehow my intuition took over; she turned around quickly when she felt my presence, surprised at this sudden intrusion, but she immediately understood I was trying to help her, she instantly knew that I had listened to her explanations and that I was sympathetic to her words, she knew it as surely as I knew that she had been sincere in her comments and I was sincere as well in my offer of help; she could feel the warmth spreading through her, concentric circles of heat pulsating away from the place where my fingers had touched her back… That moment was the end of one lifetime and the start of another, the end of who I had been without her, the end of a world where she didn’t exist and the start of a new one where she was the only being that could claim true existence… It happened so quickly, the world that I knew was over, the old sense of calm and relaxed comfort was gone, together we had entered into new and dangerous territory… Weeks and months went by, day after day where we couldn’t help but focus on each other; at some point we both started using the word love, I can’t say exactly who said it first or when it happened… So intensely and obsessively did I identify with that word, with the simple sound of it and the way it echoed back at me from the depths of her eyes, so intensely did it resonate each time it was spoken by me or by her that in effect it became a kind personal universe of secret meanings, a hermetic country that only allowed for two residents and banished all others to oblivion; outside of our small bubble of fixed attention, reality had become unintelligible and inadequate…  To others that had known me for years, and saw me now drunk by this vision of intimate unification, by this unbridled romantic obsession, single minded, reckless in its abandon, closed off to them and to everything I had ever known or wanted, I appeared inexplicable, irrational, insane, there was clearly something wrong with me, I was in need of help, of advice, of some kind of intervention…  An old friend from college asked me to meet him at a coffee shop one sunny afternoon and, after some miscellaneous questions and pleasantries, he looked at me with a somber look on his face and said: “Look, I’m going to tell you something that you need to know. When you fall in love with a girl, the way I see you falling now, you lose all your power as a man. Listen to me. All of it. As soon as you fall in love, it’s all gone. It’s gone just like that.” And he snapped his fingers in front of my face, startling me… “If you don’t manage to escape before that happens, there comes a point when the only way out is to push forward, to embrace the disaster… That’s why you have to marry them. The objective of the wedding ritual is to regain all the power that you have lost to begin with. Once she becomes your wife, you can say to yourself that you have her, you have become a man again, your power has returned…” I thanked him for his advice and then we laughed over shared memories for a few hours; but I knew that I would never feel that I could have her, in every moment that we spent together, there was an irrevocable promise of losing her forever, sooner than later, and that made each moment that much more delicate, unique, exhilarating, precious… I was always aware, even from the very first weekend we spent together wrapped in each other’s presence, swimming in a space of broken limits catalyzed by LSD and orgasmic ecstasy, how much she covered up of herself; I knew she was hiding her most common thoughts, her vulgar insecurities, her pedestrian fears, (all in an attempt to safeguard that aura of exceptional self-assurance that had attracted me to her in the first place) I always knew it but I stayed silent; I could see how much she worked to protect herself, to remain unseen; I was always terribly aware of how often she became terribly defensive (at first, she had tried to cover this recurring attitude with a veneer of carelessness and disdain but my attention was on her so firmly that even the slightest shift in her eyes became a clear giveaway, a doorway into her secret domain; eventually she came to accept that I could see her and that, as much as I could see, I still loved her… and yet instead of opening up to me, and finding solace in my unrelenting devotion, this knowledge drove her to a deeper hiding place, a chamber so unreachable that eventually it began to swallow the light that had once embraced us…) I knew that it was all unconscious, all her efforts, all her barriers; I knew it and I knew what it was that she thought that she was hiding, all of it, as much as I needed to know… but they were only habits, routine loops of ingrained behavior, an acquired taste for self-inflicted suffering, masochism as precious melodramatic melody wrapped in terminal sadness; all of it, habits and nothing else; I knew all along that sooner or later she would run away, it was clear from the first time we kissed in her apartment, when I saw her close her eyes and tilt her head backwards and our lips met, even in that moment I could hear the distant call of future heartbreak, maybe even from the first time I hugged her to say hello in front of the BART station, I knew I was destined to lose her, I was sure of it; and when it finally happened, I would find myself alone, in a very dark place devoid of warmth or happiness, a place with no hope, no escape, no glimpse of redemption… But for now, I had her attention, and in her divine and golden presence, I had found a new kind of freedom, something