An auto-intervention of sorts

When I was very young I used to play a terrifying game with myself while asleep.  I knew I was asleep but explored fathomless depths where terror dwelt and where I knew there was a point after which I’d not be able to escape, where I’d be trapped in a place like an event horizon at the approach to a quantum singularity.  Now awake I play a similar but all too real game.  Ironically, given what romantic poetry all too frequently expounds, the game involves absolute interpersonal love.  Something with which, approaching too close, I’ve permitted myself to become infected.  They warn us about sexually transmitted diseases but this may be as dangerous.  Perhaps even more so.

Almost daily now I perform a ritual in the form of a bipolar colloquy which goes something like this:

Okay, this has to end, … I know it.  Hell!  Everybody knows it.

 I just can’t make it happen.

 From her perspective nothing’s begun other than perhaps a wonderfully one-sided source for succor.  But perhaps I’m being unfair; impatient.  Perhaps, as she says, she just needs time.  Perhaps she really needs me for things other than the material realities of life. “Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps”, that word keeps echoing, … paralyzing me, polarizing me.

 “Perhaps”, thankfully for me, her age is starting to show, physical veracities to my rescue.  Perhaps, … but probably not.  The question may be “will I continue to perceive her as preternaturally beautiful or will my eyes and brain finally attain an objective relationship?”  My concern is that for me, with reference to her, where love is involved reality is irrelevant.  I’ve long known that her beauty is not what has me trapped, that her beauty is transitory, that the reason I’m lost in her web is utterly intangible.  Unjustifiably intangible.  Damned intangibility!

 Recently she dreamt she was a monster and that only she and I perceived her as beautiful.  I fear that if that were so it would make no difference.  Strangely, that realization comforts me.  It comforts me to know that I really and truly love her.  “Why” I do I don’t understand.  “Why”, when that love seems so completely unilateral.  “Love” as I’m living it, seems to suck and absolute love seems to suck absolutely (paraphrasing the old saw about power).

 “Love”, … perhaps I ought to share my perception as to just what it is, there being so many interpretations:  “Love”, for me, is the residue remaining after attraction and admiration and desire are subtracted but undiminished fascination, undefinable and overwhelming, remains.  “Love” cannot be earned, it just is (or is not).  One falls into it the way one falls into a black hole and escapes, ….  Well, ….

 How does one escape “love”?  Can one escape?  Can one escape by transmigrating one’s soul or is love Murphy’s favorite form of torture from which not even death provides release?

 Interestingly, she (the predicate for my conundrum) recently used a metaphor concerning where she finds herself with respect to a prior relationship, one that apparently failed.  Escaping its consequences has been “like trying to run a marathon in deep, sucking mud” and until she’s run it, she can’t move on.  We both seem to be in the same kind of race, only heading in different directions.

An interesting insight into how absurdly futile my situation is, how absurdly foolish.

I wonder if there is a karma bank and if so whether I’m making payments for past debts or deposits towards savings for future rainy days?

And what about her?

An interesting metaphor forms in my mind, music playing in the background, an old ditty from an old television series, Buck Owens’ and Roy Clark’s Hee Haw:

“Gloom, despair, and agony on me
Deep, dark depression, excessive misery
If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all…
Gloom, despair, and agony on me”

… and I wonder just how my life became the reflection of a million depressing country music ballads when on the surface I seem to have everything a reasonable person could want.

Except, perhaps, ….
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2018; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia although he has primarily lived in the United States of America (of which he is a citizen).  Until recently he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.