7.
Piecing together the complexity of my internal experience is a complex and tedious task. Like an artist with thousands of broken plates, cups, and various other shapes of ceramic death spilled out on the floor, a universe of possibility waits ready to take form and express meaning. I run towards this with abandon diving into the ocean of chaotic possibility. Slowly a mosaic takes form and a reality takes shape. Each shard geometrically falls in place, and a puzzle once undone takes form.
Piecing together love. Mixing and matching a relationship, a connection, a reality stepping towards a future is nearly impossible. Lost in the face of blank canvas, an empty page, a flashing curser I am now suspended, confused, and lost between countless perspectives and feelings. Floating in a drift in my oceanic ceramic flow: icebergs at sea. Piece by piece, I put her together. Gravity cementing our mosaic relating.
I remember a winter night in Big Bear. Roaring fire, 5000 piece jigsaw spilled on the floor, grandparents with grandparents in the kitchen playing cards and drinking whiskey, children unpuzzling.
Unpuzzling: the process of putting a puzzle together.
The humility and elation of puzzling towards an answer, a final picture, a solidified image drove us, on the floor in our pajamas with build in socks, to continue long into the night.
First the frame. This was always a solid strategy, as there were then fewer variables. Once the frame was finished we moved on to the interior. Piece by piece, constructing. Reality falling into place.
I feel this way now. Sophia falling into place. Each moment with her another piece fills the frame of our relationship. What was chaos becomes concrete. What is concrete becomes chaos. And the reality of love becomes some a variable, an uncertain relationship between the both of us.
A massive leap in gravitational thinking occurred with Einstein. In fact, an entirely new universe was created by his thinking and observation. Newton gave us concrete gravity and reality: objects, subjects, and forces. To Newton, gravity was a force that could be measured and predicted; it was something that was concrete, something that would construct laws, meaning was drawn inward from the outside, and reality shared quietly her mysteries and secrets.
Meeting Sophia, I tried to sculpt her towards certainty. I wanted an easeful, Biblical like six-day creation, followed by a day to rest. The universe is done. I wanted a Newtonian relationship. But this isn’t reality. Certainty is for the feeble of mind and heart.
For Einstein reality was soft, subjective, and bendable. Gravity was no longer an independent force, but something that is perceived, thus relative to the frame of one’s own perception.
Sofia isn’t a solid being. She bends as I bend. We unfold together, in relationship.
Einstein observed that the perception of gravity is the result of space/time curvature. Both space and time changes in relationship to other objects. Space/time is patterned and affected by objects of mass.
To mimic an example given frequently by Einstein: a minute on a hot stove seems like an hour and an hour with Sophia seems like a minute.
Our relationship falls towards a specific outcome in each moment. However, in each moment a mass, object, feeling, thought, want, desire, or observation reframes the track.
The mass of the objects in my interior influence the nature of our free-falling love.
The direction of our experience, our relationship, is effected by the influence of objects within. Annie was an object of considerable mass. Such mass, in fact, she was at times a black hole, pulling everything in my interior towards her. Sometimes it was fear, sometimes it was sadness, and sometimes it was her wanting and wondering of what might have been.
As Sophia and I fell, mosaic taking shape and our geodesic direction ever shifting, we ping ponged through a puzzle of infinity pieces – once a puzzle was solved, constructed and complete, a new chaotic potential arose, begging more for construction and definition.
Sitting here now in the warm Mexican sand, seven months after I dialed the phone and she picked it up, I longed for definition, understanding, and a release into the mystical and ecstatic state of unobstructed free fall. The free fall the sages of past and lovers of the present proclaimed to be their experience.
Could such a reality exist? Is there any experience without the influencing push of objects with mass?
Her music stopped. Her sweet, nectarous music froze in its honey drip. I released my gaze from the shifting Pacific flow and shoreline froth, and slowly turned my head. Panoramic slide, eyes shift slowly from center to the left, my body turned to accommodate my neck: I gazed towards the beach cottage we shared. On hiatus from the Philharmonic, we retreated to the Mexican coast. She could play to the sound of crashing waves and the sweet smell of salt, and I could think and write to the harmonics of her strings. Together we could drink and fuck. Together, we slowly, carefully, with the attention of a six-year-old, piece together our puzzle of infinite pieces.
She stood in the door, her curves black, framed by the backlight. “Do you want to walk down the beach to get something to eat, babe? I’m starved.” I am starved too, in this moment. Let me eat you, please.
“Yes. Let’s walk.”
From the dark cavern of our shared space, our cottage, she emerged like a mythic creature. Mystery and beauty danced across the sand; everything I know about her only reveals the infinitude that I do not know. Though, with each step, breath, look of penetration, word, and memory, a part of her is revealed and lost. In piecing together the mosaic of my interior, I also piece together hers.
She stepped towards me walking with the sentience and presence of a Zen monk on pilgrimage; each grain of sand felt and loved with each rolling footstep. Her walk mesmerized me and sent me into a spiritual silence – suspended in the center of the universe. She gained my side, and I stood.
Arm in arm we walked down the beach, with the feeling of going somewhere and the appearance of going nowhere. We moved in silence, rounding bends and traversing tropical coves, some housing the ancient ruins of 80s cocaine and marijuana lords. Now off-season squatter houses and on season bed and breakfasts owned by Euro trash hippies and burnt out executives. We moved in silence and the world moved in stereo.
An old man appeared in front of us. Likely a local fisherman, judging by his bare feet, cut off jeans, and ripped tee shirt – he could have been Hemmingway’s Old Man. He slowly moved towards us.
He stopped directly in front of us, took a deep breath, and said, “En silencio usted ambos es uno,” and continued down the beach.
“What did he just say?” Sophia asked.
“I don’t really know. Something about silence and one, I think. You know my Spanish sucks.”
“Nah, it’s just you that sucks.” With a laugh and a slap to my shoulder, she took off running down the beach, and I chased her. Forever chasing her.
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