I suppose I have always wanted to be this way. As in, the way I am now or the way I am here, when I am alone or here with you. I never wanted to be tough or to be so brave or brazen or as if to walk or be without shame.
Besides, who is brave? Or what is bravery anyway?
I never wanted to walk as if I were a force to be reckoned with or as if I had to walk with a lean or slant to show that I am trigger capable and battle proven.
Yes, I have scars. Some are visible and some are invisible or undetectable to others or unseeable to the blind eye.
Either way, I have always wanted to be like this, quiet at times and louder at others. I have always had an affection for the colors of autumn or the sunset, and like the main character from S. E. Hinton’s novel, The Outsiders, I always saw myself as a person who is similar to the main character, Ponyboy Curtis.
I‘ve always been into sunsets and the sunrise as well. I have a love for landscapes and art, like the way I have always appreciated Norman Rockwell or the way he depicts good old America.
I am a fan of poetry. Shakespeare, of course. Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet as well.
I am a fan of the poets, and even the beat poets, like Jack Kerouac. To be honest, I don’t know where I would be if I never had the chance to read or hear some of Jim Carroll’s poems.
I should say the same thing about the first time I heard Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You.”
They are heroes to me.
I was never able to tell anyone about these things. I would never have the bravery nor the ability to stand before a crowd and read or recite my prose, like the way Saul Williams does or how his poetry allowed me to realize that we all have a voice.
We all have words, a heart, and trials and tribulations. We all have needs. We all have fears, and everyone has moments when they are lost or so far from home or seemingly broken and unfixable.
We all have something that deep down, we need to let go of.
We need to scream or find a relief valve. Had it not been for the poetry of people like Williams or Carroll, I suppose my dream to be a writer (one day) would have withered further, and vanished like dust after the winds moved the earth enough to disappear and blow away.
I have always been a lover. I was never much of a fighter. I had to train myself to hate. But life makes training myself to be hateful an easy thing.
Look around us.
People can be cruel. We say mean words and do hurtful things. And yes, we hurt the ones we love the most.
I suppose the reason for this is because no one else cares, which means nobody else is looking to invest in us nor do most people allow themselves the rites of gravity to be down-to-earth. No one chooses to be vulnerable or real enough to share, or care, or give wholeheartedly.
We are alive and well in an emotional warzone.
I think this is true.
I had to train myself to become numb, to not care, or to be agnostic, as in to be unaffected either way. So, come hell or highwater, nothing can hurt my heart. No one could ever hurt me again.
No.
My efforts were to keep from being discovered as meek. So, I put on my brave face and wore a false bravado like a suit of weak armor.
I had to program myself to un-feel and unlearn or reverse the polarity, as if to reverse the golden rules so that the rite of passage could turn into my right to selfish, or self-serving.
But none of this was really me.
Not at all.
I have always wanted to be this way—mindful and heartily ready to love, to give, to trust, or to take turns and, of course, I have always wanted to be somewhere during the sunset to watch the sky change.
I have always wanted peace. I want the balance of serenity and the understanding that despite the world or the flaws of people, places, and things, life is good.
Love is real.
And so are you.
I have always thought about this or about me with someone special.
Or in all reality, I have always spent time in the wonder of what it would be like to fall for someone so deeply.
I always wondered if I could be stolen by the sway, or so far gone and so deeply lost, as in helplessly and hopelessly submitted. Above this, I have always wondered if I could be so taken in by her (or you) that nothing else would catch my attention.
Nothing else mattered and no one else could intrude or take something like this away from me.
I had heard about love. I wrote about my ideas of love, or what it would be like to be so smitten by someone (like you).
To be taken and owned and shared between two people, or namely us, and to be immersed in the partnership of love, so much so, that I am otherwise untouchable, impenetrable, and unbeatable because even if the world were to explode, it wouldn’t matter to me.
Nothing would matter as long as I have this kind of love
(or you.)
I can say that as addicting or more tempting than the bright lights and rush from a cocaine bliss, love and the right girl, or the way she looks, or the way her skin feels, or love and the way her hands feel in mine, or love and the way she talks, or how she laughs and smiles, or the way she kisses, and yes, the way she kisses is even more so than a simple act. To conclude, I have always surmised that how she kisses or how her kiss electrifies the senses and livens the body is more addicting than any drug in the world.
Perhaps, this can be just as deadly too. But when you find the right one, then you’ve found the right high, as in lifelong, and everlasting.
This is what I mean about the right key being placed in the right cylinder so that the world could turn, perfectly.
Nothing can duplicate this brand of heaven.
Not cocaine. Not heroin.
Nothing can duplicate this kind of rush. No, there are no substitutions, not when this is real or pure.
I can remember my first dream of being with a girl. However, I say this and use the terms loosely. The dream came to me when I was young. I suppose there was something sexual about this.
