Too Muchness

The too muchness is neon pink lights. It is your favourite shoes people keep stepping on and socks that keep sliding down. It is a crowd parted by a plastic bucket with ice and vodka and juice, a girl on shoulders holding two phones and looking like a rag-doll about to fall but she doesn’t; a flashing memory taking me to the last time that was me. This guy on stage who I paid to see but didn’t come to see has said “I like to make people feel good with my words” and then screamed “pussy pussy pussy pussy shut the fuck up” as a lyric. There is the plastic smell of bubbles but also a memory-jolting lipsmackers kind of strawberry bubble gum vape and the guy next to us with a cigar and also you - in the depth of your smell that grounds me and I shove my face into your shoulder and I know you can’t smell you but maybe you can smell me and it doesn’t make it all go away but it centres it. Your cologne is the mudra of my nose and I close my eyes for a second and all sound fades and there is no colour and the too muchness passes over into the realm of everything which is often the same as nothing. Tonight the mantra of the crowd is “You’re beautiful!” “I know!” and I like this except every girl under the age of 22 has a lip filler or bleached hair or so much make up I literally cannot see their actual beauty behind their contrived beauty. And every guy has the same three hair cuts and everyone got their outfit from Zara and the insecurity is showing on every single face but it comes off as a judgement if you’re not looking carefully. I’m not judging them for this, I’m just laughing at the irony. Is it irony though if it makes you really fucking sad? At what point does irony turn to hypocrisy? And then at what point anger because this surely was not a choice of free-will in being and expression so much as a choice of preservation and safety. I hesitate to call it self-preservation when the self is so hard to see, when it is sacrificed.

My friend comes up to me and says “I feel like you dressed me for boots and hearts” but all I really did was lend her a t-shirt that she choose. I guess what she was trying to say was “You didn’t tell me that in contrast to the rest of the crowd here I would feel like I was going to a country concert” or maybe actually “you are supposed to see me and how I want to be in the world and I am now seeing myself in the world and what you told me looked good, what you allowed me to wear is actually not how I want to be or feel in the world”… except I’m also wearing denim shorts and cowboy boots and have a scarf in my hair and honestly love the shirt she is wearing but I get it because it is easier to blame someone else for not seeing you when you’re too close to the reflection to really see yourself. The too muchness as she experiences it is in the ass, in the concern, in the hyper-fixation on wanting to be a way that just isn’t the way for her - a couple inches taller or hips narrower or something. The too muchness of wanting to be less and I just want to be like “what if your hips are what hold your knowledge of wine and love for spreadsheets, would you wish them away then?” Always something. I’ve told her 100 times my entire life I thought she was the most beautiful person. I say “what about your teeth and your eyes and your brows and your really nice, not weird toes and your hair that is always soft and your laugh that is the best laugh and your speed and your strength” and I can tell she is sick of people seeing her beauty in the same things that are what she sees it in. Wanting it to be seen other places, specifically the place she doesn’t see it - and of course it is in all places but sometimes it feels like walking into a trap to say “no these things are beautiful too” when that person really doesn’t feel that way. When it’s being said as a defence or a retaliation to ones own lack of self-acceptance. You cannot place in people something there isn’t space for - which is to say that if the spaces I see wonder in are filled with doubt, the too muchness overflows and what is the most at home is what stays. The too muchness of time I’ve known her becomes an uncrossable chasm of “but you have to say this” when really I don’t. I do not have to say anything and often I do not and maybe this is where the not enoughness eats away at us and we all are guilty of filling ourselves with whatever is available.

There is another too much tonight of trying to order pizza for pick up on a packed metro train and there is an armpit in my face and there is a tickle in my throat and there is the gaze I love the most asking me once again if I’m okay because that’s what you do when you can tell someone isn’t quite okay but you also don’t know how to get them to say what it is because they haven’t found the words yet so “are you okay?” is actually just the refresh button on the browser tab of conversation to give an opportunity for an update to appear. This too muchness is hunger and fluorescent lights and all sounds merging to one buzz and closing the browser because the coupon says $15 pizza but no matter what you do it keeps showing up as subtotal $27 and the creeping heat of hunger and frustration is a winding river up your throat, against gravity. There is a place open across the street and it’s cash only and the guy gives you a hard time for a diet coke that will surely kill you but you’re actually getting it because you like the taste but you’re also ordering a gyro with extra garlic mayo for the fries and laughing at the ways in which people insert themselves just to be close to a stranger for a moment, to do more than take your money or feed you. He gives you something to talk about, something to remember, something to reflect on even if the reflection isn’t worth much.

At some point the too muchness over flows from all its beakers. You tell me about a burgundy leaf and a picture on a bridge and you are crying and eating a gyro and there is grease dripping down your hands and tears flowing down your face and it is a masterpiece of tragic comedy. You have taken off all your clothes except your boxers and poured the can of diet coke into a glass. We talk about the too muchness of loving someone and giving them a piece of you and wanting to hold them to feel whole again for a moment. You say something like “I want to make sure that piece is still me, that it hasn’t become a cancer” and I understand that fear of who we are - what we have given - being deviated through story or fear or a weird reaction with other love coming into the picture. I think about this poem I wrote about the pieces of my heart that have gone missing and the pain being like a bullet but it’s not, and it’s rough around the edges but how time is an emollient that softens it all and sometimes I get a letter from that piece of me assuring me it is still in good hands. I see that piece of me in the plants someone I loved is caring for and how they now flourish, in the candles around their home, in the baths they take with scented salts. The too muchness of life and all we’ve experienced comes forth in sharing of stories and I say “can we hold each other?” and we take off all our clothes and get under the covers and I wrap my arms around your head and tell you about all the fantasies I have about dreaming but also of meeting you through the pieces of yourself that you’ve given to others and my arms get wet because you are crying and your hair gets wet because I am crying and there is a relief because what started as neon pink and bubble gum vape and cigar and B.O. has turned into a gentle darkness and it is actually enough to handle. We give a final go at “are you okay?” and we both say no, I am sad/grieving/remembering/guilty.

There are times the too muchness is too much; we must give ourselves away. There is too much heart, too much desire, too much longing or yearning or fierceness. The too muchness seems like and endless resource so I say “have this mountain within me” “take ownership of this meadow” “this highway of thought is permanently dedicated to you” and some things once given cannot be returned even when it dwindles to not enough. I say something like “we are all just porcupines trying to get close to each other” and I say another thing that is like “thank you for loving them so much, for giving away such portions of your too muchness so I may be here in the cavernous space this has left”. And we both say “we are so lucky” because we know it - even when we don’t feel it - that the whole world has presented its fullness to us on a platter and I can fill many plates for everyone I love at the party of this chapter and being in the too muchness of life means that even when I forget to make a plate for myself that someone else has remembered. We echo into each others caverns, heart to heart and you say “I love you and I always will” and this is really the too muchness of it all in the best way. You do not mean it as a promise or a romance, you mean it as a fact. You mean it as an offering of yourself and what you are saying is “there is still enough of me here that I want you to have some” and I say something like “I will always love you too” and it is like a promise or a premonition but really more like something I have come to terms with like how I could change my face and my hair and my clothes but I simply cannot change my mind or my heart and no matter what else either of us becomes my offering to you is actually my promise to keep what you have given me sacred even if I find one day I have given all of my too muchness away.