My fictional version of her is named Adrienne. The names have been changed to protect the not so innocent. A lie to protect Adrienne.
I chose the name Adriene out of my hat of a very real Adrienne of history. Read about her if you need to. She was the wife of Count Lafayette. A freedom fighter she stuck with him while he wasted away in prison for all his struggles for liberty.
Love is a four-letter word that no one believes in. That might be right. I would like to prove this wrong. I would like to do a lot of things but most of my dreams are shadows of a life I could have had, Ghosts. Ghosts that haunt the dark corridors of my crimes against love. I can write about ghosts. It's also said that more people believe in ghosts and UFOs than they do in gods or love. I want to say that I don't believe in love, ghosts or give a shit about UFOs either. But I would be lying (with the exception of UFOs... I still don't give a shit about them). I'm too old to tell lies now.
Love was a vision of her that is as real as any ghost, so we are even.
I will stop lying and tell the truth.
A
dear friend once told me to be careful of what I think because thoughts have
density. The truth I will tell had density. I am not afraid of it or whether
anyone will read or want to read what I write. I don't care. I need to be
honest. I have experienced obsession and I've experienced love. Obsession is
hell, and love, while not heaven, is a better deal.
Everyone is so afraid to be honest with themselves, for shit's sake.
Today our youth... hate to say it but I will, since I am being honest. It seems to me that contempt for parents who hovered... loved them too much, or abused them to victimhood, entitled them to such a degree that they don't want the bodies they were born with or even know what sex and/or sexual orientation to choose, and what lives they want to live.
The internet adventures they go on are little more than ones for selfies with exotic backdrops that are no longer exotic. A thousand Alexandria Libraries are being burned within the confines of plastic boxes in hand-held devices by a pornography of places and things that forget - or ignore - or exploit the people who eke out a living there and pretend to be in touch with an inner reality. There isn't a place on the planet where a thousand selfies haven't been taken by social media influencers. There is a blandness to adventure that died with love.... and gods, and faith in anything but a mockery of themselves. They don't seem to recognize that they are just an insignificant fraction of the seven-and-a-half-billion egos banging about on this rock hurled through space a billion years ago.
All of this effort, children, for a piece of the action, and most have no clue why or what for. Not saying I do either.
I feel as though I am a borderline sociopath. My whole life has been a curriculum of lies. At the drop of a hat, I will lie before it hits the ground. This can be when the truth is more interesting, and my reflex is that it, the truth, is no one's business but my own. It was once a talent I could rely on. That is until I was too tired to cover for lies.
See,
I lied. I lied about promises of love. I lied about sex. I lied about God. I
lied about caring for others. I lied about all of that and more. That is, until
I met her, Adrienne. It has been over twenty-five years since I last saw her. Later in year I
have had a caring, loving and somewhat honest nine-year relationship with a sweet woman right up to the day she died. That whole time she knew that the reason I could love her the way I did was due to the obsession,
turned into love, that I still had for Adrienne.
I
am honest because something happened when I craved Adrienne's love in return for
mine and didn't get it. Then one September night on a journey into the heart of
darkness, I came out like Gilgamesh, a man stripped of the ability to be
anything but honest, if not with others, but with myself. What had touched me?
What spirit moved me? There is no doubt in my mind that it was the heart of compassion for her beyond
any smarmy concept of romantic love. I saw her suffering and pain as the same
as mine. Oh my God, was that a revelation!
No comments:
Post a Comment