Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.29

Weapon
Bastille and Angel Haze and F*U*G*Z and I guess that might be it.

I'm the heartbeat of a city
I'm the scream of a small man
(yes both)
I'm clean in a small way
I'm personal just to be rude
(why do you object?)
My artistry is choice and deliberation
But I create in a state of haste and anger
I walk in patterns, but I try to change it up
My lover appears
(he is thin where I have meat
(he is steady where I am frustrating
(he is porcelain where I am steel
(he compliments me
(and I blush

These poems aren't very good, eh? Maybe I wasn't cut out to be a surrealist.

Lyrics
Maybe it's the milieu, maybe it's the meaning. I could be wrong. But this song reeks of social discontent, the collected realization of a once-silent group that there's power in speaking up. The 99 percent that occupied Wall Street were one. And I watched hundreds of angry, partial families charge the national conversation about Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown. I lived thirty miles from the MU protests. I saw the National Women's March and the #metoo movement. I haven't been part of any of these uprisings, not because of geography or willingness, but because I'm the target of each one.

My opinion doesn't matter too much on this one. I haven't lived everyone's life, and I have enjoyed immensely the life I've lived so far. That's not everyone's reality, so I already know that whether or not I give you my opinion, other people think it doesn't matter. There are enough folks who want to stop me already without me putting my foot in my mouth (I've done such a thing and will continue and probably won't apologize in time for my idiocy). So, understanding that identity politics has no place for me even as a well-meaning ally and that I have been placed into the ranks of the opposition forces without even understanding that there was a conflict on, let me speak.

This is my story, and I don't know why I want to tell it. Maybe I won't. Do you want a trigger warning? It's at the top of the blog, and has been since 2010. I will make you weep. For a few months near the end of our ailing marriage, she stopped being intimate with me. We were still close, emotionally (though how close has become an open question with hindsight). I have to believe we still loved each other because I had very little evidence otherwise. We loved each other, but she didn't reciprocate my erotic love for her. I would charm and she would laugh me off. I would smarm and she would duck and weave. I would surprise her with kisses or suggest an adventure or try a date, and I can't remember her reactions--she was so level, I swear it was like nothing I did affected her. The old tools were busted. It was like trying to flirt with a brick, but a pregnant brick at the end of a long day still wearing drity underpants from before because it was laundry day in the brick household and the clothes were waiting to be folded. I wish I were joking when I tell you she noticed the wrinkles in the bedspread with more emotion than she noticed that I was into her.

You'll have to forgive me. Looking back, now, both of us were myopic to a fault.

Finally, after too long, I finally put to words what I was feeling, and in saying it, I made it true for the first time. She was sitting in bed, and I didn't even feel like I could sit on the bed with her. It was the aura she gave off. I knew I wasn't welcome. I sat on the floor by the bed in the light of the only lamp in the room and I cried. She wasn't interested in me, sexually, and I was destroyed. I wish I could find some metaphor to paint for you that would induce the stark realization I had as my mouth spoke ahead of my brain, but I'm not sure it's possible. I had, for years, been so anxious about whether or not I would be any good at sex, and if anyone I slept with would ever find agony and release through me. I can't be the only person who has feared these things, so I know you will have the shiver of it run cold through your bones, whether you want to or not. She said maybe it was the positions we were trying. She asked if I knew anything from porn, but firstly that's not how porn works and secondly porn is as real as a transformers movie, and about as badly written. She said maybe it was the way I was approaching, or the times I was choosing. She didn't know any more than I did.

After that, I sat, crying by the bed, and she left the room, uncomfortable. If I'm honest, there's no way to know how much time passed before she came on to me, suddenly. It could have been the same day, and I'll never know. This time of my life is glimpsed through gaps in dark forest as I speed past in a car someone else is driving far too quickly. All I know is that she came on to me while we were in bed. I can picture it, and it's awful. Maybe she kissed me, maybe she rolled over and pulled me to her, and maybe she just asked. You must forgive me. You must: history has not been kind to me, and I've had the benefit of years to explain this as clearly as I am. You have a privilege I never had, and you can see ahead of time what's to come, and I know you must want to yell at me the way people yell at movies when the idiot walks to the closet to examine why they heard someone inside it say "Please open this door so I can hurt you very badly." It may sound that plain to you, but I must beg of you to inhabit my skin, just for a moment. We humans, as a race, haven't lost that, have we?

We had sex.
She didn't have sex with me, nor I with her. Certainly the first is impossible because as soon as she thought I was engaged, she disengaged. She left her body there and went somewhere else. And so, I couldn't have been with her because she wasn't around to be with. I looked into her eyes and saw nothing there. I felt any heat or passion flee from me--I couldn't go on. (Maybe it's unfair of me to be so unilateral, but have you been married to her? Then you'll have to take my word for it: I am perhaps the only person who will ever read this who knows what she's like when she's on. She was not.) I don't know what drove her to this. Guilt, perhaps. Duty is possible. I tend to think it was love. I implore you, don't scoff. We cared for each other deeply, she just didn't find me physically attractive anymore. I don't believe she lied to me about wanting me to forget the past failures and to feel like she wanted me again.

There's a terrible New Yorker story called "Cat Person." There's a difficult Babe article about Aziz Ansari. There's the popular term "enthusiastic consent."
I leave the pieces of an ill-formed puzzle for you to understand me poorly, because I will not explain myself without losing an argument I never wanted to engage in. People look at me and see a white heterosexual male, and what good is it to me? Just when I want to explain to you what happened to me with my (ex)wife in my (ex)bed, the right is stolen from me by people I don't know who are angry at a set of labels I didn't choose. In the grand narrative of #metoo, I'm the villain, not the hero. Besides, I cannot make any broad proclamations about the cause of the problem, nor can I provide solutions to young people on either side of the issue. I don't know any more than you do.

I just wish we would start seeing people complexly for once. Nothing is ever all one way. I hurt her. I hurt, too. I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. She put that weight on me, tricked me, used love against me, motivated by love. And it's the absolute worst. Nothing is ever all one way.

Stephen
Stop goddamn picking these songs three years ago.