this is going to be an ugly entry. Turn around right now if you are conservative, prudish, judgemental, or think Ralph Reed is cute.
I bear a seething ambivalence toward intimacy. I viciously despise human warmth, though I pine for it more than any of my heart's most desperate desires. Such violent ambivalence propels me into disasters of longing. I fling myself toward another, feebly hoping I won't turn it into sex, naively expecting I will figure out how to make it work as I go along. I rush in where I don't belong, among humans competent in intimacy. After all, I'm the one who wants the cute pizza-boy "to use me like an appliance". And my actual sex is described (improbably) in Don MacLean's epic, American Pie: "...the lovers cried and the poets dreamed, but not a word was spoken, the church bells all were broken."
Not a word was spoken. Could I express it any more clearly than to take into my mouth a nameless, darting-eyed stranger—in the bushes or a men's room or even in my own apartment—and never say a word.
I can write, but I speak the language of cave men—no, not even that. The language I use for spontaneous speech is that of a precocious, sexually obsessed toddler. It has always been; and is it any wonder then that I spend days here 'speaking' in the unfettered tongue of writing, groping for the words, gagging on the scream that rises in my throat, the bellowing wail I have always pushed back down with mindless sex? The written word lacks much of what a face to face encounter can possess. But I found myself absent meaning when face to face with you and, knowing I do have meaning somewhere within, I turned to words. Maybe it's a panic disorder, but I disappear when you and I are face to face. When writing I can dare to touch, I can trust myself to open to you, knowing I cannot—and need not—flee to sex, an escape route I use whenever we have between us something genuine and honest and sincere; far too important for me to risk losing ever again.
And so I work with words, in isolated safety, to bring out who I am, and to capture something—even just the sillouette—of a thing far too important to touch. I miss you very much.
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