you don't have the first part of a clue how much i love you

[click image]

.

Almost no one ever has and I know no one ever will again. The really true masters will warn you about it before they help you fall down a bottomless well. The charlatans will only put their hands together and keep trying to speak obliquely enough to fascinate you with their mysteriousness. True humans know before the light bouncing off them can meet our eyes.

You can't fathom this that is not bound, feeling with no borders anywhere, not a tuft of grass to grasp in your free fall. You go crazy building grids and bars and planks and topiary mazes so dense you never find your way back out. You hurt yourself, sometimes to Shakespearean extremes, and it isn't a tenth of actual pain, because of your air constructs more stubborn than steel. You haven't the first part of an inclination of what happens when you cease trapping yourself in them. It is a shock to find where it goes when you don't grasp anything. It's like the torsion physics the space lizard guys are apeshit behind... maybe it IS the torsion physics they're apeshit about.

You can punch through to the opposite of pain while still in it, but you cannot ever punch through to the opposite of love, only go deeper. You do NOT have the FIRST part of a clue how much I love you.

If you get a whiff, you immediately take it wrong. You immediately get it in your box. You THINK you do. You don't know you can love someone unspeakably more than even your spouse and NEVER be remotely unfaithful.

You live in a nightmare.

I had a friend, a man friend, early in my life online. There might be two other people on the planet who can make me scream with laughter like he can. Maybe not even that many. I didn't realize how fucked up he is. It wouldn't have mattered if he had not been such a liar about so much for so long. I probably even could have released him from his hell, pushed him down this well, and given him the keys to his cell... sat back and watched him redeem humanity singlehandedly... klutz though I am... or "ton of bricks" as 86's dad likes to say.

I pick up a pristine white feather from the smallest and most delicate dove and it slams people to the pavement. If I could teach myself the art of intergalactic indirection, maybe their teeth would stop chattering when I only look at the feather, the pristine white one sticking up from a tiny pot of sand here. You can't use a feather on me. Or, you can, and I will know, but I maybe will not remember to remember I know... or know and let it be neither not remembered nor remembered, decide that the feather is nice and wish to leave it be there. But I know, and you don't have the first part of a clue how much I love you, but I don't want you in my life if you cannot tell the truth, if you keep mistaking my feather for a ton of bricks you need to cart off and stack just so to reinforce your maze.

It's not relative. It's not of this world, even when you are in it. You can't wrap your pixels around this. You can't form it up into anything you like. It's alive. It's free. It's not you or me. I'm not going back to months and months and months of nightmares so intense they drove stakes through my flesh, shot me out of bed with the fumes of your HATE blowing in my ear, with the sulphur of your maniacal giggling echoing down my hallway, burning my nostrils, when you are practically half way across the planet. I'm not giving my organs over to be set hopping and banging against each other because it feels so good when you want it to. I have to ignore too much to bathe in it. It is no part of my business to insist you stop lying, and if you won't it wastes the few minutes I have left in eternity to be good for living things. You don't have the first part of a clue how much I love you. You don't have the first part of a clue who "you" is.

I was mentioning somewhere down there in comments about the White Horse bodhisattva from so long ago. His name was Joe. Just Joe. I met him in Tofino, BC. I was on a drive out of my skin and had brought myself to a halt there for three days to wait for a ferry to take me to Haida Gwaii. He was tending bar at the hotel where I stopped to try to plan out my stay, get my bearings, find the will to the mundane from out an apocalypse of pain. I hadn't slept in two or three days. He took one look at me. Asked me maybe two half-questions. Poured me a drink. Took me by the arm to a restaurant across the street where they were serving fresh, that day, seafood, all you could eat. When my head was almost hitting the plate, he grabbed my arm again, strode me back to the hotel, ripped a room key off the wall, marched me to the room, planted the key in my hand and said, "Sleep! This room is yours as long as you want it. No charge." He was there the next morning to take me to breakfast. He kept by my side for the whole three days. Never once making any remotely sexual facial expression, or touch, or word. He was at my side in a way that was utter solidarity and not intrusive in even the tiniest way. When I left to go catch the ferry, he stood down, and told me he would be right there if anything went wrong.

We didn't have to know any more about each other than our first names.

At this very moment, twenty years later, I'd take a bullet for him, no questions asked.

He's everyone, and he is only him. He is both and he is neither. You aren't even on the same planet as I am! You don't have the first part of a clue how much I love you.

I can forgive you EVERYTHING, even war crimes, if you will but step into the truth and not turn back.

YOU IDIOT! I bet you think I'm trying to be poetic... or bragging... or crazy... or... let's go with your FAVORITE!

NEEDY!

Yeah! That's the ticket.

I'm sorry you lost your father. I am losing mine. It is his birthday on Tuesday and I get to be with him again, at last, if he lives till Tuesday. My father, who can't tell where he is in space relative to where he wants to go, and who can't talk straight and only realizes it half the time, KNOWS precisely how much I love him, KNOWS what's going on, is perfectly lucid inside a skin bag that has gone out of his control, and KNOWS his wife and other daughter don't think he's him anymore. I can't MAKE them either. I know precisely why they have been trying to kill me in my dreams since I was a little girl.

For his birthday he'll be with one who knows he's in there, will be able to relax inside the wreck of his dying body.

I heard some guys going on about the strangeness of cannibalism of people who would want to eat another's good qualities, and scratching their heads about people who wore medicine bags of cremated remains, Keith Richards snorting his father's ashes. A man I loved and revered died a few years ago and his wife had his ashes parsed into little gauze bags for each person who loved him so they could spread his ashes where they wanted. The bags leaked, left residue, little flecks of Norman, on our hands. Others wiped their hands on their clothes. I licked mine. They pretended not to see... but in that moment they were ashamed of themselves. In that split second, each of them saw.

My mother and my sister see. They won't have it, won't admit it, won't get real... either... not for any amount of love they have the capacity to even dream. Just like you, they bend what they see into something they THINK they can stage manage.

For myself, I can only thank the buddhas of the ten directions for the warning, for the push into this bottomless well, for the chance to love as much as I do, for the galaxies of pain shooting me into the universes of joy, for the tears shooting from my eyes into fathomless space.

No. For real, you don't have the first ion of the first part of that clue how much I love you.

.