Two Straight Lines Make a Circle

A pounding pain in my head brings me back to this place. A wet blanket cradling my extremities, as they grow warmer and warmer with each passing day. To match the powerful center flame that threatens each night to put me out in the rain again. In our naming of ourselves, we lose contact with the meaning. We lose contact with the meaning in just about every area of our lives – one bold, and flesh eating thread pulling us out of ourselves in a straight, un-ending circle (not a line, as most people think, but a circle, which can mean the opposite of infinity in the mundane shadow of a day) thwacking us on the back of the head, right beneath our remaining Cro-Magnon ridges where our necks meet our craniums, upwards and into the brain like an old Italian mother who didn’t need threaten you when you weren’t doing right, or a handful of a woman who followed her impulses one act at a time. Back upon us, back into us, the thread circles round and removes another layer of memory, of passing, of creative imagination which we once gathered loosely round our hearts. Remember what it felt like to be twenty years old? The meaning was so close. We didn’t know fuck all what to do with it, but it was right there. Alongside. The thread hadn’t sprung up from our coverings yet. All that pacing, and wasting and wanting got us here. Then, one day, it happened. Didn’t even notice it for a good number of years…took it for “maturity” and a life less chaotic. By the time the occasions would grow closer to each other, when we suspected the run had started in us, it was too late. Like telling a woman in the throws of birth to close her legs.

Then, after you’ve consigned yourself to this place and try to find all the good within its walls, just as occasionally you feel, in the midst of an auld song or photograph or even just the smell of a place, in the crook of your elbow, the coming of winter, the home fires burning somewhere else in someone else’s home, you feel it. Zing, like a shot up your veins and bursting through the doors of your heart. You are in that youthful place, but now with this knowledge, with this regret, with this experienced energy. It doesn’t travel alone, though. Never again will it come to you by itself. Accompanying it is its twin- the loss, the pain of nostalgia, the straight line (which the thread, feasting and devouring and circling through, doesn’t let you know it’s after shape-wise). The straight line comes down on your chest like a mallet, beating out the feelings and the moments and the now of things and the Meaning. Gone again. Into the cold, teal and rainy night. It leaves you with the rain, viscous and comforting, gliding down in a sheet outside your eye sight. The best part of this ritual is that you don’t know when it’s coming, where or how and if it will ever show up again, around the bend of a summer’s day, the same home fires burning in the heat of the evening sky. In this loss, something is gained --- always. Your name remains the same, whatever that means. Your name comes from your parents, your family, an actress your aunt adored…those sounds come from colours and metaphorical pictures of things we cannot say to each other. That can also be reduced to a lineage, a grouping, a set of human beings cut from the same cloth --- from which we all were nipped from.

Most people cannot abide this deconstruction and hold on so tightly to this name, to this persona. I hold onto mine but let it slip in and out betwixt my fingers, as if I’m dancing and its going out for the night…it always comes home, a little drunk, a little world weary, often horny and needing some sense of satisfaction. I take it to sleep and dreams with me, set it to vacations in the other worlds of my psyche, so-called, and let it weave its wonders around the cracks and fissures, bouncing its way into people and back down to earth again, across the nebulas in the needle’s eye. Prying open secret doors and alleyways, roads that keep travelling round again. Always around again. My sense of identity in this place, in this body, in this space and time, is both veiled in strength and completely raw, Because I set it free to re-create itself in the colour of someone else’s eyes, in the empathy for which I feel like a piece of flint for not rising up to my best of natures, in the desiring which I can and will never detach myself completely free from – not free just yet. There is so much more work to do. It’s as in a horrific nightmare: when that thread lurks behind you and you get that sinking feeling of it coming after you again (shielding the back of your head and neck, cowering over your chew toy heart, chewing your lip with each passing second you’ve missed) and you could try to out run it. Send it away, as I have often done. But every now and again, you should stop in your tracks. Turn around, and look him in the eye. He’s following you; he has been all of this time, because he emanates from you, between your legs and in your brain he grows, and finds his voice to counter your own. Smile at him, from the very primordial place of who you are. He will always recognize you, there, as yourself. Put down your dukes now, gaze on out and then in, and learn to abide.

~ M. Lucia