True Love is Real
From Savage Spear of the Unicorn
True love is real. I know you felt it too.
Real but not tenable. Talking to Angela on the phone. Hearing her laugh. First time in four years. This is not literally what it felt like but the only metaphor that contains it: clusters of trillions of galaxies suddenly uncurling in my heart across infinite black space. Like the sun. Like a fern fiddlehead spiraling out in Golden Ratio all at once, perfect fractal leaves each a picture of the language expressed in every atom and every being, some message, some whisper from God. Angels with a thousand wings a thousand eyes blowing trumpets like Tibetan bells, just hearing her voice. And she’s in Portugal and suddenly I’ll have to care about her fucking some waiter.
She feels it too. She’s mad at me for not coming now. I have to work. Don’t you understand, my boss needs more money. Bills to be fed, FICO score needs new debts so I can one day pay “them” for a 500,000 dollar shack plus 450,000 in interest until I’m 70.
I love her and she’s mad at me. Could I take this every day for say the next 40 years. Her being hurt. My fucking it up. If she didn’t love me back it’d be OK. That would be normal but having a chance and then having to do something. Don’t you understand. I have to get gas go to the dermatologist follow up on my car loan fix my book cover… how could I leave this all behind. What if she came here. What if I could no longer jerk off alone at night then sift through piles of old mail.
My one chance. No question. Her laugh erased every red pill I ever choked down. I’d give her the divorce money. My kidneys to eat. Keep this feeling. I need to stay crazy. Real enough that other women are fake, nothing, her voice makes them repulsive like putrid meat, like fresh piss in an elevator. They make me sick. This is love and she’s in fucking Portugal and that thought intrudes. You love her because you can’t have her. Don’t you understand, it’s a bad idea. It’s “your alcoholism” that makes you want this. I don’t care. I’ll drink my way through it. Who can say what God wants.
Don’t you understand I need to suffer and die alone. She’s the one. No one else will be like this. Maybe I go and she eats me alive. No being rational. It’s go or not. This is what teenage runaways feel. I’m 43. You don’t lose it. What would it be like to feel this, and to have what you want be possible.
We’ll never know.