Asking & Telling

it is late and i am a little bit drunk but really feeling quite straight within myself. Upright. I can feel my feet and my centre of gravity and I feel dense and sure and steady. I think I tell you what I need and I think I am being obvious but I find out much later that what I portrayed was not a softened, obvious request but a cold demand. I think about how much I have to work at my this tenderness in my approach, how it doesn’t come naturally to me in some moments, how it is easier and safer to be cold and brutalist and straightforward and while my words are direct my desires are not. I tell you I am going home. These are the literal words but what I meant by them was I am tired, I would like for you to hold me, my home is your home and your home is my home so lets go to one of our homes, together, and sleep together and wake up together. But what I have said is I am going home and what you have heard is I am going home alone and you can figure out what you are doing. And there are many things said around this now too because we are both hurt - me that you are not coming and you that you are not invited. This is where my hardness hardens, where it cools further becoming painful. But I get home and I am so very aware of myself and I tell you that I really wish you would come here instead of going home, and that I do not wish to talk and what I think I have also said is because I am not being very good at that but I do wish you would hold me. And then we get some more things jumbled and you make an offer that could appease us both except you have told me you can call me and I have told you I do not want to talk and I decline the offer and say no that’s not what I need but thank you anyway and you ask if I need to be held and I say yes, yes that is it and I am shaking my head because I have already said we do not need to speak tonight, it is better if we do not because my words are all damp and crumpled and smell bad but i do not want to be alone and to me it is so obvious that not wanting to be alone is specifically to be in your arms. but it isn’t and I really do not think that much about the dissonance between how straight the feelings of my words shoot through me and how bent the sound of them is out into the world; how often I feel that flying straight is the best way to always hit the mark but the heart is a moving target and the circumstances of the world is gravity and all the other people talking and feeling and projecting around us is wind and everything we are both feeling is rain and its really quite impossible to shoot straight in these conditions - let alone for that to be the method. And why am I shooting anyway? Why am I using such violent terms and methods to touch upon you. I forget that what I want is a flower offered from the ditch, precious and common and with a lifespan like everything else - now shortened that I have chosen to pick it from the earth of myself and share it. Even when there is thunder rumbling in me and the skies are grey there are beautiful things that get pummelled in the onslaught and carry on in their bruises and mishappenness onto the pavement and our eyes in the days to come and are not prevented from blooming still in the season or again in other years and I am afraid I will give you this flower and you will not see it as a precious choice and you will miss the chance to put it in water because for some reason what I have given is not seen as something that was supposed to survive more than an afternoon and then later some laundry is done and there are small pilled bits of petal on the clothing and I become so lonesome that it wasn’t even pressed between some pages or put in our book or even simply left on the kitchen counter in some small kind of preservation. And of course if I do not say it is precious and picked specifically for you then how will you ever know. I think a thing sometimes is we think that love makes us really good at assuming. And I have been thinking a lot about how communication is so much more about asking than telling. So next time I will say I am going home, do you want to come with me? Or I could really use a hug right now, would you be open to that? Or here is a flower, do you want to know more about why I picked it? Do you want the flower? Do you know how to care for it? Are you interested in caring for it? Do you want to learn about its seeds? or maybe I will even ask if having a flower is something you are open to before I pick it. I will ask what your plans are and I will ask what you mean and I will ask you to explain your feelings again and I will ask you to repeat yourself or what colour you are today or if you are free on thursday at 6:45 PM or when you last ate today and if you are finding yourself hungry and if you are hungry I’ll ask if we can eat before we talk and when we talk I will ask you if you have felt loved by me, and when you have not felt loved by me, and what is on your mind or heart, and if there are sacrifices you’re making in yourself for us and if there are ways you can be supported in not making them if you are not necessary and I will ask if you can give me a timeline and I will ask if you want to hear the questions I want you to ask me back.