Fire Does What it Wants...

Some people might call them ties, emotional ties, but threads feels more accurate.  Tendrils of connection, sinewy filaments that stretch across time, distance, trauma and seem to have the staying power of a spider web you didn’t see but becomes plastered all over your face...

I have walked into a few of those in my time....

And like walking into a spider web, I really didn’t see it coming.  Nor was I able to quickly and easily shake it off, or extricate myself from the fibers of connection to this other person.

I used to have this recurring dream about an old boyfriend.  We hadn’t seen each other in years, but about every six months, for 20 odd years, I would dream about him.  In most of those dreams, he was a bad idea at a bad time in my life, but every single time, in the dream, off I would go with him as I watched my life blow up around me.  He was not good for me, but I fucking loved him like an addict loves a fix.  And I suppose in some sense, he was like that for me.  And I for him at one point in time.

But that connection waned over time and sobriety.  And I thought it was dead, I stopped dreaming about him 11 or so years ago and really haven’t thought about him at all.  I talked to him about that same time and we were able to catch up on our lives and it felt like a very solid period at the end of a very long run on sentence that was us.  And after that conversation and a few texts, we faded into each other’s pasts and that was that.  No more contact, no more dreams.

But I have now dreamt about him the last two nights.  I haven’t even thought about him in years.  I am not sure why he has come up in my subconscious but he is there, occupying it.  Maybe there is something going on with him, I could always tell.  We wouldn’t even be in the same town, and something would happen and I would wake up in the middle of the night knowing he was cheating, or in trouble, or whatever.  I don’t think I have ever had that kind of emotional connection to anyone, ever before or since.  I don’t even know what it was...I think he just embodied everything I thought I wanted at the time.  And my God was he hot.  I mean like Gavin Rossdale hot.  Come to think of it, he kind of looks like Gavin...maybe seeing Bush the other night rekindle the pathways in my brain...

Who the fuck knows...

But whatever jarred my mind has let loose the memory of him and he is now running through my dreams at night...and it isn’t with fondness or love or even hot sex.  It is just one version after another of a drunken escapade that always ends in me pretending that everything he does doesn’t kill me inside, doesn’t just rip me to pieces.  Which, of course, is pretty much what our relationship did back in the day.  He was this uncontainable spirit, a fire that consumed, “fire that does what it wants...”

It is weird for your mind to take you back in time to a place that you don’t really want to go. I mean, the high is fucking heady but oh the fucking crash is painful.  And so it is in the dreams as well.  Fire does what fire wants...and you would think after all these years, after all this time and recovery and healing and everything else, those emotional threads would have been consumed by the fire, the test of time, those polymers made brittle and easily broken with all this time...but he still remains.  His flag firmly planted in my psyche, despite the number of times I have reclaimed my own land.  He is like a rebel solder behind enemy lines, creating hollow victories that I am always able to undo, but nothing I can ever do can stop his incessancy.

So weird who we become attracted and attached to.  For me, it isn’t even him, it has always been the idea of him, the way we fit together, the intellectual banter, the way he laughed with his whole soul.  I know today I don’t miss him, but I miss loving someone like that.  For the fiery passion that consumes, for the intense interest that burns hot and brightly but somehow, the more it burns, the more it is there.  When I think of him, it is all passion, drunken, stupid, passion.  There is no real love there.  Never was.  It was always just smoke filled pool halls, and toxic sex in random bathrooms and long lost weekends where we never left the bedroom.  

Weird to still be connected to him all these years later.  I mean, it is ok.  I have no urge to talk to him or reach out.  He is someone that I wish to remain a distant memory.  But so odd that my psyche still hangs onto him after all this time.  Our connection fiery, hot and without restraint. He was truly like the Land of Milk and Honey, but in some mirage form...

“I try to get over you, you're in me all the time

I try to get over you, you dominate my mind”

And this is how it used to be for me.  I was not able to move on from him easily.  It took a very long time. But I did so it feels especially cruel that my subconscious is bringing him back.  But I guess we are not in charge of what the mind thinks anymore than we are in charge of what we need.  I mean, I can change what I want, but need? Not so much.

I am spending my time thinking not so much of him but all he represented to me.  So much a part of me hitting bottom. So much power and energy and life I willingly gave away and he was so much an inadvertent part of my salvation.  God selects interesting heroes, send the most unlikely souls to help save you when you quite desperately are teetering on the brink...

Interesting timing God.  I do not want him, or even another him.  But I would be lying if I didn’t own that feeling that passion again would be quite a feat.  It feels like it has been so long dormant.  So long gone.  And perhaps that is for the best, incredibly connected passion has never really worked out all that well for me.  It was never, ever the land of milk and honey I thought it was going to be. Because fire always does what it wants...

Please God, not again, still...

Quotes were taken from Bush's song Land of Milk and Honey...