Wire (thanks, Minnie Driver)

I received my 'Everything I've Got In My Pocket' cd today, Minnie Driver's first cd, & gave it a first-time listen on my way home from work. I got stuck on track 4, Wire, one spot where her voice dips down into the chorus ...

'oh I
climb so high
waiting to fall,
and then I cry
like a child on a neverending ride
waiting to fall' ...

I got speared, hooked, snagged, nailed, grabbed, BARBED, by that particular place in the song, & suddenly I was wanting to cry [liar, I WAS crying], wanting to be gentled, made love to like the fragile, delicate woman nobody ever seems to see in me. I must appear -- alive, alight, afire -- but always STRONG, like the one to take the lead, somehow, as if I'm meant to be in charge. I get depressed as hell by that. IT ISN'T ALWAYS SO -- only sometimes. I want to be drawn out, drawn in, called, coaxed, eased, seduced. I never get seduced --

What do I mean by that, anyway?

Told I'm beautiful, in that heartfelt, somehow astonished voice that men use when they're taken by surprise themselves, when they mean it utterly. Wanted, approached softly, gently, cautiously, even hesitantly -- as if I might easily be startled & shy away, might be lost instead of possessed!

Bobby is so sure of me -- & well he might be, I always want him! But it makes "ME" such a known, such a given, such a FACT ... when what I want is to be a possibility again, a maybe, an unknown. Because I'm NOT always the same (inside) as I appear outside, even if my responses seem the same. I need to be a question he still has to ask himself, NOT known, NOT secure [NOT secured], NOT predetermined, NOT a foregone conclusion.

I feel brittle, unseen, for all that I am, & he is, responding.

Difficult it is to surrender to the knowledge that there can be no 'firsts' for us anymore, like in the beginning of us, in the beginning of coupling, learning, discovering each other. Not in that sense, where EVERYTHING is new, a mystery, an unknown quality, entity, characteristic, move, touch. That beginning stuff, it has a caliber of intensity that can be hard to keep creating, between two people together for 22 years, married for almost 21. We do a marvelous job & I'm damn proud of us -- we are most definitely NOT two sticks in the mud, accepting 'the usual'. But nonetheless there IS, irrevocably, that element of 'usual' always present.

This song, blended with my mood today [with these particular absences & weaknesses & needs & blurred realities], is like a huge weighted paw, claws out, pinning me with my back to the ground. I don't like it! I don't want to feel dissatisfied when I'm SO satisfied. I don't want to mentally chase stooopid notions of Hollywood sunsets & fireworks that are never dulled by bills, laundry, dishes, teenagers, work, illness, TIME: those ridiculous perfect endings that always 'end' in that beginning phase, the honeymoon phase.

Still.

Still.

I dream hard of a certain kind of hand, rich with easy, confident experience, drawing soft doodles on my collarbone,

AND NOT EXPECTING MORE.

Just ... a touch, lingering, even a little grateful to find itself with access to me. Giving me time to collapse inside, time to see, feel & explore those old fragments so long gathered together into this Real Life, to remember myself, that self, A self capable of gasping with surprise, with surprising responses, with unknown zig-zags of reactions to an also unknown caress. No outcome in mind or imagined, just A Moment, enriched by 'IN THE PRESENT'.

I'm not saying this very well. I know that. How do I describe wanting to be innocent & inexperienced again -- not with the physical technicalities, but with myself, with another, with myself WITH that other?

I HATE this. Songs like this, so achingly beautiful, so close to my internal longings, articulating them for me in chord & melody & lyric & pace. Because I don't believe in striving for or loitering about the what-can't-be's. I want to direct my energies toward effecting the needed change in what I have, with the person I AM with, look toward positives, tweak the reality even more, toward better, toward BEST (our best, my best).

Still.

Still.

Tonight I could be someone else, with someone else. And tonight I want to know who that "I" might be.