I love you
Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer
What should I do? Won’t you help me Jesus? Won’t you come here little girl? How am I to be? I love you through and through year in year out. I can’t slip from this need. It burrows through every recess of my watching mind. I need to love you and be loved by you. I need to own you and be owned by you. I need to marry you.
Our town is falling down. Burning beams heap along the roads and fall sometimes red hot or black smoldering into the streets, asphalt cracked and fissured. I had wanted only a safe place to share with you to share me with you to give everything I am to you. But our town is falling down.
Do you see me? Do you want to know me? I want to know every bit of you with every bit of me. I call this love. I call this letting you in to the place that I keep to myself because it hurts and no one wants to deal with who I really am because that’s the code and those are the rules and that’s why people get married. People get married so they have someone with a space to know who they really are and what they really feel. No one else has space for that. As far as I can see. Those are the rules as I perceive them. But that’s not why I want to marry you. I want to marry you because I’ve always loved you, because I want to be asked to always love you and to shout YES! Still I guess you have to know about what I understand under the term marriage.
A man loves his woman. He wants to give her his all and have it be enough, have it be what she needs. He wants to be strong enough to keep her safe. But the world is so big and people are so little. People lie about how strong they are. They don’t understand either how free they are or how dependent they are. Humans are completely free but they flow of one piece all together. Humans are free but they cannot escape one another and one another’s actions. Humans are free but only to love and stay gentle. Humans are free but only to be themselves. Humans are free but only to tell the truth. Humans are all in this together — even their freedom is interdependent.
A man loves his woman. I love you. A man wants to take his baby somewhere safe and make her happy and tell her in every way shape and form that he loves her and her alone. Not that he doesn’t love every one else, but that she is his wife.
I promise you my love and ask for yours. I promise you my heart and body and ask for yours. I ask you to think and feel this life through with me. I ask you to be my wife.
Help me Jesus. Come here little girl. You’re mixing everything up! You’re getting everything all mixed up!
Tell me angel, tell me heart, tell me baby girl, tell me how you need to be loved.
These broken chimneys, jagged slices through the red brick and offwhite mortar. These charred bodies and these bleeding ones. This walking evil and that slouching one. I tried to tell them about political evil and how it gives way to the old-fashioned, bone-crunching type of evil. But I didn’t know how to explain myself in a way that worked.
You are such a bunch of fucking liars. You take credit for the good and spread the blame for the bad. You forget over and over again that you rest upon each other and upon the systems that you create and either nourish protect tend or abuse twist break. I see you. I see how the systems you think are outside of you run through you and your lives. But this is by the by.
I see that I am one of you and make the same mistakes.
And I dream to flee. I dream to escape. I dream to break free from the hurt breathing and crackling in my pit. No, no it’s worse. It’s yet more sordid than that! Because I dream of fleeing to a safe place where I can sink deeper and deeper into the nauseous give-up.
Like when I was in junior high. I will tell you what happened. The pads were too big for me. The knee pads slid down to my shins. The thigh pads touched my knees. The helmet made it hard for me to see or to move my head. They handed me the ball. I ran and juked and pushed and pulled and I felt the pile gathering around me and consuming me and I felt kind of safe being crushed like that. Falling asleep into that bundle of violent men. Well, boys. Male violence. Coming to claim you, to destroy you, to break you, to annihilate you. All with a smile. All in fun. All something like the innocence of nature. What is it? Because it isn’t evil if you contain it and keep it contained in the bedroom and the playing field. But soon it jubilates in itself, it egotrips, it sacrifices love and wisdom for power and prestige, it shows off until there’s nothing left. The soft rat feels the loving annihilation of the smooth swallowing cobra, but somewhere midgulp the serpent’s explodes with a secret little self-exultation in its infinitely spreading power, and that vainglory is felt also by the dizzy-drowning rodent — which destroys and belittles the little fellow’s pleasant, sleepy-headed, never-minding resignation.
But this is all by the by.
I wonder what pertains to the matter. I wonder what the matter is. I wonder what’s the matter.
Please marry me. Please help me. The passion in me needs a lover to push against. The loneliness in me needs a friend to speak with. The anger and shame in me need a giggler to show all of me that I’m OK after all. And you. You fit me and I fit you. I feel that connecting-force every time we approach. And I want to go there, to where I belong. Please help me love you in a way that is good for us. Please show me how to care for you and know you. Please help me be both happy and decent in this narrowing space.
There is a world on all sides, gathering round. There is a Light shining through all things. There is a Way. I am asking you to help me live in and through and with the Light. I am asking you to help me find and stick to the Way. I am asking you to marry me in a nice way, in a way that lasts, in a way that helps us and everyone. Is there such a way? For us? What are the systems we’d have to put in place?
I love you, I love you so much.
oh thank you all for joining me here I imagine you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here and why I’ve stood up now upon the long wooden drinking table completely sober but with a simple wooden chalice that might very well be the holy grail or perhaps something a strange but basically OK uncle whittled years ago and then forgot about in dingy corners for thirty years and then happened across right when it was my birthday one year and so thought it was a sign or at least convenient and so wrapped it up and gave it to me maybe even with a joke about the holy grail.
I can sense your curiosity. I can feel your suspense. Maybe I even have some inkling of a general fading of patience filling this big cavernous but well-lit–thank God for those giant gothic windows with their thin, downward-melting glass!–chamber.
So I
I
That is to say
A man loves his woman and his family. A man isn’t so much to crow about. Men and women, people that is to say, people gather together to create, to forge alliances and fortress realms where the monsters are kept at bay for a time. But I am not a politician. And I’m no more a philosopher than the next guy, feeling and reasoning through his bleeding notions and stuck-in principles as best he can, trying to shift the whole to something that makes more and more sense to his heart and mind, which process inevitably requires that he find someway to orientate the whole towards his soullight, towards that within that actually loves, cares, believes in Goodness, in something worth serving.
What I mean is
I resign.
Authors: BW/AW
Copyright: AM Watson