It is late at night and I am in bed, reading. To my right is a lamp, stood on the wooden side table that came with my bedroom when I moved into it. The light glows orange behind my eyes as they droop a little, and the words on the page begin to elude me. I mark my place, set down my book, and flick the switch on the lamp. I fall back into the dark, which moves with my body; shut my eyes, exhale.
I love this time, when everything stops but my thoughts, which twirl, kaleidoscopic, even as I lie there still. It is in these moments, not quite day or night, that I allow myself the luxury of you, as I stagger along the velvet threshold of sleep, lying between sheets I haven't changed since you last slept in them. I hold you away from myself, waiting, waiting, knowing that I will relent, and it is a pleasurable giving in, the sort of submission that characterises most of the desires that wrestle me by my wrists.
I like best to think of myself clutching your head, of our breaths as staccato notes plucked on a violin string, my small hands meeting at your chin like a clam, your blue eyes the blue of movement, blue of mystery, blue that always masks something else beneath it. The way seawater looks turquoise and easy, containing blue to be admired but never fully known.
(And how funny that this blue should be so enigmatic when its cousin gave me such clarity. Blue.
There is Joni (who is, to me, never Joni Mitchell and always just Joni, so familiar does she feel) and there is Blue, a gilded Bible about love and getting to know yourself in love’s singular, dissociative context. Unlike so much art and so many people, Blue really tells the truth – it has become a compact mirror that I carry around with me, holding it up to my life and seeing myself through it. I came late to the record, only last autumn, trudging to the supermarket one second, and thumped hard in the windpipe the next, by lines which suddenly showed me emotions I did not know I had been longing to express.
“I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some.”
On Blue in particular, Joni has this habit of stripping our most private fears about ourselves down to matter-of-fact statements. I’d never heard anyone say it quite so plainly. How she said it made me feel like I actually understood it:
"Oh, I love you, when I forget about me."
*
Once, there was someone I wanted to know so well that I hoped the knowing would become part of me, knowing as natural as a reflex, knowing like breathing. In hindsight it is easy to see that this was borne of an instinctive unease located somewhere in my guts – a more ancient type of knowledge, which was trying to warn me there was danger ahead. I think I had hoped to quell it by filling myself up with his needs, his life, a naïve type of devotion.
My willingness was fed by something false and rotten: there are girls who are desperate to know and there are men who will simply never let them, pushing the ugly, secret parts of themselves right down into their feet. Eventually they forget, stop holding the brutality in quite as easily, take the pressure off. Cruelty starts to leak out, slow at first, later like a flood in your house, and there is chaos.
Me, I had to sit amongst it even when he was long gone. I looked at my hands, raw and blistered, and retched dry into the toilet, spitting, forehead on the cool seat. I sat on the floor against a door and understood that even though I had seen all of him now, I knew nothing, had made myself so small for nothing. Finally alone, I wondered, in all my searching and pleasing, whether I even knew what my hollow body needed.)
Blue, for me, now, is acceptance. Blue means recognising beauty without wanting to grasp it in both hands like a little child squeezing a favourite pet too hard. I know, then, that your blue eyes will always keep some confidence. I accept it, even allow it to be part of the fantasies I conjure behind my eyes. I don’t want omniscience – “What are you thinking?”; “What do you want to do to me?” – and I am no longer moved to stuff myself with another person’s inner life because I finally understand the richness of my own: I can tell you exactly the little tendernesses I crave, can feel at will the ragged grip I want to be held in.
I cannot know you in my old way, because that is no knowing at all, just eroding. The way I know you is different, private, better. I know how you exist for me, when you are in my head and when you are in front of me, in our own grasping moments, as the dark folds in on us. Here we are exposed as we will never be for anybody else, our moments defined by their specificity, by the particularities of what we pull from each other. I can see us there, I love to do it – both of us trusting, breath fast, heads together, silently asking that brave, blue question. “Will you take me as I am?” I inhale a shock of air; it tumbles out of my mouth. Well, will you?