Akasha
So, I retitled this sonnet from what it was when I wrote it a few years ago, and the reason I did that was to get your attention. I talk directly to you a lot, and most of the time when I’m doing that, I’m just trying to connect, I’m trying to clarify what I’m saying by strengthening your subjective sense of our contact. I want you to apply what I’m saying directly to yourself, in an intimate, personal way, the way you’d hear a priest or a family member, someone who cares about you and wants to be honest, not for the sake of hurting or diminishing you, but in the hope of cleansing and healing.
I’ve always kind of talked this way, even in-person. I talk exactly the same way I write, as I note on my dating profile, so that others will know ahead of time that I am no less insufferable in the flesh. You of all people know that even as a teenager I was given to ranting and pontificating, getting swept away by a flow of thought and vocabulary that feels both meaningful and musical to me. I make a lot of grammatical errors, but none of them are accidental - I was a copy-editor for years; I know the rules under APA and MLA format and I can tune it up as far as Fowler’s King’s English if given a good reason to bother.
I’m trying to make you hear my voice with my grammatical vagaries, to make you hear the pauses and speed of the delivery, the weight and emphasis of each word. I’m formal but also lyrical, satirically obsessed with art history but as deconstructionist as a Dadaist, in love with Shakespeare’s lexical thickets and also the spare, sympathetic style of James Thurber and Kurt Vonnegut. I write like I talk, and I talk like a preacher. That’s why I call this my weekly sermon; that’s why I frame this nonsense I’m getting up to as a cult - because I’m an atheist who loves religion, an alien who loves humanity, a shy demagogue who will take your love as permission to rule the world.
But today I’m talking directly to you not the way your priest does, but the way I do - or at least, the way I used to. We haven’t talked in a while. Not especially long for us, in the grand scheme of our farcical failure to force a friendship out of something that has always been more complex and dangerous than that. I’m talking to one person, a specific person, the person who would click on that title, the person who taught me the term, like you taught me so much else. Yeah, you. Hey there, Broken Hand. Miss you. Love you still.
I haven’t gone a day in my life since I met you without thinking about you, and that hasn’t changed since we - well, broke up, I guess. This last time was more like a breakup than our previous breakups, because this time we tried to express more of what we’ve never quite managed to say to each other. We got closer. I think that made this one more painful - it was more real, there was more vulnerability and hope than we’ve hitherto allowed to sprout out of these two irradiated planters we’ve got for hearts.
That’s always been our problem - it’s not that we don’t love each other. We love each other so much more than we can express with the tools we were given and the damage that’s been done to us. We were both brutalized by people set up as caretakers and loved ones, people who taught us that love is both necessary and damaging, like a drug, something that makes you accept how it’s ruining your life because the alternative is death.
I don’t know if I, or we, will ever grow past all that damage. I’m trying. I know you’re trying, that’s never been a question - I’ve never known anyone as driven as you are, and I’ve only known a few who shared that strange, vaguely Buddhist belief that I have, that individual enlightenment and the exploration of the universe around and within us are identical and inextricable goals, that there is no real self-actualization short of true cosmic gnosis. Until I grok all, I cannot grok myself.
You see your spiritual development as vitally involved in everything you do, and so do I, and I wonder if that will always mean that we are fundamentally unable to share space as people - because neither of us actually sees ourselves as a person, or wants to be seen as such, but we have been taught that being anything other than a person means that you’re meat, grist for the mill, Soylent for the supply chain. We have been taught by our world that there’s no personhood outside being the kind of person they want, no way of looking at one another but the male gaze, no way of shaking off the shackles we were born into so that we can touch skin-to-skin.
We might never be clean, you and I. We might never be able to see one another without blinking away the fog from the scars on our eyes. We might spend the rest of our lives looking at the people we love and deliberately thinking, every time, every single goddamned time all day, every day: “This is a person, independent and fundamentally separate from me. This person did not create my memories, or the scars of trauma I associate with their mannerisms, or the implications I take from their words, or the chemical responses all of those things activate, or the emotions those chemicals produce in my body. This person has their own memories, their own trauma, their own chemical responses, and those all relate to THEIR experience of the world, not to mine. This person will act based on the world they perceive, not the world I perceive. This person has a right to exist, to have an independent experience I am not privy to, and to share that experience with me is not harmful even when it differs from what I experienced or what I expected. Others’ experience of the world may exist alongside mine without diminishing either of us. The only way I can operate in that situation without shortchanging myself and others is to remain aggressively open and vulnerable in spite of my fear, and try to compassionately allow others to share themselves without the insecure need to either defend my own perspective or subsume myself in theirs.”