But I was too young to understand about sex as an action nor was I old enough to understand the involvement of insertion or how two bodies became one.
I was too young to know about the act of sex, or perhaps I should say I was too young to understand the commitment or the full interaction of sex as it exists between two people.
I knew there was something beautiful about this. I knew there was something wild and free and crazy.
I knew it.
There was something about this dream that pumped blood through my veins. There was a feeling I had, which I was too young to understand and too young to know the depths of how deep this dream would be.
However, and simply put, I knew there was something about this. There was something about this that made me want to keep the dream to myself. I wasn’t old enough to know about the art of making love. At the same time, I knew there was something about this.
I knew this was something that I needed to keep to myself, which doesn’t mean that I felt shame or that I was embarrassed. At the same time, I knew this was something that needed to be private.
I’m not sure why there was so much about this dream to me.
I really don’t know.
As young as I was then and as old as I am now — I still remember this dream very well.
Maybe this was like a foreshadowing moment of consciousness, or perhaps this could have been a past life reaching out and telling me, one day . . . you’re going to understand this to an entirely different level.
And yes. Women.
I admit that there is no other creation as wild or as beautiful. I admit there is no other maze as confusing or as wonderful.
At the same time, I accept and heartily believe and know with all of my heart that women are the most incredible of the species.
We, or I, or men—we are simply the lesser of all and spawned from a lesser God.
Yes. This is true.
Or maybe it is better to say that this is true to me.
And it still is.
As for the dream, it was quick and equally innocent. I have always seen this dream as a symbolic meaning that represents the elusiveness of love or finding love.
Or if possible, this dream was telling me the future and promising me that there is a labyrinth ahead when it comes to life and love; and that while dead ends are on the way, there is also the feeling that comes when finding the key to the puzzle of life.
The right key needs the right cylinder.
Otherwise, nothing turns.
I can see this clearly now.
And yes, of course, this is a puzzle.
This is life. And life is supposed to be difficult.
Although, no one says this.
No one speaks openly or honestly and talks about how hard life can be.
But life is supposed to be hard. How else would we retain information about learning the value of something if it were not hard to find?
Or how would we understand what it took to discover something if it were too easy to come across?
The dream was as follows:
There was a woman in a backyard and standing at a clothesline with white sheets. She was standing there. Hanging sheets over the clothesline, outdoors somewhere, perhaps in the backyard of a symbolic house with a symbolic gesture of love.
There was something about this to me. She was in a suburban yard, in what I assume was the all-American dream, — and there she was, standing in the yard at the side of the house.
She was perfect and wholesome as ever.
She was tossing white sheets over the clothesline.
There was a waist high fence, white, of course, picket too, and this was posted around the house.
The sky above was the kind of blue that only comes in springtime. The grass was that newly formed shade of green, as if to define the return of spring and the rebirth of life.
She was beautiful, mesmerizing, and pure.
She was older, of course, and a woman in every sense of the word.
I can still recall her smile which was intoxicating.
I am unsure of her face, yet I can say that her smile left a mark on the emotional mapping in my heart.
I started to move towards her.
I wanted to approach her. I wanted to touch her, and she was willing to be touched by me, but she was evasive by some cosmic force.
She was elusive to the point where she was slipping away from me.
But not angrily or with any rejection.
She was vanishing as if there was something mandatory about her exit.
I was not running toward her. Besides, I can never run in my dreams, at least not really.
No, I was floating in her direction and trying to catch her.
But as I flew, I flew into the sheets and watched as she disappeared from me.
I tried swimming through the bedsheets with hopes of touching her.
But she was being pulled away.
All I could see was the bottom of her right foot and her ankle, before she disappeared.
Her ankle was full too, not thin, and all was perfectly shaped. Her toes were in perfect order, as if the big toe was in order, and in sequence with the others, all the way down to the little toe.
I went to grab her, but she disappeared.
I was too late.
And she was gone.
There was something about this. She was wearing a long white summer dress. I knew that.
She was buxom and beautiful.
I knew that too.
But all else was as it is in a dream.
Everything becomes interpretive and to us, analyzing a dream leads us to a search of a cognitive and subconscious measure.
Maybe I make too much of this dream.
Or maybe I never realized the signs around me, and I never dared to make enough out of it.
I know there was something sexual about this. At the same time, there was nothing sexual at all. And yes, there was something euphoric about this.
There was something wild, erotic, and there was something beautiful about my dream.
I woke up when the girl escaped me.
I suppose if there is something called wet dreams, then this was my first.
But again, I was too young to understand about sex as an action. But still, I knew enough to understand that there was something about this. There was something enough to push blood through my veins. I knew that someday, this would mean more to me than just a dream
This will be a goal of mine, and a failure. This would cause me to talk about a broken chain of events and that lead me to a broken heart.
