Soul Porn

I had a teacher who was in love with me. Nothing lascivious happened, he just had a fixation and confided in me inappropriately. “Alright, class see you next week. Bye, Bridey!!” I became embarrassed by his infatuation. On my report card he wrote, “Bridey seems aloof in class. I can’t get her to look at me.” I was avoiding his eyes. Our connection on his side of things was strong and real, but I just really liked the subject he taught. Unfortunately, my passion for it kind of died because my good grades seemed to convince him of something personal. Years later a friend of mine working at an ice cream shop said the same teacher had come in and immediately asked how I was. I believe I got a facebook friend request that I never opened.What a sad love that never was. Destructive and empty. He recognized me as the new girl, alienated, and he was the new teacher. We had so much in common, our loneliness!  Do I still have a place in Mr. R’s brain? Or where did I go? Dropped into his gut maybe? Gave him diarrhea? Am I flattering myself?

“It’s just so sad that love ends. Love ends!” My friend was going through a break up about a month ago. It was a relationship that was off from the start, but there was still pain in the loss. In Love Streams, Gena Rowlands character who is grappling with a divorce insists “love is a continuous stream.” She won’t stop trying to keep her family together. I have thought about this line a lot recently as I feel very loved by so many wonderful people in my friendships, the love in past relationships or relationships that never were all seem to be intertwining. Pandemic time eludes me and  I seem to becoming aware of love’s non-linear-ness and just how f-ing full of it I am these days.  There’s no longer a ladder of intimacy in my head, putting a romantic partner on the highest wrung. There’s just intimacy and connection in a lot of relationships, contained in themselves, gloriously unique and essential. This is me coming out as a polyamorous dolphin. 

 There’s no time left to ruin things with expectancy. It’s easy for conditioning to drizzle in or an insecure preoccupation with “What are we?!?”  Though the caveat to that is to be straightforward about the intention of what you are looking for. The thin wire that romantic love is balanced on feels so tenuous and fragile compared to just nourishing whatever natural connection is made. I went on a date so bad a few weeks ago that I went on a silence strike. There was a close to 5 minute silence and then the man said “I grew up on a farm.” I swear a heard a gun shot ring impossibly loud afterwards but it was my imagination.  Nothing against the man or the farm, there was just not an easy connection. I think bad dates are good too. My friend said its how you know you like yourself, when you start to soothe and amuse yourself through them. 

 Other times you can really connect with someone, but its a part of yourself and themselves that both of who you haven’t fully accepted yet and the insecurity kills it. This seems like a common and tragic little number. You have some budding part of yourself that needs nurturing and so do they and neither of you are ready to share the tenderness of it. I wanna learn how to sew! Me too! Why can’t we sew?! We deserve to die!! Other times there is too much Mommy and Daddyness similarities that you feel yourself sliding into some degenerate or earlier version of yourself like the rebellious teen you. Suddenly everything, but your relationship is stupid.  Allowing space for this sort of dynamic seems like it could lead somewhere healthy, but only if its conscious. I had this dynamic with Marcia Gay Harding in 2003.

 I’ve become aware of an antiquated harshness or  process of thought post relationship, a sort of reward and punishment attitude that kicks in. I wind up beating myself up over things that were never meant for me, or that I overstayed. I punish my younger self. As though, breaking up is a diagnosis  of some  sort of inability to love correctly, which is crazy because I am perfect.  You can really get stuck being a ghost haunting a past relationship if you’re seeking some misplaced resolve, trying to put together a shattered mirror and each piece is too sharp on either end to even touch. 

It’s been a big lesson to learn that there’s extreme connection even in antagonistic relationships and possibly those are the most important; the biggest catalyzers.  So how do you not just f—ing love everybody? Enemy and friend alike? “You know that I could be in love with almost everyone, I think that people are the greatest fun!” That is a lyric by the band LOVE. My friend, Arthur, and I both latched onto that line, and sing it often.

