The Unspeakable: Part I

Given the nature of this piece, I find it imperative to inform my readers that only some parts of this post are personal and reflect my very own thoughts, while others are snippets from encounters that I have stitched together --borrowed from interactions I have either been involved with or overheard on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I have changed the names and genders of all people involved in order to protect their identities, and have tried my best to stay away from mentioning any unique particulars.

The unspeakable is deeply personal, trimmed by conventions, hidden behind curtains of unclassified social mores. I am mired in hesitation, often, when I wish to say things out loud. Speak your mind, I am told. But you cannot speak your mind, for fear of offending people, in a culture entrenched in the confusing philosophy of 'If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all.' If you are to be frank, you are expected to bake your words in sugar, drizzle honey over your tongue so that a sweetness may encrust everything you utter. You are to be roundabout in your accusation, gentle in the handling of your frustration, and polite at the abyss of a serious break-up. You are to smile, always, at your distraught customer, for, wouldn't you expect the same if you were at the receiving end? 

The multimodal facades of culture and character seem to create within me a bottleneck of sentimentality. My mind is clogged, often, with remnants of thoughts, tail-ends and excised materials, and I seem to feel the weights of these remnants more and more everyday, as they accumulate and create pressure within the narrow diameters of my brain cells. If I could find a scraper someday and brush it gently against them, and examine the shavings and the contents of the pellets under an illuminated microscope, I would find a topography of ridges, coves and fjords, grooves and capes, covered with anger and compressed with angst, pummeled with shame and made hollow from the strains of unbearable sadness. This topography changes with seasons, with age, even between the hours of day and night, but I have little to no control over the insular nature of its morphology, or even the shapes of its transient finality. But I feel heavy from restraint, leaden even, from years and years of psychological imprisonment. Heavy and obstructed to a point that even blood cannot flow through the veins and capillaries braided within my brain. The unspeakable needs an avenue for release, the unspeakable needs a voice, definitions and accents, inflections and tenderness. And the very acts of formulating sounds for the mute, picking colors for the invisible, putting to the forefront the clamor of the ignored, have inadvertently and out of desperation, become the basis of this piece. 

--

Yolanda Marie Klein

The increasing frequency with which you have started to tell me 'I love you' is a little bit puzzling. Even more so is the spectrum of labels you append to it: 'like a family member', 'like a concerned mother', 'like a lover'. We never established rules -- were we supposed to? -- and let things build; from a professional exchange to extemporizing about sex. And emotions have rapidly escalated from there. The balances have tipped unidirectionally; your side has grown heavier and heavier, more tangled with your body, more forked with your mind, but mine has stayed the same, or maybe become slightly lighter. This happens when you are in a relationship. Energy drains, and priorities differ in the strangest of ways. Don't take this personally. It is what it is.

I cannot love you as a lover; and you know the reason why. I did not choose my orientation, but am content with how things have shaped out. Do you think God made me this way? Who knows. Religion and figureheads are mysterious to me. I try not to delve into them too much. But I wonder sometimes --would I love you if I were straight? Would you be my type? Would I be into you, emotionally and/or physically?
I don't know.

It is difficult to hypothesize emotional outcomes about a conceivable straight life using the logic of a homosexual brain. Questions like the ones above get biased by the influences of ongoing rapport, by a sense of sympathy, by a compulsion stemming from familiarity. I am tempted to say, Of course I would, but I cannot be certain. Would I really?
Does that make you sad?
Does that make you angry? After all that you've done for me?

I imagine there was hesitation before you finally opened up, especially given the complicated nature of our relationship. Maybe you said a prayer before; I know prayers help you cope with things. Or maybe you didn't give it any more thought than you needed to --sporadic in a way. But I wonder if there was a particular instance, or a tunnel of dialogues, that made you say, I am ready. I am finally ready. Do you remember when you wrote to me saying 'I don't care if they fire me'? I was alarmed. I was concerned for you. But I stayed calm and didn't say anything. We have come a long way since then; folded upon each other at times of failure, cradled each other at times of despair, and depended on each other for words of encouragement.

I have assumed, for you, an emotional responsibility. I look out for you in my own unique ways; sometimes that is silence, and sometimes a virtual reassurance. Did I have to take on the additional emotional responsibility? No. But I chose to. Because I care about you. Because I think about you. Because I wonder about you, and the machinery of your inner workings -- tapping on the cogs and gears of your logic, synthesizing the trajectories of your moves and actions, predicting for you a virtual reality in my very own city or by the seaside shores. I digest the aromas of your manifold promises. I observe keenly your professional development. I acknowledge blandly your sudden impulses; appreciating your talents, the selflessness of your giving, and the music in your words. I was trained to be a concert pianist, to speak in sharps, and whisper in flats, tremble in scales, and dream in octaves. I find patterns of sound in everything I do, everything I see, everything I hear and am made to read. There is Liszt to your lilt, Gershwin to your voice, an alternans of saxophone and light harmonics of flutes. Has anyone every talked to you about the beauty of your words? The richness of your tone? The melodies underlying the intervals of your thick, varnished sentences? They bring swellings to my throat, shuttering my tongue, while activating in my mind a concert of sounds. So beautiful, I want to fall to the floor, and cry and let the energy of my emotions dribble out of my eyes.

