Riding the Waves

I quit working at the highest paying studio I teach for because the woman who owns it is a cruel bitch. I felt euphoric the first day. Everyday since has been up and down. I've thought how much I long to succumb to what the author Milan Kundera calls 'vertigo', a longing to fall...

Yet I don't. I have riffled through the pages of books I read before my mother died, before my mind went a little crazy for a while, because the man I met soon after tried to twist it into an awkward shape, and broke my wings. My wings are healing, but this woman, I let her slow the process down. The chiropractor I saw when I first fell on my head, two days before I began this practice, said I had a broken wing. She showed me how my scapula winged out.

It does not do that now. But my 'wing' is still healing. I found an old Senior Seminar essay on why I make art. I found an English essay on "Tess of the D'Urbervilles". I found a short, but exquisite manuscript of my own, much reworked. These things are treasures from a life I am only just now getting back to 15 years later. But oddly, it wasn't the psychopath who did the most damage, with his decade of stalking me after I left...it was the man who I met later, who left me, then continued to come and see me for sex for years, until I opted for celibacy to break his spell over me. Finally, two weeks ago, I disappeared from his life. For five years no sex, but he called and tortured me in little ways nonetheless.

Reading Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" again after 15 years, not only is a new experience since I am older, but it is helping me to get over the last of my illusions about that man, who really did not love me..

Reading Virginia Woolf's "The Waves", and watching "The Red Violin", "Like Water for Chocolate" and "The Lover" (my very favorite movie), makes me see what I denied to myself and my father as we spoke last night:

I love a man. A man younger than me. A man who is single and unmarried, but whom I cannot see. He thinks I am ignoring him when I look away, but I cannot meet his gaze very often. It burns me like fire, those blue eyes like the center of a candleflame haloed by his golden hair. When he reaches out a proferred hand to me, I feel a ripple like a wave. I take it lightly, as one would hesitate to touch mercury, so toxic is it. Once, last week, I let myself, I allowed myself to feel the texture of his palm, and I was devastated. The very scent of him makes me dizzy and faint, though I have lied to myself and to him...that the dizziness is due to other causes. It isn't.

I swoon for him, like a Victorian lover, who upon seeing a bit of ankle goes wild. I want him so badly I am screaming with the agony of waiting inside. I want his hand across my neck to flutter like a butterfly. I want to turn and kiss his fingertips. To fall backward into his arms. To let him catch me, hold me, make love to me...then hold my hand and let me lean into him. I want press my lips against his neck, and feel them swell with blood before I bite his and draw blood, then lick the wound. And yes, I am angry. Angry that I cannot touch him. Angry that there is no way to ask if he feels the same or if it is my imagination.

I am angry that I love him this much, that I will wait in agony for months to find out, knowing I could be devastated. He may not love me. Yet I think he does. This is forbidden. He'll never say anything. And he shouldn't. And I shouldn't. And he won't. And that makes me yearn like a dog for it's master even more. My practice is sometimes able to assuage the grief and tears of frustration for this and other reasons, but mostly I lie twisted in Bound Lotus, imagining his hands upon my back, his fingertips massaging the ribs where the back of my heart is...opening it. I love him. And the only way I can love him is to see him in everyone, and to just try to love the world.

I have the breath of the wind, the cascading light of the moon, and words from "The Waves" to keep me company:

"The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move."

And I have Chopin's Waltz in B Minor, Opus 69, No. 2. The music, and the waves. I imagine the muscles on his back rippling like those of a great horse, or the waves on the lake or ocean, as just like the waves he withdraws and falls back again, pounding away at the shoreline. I want to take him in like the earth takes in the sky on the surface of the ocean. I want his arms to wrap around me, and mine around him, like the tributaries of the great rivers and oceans, as if we were a great woven Celtic knot. I do not want to see the end or beginning of him or me, but to see us as continuous, without end, like the infinity loop of eternity. I want to love him eternally, and if not him, then the essence of all that exists within each of us. I'd like to love both. To have my love for him be an honoring of the beauty of Truth.