My goodly ghost; and I’m always surprised how nice he is to me, given the animosity that we shared before they dropped him in the mud, visited me two nights ago and provided me yet again with a little bit of useful guidance …but you know it’s hard for me to follow his advice because I’m not good at saying no to things. I’m not good at saying no to things and so I always end up doing all this shit that I’d really rather not do.
My goodly ghost blew the fog off a couple of affairs that I ought to have divested myself of months ago …but somehow I can’t let go and they just keep on lingering and lingering and growing more and more dysfunctional and perverse. Of course I tell myself that I don’t mind the perversity because, after all, the most fucked up emotional states usually lead me to some sort of inspirational thing or another in the long run; after all the requisite boozing and months of lost productivity and probably a few bouts of insufferable madness to exasperate those around whose stable and enviable lives I seem to orbit.
But I apologize for nothing, fuck. I apologize for nothing at five twelve am with my body drained completely of its juices and my back rifted with claw marks and my lips swollen from kisses and my bed reeking of lust. I apologize for no moments wasted yet again on desolate highway sides in the pouring rain hitching my way into oblivion and I apologize not at all for banging on your door drunkenly in the middle of the night and telling you that I loved you or that I hated you.
How can I apologize for telling my heart to you? How can I apologize for hurting you so badly and then winning you over again knowing full well that I was just going to hurt you again? How can I apologize for telling you I wanted you to be mine, knowing full well it would drive you away? I cannot stop myself. I am intoxicated by the prospect of tragedy.
I am a devil and I have a heart made of stone …or so someone told me today.
I am tender and the heartache is too much for me sometimes.
My goodly ghost, in this dream I had, did me an interesting service. He showed me one lover; one for whom I would have given everything if only she would have wanted anything. This one, he told me, is no good for you. He took her by the hand and he led her away, leaving me standing along. He then showed me another lover; one from whom I tried to run more than once, but somehow I always seemed to circle back into her arms. He took her by the hand and he led her away from me. This one, he said, is no good for you. He left me standing alone.
These two figures in my dream, symbols of two directions, physically divided, and yet winding round each other, are inseparable to me. When one bends one way I bend with her and the other then bends with me. Then when the other bends I bend back and the first then bends with me. And though they have never met they bend each other. It is madness, my ghost told me, get away from it.
I reflected as I lay in the early daylight on how some days I was the weak one, constantly pedalling my silly heart as quickly as I could toward each hopeless climb that one lover threw before me …and each time that I barely made it to the top, gasping and wondering at my own stamina, I would suddenly espy with dismay another, steeper, hill rising up before me in the distance. Other days, though, I was the puissant one, throwing up mountains with an effete flick of my wrist and watching my other lover bounding up each climb, never seeming to tire of the labours I set before her. And as I witnessed her suffering and breathless at the crown of each miserable ascent, I looked upon myself and saw myself reflected in my lover. I was as her but only when I was not with her. I wish I could understand how all of this worked, how we seem to magnify our desire in inverse proportion to the seeming retreat of desire in the object of our affection.
Then my ghost led me to another figure, an unexpected one. This third figure leaned into me and delivered me a message that I have been thinking about ever since. There was sense in it.
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