Housekeeping: ask me Dear Bear questions here. The matchmaking results will be out in the next couple of days :)
I don’t have answers to any of my questions. I still remember the first time I met E at True Laurel. I showed up wearing athleisure; he picked at the mushrooms. One of us ordered the cocktail with the pine needles. I don’t know if we’ll ever talk again, but it’s also impossible to imagine that we wouldn’t. Or N—how do you rescue someone who’s in love with a person who sucks? I guess the conventional answer is that you don’t, but it feels so unbearable. Or K, off in the world with a different gender, still a million times smarter than I am. When I was younger I was so afraid of conflict, of people being mad at me or thinking I was beyond redemption, and now with every passing year I just think: we don’t get to love so many people. A real friendship that sprawls across many years—how many of those do we get?
But now I hear your voice in my head. You say: people are allowed to impose conditions on connection. Some of those conditions are implicit, obvious: I won’t talk to you if you’re mean to me. But people are also allowed to say: I won’t talk to you if you won’t kiss me. That’s normal and maybe even commendable. You say that I’m the weird one for not being particularly interested in structure. But weren’t you the one who made me this way?
No matter what you do, I couldn’t imagine loving you any less. In Montecito we called it grace, but secretly I thought of it as obsession. Tripping, catching, sticking: you have a plan, and then life interrupts. I saw you in every hydrangea bush, every flower, every bird. I got tired of myself but I kept seeing you everywhere. There’s a word for that: pathology. There’s a word for that: rapture.
*
I don’t have answers to any of my questions. All my life I’ve been addicted to control. I want to make a plan and stick to it. I want to move someone from one state to another with frictionless ease. I want to write a poem that makes a girl cry. There’s a kind of person who thinks doing psychedelics will rob of them of their drive. If I could take a drug and free myself from the thought of you—there’s a movie about that. Meet me in Montauk. S didn’t like Montauk, he thinks it’s expensive, a tourist trap. Meanwhile, I don’t think memory has anything to do with desire or fate.
*
I don’t have answers to any of my questions. I told myself to be normal about it but I couldn’t be. There’s a feeling in my stomach that’s the opposite of appetite, and I guess I’ve never thought about it that way before—how wanting to throw up can be a sign of love. How nausea, paralysis takes precedence over language. I think there’s some kind of cosmic joke here: in the beginning you’re yanked in by the butterflies and emails, and then the feeling in your stomach starts to swallow you and it never stops.
When I was a kid I was very prone to motion sickness, but for some reason my parents never got me dramamine or I would refuse to take it, I don’t know. So we would go on these long road trips, driving from Vancouver to Seattle, or to some park to camp—it took me until adulthood to understood that my parents didn’t like camping per se, it was just the cheapest kind of trip with kids—and the nausea would start to build inside me like a bat unfurling its wings and if I didn’t vomit it wouldn’t stop for hours after we got out of the car.
When I’m around everything about you, the smell of you, the sound of your voice, makes me trust you completely. I love it when you drive. So why is it that I feel like I’m going to throw up? If I complain too much, you’re going to pull over by the side of the road and tell me to get out.
*
I don’t have answers to any of my questions. I hope no one minds if I admit that I’m scared. I’ve been reading compulsively—Fish Tales, Good Girl, Open, Heaven, Audition. I saw a clip today of Fran Leibowitz saying: The closest thing to a human being is a book. I know people think it’s a dog, but they’re wrong… so to write a book is the closest thing to being a god. You’re creating this thing. When you look at manuscripts or letters and they’re written in the hand of the writer, you are closer to that writer, you’re closer to the person.
The throughlines of my life: books, dogs, people, God. The last couple of years of my life have taught me that I’m never going to be obedient or reasonable. I’ll ask you what to do, and then when you tell me I’ll probably bark.
*
I don’t have answers to any of my questions. When I close my eyes I can see your face. If I lose you, there’s no point to anything. It makes me sick to remember how much you hate letting anyone down. Hughes:
I refused to interpret. I saw
The dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her, and I knew it.
"But now I hear your voice in my head. You say: people are allowed to impose conditions on connection. Some of those conditions are implicit, obvious: I won’t talk to you if you’re mean to me. But people are also allowed to say: I won’t talk to you if you won’t kiss me. That’s normal and maybe even commendable. You say that I’m the weird one for not being particularly interested in structure. But weren’t you the one who made me this way?"
This deserves a book of its own. Fire.
the fact that that part of the Hughes poem was about the woman he cheated on Plath with is wild