Monday 23 May 2016

Phosphorus Burn

Years ago, I wrote you a poem. This is unusual for me. I'm not given to writing poetry. But I had too many feelings for you, and I was afraid to let them out, knowing that they would come as a tsunami that scared the bejeezus out of you and left a soggy, wrecked landscape in its wake. I am an intense creature, and I scare people. So instead, I doled them out in little bites.

nine words

nine words
can break a heart
or make one whole.
they can creep down inside
and claw at you
or they can fill you
with such
Radiance
that your heart
wants to explode.

nine words
can fill my veins with crimson snow
or act
like a
phosphorus burn.
once spoken
they cannot be unspoken
but will consume me
until all their fuel is gone.

months later
i stare at
nine words
and
still
i do not understand them.
they could be greek
except
of course
i understand greek
better than i understand
You.

nine words
can confound
or make things simple.
nine words
make problems irrelevant
as all the issues
that came before
that came between
no longer matter.

because

nine words
say more to me
than all the others
you ever spoke.

nine words
can show me you
and can show me me.
because of those nine words
the path is clear
there is no other
possible way
for this to play out
and stay true.
to me.
to you.
and so
i pick up my suitcase
and i pick up my passport
and i pick up the phone.

Despite friends and family thinking of me as creative, I can't create. I can only imitate. On this day, I think I was channeling e e cummings, with limited success. Still, I liked the poem. The fracturedness of it captured the way I felt.

With your nine words, you asked me a question that haunted me for years after. It grabbed at my heart the day you asked - the one and only day I was unreachable, and the one and only day you ever let your guard down and showed me that you needed me. I both loved and loathed that day, for the next however many years. It was the day you called me for help, and the day I wasn't there to hear you, and the last day you ever asked. And I spent the next half-decade hanging around in case you ever asked again, both out of love and out of guilt. Offering friendship, offering help, offering an ear to listen without judgement, offering money, offering sex. Offering absolution, the few times you seemed to need it. Offering love, unconditionally, in any shape or form that you wanted it.

I did love you. I considered you a dear friend, as well as someone that I happened to be attracted to. For your part, you always appeared to consider me one too, though perhaps that was my imagination.

There aren't too many people that I would spend three months' salary to go visit, but you were right at the top of that list.

I told myself I was visiting with no expectations. I lied to myself. I had no expectations about love or romance or sex, that much is true, but I certainly expected to find a friend. I didn't expect to find a stranger who, after literally years of invites, after begging and cajoling me to visit, after making plans to spend Christmas with me in my country, treated me like my presence was an ordeal to be endured.

The late Red, who we all miss, used to say, "Nothing is real until you meet." If there's one sentence that always reminds me of her, it's that one. I argued that idea with her a lot, in blogs and comments. Both of us interested in each other's positions, both of us defending our own. Having met you, I can say Red was right and I was wrong. Everything that I thought I knew about our friendship evaporated the moment you picked me up in the airport and said your first two sentences: "My girlfriend really wants to meet you," followed by, "I'm afraid I won't be able to come for Christmas." I hated you for that, hated you for withholding need-to-know information that, had you told me even a week ago, before I booked my ticket, would have saved me thousands of dollars and a painful, exhausting journey for a girl who had been in surgery two days before she flew across the ocean. And I hated you even more three days later, when we finally managed to get together to hang out, and I asked you what you wanted to do, and you said that you didn't want to be here at all, you'd rather be with your girlfriend and you resented having to show me around.

And yet, I was also right and Red was also wrong. Our friendship evaporated, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist, any more than water droplets don't exist because they dry up. What we had before we met - it was real. I felt it. Feelings exist. They are real things, regardless of their intangibility or their impermanence. That's a lesson that took me my whole adult life - so far - to learn, and I thank you for it.

A few days before I left, my ex - one of the ones I'm on friendly terms with - sent me a bag of onions. Cam is a man with a brilliant, odd mind that sometimes requires a bit of lateral thinking to understand, but when I got the message, I laughed. He was telling me I should sleep with you if I had the chance. Onions are not shallots - something that Cameron, amateur cook and eternal perfectionist, was always nagging me about - and I am no Lady of Shalott, doomed to live my days out in a tower and experience life through the reflections in a mirror lest something dreadful happen when I step into the real world. With the onions, Cam was telling me to step away from the mirror and take a chance on something I wanted; to throw myself into life. Cam gave me the kick, but you provided the opportunity. Had I not come to visit you, I would probably still be living in my tower; instead I have a new job and a new cat and a new life and I thank you for that as well.

Life moves on. Sometimes it laps itself. I sit here now, mere hours away from taking another trip to meet another man who I have very possibly fallen for in a remarkably short space of time - and I am half-convinced that this trip will be as much of a disaster as the last. That worry, that wariness, is without a doubt a result of our emotionally crushing meeting. Yet I am not indecisive or frozen with fear the way I used to be, and that, too, is down to you. Meeting you taught me that whatever happens, I can not only survive, but thrive. Even sick and utterly alone in a foreign country, I thrive. Lost love will always hurt, but I will always pick myself up again, and I will be just fine. And it's you who showed me that I have that resilience.

Phosphorus is a strange material. White phosphorus, in particular, is exceedingly dangerous. A burn from it cannot be stopped - it will burn literally down to the bone. You were my phosphorus burn. I fell for you so suddenly, so much to my surprise and shock, that I imbued my feelings for you with a sort of supernatural strength. I always felt like I loved you against my will. Like I had no control over the way I felt about you; like it couldn't be stopped until I was utterly consumed.

Visiting you put that fire out. The fuel is gone now, and for that, too, I am thankful.

Chances are, I won't see you again. I occasionally miss the person you were online, but I don't miss the person you were face to face, despite the fact that parts of our afternoon together were pleasant. Still, now that I no longer burn with love or anger, I can wish good things for you; wish that you live a happy life doing the things (and people) that give you joy. And for that reason, I will always be glad I came.