just shut up and write
my friend Eduardo told me about his trip to Europe, but we didn't have much time (I was at work) so he talked all about Copenhagen. Bikes everywhere. He watched an elegantly dressed woman, with heels and a purse, locking up her bike outside a night club. Everyone speaks english. He was scolded by his hosts for incessantly asking every Dane he communicated with, "English?" Sex is no big deal. In Copenhagen, sex happens. It apparently strolls about, like a content youth, on a par with all other human behavior, neither worshipped nor ignored. Thank God (or Queen Margrethe)!
Eduardo also mentioned that the Queen's son Joachim is rumored to be gay. It's sort of an unofficial fact. But mentioning it is considered by most Danes to be very crass, since the monarchy is well and truly loved by all, especially in Copenhagen.
love is to me as infections are to my body; my body and me have forgotten how to deal with them. At least I know that is true in the case of love, I am starting to suspect it's so regarding infection. I am home again today from work. You know the old joke, "Are you sick, or are you sick of work?" In my case I really believe they have become the same. Doing something you love makes you well. You can run into burning buildings with a joyful determination; crawl beneath teetering overturned cars eagerly; hover a hundred feet in the air above a burning warehouse at the end of an aerial ladder, crying for the men you know have died there, whose ashes now float in the air you breathe, and be well because of love. : 05 :
Perhaps I seek escape from life's imperative, that I complete this journey before death. But I do not like where life's journey has taken me. I once skiied through hushed cathedrals of snow, but now it seems I have skidded to a stop on dry gravel in a loud and vexing place. I hate my work. I don't just not love it, I've gone beyond that. And I've looked long and hard at my negativity. My fault-finding and whining shield me from the truth that I must change and, oddly enough, the change I fear is to leave the job I purport to hate.
I love death for this: It can be either evasion or completion, and it leaves me absolute sovereignty to choose. So do I take off the skiis and the heavy clothes, and admit that I am no longer in that happy place? Or do I continue like I have been, lamely struggling to move about in defiance of reality?
Or do I choose neither of those, but something Quixotic, a nightly serenade by torchlight to my hopelessly beloved, an unconventional quest for a thing which my heart tells me MUST be here. It must be anyplace where I am, for it is me.
it's frustrating for our therapists and lovers; the way people like me are both here, and not. My once-upon-a-time therapist called it a 'vertical splitting of the psyche'. People like me survived by stepping just slightly apart from ourselves, an infinitesimal shift that allowed us to drop all connections, and yet remain virtually one. We have learned to function very well unlinked from who we are, but we must stay close to our other 'self', like 2 magnets on opposite sides of a page, and we know for certain if we lose that tenuous magnetism, the 'I' we know ourselves to be will die. Proximity is everything. Long ago we split to evade annhilation—not just physical death, but something worse: the loss of existence. Unifying now with our 'self' equates with a return to that annhilation. But a complete split from our 'self' IS annhilation. I have lived my life standing rigid in the narrow sliver of space between annihilations; in front, one Tres Grande Vitesse brushing my chest, behind, my shirttail flaps against another.
One perceived annihilation is real; it will smash my bones like a jet crashing on a picket fence. The other is not. Would you dare move? And if so, which track would you cross?
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