COMMUNION

Forgive me if I have touched on any of this before. I think its content is timely for me and it may be for you.

A friend once told me, when I confided in him that I had never had a serious relationship, that "there must be something seriously wrong with me". It wasn't the response I was looking for but it did send me into a rage, at least internally. All my life I had been tortured by the idea that being in love or being loved was the only way to feel whole. Love and desirability were always and still are presented as the ultimate ratification of ones worth in the world and I imagine it is a source of great comfort, at least for while, not unlike deep religious practice. For me romantic love is generally represented as yet another portal into the arms of normative society. While this right of passage or rather much sought after prize may at times be a beautiful example of tenderness, passion, desire and even loyalty in human beings it is also a fount of anguish, dejection and a great sense of failure among so many. Personally, while I do enjoy a good love story I think the social ball and chain of the "your nobody till somebody loves you" sentiment is a great distraction from personal growth and odious in its ever presence in song and film as the exaltation of life at its most pure. Not everyone finds love. In fact not everyone finds themselves the object of desire at all.

Sometimes I find myself trying to figure out if the loneliness and lack of desirability I have always had and that feeling of missing something, of not sewing my wild oats or having been madly in love and loved in my youth, if it is a socially constructed neurosis or... is it simply that I have failed at being loved, at being fully human.

As I watch my face and body change with age and as the years do slip away I cant help but wonder about and mourn what I have missed in those sweet and greener years of my youth. To my eyes the language of young lovers that I might witness or encounter on any given day speak a language with each other that is totally foreign to me.

In more sentient moments I feel duped, brainwashed into feeling I didn't ever deserve a place at that table, that I was denied a feast and moreover that that feast would somehow fill me. Like most things among the human race it represents a kind of cast system. Within this system there are those that are disenfranchised and are made to feel they aren't fully living life unless they are loved and loving, racking up bedpost notches or bleeding into a diary about the pain and tumult of their romances.

I don't disbelieve in love as a whole. From my own experience I have fallen in and sometimes out love with my friends more then with anyone else. Those relationships haven't all been a fairy tales either, but they have taught me patience and compassion as well as the pain of letting someone you hold dear go.

What I have come to understand along the way is that I can revel and revile the human experience of communion with equal parts brio and dissonance.

When I am at my best I do not need your gaze for any kind of approval, I can laugh at my own jokes, find ecstasy throwing down in my own kitchen or on a canvas, and I don't need your caress to tell me my eyes are soft or my cheek is lovely to cup in your hand. My exaltation is not necessarily how I am experienced by others or how I move through the world but in how I choose to experience the world moving through me.

Happy New Year