When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.
The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.
Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself--no cost,
No past, no people else at all--
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?
philip larkin actually is my god. that cranky old masturbatory librarian.
he is broken and ugly. and i love him. 23 days til i fly out.
i am going to try and write slightly more in here. and start a blog for travelling. the one linked to here, probably not, as it's going to be filled with SMUT and i'd rather keep it nameless and unconnected to people i know, apart from Dom.
we got tattoos last week; dom a line from a nick cave song on her ribs, and me, a line from Aubade, by Larkin, on mine. we are going to get more next weekend. it is sort of a birthday thing. i am almost 27, and what am i doing with my life? i know. getting tattoos with my Lady every other weekend and driving to nowra, and not cooking at home.
i dip in and out of blogging. this is my attempt to start again. i'm not sure how fruitful it will be, and if i feel the need to draw back around myself and not let the world into my mind for a bit. i find it hard not to confess and violate those sorts of quiet spaces that One Should Keep To Oneself.
it is under a month until america. and one month exactly until Tucson. this is significant, in a way i'm not sure of, but in a way which makes me both gleeful and embarrassed and apologetic, all at the same time, and leaves me questioning again, how much of an adult i am, and what the Fuck i am doing with myself.
i have a tattoo on of a snake on my arm, i got late last year.
his ex-wife has a snake tattooed on her too - one on her ankle.
the evil of snakes; (not that i think of them as evil - i think of them beautiful, strong, and powerful, but potentially deadly - but they still have a rich, evil mythology that is interesting) - the mythology of evil, that crawling, silent danger, that sums him up.
the last four lines, hissed out, angrily, viciously, ending in 'YOU CAN HAVE THE REST, YOU SNAKE', is how i fucking feel every time i think of him, almost two years on. i saw him for the first time, in a year, the other morning; waiting for coffee with his daughter. his daughter greeted me with a hug - there are under 9 years between us in age, and over 20 between him and i. i wonder about the person i was before him. i wonder about trust, and belief, and not being torn in half. i remember those moments between when he would say he loved me, and then when he's whip back saying he fathered me, and our relationship was doomed; or the months he insisted i meant nothing and he'd leave me for his lover in the US as soon as she'd take him, or as soon as he was ready to leave his youngest, a beautiful kind little boy. (and lies, i feel. he littered his speech with snakish lies...)
i remember the first time he said he loved me - facing away from me as he left my apartment one day. i can't remember if it was a morning, where he snuck back into his house he shared with his wife and slept all day - or if it was after work one day. he muttered it under his breath, like he was ashamed.
one time i couldn't sleep. he called me, and read me the second half of 'waiting for godot' while he stood outside and chain smoked, from his mobile phone to mine. and i fell for him then, and in countless other bitter little moments.
after he'd told me he could never be with me, and that he lied when he said he didn't love her, and that i was too young and too beautiful, and he loved me too much, and i broke into nothing, and i ran away to brisbane, crippled on couches and sobbing in a way i can't even explain, a pain i still can't place - when i got back, he bought my rabbits back to my house. i sat silently in my apartment as he bought up the cages and we placed them in. he looked in the spare room, and told me how he'd fantasised of living in there one day if my housemate left. i sat on the couch, and i just glared. i didn't know what to say to him. and i cried. and he held my hand, looking like he didn't know if he could stay or go; telling me it would stop hurting; (easy for you. you replaced me before you broke up with me. you are scared to be alone, you snake, you snake. you are married with a fourth child, to a woman you told me you thought was pathetic); and you held my hand while i sat there, crumpled on the couch.
and later, you told me that you left in a hurry because just being there, near me, filled you with so much lust you could hardly breathe.
you snake. you. can. have. the. rest, you snake, because you left me with pretty much nothing. and there are parts of me i'll never get back because of you.
if i get married, i want to change my last name. because our initials are the same, and i want that part of me gone. i grew my hair long because you liked it short.
when i saw you, you tried to look through me, and avoid me as much as possible. but i could feel you trying not to look, and that gave me a sick sense of satisfaction.
and yes, i wish you the best, you snake. you crawling along, scales to the ground. your hair is greyer, and your bald spot is bigger. you are as attractive as you always were. i am glad i was nowhere near you, because i cannot tolerate your presence. i hope you are fucking happy, you miserable son of a bitch. and i hope you die alone.
it is hard, to describe in words, something that is, in honestly, nothing more than words.
can i re-use words that have been used in this context to make sense of it? or am i just an idealist? do i just have an overactive imagination? am i drawing this out of nothingness again? i like to live in words; it's a habit i fall into in darker times, over and over again.
but this is not dark. i have my Dom, and my house. i have my place, i have my job, and a world that's real. it's not like this is filling nothing.
and i know, i'm stopping the gaps. this is not ideal. this is JUST an ideal. sate it, elizabeth. make it solid. you have done this before. and i don't want it to end the same.
oh oh oh. i do not sense sense. i do not sense it well. i walk in the dark because i blind myself, and gleefully try and find my way through with hungry fingers. and now they are left with the keyboard, and they bring you out, into me. and i wonder. and i raise my eyebrows, and i feel, yes, like a fool. like a small hungry fool.
but you know, i am an optimist, i think, in some ways. maybe this time, things are different. ha.
ok, going to try and keep this a little better this time. not sure how to, however. need a better bibliography Thing. put them in endnotes? maybe i could have a word document of them.
- 5.1
5.1
6.1