I have a theory that we're all spiders. And maybe its a popular one. See, I think that all your relationships reflect, to a modest degree, your first sexual experience. That is to say that if your first experience was with someone you felt love for and were in a relationship with, then it's entirely likely you'll find that same scenario repeated in various forms throughout your life. Likewise, if it was dark, if it was yearning. If it was pretend. You'll always encounter those same threads. Perhaps we create the themes of our lives; perhaps they were written in the stars and destined to be. Or perhaps we seek them out, our unconscious...baiting the only love we've ever known, setting the snare of the same trap, and waiting, for the same catch, the same kill.
In the end, we're all just spiders. The crisscrossing of threads, the web we weave to catch, catch another.
You see then, how it's easy to know a person's history by knowing how they love. All of a sudden, you feel it, washing over you and into you, telling secrets and saying more than words ever could.
Sometimes like a tidal wave, awesome and overwhelming and too much. Much too much. Do you run from it's initial abundance? or do you take it, knowing it cannot be sustained.
Or sometimes, it's just a trickle. And while you put your mouth to the fountain, trying to catch every drop, taking the bait, perhaps you wonder, what is this love, where was it made? and who does it make me to have baited and caught such a thing?
You love in a tired way, not to say you are without energy or without passion. But in a way that says, you will leave, I dare not even hope that you won't leave. This love, tentative and withholding. Passed up from place to place. And me. My love says, you will leave, I expect you to. But maybe if I love you just enough, just a little, just right, this time you will not go.
Just two sponges, safe in the placid bottom of the sea. Anchored to the bottom, I'll leave you if you leave me.
And it's revealing, this demystifying, it lays the ugliness out in the open and you wonder how approach it, can I approach it, without failure. I look into your traps and see myself, and say, that could have been me, that could have been me. Maybe we could have been friends. Same trap, same catch. And here I am, here we are, and you say, just another lesson? This time, what is taught?
And I say, this time, I know what I did not know before. That you cannot plan an approach that knows no failure. That you must stand in the ugliness and open wide, and know that failure, that disappointment, that discontent, will come. That the very best you can do will never be enough, will never wipe this away, will never, ever, erase this ugliness, this scar, this misdeed of another.
Because it is not what you are called to do. And it is not what is required, what is asked of you, by another.
No, we are called to heal ourselves, and understand one another.
What is this lesson? Perhaps it has not yet been taught. But what am I learning? I am learning to walk through this life candid, and vulnerable, and trusting. I am learning that while a hurricane beats upon and threatens to topple anything that is barred shut and caught in it's path, its winds pass through a soul with open doors.
I can only feed my own fire, and send you warmth; perhaps let you hunker down next to it, and hope that, once its light begins to die, you find you'd like to come with me to find more wood. And if not, I'll send you warmth and watch you go, trailing thread.
