the distribution of happiness, the portions of love
“Once we begin to feel deeply all aspect of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and all our life pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.”
—Audre Lorde
In art I’ve confessed and in art I’ve hidden. In love I’ve become and in love I’ve lost the way. In passage, I took my first steps into life, and on that same road, I walked away from it too.
Four years, and fragments of my life, spilled here. This journal, this mess that’s seen through the end of four loves, and the other, smaller ones that carried that first, mistaken, unfinished breath of a poem, composed in the mind without verse. [You are the poem before it is composed,” Nizar Qabbani] The loves that have happened and the ones that didn't, all happening and alive here… where I’ve kept all that has given me parts of myself, and all that has taken from me too.
Life has been strange. I’ve never felt its beauty so intensely, but that old and new pain portions that beauty into fragments of nows. I take it when it comes, try not to think of its absence when it leaves. And about absence…how can we accept each moment without the memory of what was? How can a morning in bed without a lover not feel absent of the lover that was there the morning before? How can a moment under a tree spent together not leave its stain for all the other times you'd come alone? How, as Rob said, do you practice erasure and hold each moment apart from the others, so that the present stands as it is, for what is there now, and not for what was? Without absence, the third table at the diner is simply a woman sitting with her books. But absence adds to the eye, spills history into the present, and says, she is there now now but weeks ago this same woman on this same table sat with a man she loved and shared a milkshake…
The brevity of beauty tortures me. The portions of love never feel proportionate to the desire. I’ve paid the highest price for every love, every moment of beauty, every desire answered. Life has given me what I’ve wanted, but it’s given it to me in spoonfuls. And every portion only increased that hunger. First you are loved, and you take that kiss, that touch, that hour like the last meal. Then you discover the possibility that there is more, so you take those too. Suddenly, a new well appears in our life, and you find yourself receiving both the water and the dirt that pour through. The water and the dirt, love and love’s price, presence and absence, each negating the happiness and relief of the former. Grief carves a cavity and with time joy rushes in, fills it, like a hole dug too close to the shore, and when the water recedes, there is no longer the hole. So grief returns with its little hands and its bucket to dig into you again. And this repeats until life is over.
Sometimes, I hate the mornings, especially in the city. It feels like there’s a man-made god with a suit walking through these streets and casting a fishing net over our lives, and all our hours, intentions, silences, loves get caught into the snare. Sometimes, memory feels like the only place untouched and apart from that god. It’s where I can hold onto all that came into my life while that god was away, when there was no fishing net in the air and we held our own hours and all the autonomy to do with them as we wished. In the evening, when that god sits on his ugly couch in the suburbs and watches the news, his stale wife in another room with their lifeless set of kids, his own body slumped and too tired to make it to the bed after a long day’s job of killing us off…when he’s away, knee deep in his own death, we run through the bare streets, setting picnics under the moon and making nests of a lover’s body, eating cold pizza on the floor, making promises we know we’ll never keep…
If this is it, if this won’t work, if I will find myself again caught between what I desire and what he gives, then I have at least this. This will forever be mine:
Our picnic under a half moon behind the swaying branches, our breakfast on a park bench, our quiet hour by the ocean, that night in New York we spent in a tub of water, our long drive into and out of our story, the green courtyard with the dancing curtains against the colored tiles, the first night he leaned into kiss me, the way we spilled everything on our minds to each other after days apart, the way time felt with him, the melting ice cream under the tree, and our relief that the tension between us had parted and we could have the other again, his balcony overlooking a street that sounds like Syria, that tiny couch that held our bodies…
SPRING
