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Somewhere is a place for us.
I believe it, be it We formed by me and you or in the more likely our reality never comes to pass and you find yourself with a special someone on a separate, certainly more serious, path.
Still, saying your name is like praying. I don’t wish the fate of Maria and Tony, I don’t presume to believe you would receive and feel and believe in me as I feel and perceive and believe as much about You. I get it. I met a girl in Turkey who kept after me via social media and free call apps. It happened in Greece and again late last year when a customer service representative whom I will never meet decided I was The One for her. It disturbs me not because of that desire, to which I relate and for which I carry the utmost respect, compassion and empathy. Especially in the honest and transparent confession.=
I know all too well the seeking of the flame, the one we project onto others, that which we have already within, that fire, ascribe it to another in seeking to find what we think others will provide, that someone That Girl or ‘That Boy’ will mollify our discontent via the form of companionship, as I express now with you. That’s all well and fair and good but in that point of connecting, initiating with me a. she had access to my personal data and b. revealed she and I share the same birthday. I was thought to myself Shit! Is this what I DO????” Possibly. She also scoured the Internet and has her desktop littered with my images.
Fame. LOL. I have no such collection of You and cannot recall the last time I stopped through to scroll down your Twitter Blvd. I can’t. I’m serious. It’s too damn hard. The longing and the knowledge of reality, what cannot come to pass, to be by your side, sharing in life’s ride.
Never Gonna Dance Again
That said, I’m reluctant to edit my material in these passages, a combination stream of babel and, at least initially, a love letter, one that I carefully still craft. The doubt seeps in, a combination of the ghosts from a Grecian Goddess Past, a would-be bride too young by half, disappearing and leaving my heart broken wide open to embrace Love only that much more adherent to being unbowed, unrepentant and intent on living, if more modest and discreetly, quietly offline than that much more transparent with which I mean and say, speech and thoughts and acts all aligned, the mistakes of the past the seeds of the future learning harvested, all of it prologue, the messiness relegated to the dust bin, a clean up on aisle nine, reflecting on how I was not mistaken but more correct, this time with You as then so direct. She simply fled the scene of her crime, reacted perhaps to a guilt she could not scale up with actions to meet her careless whispers in my ear. Makes sense.
So instead she spun a complete 180˚ after our torrid romance and our passionate affair for her had fizzled out, to do as George Michael declared. Guilty feet got no rhythm. We were never gonna dance again and I knew it, too, every time she darted her eyes to avert my gaze or scroll through (I can only surmise) some recent texts or, I gather, new love-interests’ missives and bait. It’s always about the latest trend flushed and on to a new experience. I get it.
I was 24 and immature, undeveloped at one time. I’d say behind the curve of my peers and what maybe one is supposed to be doing at that age but who’s to say? What I certainly heard in her words, saw in her smile and dark, luminous eyes was a gift, a rebirth and a most unexpected surprise at the opportunity to love and be loved again. I had not been lonely.
My dating life was satisfactory and mostly I prized my solitude at that point, quality time for thinking dreams into action, an ability to harness my vitality into seeding, sowing and bringing to harvest a commune, the crop of socially minded, community-oriented give and take and reorienting, while I was at it, my career track.
All of this was under way even before the panic of pandemic Covid undertook the bulk of our collective resources in time, energy, emotions, finances and, tragically —inevitably—lives. Our atonement for our human foibles will continue to come……..at great cost.
And I do fear The Reaper, not for me but for the whole of every species, the ones endangered and the ones now forever lost — twenty-two added to that toll in this year alone.
I’m afraid to look back and shave my indulgent miasma of words because it requires reading and asking Why does Nihal suddenly mean so much to me? when I am regularly, almost daily captivated and smitten by a turnstyle of minds, like a horse at the trough of his feed, tweet after tweet, consuming more than I ever will repay: humor; grace; perspective; journalistic integrity; raw self-expression; social warriors; cosmetic beauty; and idealists’ aspirational pursuits, all mixed with a touch of class, a dose of crass, preening self-confidence, self-loathing and humility. I could arguably fall virtually in love every day and at times more than once, lending myself in a polyamorous way of virtual living .