Spring has bloomed and a mostly vaccinated population looking hot as hay started to hang and suddenly I feel like I’m twiddling my thumbs staring at a wall until it turns into a window.  I brought up a potential person to a friend and before I got their last name out, my friend screamed “BAD NEWS!” Another girlfriend  suggested I go out with a friend of hers who is a heavy drinker who masturbates to pictures of her feet. I was tempted, but the need to confront any loneliness in me, feels like the strongest impulse.  But then this man in Europe rings me up, wanting to beget kids, a touchy subject for me as my longing for motherhood hits me over the head sometimes and then runs away giggling like Peter Saarsgard.  This elusive man floats on a lazy river in my mind, lounging on a tube float drinking whiskey, knowing the waters in me are always steady for him. 

 He always appears when the seams of my life feel secure, when colors are vibrant, and my tits are on straight. Suddenly, a sexy, low baritone voice with an Italian accent beckons to me  to cross the ocean. I do no trust this voice. I mistakenly did a few years ago which resulted in me flying to London to potentially have another romance with this person. Once in the UK, I was sent on a scavenger hunt by this mystery man in crocodile boots which finally culminated in us getting drinks wherein he told me he was not single and had no intention to F and he didn’t believe in the “me too” movement.

It was all very flabbergasting. I spent 100 dollars on my Uber back to Hackney with my tail between my legs to tell my London friends the catastrophic news. They had been following the saga with wrapt attention.  We were all rooting for it to happen. I was to become an Italian Princess or go home a hungover, reject filled with  cheese toast and hard cider. This guy is slippery and in the past I have indulged the slip and slide, but now I have learned better. Yet, the advice I am getting from family and friends is just to make sure he pays for my plane ticket, but to definitely go have his baby in Italy.  

Let’s call him Antonio. I know he wont read this because the internet is below him.  I have a fascination with his world which gives him a semi open door policy into mine. Years ago, we had a luxurious weekend together at a hotel after meeting at a party. I had a ball trying to blend in with big hatted, snakey, musicians, playing it cool. He’s  a former male model/ musician who regaled me with tales from his privileged, care free existence that baffle and massage my brain.  What came after was the love bombing, and an unbendable force inside me to somehow make it last just a little longer. I was living in a shallow part of my heart at the time, post a serious break up. Though it wasn’t all threaded into him being pretty, it was more the elusiveness. I really liked the chase or the trail. The intense crumbs of intimacy and then nothing, lost in the woods alone.  I liked the weird, distracting psychic hooks because it allowed me to float around my reality with a delusional smirk on my face, half in bed with him smoking a cigarette. 

Antonio is possibly the only person I know who very much lives in the moment. He has the ease and confidence of a beautiful man who has gotten whatever he wanted.  And in the past I have snapped to his requests of lewd nude selfies on public transit and paragraphs between us of fantasy talk. “Come to Florence” was a catch phrase of his. Now, we have a much more drawn in, objective correspondence besides his request to “make me a mommy”. He comes from Italian aristocracy and spent the better part of the pandemic in his castle with his family- I’m sure a hot, incestuous bunch, no doubt. And now as I’m letting my heart take a breather, he drips in. Toxic and otherworldly. I am powerless, not to just shrug my shoulders and say. “Hell, why not? I like spaghetti!”  

Yet, he’s more like an apparition to me now. There’s nothing tangible to him other than his space in my mind stream and the little mythology he’s built. His entrances and exits in my life seem to chapter things. Will he ever really be there? Is this just a weird hedge maze for my head to get lost in for no reason at all? Despite the past floundering and the zero chance I will take him up on mommy hood, I still know there is some weird, warped shade of love in whatever desire thats behind this confusing back and forth and I appreciate it. 

I’m learning about the different kinds of love there are and how ugly and raw and spanky and intellectual and still they all can be and I’m here for all of them. Grateful to experience them. So many connections that had atrophied before the pandemic grew stronger and expanded my view on what love is which is more than just wanting to fuck the lonely father at the food court. I guess : ( ... My friend Angela sent me a video of Fiona Apple saying “Why don’t we just marry our friends?” I don’t feel like this is wrong.