Every week, Ira Glass of This American Life fame makes my life a little bit sweeter by doing a variety of stories on a common theme. This weekly podcast/broadcast is something I can count on, and, like clockwork, it streams down into my dear iTunes every Monday for me to collect and enjoy on the long road to Memphis.
Should it be any surprise to me that sometimes, like dear Ira's show, my life has a theme? This week's theme has been reiterated twenty times over, and we've barely crossed noon, but it's clear to me what solitary, secret message our planet is trying to beam into my mind today: everyone wants to touch and be touched in a way that reminds them of their first experiences with love and passion.
Officemate has a daughter turning sixteen, and she worries that it is time to have the birth control talk. There was a special this morning about cougar celebrities and how older women and younger men just make sense sexually. Liv Tyler's early virgin movie, Stealing Beauty, came on television this weekend. I, on the other hand, started my emotional experiment into the private lives of lovers yesterday.
I looked at dear Dustbunny in the afternoon sun when we were lying beside our pool and admiring all of the hard work I did in the yard Saturday. He sat silent and still, and, like it has always been with my quiet man, I felt like he was an utter mystery to me. I asked, "Do you ever get excited about me anymore? Is there anything between us that makes you utterly and completely drunk with passion for me?" Cryptically, he said, "Well, of course I do," and he returned to his face-tucked-under-cap nap in the sun, and I slipped back into my book.
Sure, I've said it here, and I'll say it again: our life is beautiful, and nearly every day I send happy thoughts to the natural power I perceive around me for the blessed existence I've landed. (This power is the same earth hum that makes me feel slightly less atheist and more agnostic.) After a decade together, however, the very rational part of me understands that daily passion is not natural. (Should I put a question mark here?)
There was this boy I knew once from summer camp when I was a teenager. After sending love letters state lines away, he flew in from North Carolina to visit me the summer after we met. The best way I can describe that early love feeling that his presence blew into my small town is to say that it sounds like Iron and Wine's "Naked As We Came." We spent the morning after my parents left for their respective factory jobs making out in my bedroom floor. I return to that memory when I need to remember how sweet early physical experiences can be.
And, then again, there is something quite delicious about coming through the back door of our home on a weeknight and finding the man I love--whose mysteries I can never fully perceive--standing at the stove with a dinner ready just for me.
Monday, April 27, 2009
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2 comments:
it really is something to look at someone (someone you sleep with every night and someone you've spent more waking time with than anyone else) and think that they are this impenetrable force. Sometimes I feel that this mystery is so beautiful, and sometimes it makes me want to break down and cry. Why can't I know someone? The heartbreaking but logical converse of this: I can't be known either. It kills.
this is of course, being with someone. the struggle, i guess it never really changes, but the constant wonder of if what you have is good enough, if it's right, if you're doing the right thing. feeling one thing, wondering if you should feel another, thinking maybe you want to feel even a third other thing, all in the same moment, while you talk to someone and make plans for dinner and criticize the way you dress and imagine them holding your hand while you lay in a bed in some hospital somewhere and die.
how is it that we can do so many things at once
i really like what you wrote
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