about jewels

today while minding my own business, that is, wrestling with a self imposed deadline in a attempt to preempt total panic later when the real deadline falls, the phone rings. i pick it up and on the other side is one of my dearest friends, colleagues, lovers. you name it, he is it to me or has been at some time. because he spent five weeks in a de-stressing therapy clinic and i have myself been up in the air quite a bit, it has been a total of eight weeks since we have seen each other, or so he tells me. for my part i have not really been keeping books.

a couple of weeks ago i buzzed him on email and got an answer with contents that roughly translated that he was not yet ready to talk to me. i mailed back that he should take his time, after all, that is all that is really his, his time. not having an expectation or anticipation as to how much time he needed for himself, i also put the whole to rest. i love him dearly, intensely, even passionately but i also have the same attitude towards my work. when he rang today, i was both surprised and pleased.

he told me about his experience at the clinic and that is a story that is not mine to tell. i shared with him the events of my last eight weeks. it was on sharing those events with him that i became aware of how very much has happened in this life of mine during the past eight weeks. that feeling that i had four weeks ago after returning from a week over-there-somewhere attending to matters close to my heart, is not a feeling, it is an attitude, a way of being and living. it is relatively new, change has taken place in this life of mine. that bit about me not recognizing my life since is real.

roughly one week ago i met with a dear soul who this summer populated my carnal distractions and when the animal who i am decided that also good affairs must one day come to an end, he decided that i am a cold blooded bitch. in our most recent meeting i could barely recognize the man, and i wondered who that person there talking to me was, he seemed so foreign. i cared so very little for his troubles and tribulations. i wondered why on earth i had even bothered to call him up when i passed his office. yet, i remember well one moment earlier this past spring when this man touched me, and i ingested a wonderful drug. i knew that it was a drug, it is a drug that i have taken before, it was the abysm of falling in love. we do fall in love with our own neurosis, and so it is also with me. the love affair with the own neurosis, is however therapeutic, if not narcissistic. what a delightful choice the psyche gives you, you fall in love and then you may choose therapy or narcissism. the choice is yours, it always is. on occasions i forget this so very basic bifurcation in every day life.

it was in my week away one month ago that i faced that choice once more. i went for therapy, and i felt like a total fool. imagine me having this man whom i very much like, and whom i admire, right there sitting next to me. imagine me sensing his presence, imagine me feeling insecurity. mine or his, it really did not matter. then i feel him pulling back and away, i turn around and tell him exactly what all of his tossing, doing and bending activates in me. then imagine the two of us alone in the privacy of his kitchen a few weeks later. imagine him calling me yesterday with a wonderful stratagem just to talk but having not much to say. it takes so little to make me happy. our call lasted less than ten minutes, and i was delighted, even satisfied. satisfaction sounds perverse now; perverse is the very idea that the seducer is now being seduced. yet our egos are so very delicate and brittle. shattered egos make for very deep neurosis. being the fool whom i am, once more i wrote to him again... and again i felt like a divine fool. i like being a fool at this point. i have given up all pretense of wisdom, enlightenment, or for that matter common sense. i am as i am so be it.

at the end of our phone conversation today my friend and i were bubbling. while we were not looking for it, we have found a deep friendship. he told me about his therapy, his falling in love, his needs, his life's errands. i shared with him my struggles, my falling in love, my fascination with the muses, my passion for life. we concurred on the matter of sharing a bed with each other.