Lune Noire

I think of the alignment of the Sun, Earth and Moon (capitalized proper names for situations familiar to us and faraway in the galaxy) on the day of the penumbral (partial or incomplete shading) lunar eclipse. All three inevitably shift from the gravity, which incidentially holds them together so shortly, of their respective orbits regardless of the reasons or feelings (humans attribute to them) in the matter. An optimistic reading on the night of the lunar eclipse is that it can be applied to humans--the mysterious way signs and symbols strengthen the invisible bond of the two hands, trembling in fear of the other slipping away.

I am at a point in my life when the Artemis instinct is the only available expression for me. I wonder if the feminine receptivity to love and intimacy is a much desired, needless to say, pined for, state, but it forecloses the intense focus required for other things, mainly cultivating interests and talents etc...I remind that the lack thereof is held against me every now and then.

I was deeply offended standing in comparison to Robert or whoever, [insert name here], earlier today for the reason that inevitably channels the above archetype: a sense of worth, for me, can only be derived by who I am and what I am doing and my insistence that you work out your motives beforehand about meeting me, because you want to, and not because you have this someone else to fall back on or one who will be compelled to enter into the transactions we have commonly used, albeit somewhat guiltily. In my unfair moments, I fail to mask my contempt for other adult relationships you have had, since they are human, they involve, evolve and devolve for contrived reasons.

Did you imply that the quarter jar, like the mortgage or the weekend boat trips were his way of compensating for the apparent lack of ambition, all his life? I correctly discarded my scruples that he would be offended when I longed for his wife--for this very reason--that he intends to retire where he is. This is why I admire my brother for resorting to violence in his dealings...he told me, long ago, that the majority of people on the offensive are really cowards or that they do not care about the people or things they stand to lose. He feels guilty for being so wicked, but he feels compelled to carry out the threat for ideological reasons...so much is made of romantic love and fidelity and bravery and honesty as if these things are common currency, and so few are ever driven to move beyond personal satisfaction, sloth and laziness. In my own way, and toward more productive ends, I want to be dared to do and make things, since the failure I feel the most acutely is my own.

I hate someone so much for being the whimpering mass on the MRI stretcher amid his disdainful technicians because he justifies his life in a bland, quasi-religious fantasy of overcoming when the hedonistic path has always been extending its irresistible temptations to even someone like him. [I have always thought compulsive eaters worked out an erotic disability through the only means at his or her disposal.] What ends the short vignette of the imaginary patient is that his housekeeper is confounded into checking his Facebook page every day to speculate on what avenues he is waddling down; though he runs, in his mind, and the women he meets there. I find the irrational pull of a common-law wife in the oil-water mix, where she is fighting for the permission to do his laundry. Could anything be more degrading?

I will make it a point to close my sympathetic ear to this as much as the orator should remind herself that her suffering is self-inflicted. Like everyone's.

My quandary at work is not the work, but the perception that I am a ready victim to all forms of harassment since I hold on there beyond any rationality. As such, I am forced to consent to the flattery of some arrogant bastard in a patient's room...someone who knows that I would look through him. He would not exist--on the street.

I do not mention the intimacies of my past for the reason that the women I have known were deeply ashamed about being perceived as less than the bright, young woman obsessing....

I paid for Martha's second trip (in the semester) to Paris quite willingly because I wanted her point of view and I wanted to secure her as my sole bedfellow, away from her male caller. I suspected from the beginning that I was complicated in an egomaniac's ploy, perhaps just as meticulously drafted as my own--that she never loved me, that she would secure a pleasure trip nevertheless, at the cost of her backwards, discreet benefactor. What she could not tell me is that life had cruelly cost her as well: being so tall she created a silent yet palpable chaos wherever she went, and the Harvard dissertation was paid through ignominious bank jobs and it sadly failed to provide the validation to her ennobled reading being or secure the dazzling intellectual projects she had dreamed. She taught French and abridged philosophy to flabby, sour girls walking in late, in the afternoon, in flip flops and flannel pajama pants...and not the cultivated, young women scholars at the Sorbonne. The child, like the creative projects she desperately wanted never came to fruitition, either. When someone approached her, as an admiring vision herself, she could not say no. How could someone be so resigned? She nevertheless remained with a colleague who pledged his loyalty to her, estimating his own self-made mediocrity the same as hers, rather than risk having her lover leave her at some point in time...regardless of my pleading to the contrary.

When I met Angelina, she introduced herself as Lisa then, in a bookstore, I was taken aback by her exquisite features, of her mind too...so much so that I overlooked the cracked leather jacket she was wearing. It never occurred to me that what she wore would be much more permanent that she or I had hoped. How could she promise a life with me when she was barely scraping by? For the sake of her pride, she told me to go away...because I would eventually anyway, inhabiting some castle, that I interminably do, in the air?

Never at any point since I have known you, have I wanted to recall who these two people were to me. They undoubtedly live on when I want to learn French or Portuguese or read Sartre in my spare time, but I think about your unsubtle influence on me as well, and how it amends the problematic present day of bearing "I love yous, always" ...It is unbearable when I know they are said simultaneously, or not, as consolations in other worlds...and in other words...

No, it is not an elevated means of securing--that stuff--tokens for your affection, but the way I dispel, for me, this terrible betrayal of words, in their inability to signify a solitary person or act. I think of the ability to attest, without conscience pains, the correct, aboveground administration of narcotics about the same measure all of us require, and sadly few of us can commit to, in a love relationship.