Some of us hide parts of who we are, because the glamour of secrecy is too much to give up. It’s too sensual, it’s too sensitive. Secrecy out of necessity is too urgent, too compelling to throw away. Some of us fantasise of a future in which that side of us is no longer swept away, buried, like a necklace in a landslide. Some of us realise that we won’t be happy while we hide who we are. Yet the small judgements of those we don’t know matter more than the warmth of those that are closest.
What to do with a love that doesn’t exist yet? A love that is merely a wish. A wish that is so abstract it is a wish of really anything but where this is going. What to do with absolute faith in evidence of things not yet seen?
Some of us love who we are, the character that has been built up, but know that’s not it. Some of us still need the comfort of talking about love in some oblique way.
We need to lie in the sunshine, lapsing out of a summertime. We need the memory of telling a friend, on some sloping hill south of the river, that they’re our person. We need safety in someone, even if that person can’t be our person – because we could never be that person for them. Because of who we are.
Some of us get sick of being the character that has been built for us, some of us tough it out. But we’re here, tough or not. Some of us are no longer in the mood for secrecy, for being handsome and sensible, rather than happy and sensitive. What is the texture of vulnerability that we so desperately need, and where can I find it? Where should I, where should I, where should some of us, where should we be looking? Where to go to avoid looking inwards, to avoid having to drag the truth from the depths of our bodies? Why can’t our bodies and tongues align? Why can’t we just say it? Why are we made so inept to grapple with the depths of feeling, to know why we feel it but not how to feel it? Well-
I’m in the mood to take photos on a real camera so I can develop them, write the names of the people in the photo on the back, put them in a blue Boots envelope, in a drawer and relive these relationships when these relationships have washed away. I’m in the mood to fall in love, I’m in the mood to make mistakes and kiss the wrong person and send the wrong text. I’m in the mood to call from a landline and run over in the rain, to cry on my own and say that I’m fine. I’m in the mood to be okay again.
We won’t all stay away forever, and when that day of self-reckoning comes, love will always comforteth, like sunshine after rain.
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