(3)

Often lately I've wished that I could learn to be a simpler sort of person, that I could learn how to live a simpler, a more "normal," sort of life.  I've wished that I could learn to enjoy all the things that normal people enjoy, that I could find myself a group of friends to hang out with, to do things, have fun, with.  Most of all I've wished to find a lover.  The shared talk and laughter, the touch of another body, the feel of flesh on flesh, the slow intertwining of my life with the lives of other human beings, and with one special other human being, ought, I thought, to prove the best way in which to explore what being human is all about.

I have been on the lookout for a lover everywhere.  Every time I've gone to the grocery store, to the drug store, to the library, to the bank, I've searched for him; every time I've gone into work I've waited and watched for him to walk through the door.  But I have not found him.  Perhaps our paths have crossed and I've simply not noticed.  Or it may be that the man of my dreams managed at some point to catch my eye, but did so at that one moment when I was least expecting it, was least prepared – and I was so startled, so disarmed by the chance, so dismayed by the timing of it, that the moment just . . . slipped away.  Opportunity sometimes comes with such unnerving suddenness, and disappears again with such an unreasonable rapidity, that I am not always able to take advantage of it:  frustrated desire is my reward.  Ironically, the frustration of my desire only fuels it to ever greater heights, and over the course of weeks and months the disappointment left in its wake has become a burden that's left me chronically irritated, depleted of hope and exhausted by a sense of futility.  In the end, I decide that life is too fickle in its external machinations and so determine that the threshold of my exploration must not lay in that direction after all.  Rather, my path must lay, as it has always lain for me, in the exploration of my own inner being.  It may be that my inability to connect with other people merely betrays some basic developmental lack; I don't know.  I cannot know, really.  I am simply, for better or worse, what I am.  But I've allowed my desire, my need, for a lover to slowly dissipate.

This "dissipation" of desire seems to be a hallmark of my life just now.  My need for friendship has also dissipated.  When I examine my life more closely, I find that there is no one I know with whom I'd want to be on more intimate terms than I already am.  I turn now instead, as I did in my loneliness as a boy, to books for my friends.  I find them richer in possibility, denser in meaning, more honest and more giving, than most of the people I know.  I've found my need for exploration through drug use slipping away as well.  Looking back over my long indulgence (of marijuana mostly), I find that the dreamy intensity it afforded me has yielded little of lasting value.  Its rapture is keen but artificial, leaving nothing behind but the anticipation of the disenchanted lover, wearily awaiting the next cloying embrace.  In place of these needs – all of which resolve themselves, one way and another, into a desire to find some context within which I might comfortably exist – I seem to find myself instead resenting more and more whoever or whatever it was that caused me to feel such needs to begin with.  I seem to be resolving myself back to my beginnings, back to that mental quest I first embarked upon so long ago, when I was a child.  All I wanted to know then was:  Who am I, what am I, all external shaping forces aside?  Ironically, a sort of indirect attack seems to be called forth, through my resentment, towards myself.  For I know now that the youthful anger I felt towards my parents, towards the educational system that tried so hard to make me part of the status quo, towards all of society's ideals (and all of the hypocrisies which undermine them), was misplaced.  Fundamentally my anger is more self-involved than this; for has it not always been my belief that, at the deepest level, it is I myself who am the one essential causal agent of my own happiness or unhappiness, as shaped within this particular amalgamation of space and time?  I begin to long now for nothing more – and nothing less – than a meeting with my own true self, and to ponder on how I might best bring this about.

There is a tremendous storm blowing through town tonight.  The wind shrieks round the house; the windows rattle; the very roof shakes as if it were going to be ripped off.  The lights go out and then blink back on again; somewhere in the distance I hear a siren wail.  The wind will sweep the trees clean of leaves tonight; tomorrow they will stand naked, barbed and blackened against the whitening sky . . .

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