bodies in time and space

This August, I’ll have lived in Gotham twenty years. In those twenty years, I’ve lived in eleven apartments, though I’ve spent fifteen in the one I’m typing in right now. I moved around a lot my first five years, which is pretty typical for new New Yorkers, actually. In those eleven apartments, I’ve lived with four men, with collective whom I shared around eight years, to make a smeary approximation. Add to those eight the five years or so I’ve spent with assorted other dudes (including the three-ish years I spent with Donny) and for a total of thirteen years, give or take, the cavalcade of my dating life has been traipsing through Gotham.

There are many bodies that hang like asteroids in my one-score chunk of Gotham time and space. There are bodies who throb and glow like pulsars, and others who lie dead and dormant like white stars. There are none whom I’d call black holes, thankfully. But they’re all there, somewhere. Spend enough time in a city, date enough people, and the landscape becomes dotted with relationship remembrances, a ghostly breadcrumb trail that pulses with meanings invisible to any other naked eye.

Taking a cold empiric if necessarily hazy accounting, I’ve spent only seven years on my onesy, and yet it feels like I’ve spent ever so much more time alone than partnered. I am, of course, single now and feeling fine about it. I suffer an almost rosily nostalgic glow when I see couples performing couplehood, which couples do as much to express affection between themselves as to express their bond to the world. Ah, I think, I recall holding hands. Yes, I know of having a wisp of hair brushed from my forehead. I can recollect that specific canting of torsos, the one that implies shared intimacy, emotions and bodily fluids.

I remain able to summon a vague cloud of dating interest, a romantic nebula. It’s a pretty sight when I let my mind drift into that telescopic view. I see the sparkles and the lightning flashes and that ethereal glow intrinsic to the happy clashing of two separate people who spontaneously unite into one hot element. I can visualize that moment and feel it resonate with that pleasurable bassy thrum that bounces between my solar plexus and my svadisthana, to drift a little old-agey prose-wise. I can see it, but I can’t touch it, and I’m not sure I want to.

Which is all to say that at some point in the past few years a seismic change took place. Something major shifted, almost without my notice, and the landscape of my interior life changed, possibly irrevocably. I used to feel a mad desperation at being alone. I felt oppressed by singularity, disfigured by it, strange and crazed and wild at my single experience. I dated in a frenetic rush. I flagellated myself with my own undesirability when I wasn’t dating. I felt the press and crush of my own romantic failures with gravitational force. I nearly broke myself with my own pressure to date. Without a man, I was nothing. I didn’t cease to exist—that would have been a step up in emotional health actually—rather, I turned antimatter, a singularly horrid and shadowy incarnation of my dated self.

Now that wild compunction is past. I put my eye to the romantic pinhole and see the expansive glory that can be a romantic relationship, but I’m still nonetheless aware of what lies just outside of the rim of my vision. The unavoidable disappointment, the uncomfortable sleeping, the pain and the fear and the meeting of parents and other family, the boredom and the sports watching. The apparitional specter of Xs and the weighty baggage that every human accumulates after adolescence. The bad smells and the anger and the stuff that drifts gently away like so much space detritus.

 I hope some day that I’ll be able to put these two views together—the rosy macro and the lurid micro—and finally put the “real” in “relationship.” Neither one view nor the other is valid, though neither are they false. And yet, even a contented spinster such as myself can see the value in the coupled state. Plus, I would really rather enjoy someday having sex. Bodies in space are nice, but bodies in bed are nicer.

Or, faint as the morning star, so I seem to recall.

Comments

[Pete]

CG,
I wish you well in your quest for "real". As I feel I know you somewhat from your writing over the years, you do deserve to have a "real" and stable relationship, just keep writing.
Pete

[Svasti]

I did manage to realise for myself recently (and there's a difference between learned knowledge & stuff you directly experience), that until I'm back in the center of who I am, until I'm no longer needy, but living my life with passion and conviction, then who is gonna find that attractive? And would I even want that person, who wants the half-beaten down me?

Sex is great, casual sex is okay with the right person. But sex with those we love is sublime. Its been a while for me, too.

[minstrel hussain boy]

there is a strange thing that happens with most artistic folk. on the one hand ('scuze me for going all tevya on ya) we need our audience to express our art.

musicians, actors, dancers, writers, painters, all of us depend upon an audience to view our work and appreciate it. yet, for the most part, the huge bulk of our process to create that thing for the audience comes from solitary effort.

when i am playing for people they are seeing so much more than the time i am out there in front of them. they are seeing years of single minded solo effort. the cumulative product of all those hours spent alone in a room ceaselessly running scales, the time spent searching for that phrase, that sound that would create something sublime.

when we read your writing, we are also reading all your rewrites, all your edits, all your cuts and additions.

for me, it all started with silence, until i used my gifts and my tools of craft to fill that with music.

for you, it starts with that terrifying blank page.

we start with nothing, and we create a something.

i need silence and solitude in my life the same way i used to need dope.

bravo for your stand. now, that you are accepting and solid in yourself, alone, the ones you allow to come in will be enriched even more. my daughter, the onetime stripper now a teacher, came to her most recent marriage (and i think that this is a good one hope hope hope) from a place of self awareness and power. what i noticed first and foremost was that with her now husband, she was herself. she wasn't trying to squeeze or reform herself to fit into his world. the fit was something that was there between them. it doesn't mean that there weren't some sharp edges to file down, some light sanding and maybe even a coat or two of new paint. that only made the fit better, it wasn't one of the cases where she changed fundamental things about herself to fit some dude's concept of who and what she was.

that's why i think she has it right this time. that's why i have every confidence in you, on your next time.

casual, sport fucking can be fun and a welcome diversion. go ahead, if it feels good do it. be honest about what it is and have all the fun you want to have.

when something that is valid and true stumbles in, often when you least expect it, your self awareness and self acceptance will put you in the perfect position to recognise and grab ahold of it.

enjoy the ride.

[Vic Rattlehead]

Gotham was based on Chicago, you live in Metropolis.

[chelsea g.]

Thank you, Vic, for your sharing your superior knowledge. You have certainly put me in my proper place.