Wind Doesn't Blow, Baby, Just 'Cause I Want It To

This will be the last of this kind of newsletter, I promise. I'm working through it and it's getting easier, although not yet easy, and I'm tired of the broken record I can feel myself helplessly becoming. I cried in therapy for the first time in years and he said to give myself space to process it the way I need to and then force myself to carve out time in each day where I'm not focusing on it and I'm instead doing other things, so that's what this is. Next week we're on to something more light-hearted about podcasts, my one true love that never breaks my heart., and then some attempts at creative projects, and then poetry. Thank you for bearing with me.

I often think that the people I love have spoken me into being, that I didn't exist before them and then they saw me and loved me and I became real. Something like The Velveteen Rabbit, that most terrible and wonderful children's story that still makes me uneasy to this day. And while of course this isn't true, because I am a person in my own right wholly separate from the looking and touching of others, I do believe they wake me up. I go through life in a kind of half sleep, hearing and feeling and thinking but removed from things, too, because to be fully awake is too painful. I don't know how to be when I'm so overwhelmed by everything, from the mundane to the miraculous. But I feel awake and present when I love and am loved.

In a recent conversation with a friend about my need for physical touch and my deep enjoyment of people playing with my hair, he said, "I'll be the friend who plays with your hair." It was such a simple and blunt kindness and it took me aback, the acknowledgement that he had something he could offer me that would make me feel better and he was willing to give it. This is a friend with whom there has never been any sort of romantic or sexual tension, one of the few people in my life who has never aroused complicated feelings in me and has never expressed having any of his own, and so I received this offer with gratitude and love and nothing more. I don't know why it feels so revelatory, except that I have been deep in the throes of unrequited romantic love and physical longing and I felt able to take a deep breath from my suddenly loosened chest at the idea that I could have this. Something that wouldn't wound.

The good thing about there being nothing new under the sun is that when you're going through any experience, countless people have gone through it before you and some of them have made art about it, and that art can serve as a kind of bandaging. Protection from the relentless razor blade scraping of sadness. Sierra DeMulder has been a favorite of mine since the first time I read Unrequited Love Poem, the most aptly named and brutally accurate poem about this phenomenon. Specifically, I return again and again to the lines, "My body is a dead language/ and you pronounce/ each word perfectly." I read that and I think, yes, oh yes, no one has ever expressed this feeling better. I didn't know the immense truth of just how much it would change me to find someone who spoke my particular body language and now I don't know how to pretend it didn't affect me the way it did, that I don't think about it constantly and want more.