The Little Prince

The tiny volume sits on my shelf.  All in French, painstakingly illustrated. In his neat European penmanship, a slip of paper holds a very often read inscription, “My love- This is a beautiful story, but not half as beautiful as you are.  I hope to read every bit of this book with you because it was my favorite book as a child and I like to imagine how it will be when we read it in bed together with our children snuggled up to us.  Quand ton sourire me suprit.  Je sentis fremir tout mon etre mais ce qui domplait mon esprit.  Je ne pus d’abord le connaitre.  I love you plus que lontemont.”
It’s like a eulogy. I cannot seem to figure out how to break free of it.  I see it when I close my eyes- burned against the white pages of my mind.  I see it when the shower water splashes against to wall, when a traffic light turns from yellow to red, when the elevator door opens.  I can hear the rolling purr of the tongue of it in every sound- every song’s lyrics are these over and over again.  I am never alone.  It is him and me, him and me, him and me in every bed, in every splash of every ocean wave.  The years that should separate us only pull me in tighter.  I don’t remember breathing on my own.  I don’t remember my own eye color that is not a reflection of how it looked mirrored there in his eyes.
Is it because love and hate, Love and Hate are both his?  That he knows me?  That he will always own my end and my beginning? That without speaking a word I always know where he is, and he knows exactly where I am, as if he could turn a page in this book and find me there, caught up in my red hair, fingers outstretched to fall into his arms.  If I press my face against the inside spine of this book it smells like him.  It makes me gag and then I smell and smell until I choke on the memory and it feels so good to hate him for all that he took from me and love him for all that he gave me and loathe him for the secrets he keeps and hate myself for not being able to throw this book away and not see the soft curve of his fingers as they trace the picture of the little blond Prince whose search for love in a cruel world wasn’t unlike his own story. I was the rose, only his glass dome couldn’t protect me from the worst pain.
I need to escape from here.  I am going to cut myself free.  Literally slice open my insides and cut him out, move away and start over.  But I won’t throw it away.  I don’t think I will ever be able to darken the night of this Little Prince

Dreams and Lovers

Last night I had a dream I was still dating an ex. We were in his apartment, and it was some sort of holiday, like New Years Eve.  There were some guests over and we all decided to play a board game in his concrete living room even though the dream clearly told me that we wanted to be making out in his bedroom instead of entertaining. Whilst looking over his expansive collection for a game to play, he opened a box and found some sort of token from his “recently passed” grandmother- it looked like a music box in the shape of a spinning top.  Immediately he burst into tears and cried “Nana Nana Nana” over and over.  I held him with his head in my lap, sobbing, stroking his hair while he cried for her.  Then it was the morning- he kept trying to pull me into his room while I was making a breakfast of cold cereal for his friends, so we could hook up, but for some reason, in the dream, I felt like he was trying to cheer himself up and did not care if it was me, a livedoll(tm), or an old magazine he was kissing. Even though it upset me, I kept letting him try to feel me up while I passed around the bowls of Frankenberry.  This is the point at which I awakened.

When I woke up, I felt the worst I have felt in all of 2012.  Devastated.  Heartbroken, Wrecked.  Not because I had been semi-dissed by my “boyfriend”, but because while I was dreaming, I actually felt like I was in love and someone was in love with me, despite the curious social situation in the dream.  My crushing solitude was closing in all around me and all that I could think of was the fact that its been so long since I loved someone, I almost forgot that feeling.

I never, ever want to dream that again, which leads me to believe I will probably have a dream re-visit again tonight.  And in some twisted way, I hope it happens, just to feel it again for a few minutes, even if it hurts for the whole rest of the day.

I’m a fool with dreams and not a lot of things
I swear that I will be all you need, don’t give up on me
Give me one more day, don’t give this all away
We’ll be fine you’ll see, just don’t give up on me.

Open Letter I

Dear Any Man Who Has Ever Wanted to Fuck Me,

Your time is running out.  You have six months.  If you want to have sex with me, you should tell me right away because if you wait until after my surgery, I am not going to sleep with you.  I am sorry if that seems unfair to you, but if I know you now, there is no way I am going to be able to let go of the idea that you didn’t want me the way I was and you only want me now because of the change in my looks.  Maybe I don’t want to bang you now, but at least I will know and then later won’t judge you.  Time is running out.  Post-surgery Shannon isn’t giving tail away like a discount sale no matter how much she might want to.

I’m giving you a chance to get in on the bottom floor here.  You can take that however you see fit.

