The Opposite of Death

Life inside the sap world

Constancy lulled me with his promise of security. A dull, hazy, warm world of consistency. Like amber liquid dribbling around me to envelop me, capture me, to smother me with its fragrant honey substance. Safe and cloistered. Sticky and stuck. Looking out from my amber chamber I could see the world through sepia tones, shot with a golden glow. Distorted shapes, patterns and objects would tantalise me with their suggestive forms. Floating, flaunting, teasing they would hover and sway, waver and flee. Away from my window of perspective, out of my tiny sphere. I cannot move, only watch those shadows. Those shadows are the unknown, the tempting, ominous, thrilling existence outside of my sap world. And they haunt me, relentlessly.

The metamorphosis

How was it that my relationship with Constancy became like that of brother and sister? This thought has been preying on my mind. I suppose that the principal question is whether this is always an inevitability or if it is a state that can be avoided or postponed, hopefully indefinitely. I think it suddenly struck me that, at such a tender age, I should not feel comfortable within such a dynamic: an ironic word, since it is also an entirely unsuitable adjective to use in regard to a relationship I rejected owing to its stagnation. Filial affection was something I assumed would be reached at some point in the distant future. So I caught myself out, convincing myself at such a youthful stage in life that it was better to be married to a friend than throw my fragile self into the unpredictable jaws of passionate Love. Passion is ephemeral, so why waste time preserving, or even seeking, it? Life seems to conspire against me at times like this: times when I have made stubborn assumptions and protestations. We shall show her. Let us shatter her warm and tangled little world of comfortable thoughts. So my safe and cloying cage was ripped open and I was thrown out of it, to be faced by my most deadly adversary: Desire. And so followed the realisation that this is the opposite of Death, as I would have suffocated in that tiny sanctuary and slowly withered.

I want to avenge Constancy for my hedonistic moments. Sharp point piercing and dragging through soft flesh. Soothes, assuages anger. I shall feel pain, as you do. I shall endure. I shall pay, Repent! Forgive me, though I do not deserve it. The happiness I felt was not mine to have, I owe you pain, suffering. To feel as you do, that would be my lot, it is what I have bought, what I must pay for. Atonement. I'll have none of it, I do not deserve your forgiveness. Despair has been hiding, pushed into the dark, ignored and mocked, but she is creeping forth once more, moving quicker as she reaches closer. Confident in her inevitable conquest. Four years ago I knew what would drive me away from you. Yet, it wasn't right for me to leave you until now. Why? The same happened before. I am not afraid of confrontation, there is something intuitive that holds me back until the right moment. Why? Am I being forced into knowledge through experience even though I am aware of what the future will hold? Does my stubbornness wish to prove my intuition wrong? And yet it never is. So why do I persist? It is as if I have Cassandra and her critics in my head at once! Damn this perpetual inner battle, I want to rest, to be happy, or simply indifferent. I am afraid to write down what I know the future will hold, to pin it down, to commit it to black and white, to make it fact. What if I am wrong? Would it transform into a self-fulfilling prophecy when an alternative path could have been sought? Do I indulge in resignation? No. I fight, and that is probably my problem. Am I supposed to submit? How would I ever learn if I did that? Perhaps I am looking at this all in the wrong way. Ugh, I am ambivalent.

Of course, Guilt was inevitable and would not release me from her sickeningly latent grasp for some time. So I found myself swung violently from Ecstasy to Desperation until she had satiated her appetite upon me. Despite this abusive maltreatment, Desire would not succumb and so remained, stealthily drugging me with his seductive cocktail of emotional opiates.

I will miss you tonight. Miss your smile. Miss your laugh. Miss your look. Miss your arms. Miss your kisses. No warm body to curl itself around mine. No embrace to keep me close to you all night. No warm breathe against the back of my neck. No legs to tangle with mine so we forget precisely which part belongs to which separate being. Warmth, I long for warmth. Warm lips. Warm skin. Hold me. Hold me before I disappear. Before I evaporate, before I become cold, unfeeling, without desire. Before I sleep and flee into another world, a temporary wraith. I thought about you so much today and missed you, missed you so much. I have so much to look forward to and so much to enjoy. But it was all mildly tainted by your absence. Beautifully so though, I could lose myself in a reverie full of you and find blissful, happy remembrance therein. Escapism and impatient anticipation. Sunday is too far away! I hope you are having ridiculous amounts of fun and aren't missing me too much. Love is creeping up on me so deliciously and I will not resist, I never do, I refuse. I shall willingly become His victim again and pay no heed to caution or good sense, I shall sacrifice myself to Him entirely and observe the results with avid interest. I shall acquiesce for as long as possible. I shall learn, I shall grow, I shall feel and perhaps I shall even keep.

