Birthday Lasts
Early this morning a House Sparrow broke through the crack in my window and darted around my bed. I was alarmed! But then, when it began to crash into me and tear tiny beakfulls of flesh from my thin neck, scalp, lips and shoulders, relief flooded through. This pain, sharp and direct, was silencing the mouthless internal ache of grief, shame and loss.
Loss? Destruction? Succumbing to sickness. Excuses.
I had never known empathy and so my caring for people was circumscribed by material concerns. At 19, as I sipped my Milo supper, I told my best friend that she was a fool to believe that anyone ever cared about anything but themselves and that she had better learn to look out for herself. Survival. All my relationships were for and about this. What could this person do to further my nutritional needs? How could they help me pay my rent? Could I use their computer? In fact, she was there because she paid half the rent. So I tolerated her.
This structured my life. Entirely. My pleasure was in perfecting survival, a dissonant orchestra of compulsions and deprivations.
Until I met you and everything fell apart.
You pulled out of me a powerful empathy. I could see how you were like me. A real living, deeply emotional person.
I was overwhelmed. Dazzled within the newness of reciprocal love. But still trapped between my survivalism and this shocking, healthy reason for relationship. I coped by weaving the two together. Offering everything I could that was kind, from shelter to home cooking as a counterbalance to the powerful foreign feelings you evoked. The pain I felt when you hurt, the concern I felt for your well-being – I can’t adequately describe how unwieldy these felt inside my small body. It devoured me. Who was I fooling? Unreality mixed with love and I fell all over myself trying to move ahead by silencing what I believed to be my own selfish and poisonous needs. Blind and mappless, I kept slamming into my needs and desires anyways. So I acted horribly. I built one more perfect Barbie house for us to pose in with plastic smiles awaiting joy. I even had us clean once a week, just like I did for my Barbies.
You told me again and again that this was not the way. But I was trapped within cycles of emotional repression, sex secrets, guilt and responsibility for your happiness. I felt sure this was the only corrective to my vileness and it drained everything out of me.
It is no surprise I suppose that these movements lead here. To enjoying death by small bird. My desperate need to survive is closed, is a curse I now oppose with bird. The love that transformed my world is now poisoned by my inexperience and sickness having triggered your necessarily protective dissassociations. The only person I have ever wanted to protect from pain and harm is horribly hurt and damaged by me.
Of course, I have known terrible grief in my life: The loss within denial of my father. The hollowness of my mother. And now I can place another notch on my grief belt. Meeting your soul mate and bashing them out of your life with your weakness and disease.
Hopefully this expresses cleanly what I have already tried to say: I am not to blame but I still accept and own tremendous responsibility. We finally found our familiar voice by revealing all our old tricks without restraint. I miraculously opened up about so many things. The crucial opportunity to have emotional integrity feels like a cure. There are more things but, imperfect as I am, it is okay and I know I will get to them.
Today and every day you deserve honesty, integrity and openness to surround you. I gave you some of that but, of late, more consistently services and stuff.
I always loved birthdays because it was the one day I left my sickness behind and let myself say what I felt.
Plan a celebration equal of you. Something astoundingly good and beautiful. (and you know I don’t just mean your cock).
Happy Birthday.