Love,

Shannon

Day 02 – Your first love, in great detail

Oh man.  They are starting this off with a bang.  No pussy footing around.  I think this one is especially difficult for me for many reasons, reasons that I don’t think many people have when referencing their first love.  I could make it easy on myself and write about my first “love” in an angsty unrequited way, or I could write about the person who I like to give my unofficial first love title to, because I am pretty sure I was his and since I still love him almost as much to this day it is an all over better story, but, in a way that would be a cop out too, since he isn’t truly the first, and because it is almost more painful to write about him than my real first love.  Are you confused yet?  I have decided that I am going to write about my real first love, and I am going to stick to that part, the love part.  It’s all the question really asks anyway.  I’m going to change his name even though you probably already know it, to protect the innocent and not so innocent parts of us.  I’ll call him Adam.  You know, the first man.

Meeting Adam was like something out of a dream.  I was crushing hard on another guy, painfully bleeding away page after page of my journal wishing and hoping for one breath from this other man, so infatuated that I was blind to almost everyone and everything around me.  This was in the time before cellular phones (can you imagine??) so I would actually walk to the nearby convenience store to call this other guy on the pay phone when I knew I could slip away for half an hour unnoticed.  So here I was, in the toy store, looking at pound puppies (they had made an unusual resurgence in teeny tiny form), when I heard a voice behind me that stopped my heartbeat.  He asked me if I was indeed the girl who lived nearby.  I confirmed.  We had seen one another before in passing.  He inquired over my health and well-being, general pleasantries,  I couldn’t begin to remember what I actually said because my brain was exploding.  It was like the sound of his voice unlocked the part of my body that connected my heart with my sexuality and my brain.  It was what people read about, write about, make movies about, kill people over… I was completely destroyed and it was practically at first sight.  I know I believe in pheromones and all that nonsense only because it happened to me in that moment.

From that moment we were like lost souls that found one another.  In a way that was beyond sexual, I needed to be near him as much as possible, as if breathing was easier if he was in the room.  It was a great love, and I know it sounds silly, when I type it out, but it really did feel like that at the time.  That he was the lost part of me that validated my existence.  We fit into the empty places in each of our beings.  I just wanted to be swallowed by him.  He understood my every move, I knew what every twitch of his body meant.  I felt like if I could place my mouth on his mouth, I could make the words come out of him without him speaking, like I could touch his mind and know his soul just by feeling his mouth.

Like anything so symbiotic, fast and strong, the fissures started to wear away at us eventually.  I held up alright, but for Adam, every motion I made without him felt like I was stepping away from him, invalidating my need for him, and it made him crazy, in the end. I know part of it was because of the terrible child abuse he had endured as a pre-teen, it made him extra sensitive and extra needy, but it was too much for me, especially being so young, and so much younger than him (6 years) to handle.  I think, in a way, my youth was part of what attracted Adam to me, just as his maturity attracted me to him.  He saw someone who wasn’t sexually aggressive or emotionally dangerous, and I saw someone who was protective but who seemed not to be led by his libido.

I don’t want to talk about the long, long fallout of that.  But what I will say is that a part of me has never stopped believing that when I let him go, I lost my chance at ever finding that kind of soul-crushing love and passion again.  I feel like it was too soon, I was too young, and in a way it isn’t fair.  It has colored my life.  It has made every love and every potential love I have had just a tiny, tiny bit less beautiful.  I wear him like a stain.  It blends into my skin so well you can hardly see it, but I know it is there and I don’t think there is anything that can wash it out.  I wish I had some sort of lighter, fluffier, happier tale of first love.  But I just don’t.  I just have this.

On Demand

Yesterday I felt so uncomfortable at coffee and I am hoping he is a bright enough man to take the hint. A nice man, certainly, but it felt like I was filling in for something more than just a coffee partner- I was all the women of Boston, all the human contact of nine months, every hope for a union of Africa and the United States and that, my friends, is just too much pressure for one girl to bear. That and nothing bothers me more than being forced into a hug that is ten seconds too long.

Bloom in our hearts this winter…

I’ve been alone in the house for a couple of days now.  Friday, Saturday, Sunday- the tail end of a pretty thanksgiving.  I think a lot.  I think the primary function of a roommate or mate is to prevent long stretches of profound thinking.  I just downloaded the new Tori Amos holiday song album and have been listening to her very supple and unique tone- she’s something special- she moves right through my heart like a painful but beautiful breath.  Sometimes I feel like she is what the voice inside my head sounds like.

