The Wandering Soul.

Today as I destroyed a chicken burrito and watched the Tyra show on my
lunch break, a thought occurred to me which seemed highly profound at
that very time. There are two reasons for this, maybe the thought is
indeed profound or perhaps it was only profound in the context of a
burrito and Tyra Banks. You be the judge.

I began to contemplate the differences, if there are in fact any,
between prostituting your body and prostituting your mind. To me, my
mind is more intimate than my body, which is why I guard it much more
heavily. Half the population has man parts and half has girl parts,
but no part of the population thinks my thoughts or feels my feelings.
At least I hope not because if they do then I am terribly wrong about
all of this. But I am sure the sanctuary of my mind is much more
incorruptible than the sanctuary of my body. There are only so many
mechanisms, which can protect the body from its environment while an
infinite number of protective barriers exist internally to shelter the
mind. Or so I would like to think.

But what is ultimately more detrimental to your soul, to sell your
thoughts or to sell your sex? I think that Tyra should probably do a
show on this, in fact I cannot think of a more perfect forum for such
a discussion. I can see it now, Tyra batting her artificially enhanced
eyelashes, "so Mr. really smart triple PhD. from Harvard, what kind of
effects does assigning a monetary value to someone's painting have on
their psyche?" And she would nod her head and say some big words
someone wrote for her on a cue card. Not that I don't love Tyra, but
seriously, any woman who would get a live ultrasound of her boobies on
cable television just to prove that they are indeed real does not know
how to pronounce words with more than three syllables. And if she
actually does than she must of learned a long time ago that people
like her more for her body then they do for her brain. That's
intelligence.

Okay, I thought I was going somewhere with that but I'm not feeling it.

Days later.

I have this sort of empty feeling in my head, a hollowness that aches
and retches and needs to be killed. So easy to drown it with some
wine, some liquor, some something, but I'm fighting that because you
can't always run from what is real.

Today I made two phone calls that I never wholly intended to make. One
to an old friend, one to an old lover. Even as I was dialing the
numbers I didn't want to. Even as I was saying hello I had to fight
the urge to throw the phone and run away. I get that way with people
who know me, I mean really know me. It isn't even that, they think
they know me and like to tell me who I am and what I am like and it's
so hard not to laugh. How could they? I've had this discussion before
with maybe a handful of people who I truly tried to let know me, but
the reasons I found and the answers I gave were never really enough.
They felt like excuses, not explanations and maybe that is it, there
can't be a simple sort of explanation for a not so simple mind but
that's what people want. They're so uncomfortable with brokenness,
especially the kind without a how-to-fix manual that sometimes it's
easier to give up and live somewhere on the surface instead. And yes,
that's possible at least for some time. You can ignore and battle your
true self, you can replace it with some sort of ideal but horrifically
funny things happen when you do that. People fall in love with the
surface and it doesn't matter to you, well maybe it hurts a little,
but you can't love them back and you can't explain why that is and so
you keep living some sort of fantasy, someone else's fantasy. You push
away the reality of who you might really be, trying to find the right
time to explain it all away but that time can never come. You move on,
you have to.

And this is all why it's good that he's leaving, because I haven't yet
had to confront the conflict between the truth and the ideal. And
maybe that's not even it. I sometimes like to think that because I
knew that he would be leaving that I let him know me in a way I let so
few people know me. It would never be my fault that he left and that
feels so much better. Not just that, but realizing that there was
something between him and I, something unexplainable and
irreplaceable, not exactly love but an unspoken understanding and
acceptance. I didn't need to find excuses for who I was and he didn't
ask and I somehow know it wasn't because he didn't care, it was
because he just understood. That's enough to make me love him always,
enough to let him go forever because some things need to end like
that. This wasn't meant to be a forever kind of thing, I think it was
something to fill a void in each of our lives and I think that's
pretty beautiful. People keep telling me that the world works in
mysterious ways and most of the time I don't believe them, but right
now it makes some sort of sense.

So tonight I will sleep alone and let the cool breeze play games with
strands of my hair and be happy knowing that there is so much more out
there.