Instead, I’m sitting here just watching the day pass as dusk ushers in nightfall and thinking about You, wondering: What are You up to? How do you look when you are asleep? How to approach my desire for you, desire for communication, conversation and collaboration. I mull over the raw and fumbling means I employ towards my own ecstasy, too little or likely too much, I ought be or not to be versus finding some other modality, some excuse to reach out. I clutch to my pearls of worry. And then I let it go.
I question my sanity, no doubt. I doubt that you’ll believe I’m anything but a lunatic. A lout. A louse. A sociopath creep who loves to troll and cyber stalk. You may be not wrong — on that stalker talk — but I resist. It seems pointless if I can’t have You in my life, selfishly all to myself. Lol. I also have no doubt that my overtures will be rebuffed, ignored and reported.
I question how I might impart to you — Do I need to chivalrously prove my worth, too? — my already substantial consciousness has been awakened to another, deeper level of compassion, empathy and frustration, helpless at both my perceived complicity in the mendacity of capitalistic imperialism, sexist misogyny, wanting to fall at your feet and seek absolution for the patriarchy of which I am a part while still marveling at the incomprehensible amount of information you in your front-facing life have exposed to me and my fascination with whom is behind that keypad and your tweets.
Immanuel Wallerstein on Historical Capitalism but now, too, I am excited to read his take on Africa, on Marxism. Bottemon’s Dictionary of Marxist Thought was nowhere available for less than $78 until I was lucky to find Allibris through the grace of a BFF when I asked her for help. So, even though I was going to ask you to maybe loan me yours when you come to visit me in New York, now instead we can simply discuss over tea and trade notes. Wait. There’s more. The End of Eddy and G: A Novel, Pig Earth — the latter two by John Berger — are now on my lengthy shopping list. I know you likely know this but am choosing to speak to a wider audience under the tentative title, Nihal Teaches ME.
The reading of books and the building of a library are two separate and unique pursuits, to summarize a note I scrolled passed, tapped out by a certain elegant someone. Those are where among a few conceits where our stars align. Djokavic and Kobe, not so much. Another time, place and post. However, I’d love to learn more about fütball as I do with my nephew. I question my motives and ask if, here in the share, I’m attempting to woo or convince you of something, gain a gold star and pat on the head. Maybe.
I’m sure some level of the people pleasing in me will persist but it’s in the expanding, the ever-expanding vastness of the universe in consciousness that I find the thrill, the pleasure and the affection but most of all the gratitude for Dan Froomkin. If not, for me, his advocacy for truth, accountability and an avarice for facts and transparency, especially in his relentless ability to claw away at the walls of deception in the [Yawns] entrenched US corporate-capitalist driven “Fourth Estate.” I’d suggest he and others on the same beam like you are doing no less for liberal democracy, socialism’s aims, for true humanith and its freedoms if not its means, and its discontents, the welfare of citizens and nations than would the theatrics nearly two score ago, although those were mere optics for a different reality behind the curtain of the show: a certain past leader of a certain imperial empire (I mean nation), the elected president, staged an event where all the the hungry eyes of all the nations we were told, across the span of the entire globe, tuned in to hear: “Tear down this wall, Mister Gorbachev.”
Was that the goal? To tear down walls and help the betterment of humans in where we should go, towards a better world than the one we know? How’d that go?
So, yeah. this moment is sort of like that but we know better, in actual reality, it’s not. It’s better. This moment in time is the inversion of that one. This is the dare, fo shizzle, to shake everyone who is asleep at the wheel and ask, demand we do more for our country than that of which we believe we are capable by waking the fuck up.
Anyway, Dan’s great Twitter took me down some wonderfully cathartic, if painful, rabbit holes that led to you and yours were a bucket of cold water on sentimentality for anyone hiding in fox news holes. In a weird way, the silent frustration and inability for me to articulate any coherent idea beyond frustration these many years of wanting something akin to peace, the humiliation and apology I feel at the diaspora of immigrants and refugees who have known nothing but imperialism, occupation and fleeing while I have lived a very sheltered and oblivious life.
