the persistence of narration

I used to be lunatic
From the gracious days
I used to be woebegone
And so restless nights
My aching heart would bleed
For you to see
Oh but now...(I dont find myself bouncing home whistling Buttonhole tunes to make me cry)
No more I love yous
The language is leaving me
No more I love yous
The language is leaving me in silence
Changes are shifting outside the word

--Annie Lennox




this isn't sophistry, a plea for understanding, or even voice. recently, i have had contact with a past love. actually he was my first love. i have known him since the 8th grade. i have been narrating him for so long and hard in an attempt to write him out of my life that i have inadvertently stitched him into my being. a psychic tattoo that i try to rub off...but my efforts only seem to create and recreate more words, more narration, more dark circles of melancholy sutured to memories of the past that somehow follow me into my future... skipping ahead of me, even. and i follow like some stupidly naive puppy. i know better. i should know better. i can recognize this for what it is but still it does not stop me from continuously, somehow, loving him. my heart is rooted in this soil. my brain is somehow disconnected from the rest of my body....it tells my body one thing but my body doesn't listen. i use the tools available to me. i use anti-depressants, i use sex and other significant relationships, i use kristeva, i use butler, i use derrida, i even use foucault (although he could care less) and on occasion i have even used the/a goddess but still my heart's roots insist upon this anchoring that is terrible and mean.
i do not like this kind of love. i do not wish to narrate it anymore. it is obsessive and cruel. it clothes itself in an unrequited-ness, always incomplete yet circular and mimetic. i have always been caught within this web. it is a disappointing love that you get used to...which in its incompleteness creates a different kind of disappointment....not new, or easy but instead a disappointment of a much deeper kind. this love reflects back to me and also reflects itself within my other relationships. it is jealous and difficult; this love is dark red and it flows still. i do not want this love anymore but there is a resignation that is stained by its flowing. this love is one sided and it has really nothing to do with him and, at the same time everything to do with him. it casts a deep shadow that is mingled with nostalgia and memories that i try to name and make real so that i can exorcise them from myself, to cast them away, to abject them..but yet they still remain unnameable, solid, and insistent. a boomerang that i throw away from myself but returns, always. i see this love in my other relationships. i try to stop it but the same scenario announces itself clothed in the same nuances that i can recognize...that i am alone and waiting, in the dark, for this love to return. this love leaves me tired and broken, it sabotages my other relationships so that i am solitary; this love is not for sharing, it is "thick" and suffocating. how do you rewrite that? this isn't just an object, lost or otherwise, but the nature of the object...it's physics...how do you renarrate that? how do you rewrite a law? when the boomerang completes its circle how do i not occupy the space of its destination? i have never had the chance to start over.