But what of you next? I wonder in earnest.

We have, together, woven many plans for you involving careers, partners, and relationships. Some of them have gained momentum, while others have flagged, as with any set of endeavors in life's complicated paths. You will be alright professionally, I am certain of that. You will build widgets, continue to recruit the finest of talents from applicant pools, put to use the convoluted mechanics of communications and technology. Or maybe you will nurse, teach little children, or run your own business; some kind of home-service or a tutoring center. 

But what of you romantically? 
Who will you love? Who will you build the next stage of your life with? I remain curious.

The unspeakable is this: I worry that your feelings for me are holding you back from truly making yourself available --more so emotionally, than physically. If you explain to yourself that you are content with the way things are, that your mind is preoccupied with narratives of us and geysers of thoughts spritzing out of our day to day encounters, I understand. But is that helping you with your goals of finding a man? 
Is that even a goal? A priority? 

In my life so far I have realized that love follows no logic. The philosophers and advocates who insist upon investigating the rational nature of man, are incorrect; their explanations falsified, and their theories, only fit for textbooks, preserved in ethanol and bell jars. You can comb through your heart, sift through your memories, give every node of history a second look under telescopes, but the organic nature of attraction knows better than mathematics, evasive of algorithms, discrete from time trends. I have had the thought, several times, of severing connections with you; to help us dissolve, to help you forget, but that didn't seem fair. It would be devastating. It wouldn't be right after all of this --whatever 'this' is. What is this? Do you have a more complete definition of us? 

We could be bodies of continents drifting along, interlocking and letting go beyond the meshes of geological timeline. Or islands on a river bed, observing from a distance, ever present and calm behind lavender skies. We could be minerals like magnesium, essential for stasis. Or wedges of peninsula, along which time travels in capsules. We could be flowers on the lily beds, swaying to the winds. Or aluminum marionettes, wired by the essentials of camaraderie. Whatever we are, and may continue to be, I want you to be happy, both mentally and physically. Stop for a minute and look at your reflection dazzling on strings of knobbed diamond bracelets; you are tantalizing, mischievous, and absolutely beautiful.

--

to be continued.   

Short memory

As I waited for the elevator doors to open, on the third floor of the Steinberg building, I thought of you. 

This sudden bifurcation of thoughts felt particularly strange, because I was in the middle of doing an experiment at that time, and nothing that I was working on had anything to do with you. But my mind kept drifting.

I remembered your building; walking along the street, in khakis and a cotton shirt, observing the trees, and its branches curling upon themselves like wrought-iron paisleys. The sun, the color of cantaloupe, floating on the clouds. And the traffic lights on Eighty-Sixth Street, periodically changing. 

We met in the North room of your refurbished apartment; red velvet carpet clawed to your floor --brocade curtains swaying by the windows. And we made love, violently, passionately, our hearts collapsing onto each others; our breaths synchronized like cello duets. Sweat trickled down your forehead, in little globules, smudging against my neck. And the bed rattled, and the lamps flickered, choking the filaments within. 

When you were done, you bathed in lavender and stood on your balcony while I was still in bed. And I remember looking up at you and being in awe. The sky was a riot of yellow and purple, and clouds, the size of quarters, melted on your hair. The city twinkled across the stretch of your penthouse balcony. And shadows of stars settled on your neck, speckled, like sand grains. Choruses of winds spun around you, and the magnolia petals, and the cotton seeds on your desk. 

You gave me a glass of water -I was thirsty and exhausted from the overuse of poppers - and spoke to me about your time at Yale, acting school at Juilliard, and your current pitches for Broadway. There was a weightiness to your voice, the kind of inflection that develops with success; or maybe it was another practice of your trade. I never quite figured it out, but I have remembered it through the years. Your phone rang three times and went directly to the answering machine. They all started with Hey It's John...and the voice trailed off. 

We shook hands and embraced each other. Your stiffened nipples sensitive against the brushing of my coat lapel. And then I was gone, walking on the street, down to the subway and up to my home. I finally sat down at my desk, at 10 pm, August 2012, and wrote, Broadway Star -Check.