All that evaporated as that cold bucket of water dried in the sunshine of your love and that is how I interpret the work and the window into your world, the room with a view permitted to me by you.
We The Collective Human Race are a destructive force against nature. I can’t let US be singled out but rather we are merely the torch bearers, the baton in our hand of this leg of an endless race, the entire disastrous lurch towards an elusive and, really, treacherous finish line that will never come until we are all subsumed by its destruction.
That those who would rule — Sorry, I mean ‘govern’ —over their people will never, and refuse to ever, figure it out, that sovereignty for each human is yet attainable. A world that is bound by flags, nation-states and borders is a mendacity in and of itself. As vociferously as those who would demean immigrants and quake fear into mindless denizens on yet another war that needs to be fought, that ‘they (whoever the fuck ‘they’ are) are coming after you,’ I will blow back and say “Enough.”
Finally, enough. What about Love and, more than love, what about all the stuff that comes with evolving, starting with looking in the mirror and assessing every single last thing, not with criticism nor even socially-impugned self-loathing but a far more perilous journey, a far more delicate thing: Acceptance???
Self acceptance. Total self acceptance. Embracing all that exists. That’s the story. That’s the ballgame. Acceptance. Your tweets sort of met me on My ever-winding Road to Damascus, a Pauline Conversion in its essence, stripped of its political bloat and historical bloodshed to reveal the presence of only Love and ne’er a single lightning bolt but rather an ongoing series, rumblings, thunderheads and cleansing rains to nourish the soul, part the clouds and reveal, a bit Further on Down The Road, The Sun and a Ghost drawn not in caricature nor cut-out form. I’m a bit closer to fine, I suppose, thanks to a life in pursuit of ceaseless exploration, one insistent in beating back my own ambivalence, determined to squelch the avoidant equivocating and snuff out the prevarications.
It makes sense I’d find You.
You are a gift to the world, Nihal, a gift to me and I hope and pray that you allow this to percolate and resonate, regardless if you are perhaps willing to connect. We already are. Always. I hope when you look in the mirror what you see reflect is your radiance, your elegance and brilliance, that you will look at your self and see Your Self. I have faith that you will accept these sentiments, choose to believe you will trust in all of it. Whether or not you ever respond to me is immaterial. It’d be the cherry on the sundae. I cannot tell a lie. Dang. That cherry metaphor is still alive! LOVE IT!
This is as much your story as it is my song to you.
That said, it would be really groovy to know where you receive mail/post so I might pen and mail love letters every day just like this one, only hand-written and all of them love notes. Maybe I’ll start penning them now just in case and if they collect I can always one day dispense them to You quite direct. On our Honeymoon. By the by…I did not even once consider in any of this ramblin’ mess the likelihood you are married, you are in a relationship with a lucky soul, never mind maybe you’d be aghast a fiftysomething man, from the United States no less, is smitten with you a continent away but Baby, I’m your man!
I’m in love with You, not Nihal ;-) but You, in every way. You dig? (((Sigh)))
The irony in wishing I could coax you out saying Yes is that the story I imagine for us, hiding in plain sight all along, is in the form of a screenplay by Berger and Sally Potter, a film of which I had read so long ago. Never screened it yet in the sound of its synopsis just the same is the fable in my mind that turns between you and me or at least similar.
Here I thought I was original but I also am sure that it’s very unoriginal to call You a Muse, to be in any form — virtual or proximate, carnal and spiritual — of love with You. I bet your dance card is pretty full. You simply seem too cool.
Never gonna dance again the way I could dance with You.
Bibliography
Ivory Billed Woodpecker, p. John Audobon, Cover Art
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Last Scene
Historic Capitalism, Wallerstein
Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Bottemon, Ed.
Alibris Books
G: A Novel, Berger
The End of Eddy, Edouard Elise
Pig Earth, Berger
Presswatchers, Dan Froomkin
Fourth Estate, Defined
Dan Froomkin, Twitter
The Conversion of Saul to Paul
Raducanu and Fernandez, US Open 2021, The Telegraph
Insouciance, Wikipedia
Imaginarium, Defined
Austin Powers, Groovy!
Yes, Berger and Potter
The Atrocity of Love, Soundtrack
