feverpitch

I try to date like a man.

I can do nothing else in my life so manly as dating. Women are vulnerable, you see, needy. You can see right through us. Even the cheaters and the liars. It's in the way our bodies curve in or out. Love is like gravity for a woman, and we make satellites of the most tender parts of us. When in love we orbit, some in more obvious ways than others.

But men maintain a certain stoicism.
They are better liars. There hopes do not find a place within them to settle and magnetize towards their love. Something casual and dangerous lurks in the love of a man. It can pick and choose. There is no irrational chemical burn in their veins, no withstanding martyrdom.

So I try my best to date like a man.

I do not make myself transparent. I ignore phone calls. I hold myself in check. I do not squeal, I do not gush. I am careful. I can flirt and multitask as well as any man. I can go out at night, and know exactly which phone numbers I give out with be ones who might be kind, might be real. But mostly, I know they will text me the next day, with texts about "chillin soon" which will chill me with the surreality of it all. It is not possible that people are not hungry for each other, except in body. I know somehow it's not true.

But I see it. Eyes glazed and so far past pretense as to not even care if I hope. Eyes with intent and the desire to hunt. The ones that will say anything.

So I limit myself. I tell myself I can see right through all of it and suddenly, when I choose wrong, I am as shocked as a child who touched her fingers to the perfect orange flame. But I am a child in so many other ways. Once found, my vulnerability is naive and bottomless. I become a well of forgiveness, and unabashed tears flow freely if violated. Once penetrated, the core of me is sunburned skin, open wounds, and a toddlers trust, all in one easily trespassed package. I am a doll undone, filled with all the world's rot, and sewn shut again, with the loss inside me.

I am a cry at feverpitch, and I am lost. It's strange and rare. My pain is the blackest and most priceless of gems. I cannot keep it safe. And worse still, every day I'm growing new nerves, new loves, new ways to hurt. In each and every moment a millimeter of skin grows succeptible, even with all my trying.

So I try to date like a man. But I am a woman. And I am the soil that will not fallow. I am made a great arch and a great fool by the gravity of my love. And gravity is ever so strong.

"--He was once found on the Well-Regarded Rabbi's lawn, bound in white string, and said he tied one around his index finger to remember something terribly important, and fearing he would forget the index finger, he tied a string around his pinky, and then one from waist to neck, and fearing he would forget this one, he tied a string from ear to tooth to scrotum to heel, and used his body to remember his body, and in the end could only remember the string. Is this someone to trust for a story?" Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated.

And so I am bound, like the madman in the story, to everything that I believe. I have tied myself to myself in order to remember all the things that I must be. As a writer, I am naturally one of history's self-swaddled string things. I am bequeathed the duty and the desire to watch as people act, and commentate on the hasty race of minutes through the years. And as the years enter the pubescence of decades and matuure into eons, I take note, and in order that I might remember the beginning, I tie it to yesterday and string each today like plastic beads on my elastic memory. I have front row season tickets to the tournament of our humanity, while each and ever belligerent soul fights for his or her right to be the most impervious to their faults, and therefore the most fallible.

I have taken note, and kept notes since my bitten fingers found the poise of a pencil and I have built my ideas about the world from notebooks filled and overflowing. Slanting sidewalls of spiral notebooks, clothbound volumes half filled with sloppy ballpoint texts, evolving from bottom to top. A foundation of titled rhyming verse, in junk store ledgers, easing up into the free form poetry etched into floppy disk, then CD and nearing the top transparent walls electric with attempted blog prose, and the glowing Verdana font of Facebook notes.

All that I know has or will be housed in what I write, and in what I can't. In tying together the days, I've opened doors, eyes, hearts, and lives and inadvertently scared the living crap out of myself. It's always been about bearing witness; in speaking the unspeakable things all I have wanted was to connect those who thought they must be seperate. I started to get scared when I started to succeed.

And then there were more strings. To remember to be deep I ran a string in one ear and out the other and tied it round the back of my head: reigns for a mind whiche needs a strong lead to direct and maintain the trot of the romantic elite. Further and further I entrenched myself in expectation. I could not be shallow, I could not be untrue, I could not be uninspiring, and for Christ's sake...no more princess dress blogs! I needed to tell the truth and unburden myself, but with the delicacy of a face atop the shoulders which woud bear my load, suddenly the strings which made me remember myself were inummerable.

So there I was, up to my metaphorical scrotum in my fear of forgetting the days, the lessons, the rules, the hours, the minutes, the expectations. I managed to hogtie myself in it all.

Is this someone to trust with for a story? Is this someone to trust with your life? Am I, one of the madmen of the world, she who you should trust with the annals of your humanity?

Can I be trusted with all that I have seen, to do something real and bright and hopeful with it all? I am afraid of my own yes. But there it is, most ardently, yes. I can build a fortress unto the stars, stacked tale and life and leaf and instant upon verse and bat of eyelash, metaphors jointed and mortared with assonance piled and ornamented with lies more honest than a lovesick teenager's eyes. Ceilings vaulted with lofty attempted eloquence can make a place to take refuge against the harsh truths of the world.

I can do that. I can hem and haw and tie myself up, tooth to toe, and unravel myself again like a child 'round a maypole, and make right my hesitation. I can. I think.