The History of Gravity - Ch. 5

5.

I find myself perpetually in circumstances of compromise: self and values lost; situations that I create, allow, continue, resist with what seems like everything within, but are impossible to avoid. There are gravities in me that control my life that I am not aware of, strings pulling me like a puppet, yanked and tugged and tossed about through the universe like Andy, brother of Raggedy Anne. I sit, eyes resting on Annie in front of me, across the table. My nostrils are saturated with her, her scent, potent and rich, gathering and overwhelming the soft inner ear of my nose.

Everything inside me hates her. Everything inside me, right now, screams for me to get up and walk away. But I don’t. I sit. I sit across from her, following the movements of her lips, acknowledging with the movements of my head: my head, nodded by the puppet master, moved against my conscious will. There was some deeper will, deeper desire, deeper value that compromised and trumped all of my conscious self. My life is lived in compromise and shadow, and lived by something I cannot see and do not know, for here I sit against my consciousness will, but I continue to sit.

My fingers clasp a cold glass with a whisky soul. I twirl ice. I drink. Whiskey is stale against the tongue. In its southerly throat slide a pungent rush floods my nostrils, temporary relief from her lingering olfactory presence, and then the final, perfect, expansion of warmth and happiness opens from my belly towards the rest of my body.

“You’re drinking fast,” she said. I was drinking fast. I had been drinking fast for a year.

“I’ve been drinking fast for a year.”

There are moments of light, ease, fluidity and grace. Moments when life effortlessly unfolds and nothing matters much less the quality of light, the honest kiss of air on skin, and sweet indulgent assimilation of each breath. Moments of love, complete satisfaction, when all desires, wants and needs have been satiated, and all that remains is freedom and flow: this is when I am most myself; this is freedom.

Sitting here, across from Annie, freedom lost, I desperately long for my natural state, and resent her, Annie, for evaporating my perfect stasis. With her words, her movements, her gestures, with her, drunk through my senses, I am bound.

All lovers, all people, establish their own rules for the game of love. We walk around with these rules, and they guide our actions – the puppet master divorced from the appearance of the show. Most of us are unconscious of these rules. We don’t know what they are, and we only know their existence by the affect they have on our lives. Annie built her set of rules, and I built mine, and at a certain point our rules raged against each other.

In the fourth century, Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, believed that there was no effect without a cause, and thus no motion without specific force. It’s in prejudice that gravity and science in the west are often attributed to western thought, but it has conceptually existed much longer in the Indian mind. Aristotle, much like Kanada and Brahmagupta, theorized that objects moved in attraction based on weight.

Paradoxically it was the westerner, Aristotle, not an easterner that saw gravity holding relevance outside of the physical world. He also hypothesized that everything moved towards its proper place in the heavens – that is: up. Aristotle saw gravity as two things. First, a physical attraction based on mass moving towards the earth, and a spiritual attraction based on perfection moving away from the earth.

The simple, clear, but pathetic truth between Annie and me was that we actually understood each other’s rules, though we, ourselves, did not even understand our personal preferences. There was an inexplicable relational gravity that bound us together, while there was an ideal of perfection that drove us apart. We walk around the world storying ourselves through relationships assuming we’re understood and that we are understanding. I walked with Annie like this, and though we walked side-by-side, we stood miles apart.

I now sat directly in front of her, and we were still miles apart. Another long draw of whiskey: stale against the tongue, like the lingering taste of a love now lost.

“You need to know I’m sorry, Philos. I am very, very sorry for everything. I made so many mistakes, and though you weren’t the easiest person in the world to be with…”

“You’re not going to make this about me, again, are you?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” I didn’t mean it like that. The words echoed through my head.

Images and feelings collided with each neuron. A small reality of memories unfolds. A beaming sunlit Sunday morning; we were in bed, sleepy in soft, gold, Southern California light. Between covers, sheets, and pillows; between lust and satisfaction, we rested sweetly. She whispered in my ear, “We’re going to be together forever, just like this, forever, aren’t we? Tell me we’re going to be together forever.” She stroked my face and hair. Her gaze penetrated and held. She kissed my face. “You mean marriage? Kids? House? Forever, forever?” I asked. “No, darling, no. I didn’t mean it like that.” I didn’t mean it like that. (She never meant it like that.) “I mean just like this, forever, just like this.” She took me into her mouth.

My groins harden and my pelvis lifts: thighbones are pulled forward and up. My head fell back. I let go in her mouth, with the sunlight pressing warm into my face. “I’m going to drink you forever,” she said, “just like this.”

“You never mean it like that,” I said. Twirl of ice, drink of whiskey. “Tell me, then, Annie, how do you mean it?”

