Friday, January 06, 2006

dry run

I should have known the day Ben looked at his watch. I did know. My friends would have confirmed it if I had admitted it to them, but my ego is delicate. Somehow I feel like it's my fault. Maybe it is.

I talked about it here. "Be wise", I was warned. "It's the little things that trickle out after a bit of time. Watch and heed the signs."

I made allowances. I knew he liked my body and all of the things that he could do with it. I liked all of the things I found I could do with my body in his presence. It was never about him. He was a medium. A place to be. Outside of that there was emptiness. I tried to fill it in for both of us. I imagined him a personality that didn't exist because I am ready and because I can. I can live for everyone if I have to - one of my many talents. I swallowed him until now, a large and bitter pill, another talent.

I am past the point of pretending. I can no longer conjure up a believable image. That stopped when he began to feel too comfortable. Presumption early on confuses my insecurities. Part of me wonders if I should feel lucky - like maybe the size of the liberties taken are a measure of my likeability. When he absently slipped his fingers into the front of my underwear while he watched television I didn't pull away, but I had to remember to breath. Later, walking home alone, it occurred to me that I could be murdered right there in the dark and he would have never known. Nothing converges those two lines for me: intimacy and distance. I would make a terrible prostitute.

I'm not hurt, just dissapointed that I didn't fall in love with someone. It has nothing to do with Ben. Thank G-D I am not one of those people who wants it so badly they pretend they found it. I might have pretended a little in the beginning, but that was just a lubricant to get things going - to get those things that hadn't moved in a while moving.

Tonight I got them moving in a whole other way. I sweated them out at the gym. I ran fast and lifted heavy weights (ok 5 pound hand weights, but who's counting). I listened to my girl Gwen Stefani, "workin' so hard every night and day and I'm gonna get the payback...", and I watched the Raptors winning - that gym/tv combination is a good thing. Now I am eating the sweetest, juiciest honeydew. Josh, Lana and I had a conference call to talk about plans for tomorrow. We laughed the way we used to when we all lived together and it reminded me that I am a lucky girl.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

i hate hearing all this familiar crap. familiar to me, i mean. absentmindedness is the least sexy thing ever. i'm sick of this dude.

Rachel said...

Me too, but It's ok, I finished it days ago. This was just the m&m rounds - a debrief.

Anonymous said...

i remember that piece of advice.
from somewhere.

amp

(S)wine said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

it's always fascinating to me to read things like this post--from both mens' and womens' perspective. i wonder, what would we all be like if we stopped believeing in this...thing called love? would we be automatons? or would we be more honest? with ourselves, especially. why is it important that we love someone? or that someone love us?

i've often contradicted Donne--privately and publicly. All men are islands--we've just built lousy bridges.

i know this sounds calloused, but it's an interesting philosophy. i've been married for 11 years, together for 13, I don't have a wrecked or a bad marriage, i have a wonderful family, pretty much the "perfect life" if you start counting off the things in my life. yet, i don't truly and really believe in love. and so the question begs: then why are you together? why don't you leave?

ok, those are two questions. i'm sure between you and Jason you can come up with a thousand more. they're all valid and they're all complicated. i do not know the answer to any of them. but i know one thing: i'm not here because i'm comfortable or content or lazy. i think it's obvious from all the material that i've put out there--and perhaps more obvious by the material which many haven't yet seen.

but it's a good question. just not easy to answer. and so what's the quest? in my life it has NEVER been about finding love or wanting to be loved. many have called me jaded and negative. but my better half accepted that as a philosophical dilemma or a quest of some sorts. and i've found that only that way, i could somehow be happy.

does any of this make sense? i'm not going to go back and re-read any of this because i might start to edit.

amp

2:38 PM

Rachel said...

amp, It is funny, the second you gave me the piece of advice I quoted in my post, I knew you were right. In fact, you were right before that. You called it with the arty/artsy comment. Well done.

I think we humans have too much in the way of brains. Honestly, I think so much of what we crave and believe in could be boiled down to biology and the evolutionary advantage. Then we come back to everything and intellectualize it. Love can be explained by biology very easily, but that would take a whole book. In fact, the book to read would be The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris. Biology might be the skeleton, but layers of reason have collected around the bone like cells forming tissue. The tissue is where it gets really interesting. There we could all probably think of a million reasons why people want the love thing.

If you always thought you had it when you were growing up (or more likely, never noticed that you didn't) you might not think a lot about it. If it was disrupted somehow (eg, you were abandoned, mistreated etc...), which most of us are to some degree, at some unconsious level, it would mean your world was in jeopardy. Frankly, without love/committment, an infant or young child's world is in jeopardy, only because that is what guarantees you will be fed and attended to properly.

I think people take those primitive fears with them wherever they go and they gather moss and grow. Finding love may become more and more important to you - or maybe less and less because that was the way the wind was blowing at the time. Everything we do from that point on is a reaction at some level.

How about this one: if you are a man without a timeline attached to his sperm, perhaps there wouldn't need to be as strong a focus. You can only take something for granted when you assume it will always be there.

I don't know any of the answers. Like even now, I am trying to think about the automaton v. more honest question you raised and I can't even bring forth the image of a loveless world to my mind. As I try to focus I feel like I am being sucked into a black hole. It is a frightening vacuum to me. Weird, right?

What does that mean when you say don't believe in love? Do you just not believe in unconditional love? Do you not feel love for your family? Maybe you call it something different, or maybe love is like air. If you have it, you are barely aware of it. The second you can't breath, you can think of nothing else.

I hope something here makes sense. This is about as close to un-edited as I can be.

Anonymous said...

i actually never grew up feeling "love" from anyone--including my parents. but now, 36 years later, i've found out why. i was never quite right; there was always something strange in the air...but i did finally get my answer.

unconditional love: i think i have that for my daughter. but again...i cannot be sure. it's a complicated subject and quite frankly, i never had the chunks of time in my life to really...AND I MEAN REALLY digest it and deconstruct it and re-arrange it and really analyze. Gone are the days when people would hang about pondering the heavy duty matter (thanks Isaac and Albert).

I don't know very much about this subject (love); but I do know that hate, by far...BY FAR outlasts and outlives love. And I mean this not to sound jaded; I mean this looking at history (think religious persecution lasting millenia).

The Male vs. Female time-ticking issue you bring up is valid. Although I wonder...why is it set up this way in society? One thing I'm going to do is make sure that my 1 1/2 year old daughter does not adhere to societal pressures. It's difficult to predict what she will and will not feel or do, but I'm going to try my hardest to raise her a strong woman who does not feel the need to feel anything she does not want to. I think civilization's greatest folly is its views on women/Woman and its pressures.

I say BOLLOCKS to time constraints and BOLLOCKS to those who emphasize them, regarding women/family/roles. We are individual human beings with extremely individual destinies and will not and cannot be pigeon-holed. Ever.

One thing being a father has taught me is that every soul on this planet is different and cannot really and genuinely be put in a category.

We limit our race (human) and our abilities by assigning roles and categories to gender.

Now, stepping off my fucking cheap ass soapbox, I'm off to mix me a dry gin martini.

Happy whateverinfeckthedayisnow!

amp