Gullibility, Irony and Karma

Everything has been upended ... I can’t concentrate enough to work on C’era una volta, I can’t concentrate enough to finish Beautiful Beige, I can’t concentrate on anything, truthfully.

And I have been learning valuable lessons about gullibility.  I know, what a boring topic.  I would agree, had it not just had it hit me squarely between the eyes with the force of a bullet, taking me completely by surprise.

I usually don’t spend a lot of energy on gullibility or even trust, or at least I never thought I did.  I just realized why that was – I didn’t care enough.  Isn’t that a horrible lesson to learn?

Your heart is so lacking in ... whatever emotion most people have that makes them care about “the other” that you don’t really care whether or not they feel anything for you ... some poor schmuck falls head over heels in love with you, and after a time they could spend an hour screaming that you’re the most heartless so-and-so they ever had the misfortune of encountering, and you just regard them as something of a curious insect, because you didn’t share whatever emotion they were feeling.  And yes, that has happened a lot.  I’m not saying it happens every single day of my life – just that it tends to happen more often than it doesn’t.  I seem to have always gotten myself tangled up in uneven relationships ... and 9 times out of 10 that imbalance comes from me not feeling anywhere as much about him as he did about me.

And then – the gods of irony decided it was time for me to learn a valuable lesson – and I fell head over heels in love with the one person even more uninvested than I was.  I think when I regain my wits, I might even see the humor or the irony in it ... perhaps what some might call “karma”.  For the moment, though – I’m completely upended.

I had no familiarity with the other side, or very little of it.  As I said, when it hit me, it didn’t just brush by me and disappear, it hit me with the force of a bullet, and I was left utterly floundering.  It felt like I had just died inside.

I Heard the Trees Scream As They Fell
A clearing, bright as daylight, a body
laying upon the dry leaves, entrails strewn
in crackling tinder, her dried heart bloodied
once torn, silent, accusing and immune

from life’s dim vagaries now, you look down
at the face once animated and young
she says I saw the image, heard the sound
of trees ripped from the roots to which they clung

I heard the trees scream in pain as they fell
Or was it my own cry that I heard,
he lied, he lied, he lied, I know too well
when you are no longer bound to the earth

now falling behind you, anguish so sweet
even the birds are stilled in reverence,
his last endearment, brief as a heartbeat,
my only now forgotten recompense.
© Me, 2015, Snake’s Trail

So there you go, I thought, when I finished with that pitiful ode to my misery.  Stick that on my urn.

Right after that, I started sorting through everything ... it began as clearing out a flash drive, and evolved into a deeper dive into progression.  Actually, it started as a cleaning everything out activity, because I think part of me expected to die. 

Oh, not that I was planning on off’ing myself – hardly.  I’m too big a coward for that.  No, I assumed the Universe was doing it for me.  Wait until the very end and shatter her heart into a million pieces for the proverbial swan song.  Pure entertainment for the Sky Sadist.  When you’ve loved someone that long and that passionately, to have them slide themselves disinterestedly out from under you – where are you going to go but down?  I mean, sure if you had a crush that lasted a week, maybe it stings but you survive.  But all these years?  When they're all tangled up in your head and heart with everything from music to poetry to your own art and your own writing and your own self image to the clothes in your closet to the perfume on your body?  No, you don’t survive that.  I expected to die, because there was nowhere else to go, after that.

So I set about planning on selling everything off, which seemed a worthwhile – and fortunately distracting – activity after the day or so leading up to that poem.  Yes, I had just had my heart shattered into a million irretrievable miniscule pieces, little atomies now spreading out into empty space, alone and isolated - but with what little energy there was left in me, I thought maybe I should start clearing out the rest of me.  Life wasn't all that fun anymore.

Then, for lack of anything else to do, I went to the gym and tried to give myself a heart attack and die (went way over maximum heart rate, running; didn’t work.  All I did was sweat like a pig and stagger home, still not dead but doing my damnedest to get there.)  Looked like it was going to storm out there.  I looked it up.  Yup.  Scattered thunderstorms, starting at 9:15 a.m.  Cheered up briefly.  Maybe I’ll get hit by lightening.  Or hydroplane off the road.  Something!  Anything!  Just take me out of this pain!  Of course not.  The sun came out and stayed out.  Not a storm cloud in sight.  Sure, maybe I’ll hydroplane off the bone dry road in bright sunshine!  Got home safe from a bunch of pointless errands, safe, sound and miserable.

I had learned learned through experience that sometimes things can change in a heartbeat.  Look at the “Miracle Oil” moment.   I say “miracle” although it wasn’t, really – apparently, people have known it was great for muscle stiffness and pain for eons ... no one bothered to tell me, though, until Mr. Spirit Guide got tired of my whining and moaning and decided to slap me upside the head with it:  “Use THIS, you numbskull!”

All I had to do was “google” it, and there it was:  my “miracle oil”.  So I went from relentless leg spasms to very few of them.  Sure, I stink like the fragrant bush the oil is made from, but I can live with that – as long as my legs were no longer twisting themselves into knots.  And that changed in 3/10ths of a second!  So obviously, things can and do change very quickly.

But this time ... no, this time was different.  This time it hurt down into the core of my bones and even further than that – maybe down into my cells, and maybe further than that ... into my quantum self, if such a thing were possible.

I came home and dove into my own past ... for reasons I couldn’t even begin to explain, I was obsessively looking for my mother’s recipe for Rosemary Chicken, astounded because I couldn’t find it.  I had been carrying around our collection of recipe cards since I was a child and naïvely believed I could collect all of the recipes in the world ... handwriting and typing them onto index cards and filing them into categories ... and I had started with my mother’s collection.  She added to it over the years, so I found scores of cards and recipes in her handwriting, as well as her mother’s and grandmother’s handwriting.  So much of it I would never – ever – prepare or eat, but I couldn’t bring myself to cull any of it.  But no Rosemary Chicken.  I sprayed the inside of the box with Liquid Gold ... I hadn’t made any effort to preserve the beauty of the wooden box with its little clasp since I inherited it ... and then started looking through external and flash drives to see if I had captured it anywhere else.

This is when I began sorting through everything.  Temporarily forgot about the Rosemary Chicken and started looking at my own recent past ... after the Carbonite disaster, that is; before that, I had nothing, unless I’d fortuitously printed it out like I had the 1993 journal.  Found the history of disinterest on my part.  Found that I had even questioned it on numerous occasions:  will I ever know what love is?  Will I ever care about anyone?  Why is my heart so cold?  Why was my heart made this way?  Why haven’t I found anyone to love?

Then I burst into tears.  Non ce la faccio, mi arrendo.  I can’t do it; I give up.  I went back to Paradise Lost, because it fit.   This wasn’t where I was expecting to go with Paradise Lost; I was expecting to countermand it; instead, I agreed with it.  Even the First Duality can finally shatter into nothing, huh?  Never saw THAT coming ...