I had never experienced before, something I was not willing to surrender regardless of the risks involved… She turned on the stereo in my room one night, turned it up loud, an album of dark industrial music that I had bought recently, heavy electronic rhythms punctured by sharp high frequency noises and a heavy deep voice slowly intoning a kind of speech-like melody; then she stood up in the darkened room and danced naked for me, spinning round and round, gliding over the intricate beats, her arms swimming in the shadows; from the bed, I stared at her body as she moved with the intense music, her smooth white skin, her short black hair, the few tattoos on her back, her narrow shoulders, her thick hard nipples, her carefully trimmed pubic hair, her muscular legs, her shining eyes… “If you love me,” she told me without speaking, “just watch me, watch me carefully, put all your focus on me… If you don’t look, if you can’t fix your attention on me and on nothing else, then that tells me you don’t care, and if you don’t care then I don’t matter, and if I don’t matter, then I don’t exist, and if I don’t exist now, then I never did… Right?” She wanted to be the one and only focus of my attention, she wanted me all to herself, (she openly told me this once during a particularly intense moment of intimate revelations- she said it clearly and meant it as a warning to me- but I had known it all along and it was too late for me to heed any warnings) but at the same time, she feared the intensity of my obsession with her, my unrelenting need to feel her presence and the feeling of magic buoyancy that came along with it; (I called her constantly, I drove her and waited for her when she had a late appointment at some client’s house, I recurrently checked on her emotional state when she was with me, every slight change in her eyes could be a reason to check again…) Not enough attention would become a lack of heat, a cold death, a dark oblivion; too much attention would become an overwhelming fire, death by incineration, a climactic explosion with no survivors left behind… At one point, during one of our many psychedelic trips, I saw it all very clearly and distinctly, colorful shapes slowly tangling with each other in cold and empty space, two habits which were one and the same- both predetermined methods unconsciously designed to prepare the ground for her to eventually disappear; kill your dog in time, kill him before the night has even started, kill him long before it has a chance to howl… In that imagined future, where she would no longer be present, where she would become another fading memory, I would also be gone, the “I” that now loved her obsessively would be forced to disappear forever, it would die in silence and shame, and everything I had come to love and understand through my contact with her I was afraid would be gone as well, as if it had never happened… but tonight I watched her naked body swirling in the twilight of my room, a glowing shape of pure beauty responding to complex vibrations of stylized urban decay, delicate grace born of futuristic destruction, a kind of loving sensitivity emerging out of careless darkness… I allowed myself to identify completely with the beautiful apparition that was manifesting before me, an angel of pure light dancing among the shadows, holding a gift of unstable mercy high above her head… At times we traveled very far together, through the use of the psychedelics, through the deep synchronized breathing, through the ambient music, the overwhelming sensations of recurring physical touch, of flesh against flesh, presence imposed on presence… I felt that we had been transported to a very different place, somewhere completely new for both of us, somewhere that the world as I had known it could never reach… The most fundamental interaction, the only one that mattered, was between us and only between us, these two specific people that were now intertwined with each other in an emotional web of need, love and desire, and our expanding imaginations, our waking dreams and lucid encounters, awash in colors and sounds… what would happen later, where would all this lead, what would we become for each other after enough time had passed, none of it mattered, an entire universe was being brought forth out of a single touch, a distinct and particular future was cascading into being… For months I tried to write in my journal every day, trying to capture this experience, this moment of sheer wonder and exhilaration (the way she looked when I kissed her cheek while standing on the old Pacifica pier, the way she laughed when I stumbled over the stairway of her building and barely hung on to the banister, the way she brushed the side of my face when she detected a hint of sadness in my eyes…) but there was no way of writing enough declarative sentences to describe in full all that was happening, this unexplained event swirling around us, a speedily moving target, an entire world was changing as I wrote, too fast to hold, too liquid to contain in solid language… When I finally fell into a dark place, out of fear, anger and old resentments, she laughed at me, she laughed while standing over the side of my bed, and I tried to hide my face in shame; (embarrassed by my own anger and melodramatic self-pity) she spoke carefully and slowly, with a cold assurance that I found frightening and final; she said that I had at least some of the blame, if not all of it, for where I found himself now… “It’s not because you are a bad man, but because