Any Affection

 

Who would guess that this stage of life I'm still looking for my people. Where are my people?  I've floated on the ocean currents and let them take me into the next place and the next web of relationships. It never seemed to be my choice but more what the tide brought me, like Robinson Crusoe, alone on my island and then the ocean brought me companions.

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“Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Preserve your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between inner solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.”

—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947)

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Yet still there were the special relationships and friendships that seemed constant and predictable. All illusion because the tide has taken all of that back into the sea and I have to choose to remain as things are or take to my solitary oars again.

My question to myself is a lifelong "Was I wrong about everything?"

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“Because it was him, because it was me”: [...] taking this phrase of Montaigne at face value, are we not tempted to give up on trying to analyze a feeling, a type of relationship [that escapes] all explanation?

It is these "common" friendships that can be rationalized: I like one person for their generosity, another for their sincerity or loyalty... The reasons I feel friendship towards them are the qualities [...] that I recognize in them. But "perfect" friendship [...] has, at its core, something irreducible and ineffable. At most, it is possible to give an image of it through successive distinctions, by setting it apart from everything that is not it.

— Friendship , ed. Sophie Jankélévitch & Bertrand Ogilvie

[exhaled spirals]

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Because the most solid the most dependable the most clarity is with those who I knew earliest. It makes me wonder if I started out with a clear compass that later became erratic. Did I damage myself by being too needy? Too everything? Or should I have been more exacting and more courageous all along. To choose without equivocation. You. Yes. You. Clear. Emphatic.

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“Early on in our friendship we'd explored the possibility that we were in love, but those feelings had soon subsided and made space for something much more enduring, a multiyear conversation that went round and round, a true love without claim to ownership, a bracing pact in the face of every new circumstance in our respective lives. »

— Ia Genberg, The Details

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I tell myself that this is good, good to be alone, that I've been partnered pretty much my entire adult life and this time this solitude this aloneness is essential is emphatically right and correct and even holy. However all alone in a sound stage full of ghosts and echoes just intimidates me and I end up in a conversation with these same ghosts and my own unhealthy fantasies that throw up to me failure and humiliations both real and imagined. I hesitate to ask someone to send me a lifeline. I want real love.

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“Seduction is woven through every friendship. Perhaps friendship is only love's mirror, as Hubert claims, but it is made of love restrained—that's what gives it its character, what allows respect to exist between us. Friendship is love that resists. »

— Mylène Bouchard, Imperfect Friendship


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Maybe my loneliness for friendship is in reality my longing for the certainty of a former self and former certainties and purposes. This shipwrecked self is sending out bottles from my Robinson Crusoe island but I'd better get to work building shelter and foraging for food by myself.

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Today I write you from my traveler’s cell
at the hour of an imaginary rendezvous.
A downpour shatters the rainbow in the air
and planetary sadness on the mountains.
Sun and bells in the old tower.

Antonio Machado from “Songs to Guiomar,” Border of a Dream: Selected Poems, transl. by Willis Barnstone (Copper Canyon Press, 2003)

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 I remember when my brother was paralyzed and languishing in Shepherd Spinal center and his many many friends and lovers would come and visit. They would say things like "You're still the same you." When they would leave, he'd turn to me and say "But I'm not. I'm not the same person any more.  That person has died." Almost all of those people disappeared out of his life. Then he met his current husband. It's like they had to go first and make room. Thinking about this I realize "I'm injured and I didn't even know it."

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But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.

Albert Camus, The Plague

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The stress response rewires.
New signaling patterns emerge that were impossible in the old configuration.
Not because grief made you “stronger.”
But because grief forced a reorganization of your entire bioenergetic identity.
This is what no one sees from the outside: that while your heart is breaking, your biology is reorganizing itself around a new frequency of truth.
You don’t come back the same.
You don’t return to who you were before.
Hopefully, you rise with a different kind of power:
one born of loss, longing, love, and the refusal to close your heart even when it hurts like hell.

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“I am going, friend, I am all but gone, I believe you prideful and wrong but I have no desire, now, to cure you. Your wrongness was an idea I had. I am all but gone. My idea of your wrongness will go with me. Your rightness is an idea you are having. It will go with you. For all of that, I hope you live forever, and if the place falls down around you, as it seems to be doing, I hope even that brings you joy. It was always falling down around you, everything has always been falling down around us. Only we were too alive to notice. I feel the truth of this in my body now. I am trying not to be terrified. But I am sometimes, in the night...

That letter exists in my mind. But I am too tired to write it. Well, that is not true. I am not too tired.
I'm just not ready.
The surge of pride and life and self is still too strong in me.
But I will get there. I will. I will write it yet.
Only I must not wait too long.”

― George Saunders, Liberation Day


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