As time wore me down, I faced the same threats; of emptiness and loneliness. I had almost given up on the idea of companionship. The very thought that I could find someone to coexist with, who would be there to listen to my day and make dinner with me, and that if we did something else it was expected but discussed – not from fear or ownership or possessiveness but purely out of respect. I had been wondering if that were possible.
I fell in love for the first time at the age of 18. I was in college at Suny Purchase, and I was taking the only art class I ever took in my entire life. It was a photography course, and I was learning how to take, print and develop standard 35 mm film. There was a girl in the class, and we got paired up on an assignment and it was then in the darkroom that I ever felt the warm touch of a loving soul. A couple weeks later we were making out on a trampoline I had assembled far into the woods of the college campus, and at that point I felt pretty sure that I was experiencing what I thought or was hoping could be the feeling of being in love.
I’ve heard it more times in my life than having heard anyone tell me “Ian, I’m in love with you.” I’ve never heard anyone say that to me in my entire life. What I have heard, on occasion, is something to the effect of “I love you, but I’m not in love with you,” and every time after months and months (sometimes years) of placing all of my trust and hope and energy into a relationship, I find myself puzzled and perplexed as to what that means. And to some extent, why I keep hearing it from different females.
Maybe it’s because I want everything from the one that I’m with. I want more than what would be considered reasonable. And I give more than what would be considered normal. The influx of generosity and complete wide openness doesn’t always work in my favor.
Time Well Spent
I got lost on a winding road with hens and chickens and all kinds of ducks. It was the back entrance to the trolley museum, and I found myself out there trying to find myself on these dirt roads full of farm animals not too far away from my hometown. Those were decent years.
These were solitary, quiet, peaceful and placative years. It was time spent really beside myself in awe of the beauty of nature – and the solace of solitude. I spent all my afternoons hanging with the ghosts in the house, wondering when my friends would come and visit.
It happened that perhaps all of that time was worth it. But the minute I found someone to potentially share it with, it all was taken away. I guess the message was that it wasn’t mine to share. And I get that, in a way. And it was better that she knew right away that was the case, rather than to mislead her into thinking that I was in any way shape or form responsible for the place – even though I believe my actions had an impact on the outcome of the place.
Years later< I still wonder what it is that I’m looking for. There’s no way to deny it, I most certainly am. I don’t want to be alone, and the world at large seems to have the same attitude: what’s the point. As thoug the idea of finding true love is a meaningless quest or pursuit, and I don’t believe that one bit. I happen to think that we all have a place and a goal and reasons for us to be here. And I was missing that for a while.
Down the path of rail leading us quietly into the maze of repeat patterns that is New York City,at the other end of that tunnel is a little place that I call home. It’s not like anywhere else in the world, and I believe that as time goes on, it will become even more different from the rest of the world, to the point where it will not resemble any other city.
I was always hoping for something like this… I was hoping for a woman to change my perspective. Someon who I could take to this magical place that I called home, to introduce her to all of the people who mattered to me. And it’s unrealistic to believe in this because it’s just fantasy to believe that someone would want to drop everything they were doing just to absorb every aspect of your life, and who would always know exactly what to say. And if I hadn’t experienced this in small dosages, mostly at the beginning of great but doomed to fail attachments to previous former lovers, the same ones who would say to me, “Ian I love you, but I’m not in love with you.”
There were times when I felt that the stories that I found endearing about myself, which were often tales of loss, hopeless optimism and redemption, that the message would become clear: no matter how much crazy stuff would happen to me, and regardless of the madness that I would face, I would always figure out a way to make it all work - and that’s how I became who I am. There needed to be some level of acceptance on that level for anyone who really truly wanted to get to know me, simply because it was such a strong part of what defined me.
There were times in the past when I truly believed that everything would always work out and there were times when I was faced in situations which made me ersiously question that. And throughout many of these steps, money was certainly absent from the picture, both as a plot design and simply as a form of tension. That iw as there only to drive the plot along, at certain points, but never there to buy me a car or take me on a trip when I needed any of that; because, for years, I didn’t need anything extra.
I was happy to go about living the same existence nearly every day. I felt that in some way I would be exempt from aging if everything each day stayed exactly the same. My body wouldn’t notice that time was occurring. Of course we all know that this is not the case, and in the process there’s arguably more work to be done to fix up the place. That still doesn’t’ stop me from saying that I welcome I and would never discourage anyone sitting by him or herself on a Friday night to ditch the same old friends and go on an adventure; or go on a walk to a place you haven’t been, or take a look at something from a perspective that hasn’t been already made into a movie somehow.
I thought I met her in real life, several times over. But it turns out I was only seeing her shine through different sides of people I was meeting. I wasn’t sure if this was good enough in terms of proof, because what I was looking for really amounted to a quest to find god; or some version of the perfect human being who could bring me eternal happiness who was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen in my life.
In that sense, a woman can be like a god to a man. And you really can’t help but thing there’s something of an almost worshipful quality to any truly deep and powerful romantic relationship. What makes us always wonder what the truth is, when the facts are so obvious and in our face? Why should we bring one another through these loud and impersonal arguments about nothing in particular.
To see traffic patterns in cars and then convert it to video games has been quite a task, but well worth every bit of it. To have a place called home we could both go to, and to find that place in each other’s hearts; these were not things that I found to be impossible, because I could see that it happened fro others with loving partners whom they could trust with their lives and entrust with their secrets in hopes of trading those for happiness – I believed it was possible and not worth giving up on believing.
I could see these specific places, these little moments in time which only lasted an instant. There were nights spent lost in the freezing cold, wondering if I would ever make it home. And other times I found myself not sure where home really was. Told as a story, to most women it seemed dangerous and sketchy to know that I knew what it was like to be homeless. But to her, she’d find it to be a source of strength as it actually is, rather than a sign of my weakness.