you are an idiot… you have allowed yourself to be pushed around by a woman,” and as she said those words, she leaned into my side and placed the weight of her body on me, emphasizing her female presence against my masculine body, “look, it is my place to seduce you, to pull you away from your plans, to destroy all that you have built over so many years; that is what I do… It is your role to resist, to make sure that I don’t break you, to insist on your carefully designed discipline, regardless of what I do to distract you; but you haven’t done a very good job of maintaining your world, you have allowed yourself to fall away from your clearly delineated path, you have allowed entropy to take over, you have fallen into a senseless distraction…” I felt completely beaten when at last she was finished with me; I could see the truth in what she had said, all of it made complete sense, but I didn’t like to see it, I didn’t want to admit it, I didn’t want to acknowledge my role in the game; it was the kind of truth that hurts too much, it was better to hide from it, it was better to forget it and place the blame on bad luck or evil intentions… Our love affair was not the day to day process that we lived together but the story that I would remember after she was gone, the way I would remember it, the specific moments; standing by a foggy window in front of the ocean by Stinson Beach surrounded by candles, kissing her atop Twin Peaks overlooking the yellow lights of San Francisco while a plane flew overhead, laying naked under a blue sky and staring at her face as it shifted from simple pleasure to orgasm to contentment to rapturous embrace… all those moments would now be shaped and framed by our final goodbye, they would be defined by the darkness that had always been waiting at the end of the road… in this lonely future, when I would sit down to tell her story, it would all be framed by the sight of her slowly walking away from my car under dark clouds, holding a small backpack with her left hand, the sound of a sports announcer in the distance, the smell of meat cooking sliding over to me from a nearby house… This was the end that I had expected from the start, this was the end that had always been unavoidable, this was the end that had been implied in every single moment we had spent together; finally, I could sit alone in my room and acknowledge it, “it has finally happened, it's over. It's over.” I asked myself night after night: what did I get from all of it? After so many days of intense adoration and surrender, what was left behind in the aftermath if anything? One time I asked her about the music that she particularly loved and she carefully explained how she listened, how she had a different way of perceiving these recordings… For her, when she listened to free jazz or improv or industrial noise, she was listening to pure sound, raw vibrations, the world itself was speaking to her through tangled frequencies and disharmonious intervals, a direct message without any intermediaries, the most basic ground of unmediated communication with the infinite… After that conversation, sometimes we would listen to music together and I could sense that she was listening in this unusual way, I could see it in the way her face moved around even though her eyes were closed, I could feel that she was taking it all in from this very deeply grounded perspective that was so mysterious to me; I did my best to emulate her, I tried to join her in receiving these transmissions from the most vulnerable and open position within me, I tried, as much as I could, to set aside all my preconceived notions of form, harmony and melody and simply receive, swallow, process, transform, breathe… Sometimes I got her to listen to something else, to more straightforward old fashioned jazz, to bebop, to old romantic songs, to classical symphonies; she enjoyed them and thanked me for sharing them with her but ultimately, for her, they all seemed too stylized, too abstract and artificial, too cooked in comparison to the rawness she was accustomed to embracing… when I made the effort, I was sometimes able to listen the way she did, even if only for very brief moments, eventually those moments would become longer and longer, and they opened an entirely new doorway, a new relationship with sound and music, a new way of receiving the world itself in a raw state, detail within detail, a fractal infinity of restless living change… And I asked myself, after so many questions and so many multiplying answers, what did I learn about myself, if anything? Often, I had the impression that she was trying to keep up a certain image for my benefit; I always hoped this was not true and yet the impression kept on emerging from the back rooms of my mind, little gestures she would make that seemed calculated to elicit a certain reaction from me, recurring phrasings and stories that seemed to be somewhat fictionalized for my benefit… After so many years that she has been gone, so many years where I’ve only wrestled with my own memories, I have come to accept that she was in fact carefully creating an image to seduce me, and that I fell for that image to a certain degree, as much as she might have fallen for the partially artificial image I myself was projecting for her; the one that she met and she ultimately rejected was as much an artificial creation as a carefully composed piece of music, a random work of popular art… In watching her create an object of desire for me, I came to understand how I was doing that