“I love you, Philos, and I’m sorry. I want you.”

“There is nothing left of me for you to have. I am done.”


I woke up slow and fuzzy. I could smell liquor before all else cognized. I knew by the feeling of the sheets that I was not in my bed. With my next breath, a lightning spring of pain geysered trough my mind. The taste of alcohol and sex was in my mouth and soul. Another lost fuck, gratifying to my body, glands, pussy, but sad for my heart and puncturing to my soul. I’ve always thought myself a modern woman, free and sexually liberated, but for whatever reason, deep down, I rejected my liberated actions. These were not free. A one-night stand or a casual fuck is a sadistic jihad against the sweet beauty and divine affirmation of love well made. Without emotion, feeling, connection, care, sex is simply masturbating with a body that I can’t feel from the inside out. I, for one, am tired of fingering myself.

He rolled and bumped me. I opened my eyes. His room was cavernous, dark, and dusty. Another eruption of pain in my head: what did I drink? Whiskey. Always whiskey. Only whiskey. Your mom drank whiskey straight; she could catch a room on fire, is what dad used to tell me. I drank whiskey straight. I doubt I catch rooms on fire.

I rolled out of bed. Silently. I walked and felt for my clothes in the grey, dark room. Dad said that he knew from the first time she handed him a whiskey + rocks and clinked her glass of whiskey + rocks against mine that she was the woman he needed in his life: dad imprinted whiskey and my mother on my soul. I felt around in the dark actions mirroring mind. Pants, bra, shirt, one shoe, the other shoe. No panties. Where are the panties? The panties will be left, with a piece of my soul.

Pulling up my paints, I hopped quietly to the door. Bra, shirt. Hopping on one foot, right shoe. Hopping no on the other, left shoe. I open the bedroom door. More grey light and tired dust wedged into the room.

“Are you leaving?” A voice echoes from the deep – creation!

“Yes. I’ll see you at rehearsal.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll see you later.” Hallway. Living room. Purse. Phone. No missed call. No message. No text. No Philos.

I walked through the eastside towards my car. East Los Angeles: a graveyard of masturbatory experiences, a garden of relics past, and a reminder of the dissatisfaction of disconnection. It is my nature to move towards union sweet, and it is away from connection my life continually spins. “Ennui, ennui,” the love-bird sang. And it was within these notes and its’ song that my thoughts twirled.

With the shining light of wisdom, my love casts soft shadows, but now wisdom was dry and absent like moister in Los Angeles’ fall Santa Ana winds. Dust to bone, ashes to ashes. Contractions and dullness in the body reflect visionary disassociation. Patterns in the brain repeat forever with revised content, but sadly most believe the nature of content to be self. I believe my content to be me and I know this is wrong, but I do not know another way.

Through the graveyard of the eastside, and through the graveyard of my mind, I step my walk of shame: the shameless shame of a liberated woman.


Annie fucked it up for me again. I fucked it for myself again. Patterns within nature constantly repeat. Annie, for whatever reason, had the power to remove everything of virtue and importance:

Dreams
Vision
Low cost fuel
Love
Post consumer recycled products
Sex
Luck
Art (especially good art)
Faith in Humanity
Faith in Divinity
Rocking out
Non-Violent international relations
Community
Joy
Gut splitting laughter
Eco systems
Good posture
Tasteful fashion
Chance
Long holiday weekends
Vocabulary

With one sweep of the hand and tongue, realities, suspended by belief and disbelief, are dismantled, imploded, and destroyed: Death Star in Return of the Jedi ad infinitum. I do not know why she places me in such meandering confusion, resentment, and disconnect. One moment, I know everything, lifted by the promise of new and considerate love, and then she, as if magically, reappears. The universe flies apart and Bastian on the back of Falcor cannot save The Empress, and reality, my reality, flies effortlessly apart.

The pain of confusion is different than any other pain. It’s not sharp and demanding. It doesn’t force immediate change, like a hand on the stove, the ache of loss in the heart or the punch-in-the-gut of betrayal. The pain of confusion rests solely within one’s self, but affects all those around them. Dulled by the gauze of confusion, the senses are confined to their egoic prison of indecision waiting and wanting someone to decide fate. Pull me forward and from this pathetic experience! is their war cry.

Annie now, again, wanted me and loved me. She had returned, from indecision to decision, and now left me in indecision. To be loved by her again would not heal the wound the absence of her love tore in my soul. And there was Sophia, in her perfect mystery; she allowed herself to be sung by me, forever celebrating the sunrise and continuously singing of daisies. Consider the sparrows, consider the lilies; never having spun or stored, they are provided for. Unfortunately, lilies and sparrows aren’t capable of human emotion and complexity.