Don't Cancel Nini

**I am coming back to life. A month of life-affirming activities and aimless drifting from friends to friends, partying for my life and many late nights and early mornings to watch the sun come up.

I have fixed my gaze upon Mount Tam, the Golden Gate Bridge, Ocean Beach and the Sun and Moon, Mars, the horizon, shooting stars.

I have contemplated my losses, closed my ranks and opened my heart. I have cried to myself and to the universe for the love I have lost this year, while simultaneously thanking the heavens for the love I am yet blessed with.

I would describe this sadness thus:
staring out the window
waiting for your love
waiting for his footfall, his voice, his arms
to wait without end
as the anxiety and desperation rises and falls
the endless cigarette
as the hour grows later and longer
hoping with every rustle and sound


but my love will not return to me
though he is here in my heart and memory
our potential will not be realized
except in my fevered and tortured imaginings
where and what would we be now
if he didn't have to go
if this had never come to pass

I am not angry with Time or Love
I am not angry at all
The future of love I am now denied
wrings and wrestles the cries from me
walking through this life amidst the others
who have their arms full of one another

There is a feeling of abandonment
That he should fly to the clouds with out me
That he should leave this earth
full of our joy
in the end we are selfish
how can we not be?
and yet i wished (how could I not?)
that we had passed on together
that I had been in the plane
to check out at the height of love

I know there is more to my story
I am yet a student of this life
with more to learn and love and give

Attachment, desire, that void which needs Love
I must let go, let flow
the impermanence
What have I lost which cannot be regained?

but i had a taste of what it was to make love, truly.
in a way in which i was not an object or a subject.
i was There. Held and caressed and loved in a way which
allowed me to abandon on previous notions of my sexual self. And just be a creature of love, a mate, precious, passionate, emptiness being filled by 2 energies creating a sacred space of intimacy where I felt yes, that I finally belonged to someone, and that someone belonged to me. I needed no fantasy to fire me, only his body, his arms, his skin, his scent.

That kind of love is the ultimate perversity, the riskiest fetish.

I remain, as always, a wandering spirit ISO the right heart to call my home, the right arms to hold me,
and a love stronger than all these disconnected rituals
and fetishes which simply protect me from the realest intimacies.

I know my future has much in store.
I know about dopamine and high compatibility.
I know about idealizing past relationships.
I know that Barry and I were not perfect.

But I know what I had with him, and that my heart twists to
see the Golden Gate Bridge knowing that he is not waiting for me on the other side.
I know that is over-sentimental and a phobia I create myself.
I know Death is just a horizon beyond which I cannot see.
I know the Secret Joy is the Mastery of Pain.


I know. I know I scoffed at love.
And I know now that I have tasted the real deal,
I feel my desire only more whetted to find it again,
and helpless in knowing that it is so rare.

It's all ephemeral and delicate in this world.
Enjoy each emotion and experience like a Connoisseur.