This is the rawest piece my brittle fingers have carved on paper.
For at 51 years of age, and only at 51, did I dare return to this place.
And it comes from a hole in my jigsaw coeur*
that was taught to fall apart, put itself back together again,
and patch itself up,
time after time after time
at the thought of a memory
that hole-punched me like like a child's art project.
This is about a love that's alien; a type not yet defined.
About a thing I loved to the point of dying
just to wait on the other side of life for it,
which would be less painful
than waiting for it here.
Because what its all come down to now
is the lack of everything
and consequently having obtained nothing.
At times, when I sat and thought about it,
my fingers, now old, felt the tingling desire to run
down its back as if in a marathon in slow motion.
And at other times I wanted to wrap them around it,
in a prison-hug that is as inescapable as Alcatraz.
Long ago, I ventured to the deepest darkest skies above us.
It was a voyage recalled to this day, still,
which expanded the knowledge of human kind
about the mysteries foreign to Earth.
And among heroic routine,
I broke myself away from our vessel, unnoticed.
I swam through the space oddity, fearless,
to the point of being one second away from being permanently lost in space.
As I broke myself free from matter,
I saw it.
It caused such a commotion in my body
and felt like an immovable seizure.
Though surely, being in space I knew I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
It was a mixture of what I call "the double f's:"
fright and fascination,
which fell over me like a warm waterfall,
for it looked at me just as I looked at it.
It was as accepting of me as I was of it.
And it almost broke me to tears,
realizing that no human ever looked at me
with such sincerity in the eyes (as big and beautiful as they were) as it did.
We were two beings. We were two.
One for each other, then each other as one.
I could see it accept with a slow yet voracious veracity,
waiting for me to reinforce that feeling.
This reaction was not the norm for either one.
Whether I was in a trance, or experiencing the purest emotion
I have ever felt,
I felt that it didn't know
what discrimination or being judgemental was.
So naturally, I fell in love with it
as it cleared the slate for me.
We embraced with an odd sensation of homely peace;
The kind of peace people wish for the world, our world;
The kind that innocent children feel,
only there was no ignorance here,
no naïvety.
I allowed myself to be sucked in
to the black holes that were its eyes.
And for the first time on my voyage,
or in my life,
I was completely lost
and wanted to stay lost,
for being lost never felt so good.
And I thought to myself:
If this is what people feel when they cry out of happiness,
then may I carry the Earth's oceans in my eyes.
And I squeezed my eyes with the force of Hercules
to trap the oceans within me,
attempting to hold the moment still, very still.
I felt the rubbery hands embrace my flesh.
But after that pleasant darkness,
which had cascaded over my body like a satin veil,
I opened my eyes
and found myself on the opposite side of the glass again,
trapped, and away from it
as if it was all just the cruelest of daydreams.
I was being restrained.
Among the chaotic voices and movements around me,
my face was expressionless
but adorned with the salty drops of the oceans I had held within,
which were now leaking out of my dream and my eyes.
Ultimately, among my grief I realized it was gone;
We were gone.
My vessel descended, unimaginably, away from it,
and I snapped back to the cruel light of the ordinary
where the years go by like water in a river:
insignificant, unimportant, and unmissed.
Since then, I've felt a depressing ecstasy
that has lasted an infinity of years,
even longer than the years I've been alive.
I know this encounter
was coincidental as it was great.
But I'm as thankful as I feel cursed
that I know pureness existed,
though in another world and another time.
The combination of events
will never repeat and bring me back to it.
And the most painful thing,
is accepting that it was the only thing that ever existed
that truly acted as a human being should.
*Coeur: "Heart" in French.