myself for her benefit… when I lightly touched her back, when she felt that sudden warmth spreading all over her body, just as I felt it coursing through my arm and my fingers, she turned to smile at me, in a way I had never seen anyone smile before, it was light and warmth and surrender, and it all came from her and flowed through me like liquid fire… right then and there, I felt that I could allow myself to get forever lost in the alluring seduction of her presence, I felt myself disappearing into a million fragments, what had seemed impossible for years was suddenly tangible, close, within my grasp; this was precisely what I had always heard about, this was what they meant in so many poems and so many songs… A few months later, sitting on her futon in her apartment, listening to a kind of rough ambient improvisation, a mix of pregnant silences and a hint of shifting rhythms under the surface, she suddenly kissed me intensely without any warning, and she whispered something in my ear and I could feel her hot breath against my face and I could feel the warmth of her small body pressed against me but I couldn’t hear what she had said, I couldn’t make out the specific words, I could only feel it… So intensely and obsessively did I identify with that single unintelligible whisper that in that one moment, she became my entire personal universe; outside of her, the whole world had become unintelligible and inadequate, a gray and fading reflection of the world I had known before… To others that saw me in those days, driven by this vision of ecstatic love and romantic surrender, I appeared lost, confused, unwell, utterly derailed from the path I had so carefully outlined, something was clearly wrong with me; (some of them thought I might be doing drugs and they were correct when they thought that; a lot of our time together was spent under the influence of strong doses of psychedelics, feeding each other improvised suggestions and nonsensical poems while swimming in an ocean of open possibility; some of them thought she had put a spell on me, some kind of witchcraft; they were correct about that as well, I had felt it happening when the magical operation went into effect, and she had known what she was doing every step of the way; the signs were there and I knew enough to recognize them; she was in control from the very first moment she turned around to look at me; she was in control and I wouldn’t have it any other way…) When I asked her to stay with me forever, to set aside any other plans and solidify our basic connection, ensure our unified future against any other mundane eventualities, she made all kinds of arguments against my proposal, all of them without logic or clear reasoning, all created and dropped on the spot, an effusive outburst of words to avoid saying the obvious… It happened so many times in the final months we were together, a moment of decision, a single question, a few hours of arguing (in my car parked by the beach with the sound of the waves behind us, in her apartment while kids played outside, laughing uproariously for no apparent reason, in a restaurant while other diners tried to not stare at us and we tried to be quiet…) sometimes there was much screaming and much fighting, there were allusions to the past and to possible futures, allusions to objectives and multiple unknowns, then she would calm down and I would calm down with her, and we would hug and kiss and everything was fine again for a moment, but it took a lot of effort on both our parts, and each time it happened, it became more and more difficult to come back, to step away from the edge of catastrophe; the next day she would say once again: “I might have to leave soon. I don’t think this is my place any longer… I love you but it might be my time to go…” And again, I couldn’t believe she could even think this, I couldn’t accept that this was even a possibility (even though underneath my refusal was a clear knowledge that there was no way to avoid this terminal diagnosis…) There was one clear recurrent habit I had observed in myself often through the years, maybe the most fundamental habit of my entire life: when I thought that I might fail in any given objective, in any endeavor, I would decide it was better to not try at all, I would rather give up before even starting, and yet here, with her, I knew with absolute certainty that I would fail and I couldn’t resist the unspeakable pleasure that came with every moment of falling, every moment inching closer to a final disaster… When I touched her back that night, when she turned around and smiled at me, in a way I had never seen anyone smile before, and I felt that I could get forever lost in the alluring seduction of her smile, in the blinding warmth that slipped into me through her presence, I faced a clear choice, a singular moment of true decision… We were just two strangers at a party and nothing else, and nothing needed to happen between us, nothing was predetermined or laid out; I smiled back at her and there was a moment when neither of us said anything, neither of us moved at all, suspense, tension, expectation, invitation… and then I walked away. As intense as our contact had been in those few seconds, I never looked back. To lose her so soon was to find myself alone in the middle of a party full of strangers; to lose her before I ever got to know her was to find a special kind of freedom, a pearl so precious that it has no price; I had found a way to close the shining chamber before it fully had me in its grasp.