Love And Lamentation.

He is teaching me to kiss. It is as otiose an endeavour as one can be, I’m never going to learn and what’s more is that I don’t want to. In any case, the purpose of this heuristic enterprise is not really to teach me, it’s so we can laugh about it. He has me practise on his hand. I can kiss a hand, and even a foot, with passionate fervour, because they don’t kiss back nor do they secrete the vile enzymes and liquids I am loath to have even in my own body. He often refers to my pecks as ‘corpse kisses’ because I don’t move my mouth. He has me kiss his hand so I have a recent memory of opening my mouth for an embrace that I can replicate.

“Now, after you do that, we have to sort of sandwich our lips between each others,” he explains, “It’s like a ladder, yours then mine, mine then yours, do you understand?”

I do not understand. I do think that if this were a movie, the lighting in the room would be perfect for what we are doing. There’s a white shirt draped over the yellow bulb, because I just will not replace it with a dimmer bulb until it burns out, and it makes his bedroom look like it is bathed in the expectation of thaumaturgy. In a movie, I would learn to kiss, he would be the one because he taught me to and we would live happily ever after. In reality, I just don’t understand.

“But..how will we know which one of us should go up and which one should go down?” I ask him, “Do we decide that in advance?”

He shakes his head in pretend-exasperation. It is pretend exasperation, I know that, because the reality of love is so different from its fantasy. In the fantasy of love, your boundaries and limits disappear because they are overcome by the softening of your soul that is enabled by this entity, everything you held true and dear about yourself seems to dissolve into obsolescence and you suddenly wake up and realise that everything that was seemingly so wrong about you has disappeared. It’s a neat story, one that has been exploited by many a rhapsode in an attempt to peddle hope and catharsis. It’s not real. In the fantastical version of this love, I would have overcome my disdain and trauma around kissing many years ago, I would be able to kiss this man I so adore and the blotches on my soul would have been healed, but love is not a fix, in reality, it’s something much better than that. It is acceptance, but more than that, it is an effusive affection and acknowledgment for the parts of you that have always felt mundane, inconsequential or diseased.

“You are ridiculous,” he says, laughing and hugging me, “Come here so I can kiss my corpse bride." 

He kisses me, I lay here, tight-lipped and unyielding, because love hasn't fixed me, it has only made me capable of seeing the humanity in myself as something other than a flaw. It hasn't healed me, it has only enabled my knowledge of the possibility of being cherished for exactly who I am. My former partner really despised the fact that I couldn't kiss him, it was like a personal affront to him. In his conception of the world, the fact that I didn't do it meant that I wouldn't "move on" from a past of sexual trauma, which in turn meant that I didn't love him enough and I wasn't allowing him *to breach my hard-shell exterior* because I was fundamentally broken and determined not to accept (his) help in being fixed. It's odd how we seem to *owe* healing ourselves to the people in our lives and it's funny how we seem to buy into it as well. It makes sense to some extent, sometimes our trauma and our neuroses begin to dictate and justify our poor treatment of other people, but really, it's about what the other person considers *poor treatment.* 

There is a (heterosexual) couple I know, the woman was addicted to opiods for fifteen years and she described to me, several episodes in which she violently attacked her husband, and he hit her back. When I asked how they got past having been violent with one another, he explained that he didn't view that as her behaviour at all, in his interpretation of this situation, that wasn't poor treatment. I find this situation difficult to examine, I don't know how I feel about it. It's not mine to live so I ponder it with the detachment of considering harrowing life experiences, recreationally. My former partner considered it "poor treatment" for me to bear any impact from having been raped or abused, he found triggers disdainful, as if they were targetting him. Any behaviour that I could explain as a function or consequence of something that had happened through my life was viewed as an attack on him. I now understand that he was really just extremely mad that he had not acquired me when I was *brand new*. He didn't see a person, he saw a toy and in my zeal to conform to an idea of stoic enduring strength taught to me by the women who raised me, I was all-too-eager to see myself as a toy. It was more entertaining that way. Love was recreational to me. Hell, I was recreational to me. To a large degree, I still am. 

I write myself like it's a game. I live myself like I'm observing a character. Ten steps away from true sentience, always. As hard as this may be to believe, I don't want anyone to know me at all. It's the adage: *I want to tell everyone and I want no one to know.* Writing is perfect for this, I do require some kind of human connection, but the notion of it is enough, if I feel like I am talking and sharing, then the concept of an audience is enough for it to feel like there are people in my life. They don't even have to talk back. I feel comfortable being seen only at a distance, I believe I am likeable only at a distance, because the world may not be an equitable place, but it is poetically just, and so in all my grasps for just enough complexity to make it seem meaningful, I am afflicted by the simplest of fears.  It's coming from the easiest to track source as well. For most of my life, those who knew me best, or at least, had the most access to me, despised me most. Those who *loved* me in concept, expressed it with only violence, disregard and contempt. My husband keeps telling me that those were not relationships of love, and I see his point, but it's that we fundamentally view love differently. He views it as a necessarily positive thing, I view it as a virulent force that can enable great things as easily as awful things. As much as you can be cherished for your idiosyncracies when someone loves you, you can be condemned for them with just as much vehemence. I rarely find people who agree with my ideation of love and my therapist believes I choose to view it that way because if I don't, I must confront the possibility that I feel like I went through most of life completely unloved. Who is to say which one of us is right? She would ask if it matters as I raced her to ask the same thing. 

She asks me if I feel like I need to *ace* therapy, if I need to be the best client a therapist can conceive, and she's right if she suspects that I do. It's what I think the character would do. If it didn't, it would have to really talk about the reason why it made an appointment in the first place. The truth is, I've lost *a lot* of love this year, and with it, some of my ability to love. I feel stifled by my novel inability to enjoy people, perhaps I feel stifled because I won't let myself indulge the need to lament. 

Is that a part of love too?