The conquest of Desire

And so Desire had conquered me: I who had insulted and refuted His worth. Still, somehow I felt my position was precarious and the lack of control both petrified and seduced me with its hedonistic allure.

Should I stop holding back? You appear to have dispensed with caution and allowed to yourself to feel, unceasingly and utterly. You have been open and ingenuous with me and for that I am so very grateful, even if hearing your doubts and moments of trepidation has made for anxious and pain-tinged listening. You see, I desire nothing but total love and devotion, as I will readily offer up myself. All that I am and all that I can give will be yours, from the next time I can be held by you and look into your eyes and tell you that I am yours entirely and you may do with me as you wish. I am powerless to resist this now, I will submit to overwhelming emotion and damn the consequences. For the first time ever I feel the danger in this, this suicidal plunge into love - the only way I know how to love. It means that the high points will leave me dizzy and breathless, as though from altitude induced oxygen deprivation. But it also means the lows are unbearable, frighteningly unendurable. Why must my emotions be so extreme? I do try to look upon it as a gift, a gift that enables me to experience life on an almost supernatural level. I am aware that many people view this ability as being childlike, if not naive, and I can understand this very well. I have never lost the propensity toward marveling at the beautiful, the unusual, the fantastic, the romantic and the melancholic. However, I haven't the veil of innocent ignorance obscuring my vision. I am not naive. I have hope. The difference is significant. I am not afraid.

It was inevitable that I should begin to analyse and rationalise the events that had taken place, once the initial, giddy infestation of Love had abated a little.

I have been awash with emotion for so many months now. It started to set in sometime around halfway through Spring and it was utterly inexplicable at the time. Now I can see how such a state caused, sparked off, and invited so much of what has taken place since. It was highly confusing for a while but in retrospect I can see the chain and how it all relates to that sudden onset of a high emotional state. I do not know from where it originated, I just remember that feeling was the first indicator - almost as if some one were preparing me for a complete emotional overhaul. It forced me to question and as a result made me re-assess everything in my life and face up to the inevitable changes that had to arise from dissatisfaction. I was so close to descending into depression, I knew my mental health was far from at its best. All that compulsion toward escaping, running forever, craving solitude. All the insane thoughts and mood swings and all the hallucinating - not good. I know that you cared, Constancy, I know you were tired, I didn't want to trouble you and I wanted to be left alone. Don't question me! As much as I loved you and knew you would try to understand, I was also painfully aware of your limited, black-and-white view of everything. I'm sorry, that's not an insult, you are a wonderful person in so many ways and there are so many reasons why I cannot deserve you. You need some one who will simply love you and look after you. I fluctuate too much, I crave too much, I despair too much. And that is the crux of it: I am too much. How can I expect anyone to handle me? Strange how the first thing I laid eyes upon when I looked up was a reproduction of Atlas holding the globe on his titanic shoulders. Poor Atlas. I could not inflict such a burden upon anyone else. How are you shoulders bearing up, Desire?

An uncomfortable and oft unwanted bedfellow of Desire is that slithering sickness known as Envy. Having never needed to consider the past of Desire before, I was suddenly confronted with a multitude of unfamiliar individuals, whose part I had to consider.

Strange, your keepsakes. Your remembrances. What do they all mean to you? Are they hovering relics of procrastination? I can well appreciate the reluctance to dispose of such little gems of fond recollection and ardent adoration, but why not consign them to a beloved box or somesuch precious storage space? Do not think me jealous or heartless. I well know such attachment and privately foster tokens of memorial Love myself. Sitting there surrounded by them dwarfs me, engulfs me, until I feel assimilated into the mixture. I am one of them. Aquatic me, hanging there in the pool of time, a memory myself, a piece of nostalgia. The pictures eye me with contemptuous suspicion, even the written word faces me with cognisant accusation. You are His for now, in the present tense, but will you fall from grace and join us? Are you so proud and presumptuous, so assured of your current position that you will never share in our fortune? So, you believe you will not deign to sit on this wall, with us, one of the many. Faceless, voiceless, wordless, that sardonic resonance. A sneer but no mouth to form it. My own paranoia fueling it.

The battle won

However, such parasitic thoughts could not survive long once influenced by the softening flutter of reassurance from Love. Then I slipped achingly back into the warm soothing environs of Desire, who once again had me in His thrall.

I wait here in sweet and anxious anticipation. Dwelling upon our passion and my deep love for you. My ears are finely tuned to recognise any strange sound and interpret it as your arrival. My heart leaps in a sickening convulsion before my, only slightly cooler, head can rationalise the sound and eliminate you as the much longed for source. At any moment you could interrupt and the imminence excites me. No, those sounds are not you. Beautiful you. I await your presence, your close physical presence, your skin that feels like you and smells like you. You are a sensory delight and I shall gorge myself upon you. Oh sick, depraved, sensualist me. I must indulge my desire and revel in it.