Real love is far from easy.
But fake love is pretty simple.
Then again, fake love is like a knock-off or a generic brand that doesn’t seem to pack the same punch as the real thing.
At the same time, there was something about the idea of being so helpless or so attracted and so deeply lost.
I have always viewed this as if to be unforgivably lost and blinded by someone or teased and aroused by them; even the simplest features.
There was something so amazing about this that I could understand why battles were fought over love.
And I can understand why someone could literally die from a broken heart.
I really can.
I know that there were times when friends of mine would talk about the boys in our crowd.
They’d laugh about how one of our friends “wifed-up” or how they met a girl left the scene to have a girlfriend and fall in love.
I remember what we said about this or how we would call this being “Whipped!”
As in pussy whipped.
However, I dare us this world cautiously but meaningfully because in support of the crudeness; my reason for the profanity is not to offer this in a profane sense — but instead, I want to be true to the words of crass men, or true to the description of my so-called friends with names like Johnny the Rug.
None of my old friends were hopeless romantics,
And as for Johnny the Rug, his height of romance and sentimental value of girls was to call them chicks — yeah, well, I never said my friends were great teachers.
As for Johnny the Rug, he taught me a lot about what “NOT” to do.
But again, I go back to offer this as meaning behind the word “whipped” — and furthermore, without objection or rebuttal, I can say there is no whipping better than this.
To be in love . . .
I suppose I have always wanted to be in love.
I suppose I have always wanted to walk you to class or hold your books as we walked down the hallway. I have always wanted to stroll past the lockers and be there when you opened your locker and returned your books and got ready for the next class.
I suppose I always wished that I could have asked you to go steady with me.
Or maybe you could wear a ring of mine as a pendant on a necklace and put this around your neck.
Maybe this could have been a way to honor me, or as if to express without words that I belong to you, and you belong to me. But more, we belong together.
I have always wanted to feel this way, which was high as ever and in the most natural ways. I have always believed this is what it meant to be euphoric in the truest nature.
I assume nothing could feel this way.
Nothing at all.
I am the key, and you are the cylinder, into which I could turn perfectly.
Yes, I admit that sex is a drug. I admit the draw is strong.
I admit that I can be blinded by the prize and yes, I can lose sight of the cost or the price of love, which is not free; nor is freedom free, nor is anything worth living, dying or fighting for.
Even you and I can be evasive and elusive at times.
We can be lost or sucked away and thus, an altercation takes place or a distraction, and we can somehow vanish for a moment.
I have always been afraid of this.
I was never comfortable enough to stand on my own or claim what I call my special brand of beautiful.
This is you, by the way.
My special brand. . .
I am not typical by any means. I do not fit the mold of anyone else. I like what I like. Or should I say that I love what I love. And yes, I have my own secrets and kinks and fetishes.
I have my own desires. I have my own special things which make me move, so-to-speak, or sometimes, I know that there are tricks you can pull to make me purr, if you choose to.
This is when you know someone.
This is more than the fetish or the kink or the madness of say, doing it anywhere, just to get off.
Then again, I am older now.
My drive is no different from when I was young or in my prime.
In fact, I can say that I am in better shape now than I ever have been in my entire life.
More to the point and more importantly, I am not looking to run or to chase down the elusive or the evasive.
I do not want to rush anything when it comes to this.
More than anything, I want to take my time. I don’t want to rush and miss something or skip a beat.
Even though I understand that times moves faster when we grow older, I don’t want to rush the perfection of touch.
But if I had to, I would run through the sheets of my dreams and run across the world, just for you.
I don’t want another minute to escape me, let alone you nor do I want this or the love I feel to escape me.
Never again.
All I can say is when I grab you next, I’m not going to stop — or let go.
The high you bring to the table is more euphoric than anything.
The high you give me is better than something I used to buy in packages called Crazy Eddie.
This was over on 116th and Park—those were the bags that made people so high that they would jump out of windows.
I guess love can make people do the same thing.
Jump out of windows, I mean.
Perhaps this is figuratively and literally, or at least, so it seems
Crazy Eddie were the bags that made you so high that they they could latterly erase pain.
Then again, so can you.
You are the drug that makes me high enough to keep from the pain
I swear it.
Man –
I always wished I was strong enough to stand proud and say what I thought or told you how I felt.
Imagine how long and how high we could be, naturally, of course, if all we did was submit to the truth and that yeah, like Johnny the Rug used to say, “I’m whipped.”
But I’d have been okay with that. Not to mention the fact that what a whipping this would be.
God, she is so sexy.
I just wish she knew this in her own heart.
Maybe then,
She could feel this high too
and be with me
forever ~
The Written Addiction 