What am I getting myself into that I don’t want out of?
I can’t remember beginning, I can’t conceive of ending. That I am afraid of, that I need, that I find unlike anything I could ever have imagined or anticipated, that I can’t do without, that I don’t know what to do with a cliché.
And what if I said I loved you? What then? To justify some delinquent desire with the confessions of some emotion? You’d know where you stood—right on my feet. It needn’t be anything. But it’s the possibility that leaves us delirious with dull discussions.
This is fairly new. Incurable optimist that I am, I am bravely inclined to think it’s temporary. The hundred-dollar question: “What do we mean to one another?” Afraid the answers won’t support each other. And all this talking around the issue. But what is it? “Let’s define our relationship,” you bastard. I spend my entire epic existence vacillating between extremes and I think possibly this might be changing—but no. What the fuck happened to the in-between? Midway between passive and panicked. I seem to become involved in situations that only allow for tension. I’m beginning to think, “Relaxation is a rumor, a vicious rumor started by a sadistic . . .”
We could come to a full stop now if you think that would help. Because like any other B-movie heroine, I can’t go on like this. Can you understand? I don’t want to hurt you any more than I want you to hurt me. It’s now a question of surviving each other’s company instead of enjoying it.
Trying relentlessly to make you love me, but I don’t want the love—I quite prefer the quest for it. The challenge. I am always disappointed with someone who loves me—how perfect can he be if he can’t see through me?
I can just get so close
Till I begin to suffocate
I must go back to the surface
To breathe
I catch my breath
I manage to breathe
Offhandedly supplying distance
While I seemingly never leave
To compensate
For my lack of honesty
I entertain with distorted truths
My inadequacies and obsessions—
If a personality can be promiscuous
Mine would be quite loose
Try as I might
I can give to you no more
Than I give the next person
Or the last
I set the stage by establishing positions
You are the audience
I—the cast
I try to be somewhat exclusive
Somehow I never quite succeed
We’ll keep in touch
But enough
Is too much
I’ll need new disinterest on which to feed
Of course I’m playing a losing hand
A hand on which I invite you to tread
If only I could love someone
But I’ve chosen to love
Anyone
Instead.
Hey check-coated guy
Blow your smoke into my favorite eye.
Steal your arm around me
Till you’ve finally found me.
All under a moonlit sky.
Oh my
All under a moonlit sky.
Moving side to side
On a dampening lawn
My head falling to his shoulder
He stifling a deep yawn.
The party fast receding
Leaving the dancers with the night
Someone runs some water
Someone turns out a light
Half woman and half bar stool
The room spinning round from rounds of drink
She sits hunched over her wine glass
Returning any time she was given to think
Who am I doing it for,” I asked him. It was a fairly rhetorical question and the only reply it warranted was a shrug, which he supplied. I sat on the floor engrossed in the empty space before me. He lay stretched out on the couch looking sturdy and sure. Maybe no man is an island, but some sure look like one. All safe and dry and looming on your horizon. But the current was against me and who was I kidding? His island was already inhabited and here I was, a teenaged trespasser. All I had to do was make the most of being adrift.
He yawned. I looked at him with a minimal amount of expectancy. He looked over at me, and I had to look away. I didn’t want him to see that I “belonged to him”—it was bad enough that I knew it. I didn’t want him to know it, too. I kept it from myself for almost 2 months now, calling it everything from “physical” to a big mistake. Not that it wasn’t those things, it was, but when I “gave myself to him”—Merry Christmas, baby—I gave myself for a while, not just for a good time.
But whatever kind of time it was, it was running out. He was leaving Sunday. So there we were, Tuesday night sitting in the lurch that he would leave me in. Nothing personal, of course. He finished filming and had to go home to his wife and kids. Aye, there’s the rub. That’s when Cinderella’s pre-shattered post-ball shoe was scheduled to drop.
With him love was easier done than said Instead of taking you to heart he would take you to bed And you take what he has to offer lying down You’re getting more involved while he’s still getting around It’s all a matter of touch and go Cause he’s one for all and all for show But after all was said and almost done
I was playing for keeps and he was playing for fun
I call people sometimes hoping not only that they’ll verify the fact that I’m alive but that they’ll also, however indirectly, convince me that being alive is an appropriate state for me to be in. Because sometimes I don’t think it’s such a bright idea. Is it worth the trouble it takes trying to live life so that someday you get something worthwhile out of it, instead of it almost always taking worthwhile things out of you?
I wish I could go away somewhere but the only problem with that is that I’d have to go, too.
forty years on
How I’ve portrayed Harrison is how Harrison was with me forty years ago. I’ve gotten to know him a bit better over time, and as such somewhat differently. He’s an extremely witty man and someone who seems more comfortable with others than he is, or ever was, with me. Maybe I make him nervous. Maybe I talk so much he can’t get a word in edgewise. Maybe it’s our mutual gestalt. Maybe I exasperate him. Probably a bit of all four.
But perhaps the most important reason, maybe, just maybe, we didn’t speak much was because the subject of our relationship was off-limits. And that was the elephant herd in the room to tiptoe around. So we sat amongst the elephants and ignored them together. It was our biggest activity, the biggest thing that we shared other than Star Wars dialogue and the painfully obvious undiscussed.
My affair with Harrison was a very long one-night stand. I was relieved when it ended. I didn’t approve of myself.
If Harrison was unable to see that I had feelings for him (at least five, but sometimes as many as seven) then he wasn’t as smart as I thought he was—as I knew he was. So I loved him and he allowed it. That’s as close a reckoning as I can muster four decades later.
I’m frequently still awkward in his presence, still struggle with what I’m going to say. I always imagine that he’s thinking that I’ve just said something asinine, which may or may not be true.