*Originally posted November 15, 2014 – Rescheduled for reposting on March 29, 2016.
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August, 2014
I adored the boy. Adored everything about his sensitive, electrifying personality, and the sight of him, all healthy and alive and real, not destitute in the gutter. But, he, distinct from my image of him… that reality was jarring, and jostled my senses. I would learn to find that he carried within him a fundamental lack of acceptance of the As I Am, and probably, across those past many and joyful days, had really come to me only as a respite from an atmosphere he’d described as intolerable.
As such, I’d fulfilled my role, for him; however, his actually giving me anything that might have brought what I needed may, also, have been pre-destined to be short-lived – just like the three lovely weeks those 30 years ago that had meant so much to me and, now to be realized, so little to him.
In plain English, when I lay in bed that night, I’d said to myself: “Given his repeated references to my ‘thinking out loud’; being ‘caught in the mind’; and, his most unflattering characterization of my swift, reactive personality….. his pontificating need to endlessly laud the virtues of Mindlessness and Disinterest ( hours at a time, over a period of days, toward which I applied my mind’s full capacities to grasp), I am left to [yes] think: “You know, if you extract my unlimited Internet access, my enticing electric Clavinova with the multiple presets and delay features, the guitars, and all my food, plus my willing reimbursement for household work (in which I duly shared, lest you think I sat by merely watching and barking orders)….would he have any desire to ride his bike to my house just to be with……well…me..….? ”
I concluded that the answer was: “No.”
Because, by his Master Teacher’s definition, “I” did not exist.
Only the god in all of us exists, he’d said. The god in him, with all his specific needs so expressed (and, defended)….but, the god in me, those needs either un-acknowledged or labeled “nasty”, perhaps petty?, all ultimately dismissible. And, he would persist to exist, in the fullest expression of god, but not so me – because I was merely Self, the product of my own, limited mind.
My adored’s needs very definitely did exist – his need to extract himself from all perceived negative forces; his need to identify flaws in the allegedly un-enlightened’s behaviors; all of that…..but, as soon as my needs attempted audience in the discussion, I was reminded that “I”, as a self distinct, did not exist.
Though I’d simply said: “Sex aside, don’t you ever just want physical contact for affection’s sake? “, I was not to be heard. “You might receive a hug.” He would hear only the voice of fear in his own head, which declared: “She wants to have my body, and she shall not.”
Everything had pretty much exploded at the moment when I decided to define my parameters for the sharing of provided goods. These were met with the litany of each of my flaws, in succession.
He’d railed against me, from all directions, pronouncing me crazed and spiraling (how does one “spiral into mania” in print, exactly?), declaring that “we never would have made it all those years ago, either.” Because I was a split personality – half Christian, half sinner.
To which, now, I can only respond: If a human alive exists without duality in his or her nature, let him step forward and speak; If, as the embodiment of the god in all, there exists one, pure person – without need, without ego, and irreproachable – let him stand in judgment of another, as Christ was so characterized. In the meantime, I will wait, in my fatefully split state, and in every further facet of my multiplicities, in the silence of my own, equally-real illumination.
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© Ruth Ann Scanzillo
8/2014. all rights reserved. Thank you.
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