culture fix

**

I feel like I must be really lost. I can’t remember where my solid ground might be.

I tried to love a woman once. We tried to build a life together. We broke each other’s heart, and then spent years ripping apart whatever remained holding us together. I felt like I had to claw my way out. Still, I fell back into her embrace with a reckless passion like nothing else. Not just once, but again and again, I threw all of myself into devouring her, being devoured by her. She told me she could use her body to heal me, her, us. In reality, ours was a mournful, desperate cry, a mutual and inescapable howling. I wanted it more than any other thing, and I wanted more when I was done.

**

I told myself that I had finally learned how to love one person – and just one person – deeply, reliably. I had tricked myself for so long that only a short success was necessary, that I was started to believe in the potential of long-term results. In short, I have walled off portions of myself, attempting to leave a portion intact that is worthy of respect. I asked her to facilitate my frailty, and how could she have complied?

It has taken me a long time to register just how deeply I was crushed by our failure to maintain a certain level of cohesion, passion. I still have not said how much I mourn the passing of our fluid, fluent desire. We fall into each other like well-rehearsed characters, sometimes even pulling off our parts, but something has died. And rather than allow the death to stink up everything, I have let it rot within those parts of myself that survived the walling, and there is little room left to be respectable.

**

For all my attempts to cajole myself into adulthood, I still love like a child. Privately, I laugh haughtily at the adults and persist in my boycott of manhood. To your face, I am trying to learn how to be reliable, decent, strong. Each night before I sleep, I am flooded with a desperate longing for connection. What would it be to hug every woman I’ve ever felt drawn to? What if I did make love a thousand times, with a hundred different women?

I hurl scorn at my old lover for bringing a man into her bed every night; but what else should she do? Who should hold her the way she needs to be held? Don’t I simply wish that it would be my hands wrapped around her naked skin? And don’t I get to be held, too? Is it ok to demand such a thing?