Day 247 - Resurfacing - Chapter 1.2 - (1025 words)

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resurfacing

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 1.2

I turn away from her hurt by the interacting with the memory of someone long gone, the thoughts and feelings that have coalesced into a new person inside of me, one that feels real and for me is real. I know I can't hold on to this, I know it's a creation of my own, my pain made flesh my desire made whole and yet I still set it against me.
That was how she was, there was no knowing which way the hammer blow of her attention would fall. It was on me or it was near me, but when she turned on me for good or ill it had a devastating effect, set my heart racing. I never thought of it at the time, but in years to come when relationships came and eventually went I could tell that this was the way of the man and woman on the surface of things. Like dreams love hurt more and felt more than reality should have. Love is like a dream that way, emphasising and exacerbating everything until you can't bear it.
No wonder Romeo and Juliet killed themselves, I could not stand it at their age and they were younger than we were at the time. They might have been fictional but Shakespeare knew something about pain and about dreams. You didn't have to look to far for the over dramatised painting with words that made us feel more than we ever should.
What evolutionary forces developed love in us? What situation singled out the genes that create and maintain these obsessions with owning and controlling over beings, where is the advantage in that, evolutionarily speaking. They say that God is love but also that he is a jealous God, and all that gels with my experience of the emotion and we supposedly made in his image. It all feels a bit cruel though and I can't see why either camp is right or wrong, and frankly it doesn't matter. My pain is real and the underlying belief system that supports that emotion is irrelevant. God or genetics, neither has made a step to negate my pain and soothe my out of control imagination.
“Philosophy? Heresy more like it.” She is mocking me again, I wonder why she must do this to me, like she always had done, but inside my mind there was no escape. Not that I would ever have tried to escape, if I was honest with myself.
“Honesty? There's a novel thought.” she says.
“You could not leave me even one?” I respond, turning to see her and there again the hammer pounds at my chest. Illusion or memory, she seems an all too solid flesh to melt.
“You can't, so I can't.”
Now that makes some twisted sense doesn't it? I step towards her and she opens an arm to encircle me once more, and with the movement of clothes I get her scent on the air. It's twenty years on and it still comes on me like the summer breeze. What a cliché I must be, reminiscing of the smell of a sixteen year old girlfriend, reliving the past and wearing it on my sleeve.
Thank god there's no one around to see it.
“Oh you're a believer now?” Her eyebrow is as arched as her voice.
“Oh shush. You know it's just an expression.”
“How do you feel now?” She asks me sincerely and it catches me off guard, because she had been jabbing at me, pricking at my pride and self image then following it up with the hay-maker to the chin and showing how she cares really. I try to pull her in closer to answer, not with words but with a physical language, not lust but something intimate that binds me to her, her to me.
“No.” she says and it feels like she is fading to smoke in my arms just then and a panic takes over.
“Don't leave.” I wanted to beg and plead, but what emerged was a squeak.
“You can't hug it out. It doesn't work like that.” She says sternly.
“Tell me how it works, tell me what to do. I'll do it. I'll do it all.” I sound like a petulant child. This is some kind of emotional puberty where my voice breaks and changes uncontrolled and unfiltered by common sense and the walls we construct to hide our weaknesses with age and wisdom.
“Hold still.” She says and there is stillness that flows out from her form, like a mist creeping over me, not felt bodily but sensed by it's lack form rather than any physical element. Momentum is an oddity of physics and motion, you have it and you feel it but if you try to examine it then it is gone. It's the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, you cannot know the velocity and the position at the same time. I feel like that now, I am moving through life and I am on a trajectory, but I want to know why I am going this way and where I am going to. As soon as I stop, the momentum is gone and the direction is meaningless. The only way to examine myself is to surrender to it and let myself be taken.
It's not about the journey, it's about the destination. When I am there I can look back and see the road I travelled, but now I and inside a forest and the trees are in my view.
“Were you this mad when I was alive?” She laughs at my way of seeing my world and it chills my love a little, her to see me and expose me as a fraud.
“It works for me, what do you care how I see things? How I can make sense of this nonsense we call life.”
“Bloody hell, there is no stopping you is there?” She rolls her eyes at me and despite the hurt I can take her comments and know that the embarrassment I feel is fully justified.