Love

Yeah blogging about it again, scramble if you don’t want to hear it, feel free to pick a fight if you need to.

‘I’ve waited all my life to cross this line, To the only thing that’s true,’ – Ryan Cabrera

Well frankly that’s just stupid, wait all you life to fall for someone, to say yes I have no dreams of my own because I haven’t done anything of my own because I was just waiting for you to come along and make your dreams my own.

Wait for someone else? No, and waiting for love is just as bad even if you do get on with your own thing because you’re always thinking shouldn’t I be further along than this, shouldn’t I be doing something with someone else, where is this mythical other person?

And half the time when people are saying that in movies the other person is the one they’re saying it to, course generally in life they’re saying it drooling into their fourth pint of the evening…and if I’m honest, if I’m painfully honest I never expected love so I never really bothered about it and that’s almost as stupid as expecting it to come.

Assuming that this life you’re living is your own, assuming that you can have your own dreams and that you can imagine going anywhere, even to the moon and back, well that thumped me in the head back in Royston Vasey. Imagining you can live without love when you’ve read all the stories, when you know that in all the stories, across every silver screen that flickering shadow hovers ready and waiting to engulf them all, all the characters, thats as stupid as I’ve ever been. Because if you do that, not even knowing that you’re daring that shadow, that hovering silky soft assassin, to act, to pounce and entrap you, then you’re doomed. Then love will creep up on you with her tendrils, slide them softly around your neck and choke you even as you’re asking why is my breath not coming easily, why is this so hard, what’s this around my neck?

And you’ve got no idea what to do, because this was never planned for, this sudden ambush, this all out attack that has you overwhelmed because you never dreamed you’d face it never mind knew what it was or how to defeat it. And then you’re stuck because everyone else has practiced and so it twists and turns within you until it is quite different from the original silky smooth assassin’s garotting wire and is now a poison that seeps through your soul until you can’t remember how you lived without being so sick, and you’re wondering if it will ever leave.

‘I like to see you
But then again
That doesn’t mean you mean that much to me
So if I call you
Don’t make a fuss
Don’t tell your friends about the two of us
I’m not in love, no no, it’s because.. ‘ Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart

I bow to Princess Lex over this one, however much I might admire my Mother-In-Law I can’t pull it off the way she does, I need the sex, the chemistry created, the flirting, and the stupid physicality of kissing in the street, in private, in public, at the front of a bus, on a bed of sharing a bed, a tree, a wall.

But you know a part of me still says that this is the best option. Have love put it’s poisons in the pit of you and deny them, walk upright through the cramps, head for the door when the room is spinning and throw up quietly in the flower beds on the way out.

Chemistry and all the fun of the rest of it sometimes leads the assassin to your door, because once you’ve set yourself up against her she can’t leave you alone, seems like she recalls the joy of catching you completely off-guard that first time and she can’t wait to repeat her partial success. Loving someone is something that is totally different from falling in love with them, I don’t think any of us can quite manage to explain the difference, it’s as though there is an analogue scale of loving, but just near the deepest red of the scale is a trip wire and spike filled pit and thats where you fall.

Deny her to them, but if you deny her to yourself then she’ll set up an ambush like the first time and you’ll be down there, hurled against the spikes and broken. Its amazing the advice I’ve given myself and then forgotten.

See the thing is I get swept away by the romances of everybody else, I mean the idealist in me says that people need to know who they are before they give themselves to someone, and it should be a specific someone not just ‘I want a girlfriend’, just one, any girl will do…
But people like this silken assassin, even breaking on the spikes in her pit they seem to like.

‘Don’t stop me now I’m having such a good time
I’m having a ball don’t stop me now
If you wanna have a good time
Just give me a call
Don’t stop me now’ Queen

I’ve hurt people, I’ve quite seriously hurt people with my relationship to this bitch who hunts and haunts and tries and tries to fell me.I’ve hurt myself. Again and again, over and over bruised and broken and forcing myself up, pulling the spikes and splinters from my arms, face and chest and I’d do it all again. I wish that people didn’t get hurt, I wish that I’d been more responsible when it came to noticing the looks in peoples eyes and the things that they didn’t say… but I would, I’d hurt you all and myself exactly as I did before. I’d scream in the street and be gripped by the shoulders and pull the scabs from the various bruises and grazes and I’d blog, I’d blog and blog about all the things I should never have said until it makes you hate me and I’d shake quiet with tears silently in the corner of houses and streets and know that I asked for it all, quite politely and with flowers in some cases. But I’d do it all, because without the lows we’d never know the highs and there have been such highs and not only mine.

At the end of it all I’m reminded of Quiet Sarah sitting in Royston Vasey and listening to the lies and truths and the rumours bitching about me and never saying a word, but quietly coming to tell me the new round of stupid mind games. I never asked her why she never told the liars she knew that they were false, but one day in May she told me anyway, that it was because she knew that I loved the brilliance of the foolish games, the chemistry that was still sparked though the assassin was denied on both sides.

‘Somewhere along the line, I must’ve gone
Off track with you.
Well, excuse me, guess I’ve mistaken you for somebody else,
Somebody who gave a damn,
Somebody more like myself.’ Jewel

In the end the assassin breaks you down without the aid of spikes or her poison, though it’s been floating sending purple deaths throughout your system, she wears you down and the chemistry breaks through the last defences because you’re too tired to maintain them properly.

To love and tell the person that you are in love with them. I still think thats its stupid, that there are better things to be done and doing. But it has the seduction of a drug, it has the release of some hallucinogen, the warmth of some opiate, the rush of sex about it.

Its the practicalities that the stories never tell you of. Its the practicalities that I prefer, the reality of cups of tea rather than this untrustworthy flying over clouds. Yet the poetry comes better when you’re rushing and flying, the writing is more real when the drug is in your veins causing you to rush, gabble, lose the connections with reality and dance and dance until the stars spin and you fall down alone in the middle of a field of grass and you wake covered in dew in the morning.

The dew in the morning, the headache that has nothing to do with alcohol and the lines and lines of writing that you’ll deny exist to any but yourself, I think that without that ache, pain, discomfort then the cups of tea would be less than they are.

I remain decided:
Love, is the worst thing on the planet. It is also the best. It hurts and hurts and holds and holds. Like the best of lovers, like the best of never-lovers.

I wouldn’t swap my wrestles with the Shadow for anything, but then nor would I give into her, not for boredoms sake, nothing. Not for three pairs of blue eyes or a cascade of red hair, but I’ll declare a truce on account of a pair of brown eyes and a pair of blue-green.

To gain closure over something, over someone, some situation you never realised you needed closure on proves to me at least just how good humans can be at lying to themselves when necessary.