Lavan, my constant companion, is peering at me. Like the child born to keep together fading lovers she tries to pull me out of my reverie, shoving her toys at me, showing off, offering me her kisses as if she were a consolation prize.  I cannot picture days like this without her diligent attention on me.  “I’m pretty Mommy.  You’re pretty Mommy.  I love you Mommy. Look what I have for you. Want to throw this for me?  Maybe we could just sleep.”  It’s a song her eyes sing on repeat for me.  Seamus sliding in to sit beside us, I wonder if this is how it will always be.  Just me and them.

I often think that the answer is change- change something.  Change what I do, change who I see, change how I look- just make some change that will bring me closer to someone that someone needs.  I think though, no matter how many times I think it, it must be the wrong answer.  If it were the right answer then I would change.  And things would get better.  I wouldn’t feel like this anymore.  I cannot tell you how many dates I went on this year, thinking someone, anyone, could work out and end this.  No one was anyone I wanted to see more than once, maybe twice if I forced myself.  No one was anyone I didn’t think I would rather be home with my dog for.  No one was anyone that looked at me with even an ounce of recollection for the amazing depth and quality of my heart.  And worse, the ones, or I should say, one, who whispered at my core for the first time in, hell, years, only to systematically disappear making me wonder if I imagined the whole thing.  Sometimes I want to relocate my entire heart and replace it with something smaller cheaper and easier.  I am growing so tired of trying, and I haven’t even begun to try.

I wish it was early enough to go to bed, even if its only return to the same dream I have almost every night. A hard thing to wake up to every morning, the same old violence by a varied cast of characters.  But insomnia doesn’t work.  Waking dreams are as bad.  I am ridiculously looking forward to being back at work tomorrow where I am distracted and I can enjoy the company of people who value me.  Imagine that.  I suppose that is my fault, too.  Like everything else.  Like every other failure.  I don’t want this path anymore but I cannot seem to find a different one.

218~

I wish I could remember everything
about that moment when I first met you-
my eyes were stars, immediately- I know-
I wanted you in some primal way
thought that might be enough
thought I might try to make you mine
and oh! did I.
I used to watch the rain dripping down the window frames
and leaned my face against the screen to feel the wetness there,
and I would see the lights on from your room and want
with something deeper in me than I knew
than I had ever known,
want you to come out and ask me to throw down my golden hair.
I can see, behind my eyes, the way I was pushed against the wall,
so like a rag doll,
broken and silent,
it was you I pictured there.
And like the cool water of rain, my tears were the balm that soothed me-
and you didn’t hear a word-
how could you have ever doubted a kiss?
but I could not help but turn away- did you grow tired of my cheeks?
what was left was not a combination of you and me-
but was actually the work of three.
If that love had been enough there might have been,
something new or blue or full of woe-
I’ve nothing to show for my rainwater eyes
but a pile of odes
and a memory that doesn’t die.

Ever Virgin.

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek; and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. (Matthew 7:7)

There are times, it feels, when I pray so hard, so long, so loudly that for hours at a time I feel like I am screaming in my head.  I scream for help and guidance and I scream for an end for the crushing loneliness I feel.  I scream so longley and with such absolute fortitude that I cannot imagine that God does not hear me.  I’m clever.  I attempt to pray in the way we’re taught is best.  I don’t ask, “God, please send me a boyfriend”, I ask, “God, please help me to feel the blessing in the love that surrounds me.  Help me to be less selfish and less demanding.  Give me the strength to endure this time alone until it is the right time for me.”  Except the bully of it all is, no matter how carefully I phrase it, doesn’t God just hear, “please send me a boyfriend” anyway?  I don’t even want a boyfriend. I hate boys.  I just want to stop feeling this way.  I want the answer not to be, “find happiness in yourself- look not to other people’s validation for happiness,” but that isn’t the answer.  The answer is that my heart will forever feel like a wasteland until I am able to prove to myself that there is a time at which I am the first choice.  A time at which there is not another soul in the world greater or more important than I am to another human being.  I used to believe it wasn’t true by virtue of some deficiency in the way I looked.  Now I’m not so sure.  More and more I think I am just tragically flawed- another Manfred in a sea of Heros (minus the incest). I think I might be doomed to wander the cliffs alone forever until I am overcome with despair and hurl myself upon the rocky shoals below me.

I’m just tired of everyone elses boyfriends, I think…. or maybe I’m just tired.

That seems likely.

Ever Virgin.