It’s a lot to say every second when you look at someone you love. It’s exhausting, and frustrating, and painful to live in this world, to have the scars we have, to try to find our way through gently anyway. But I don’t know another way. I don’t know another way to work past my own damage, and the damage we’ve done to our relationship, and the damage we’ve done as a species to this world and our psyches and our souls, except by continually showing up ready to listen and be honest, to have compassion enough for myself to let me state my failures and mistakes out loud, knowing they are not all of me, and to listen to others with that same compassion, not needing to identify them entire with their mistakes to make the point that those mistakes are meaningful. I don’t know how to do this except by showing up to fuck up again and again, and each time fuck up a little less, a little smaller, a little slower. I don’t know how to do it right, so I’m doing it wrong with gusto and enthusiasm.
That’s not easy to live with. Perhaps every ‘I love you’ is also fundamentally saying, ‘I love you, but I’m human and broken and I’m never going to love you perfectly, and I’m never going to stop hurting you entirely’… but we like to pretend that isn’t what we’re saying. It’s… not awesome to be in a relationship with someone like me, who insists on saying that out loud, on never forgetting our frailty and fatalism. It’s depressing, and I don’t know if it will ever not be depressing. That depends on me, but it also depends on the people I’m talking to - in order to be happy here, we have to be able to be happy with our eyes open. We can’t have our innocence back. We can’t have our clean, intact young bodies back. We have to limp on with what we’ve got now, and we have to find a way to enjoy it.
I’ve always absolved my rather uncompromising tone in these pages by saying, ‘If what I’m saying does you harm, causes you grief that teaches you nothing, please don’t burden yourself with it. Please move on to something you enjoy.’ I don’t believe in spending a lot of time on things I don’t enjoy. I don’t hold with social media’s monetization of agitprop, and I don’t pay much attention to people I don’t like. If people don’t like me, I’d rather they simply go away and find someone else to hang out with, rather than justify myself to them or ask them to justify their opinion. It’s easy to do that when you don’t have any friends - you’re not losing anything. It’s harder with people I love.
I love you, that is a fact. I am broken, that is also a fact. I’m trying to figure out how to live with the brokenness, and I still don’t know if it’s possible. I’m trying to figure out how to love under late-stage capitalism, and I still don’t know if it can be done safely. Those are the conditions, and I don’t know if they’ll ever change. Without a lot of change, both societal and personal, I think we’re going to keep hurting each other. I think we’re fighting for survival, and you and I friendly fire one another pretty constantly, and probably always will. Until we can survive that and laugh it off, it won’t be safe for us to be close.
But that doesn’t erase how I feel. I still think of you every day. I still hope that you’re safe. I still worry about you and want you to get another cat, so that something wordless and unpredictable and demanding will ask you to keep living every day when you can’t come up with a reason. I still put parts of you in my stories, and use the things you taught me, and wish I could touch you, and agonize about whether I should email you. I don’t think I’m remotely safe to be around, any more than I was before, and so I don’t do it, because I don’t want to make you any more promises I can’t keep. But I want you to know that I love you, and I always will, and I’ll always show up to fuck up again if you give me the slightest sign that you’d welcome it. The only reliable promise I’ve got for you, or for anyone, is that I will keep making entertaining mistakes in an attempt to catch your eye and make you smile. If that’s enough to keep you around, I want you here.
If it’s not, no hard feelings at all. I was always a waste of your time - I just want to waste it beautifully, and you’re the only one who gets to decide if I’ve done that.
They bid you sit, and praised your decorum,
and then the awful fashion show began.
You shuddered at the glassy eyes of fans
advertising other forms of boredom.
A glass, a lens, a camera... an eye.
The closer you look, the less you can see,
nothing but an empty facsimile,
a sack of impulse calling itself "I."
Broadcasting in wide band at all hours,
the neon signs have come between you and I.
But lady, I still swear by all flowers,
I always worshiped your shadow. Don't cry -
when we were young and still had magic powers,
I broadcasted your name into the sky.
