This is something I wrote in the coffee shop formerly known as Royal Coffee. Now I think that place is called Cole Coffee but I liked it better when it was called Royal Coffee. It hasn’t really changed I just think that Royal coffee was a better name. That just goes to show how much words can influence our feelings and perceptions.
It is an excerpt from something that I was originally writing to be a novel.
I remember bright yellow lemons on the lemon tree whever I park here. I think that was the same day that you brought me a rose. The sight of the lemons is the first thing I recall, and then a vague sense of you. Or at least the way I used to know you to be; patient, compassionate, honest you. Always happy to sit and talk or have fun, just to be. Not to need a drive to be obsessively isolated and figure things out, to worry yourself into an imagined turmoil of responsibility to cover up your real emotional turmoil inside.
Your emotional incognito is so effective that most think you are okay. Indeed, you even fool me much of the time but I realize you are hiding something because mostly I just can’t get a reading form you. I know that I have a certain sensitivity towards you, that I can read you better than many can so I know that you are hiding.
I am learning to sleep now but still detest waking up. I wake nearly every morning with the sensation of you embedded in my bones. Each day I wake up to realize that I have lost you over and over again. Losing love matters not in this situation, but it is the lost of trust and tenderness that matters. Throughout the day I mostly forget youor hate you because it is easier, then when I dream in my much needed allotement of REM, you are there. My subconcious mulls over the way that I feel and how I can process this loss. This is why for months I would sleep only enough to get not quite to the REM part of the night. I would enter deep sleep and then wake up before the assult of the dreams. I intuitively avoided REM to avoid losing you over and over again.
In my dreams, sometimes you are there for me, having fun with me again and being my friend. Those are the saddest nights. Then I wake up with so much more to lose than the nights when I dream of you being aloof. The aloofness is real and the friendship is just a dream.
When I begin to wake I feel disoriented and sad. I sometimes forget why until I make coffee and breakfast. Then it slowly comes back to me in small bits and pieces. Somehow the weight of a spoon in my hand reminds me about your girlfriend being in my dream which reminds me that in my dream she caught us snuggling in a bed. We weren’t doing anything that warrents guilt, we were just holding each other like we used to do. In the dream it was definitly a platonic embrace.
This morning shall be thick with loss. Last night, after your girlfriend caught us she ran away screaming about the impropriety of it all, you held me and reassured me that you would stay with me. Not that you would be with me but a reassurance that you would at least defend me and defend the deep love we hold for each other. The kind of friendship-love and adoration that oozes so far into respect and awe that nothing can be done but revere it. Many people don’t understand this but deep-down I know that love like that can exist without having to denote sex.
This day will tremble with loss because the dream is the antithesis to the most tragic truth of all; the fact that you did not defend the way in which you claimed to care for me. Not the way you looked into my eyes and wanted to wrap your arms around me, press your hand s against the small of my back and knead my ribs. Not the way that when you looked at me long enough you wanted to taste my body. That would not be appropriate to defend.
But you failed to defend the way that you CARE about me. The way our history is thick with stories and jokes both happy and sad. The way that you said you care about my well-being and adore knowing me. The way that we used to call each other “best friend” and felt proud to say that. The way that we always told each other “I love You” at the close of an e-mail or conversation. The way that looking into each other’s eyes can be a completely pure way to understand life, a total reassurance.
You failed to remember or mention any of that to your girlfriend when she confronted you about us spending time together. You buckled under her pressure and failed to separate our love and respect from our attraction. It’s nothing new to feel dissapointed in you but somehow I thought that if it came down to it you would at least defend our friendship. I thought you were “the friend that would give me wings when I had forgotten how to fly” as the saying goes. But all of that is an assumption based on the part of you that I adore; the part that you have silently tucked away.
I yearn for you to stop invading my nights but maybe that continues as it is the only way i ever see you now. Maybe you in my dreams has become such a constant that I would miss it if it ended. But often I do wish that I could forget you, or at least stop missing you. If I could somehow un-knit the neural networks that were made for nearly a decade. If I could disconnect half of the randomaccess long-term associations of you, I would think of you much less. I would not think of the day that we parked near a lemon tree and how you brought me a single rose after dance class. I wouldn’t struggle with the fact that when I see you, your “youness” that I so adored is numbed and subdued.
So, either I need to disconnect most of my neural networks, so that parking on this street and lemons remind me of you and a rose, or I need to remove myslef completely from this particular reality. This is why I still want to run far away.