Static, static, static… love Part 1
We could have flown anywhere. This is the seed, not the self-mutilation that initially attracted me to her, not the fact that she learned how to lose weight and preserve an image that might’ve saved the last mirror in her house had it arrived just a few months sooner, and it wasn’t the year she spent most mornings blindfolded or eyes simply taped against the light that reflected directly upwards from the figure she hated, the sick curse that is the human body: our existence, generations of builders, changes, the development, evolution of the frontal cortex into a center of planning, problem solving, endless theoretical figures, decisions, fantasies, manipulations, hatred, dictations, rules, laws, moralities, self-deception, yet resting atop all of this, crowning that which is the self, a physical manifestation that preceded it all and that could never be fundamentally altered except by financially demanding, physically painful, and emotionally blunting investments into intrusive forms of modern medicine that even then could sometimes relapse into the only thing besides time and death that man has failed to truly and permanently manipulate. And it wasn’t the Disney channel special where the threats were only tepid, like a simple shock from a weakened power cell, incapable of causing any true trauma but rather simply suggesting its possibility, and the show’s simple resolution that instructed her how to lose all that unwanted weight, tooth enamel, gastrointestinal stability.
The seed was the fact that we could have flown anywhere but we simply didn’t. If I had known her as a child I may have seen where that strength was born, what invisible, metaphysically non-existent place could keep her in her own fixed pursuits regardless of environment’s established “realities” or “truths” that fix the rest in predetermined corridors and limits that not only were powerless to deter her purpose or progress or even some antithesis of progress if that happened to be her current direction but didn’t even appear to her. It was as though the structure and institutions of reality were simply geists that appeared to everyone save her.
Had I been a spirit I would have followed her and whence I am a spirit I will and so allow me to write of the day her strength was born. And when I am the spirit that can be her father, son, brother, following the flesh’s ability to be her lover, I would ensure that this strength was birthed on that day, because without that strength my love isn’t even a work of fiction.
Perhaps had I written this the first time through her mother may have had some explanation and perhaps her night terrors may have blessedly taken a face, one that she could claw, or kiss, or caress, or bludgeon, or kick, or burn, destroy, embrace, lick, whichever thing one does to finally incorporate a nightmare into their own inner sepulture, not to overcome or to forget but rather, because it is the only way to make peace with a demon, to ensure any permanent armistice, permitted him to be a legal citizen within her own psyche.
As a small child, Julia (pronounced Yule-ee-ah so that the tongue remained free during enunciation, slapping singly against the roof of one’s mouth as though it were the passage of air that pronounced her name rather than any concerted muscular effort) followed her adopted mother, far too old and pale to suggest any possible natural conception or genetic influence, along the gardens of a past Prussian king’s palace rising in Feng Shui adherent brilliance over eastern Potsdam, sometimes deliberately staggering or stomping, skipping, faux-tripping, and scurrying, proud and safe because at five years old she was still youthful enough to find appreciation in a ball of cotton stuffed into the rough shape of an animal or a plastic figurine that looked nothing like a real infant but still spoke to her, whispered secrets, and gave her companionship, an appreciation that would eventually disregard such simple inanimate objects and subsequently find fulfillment only in the attention of other human beings and then, finding that source to be unreliable and sometimes slightly toxic, embrace the fulfillment of heroin and then finally me.
