I think it was first in college that I became aware that it takes two to live. But I somehow convinced myself that what I wanted from my Other would be happiness. I yearned for happiness, more perhaps even for happiness than for love. Or rather I confused the two, I wanted the One who would make me happy. I dammed myself from everyone else, everyone who could hurt me, who could leave me. And for three years, I condemned myself to a long night waiting for the one who would never come. I still look for Him. I covered myself with images, to stop myself from feeling anything for anyone, to live without love, I lived like I was dead. I never let my desires get the better of me, or rather I controlled them almost perfectly. There were images to satisfy myself at a particular hour of the night. There were stories to satisfy myself when everyone slept. If the feeling of loneliness became too overwhelming, I would jerk off the feeling, there is no greater antidote to desire than a healthy round of masturbation. I think my flirting with others was also, partially, a form of masturbation, a need to remain in control, get hold of the thing, keep it. I genuinely care for each and every one I have ever flirted with, each has been a dear friend, and some of them have been ones for whom I would have done anything to help them. Yet I flirted with them knowing it might hurt them because I was not in control over myself at the moment I thought I was in the greatest power over myself. I needed to feel I was a part of them, that they were a part of me, that I was a leaf that had lost its individuality along with its selfhood, which by falling had joined a heap of red and golden dreams lying under a tree. One cannot be happy unless one dies, to live is to be drawn out of matter, a loneliness out of swirling clay. To get a form is to be alone, to live, to think, to feel, is to be unhappy. To live is to be exiled from the eternal and infinite harmony that animates gods and corpses, that utter contentment in which one becomes united to all that is, till nothing is left to desire. I had to jerk off this feeling. I had to live. I caged myself in fantasies. Anything bad would happen to me, and I would retreat into my fantasy, weave a story while crying in the pillow. Weave a story where He would make everything alright. If God did not exist, Voltaire has rightly said, it would be necessary to invent him. A theosexual who flirts with everyone, who cannot form normal friendships, who must flirt with every man and woman he meets, just to feel wanted, sufficient, who ends up hurting the ones he loves the most, such was the paradox I made myself. I flirt, therefore I am.

For sometime now, I have been changing again, I feel it. I feel like I want to be overwhelmed, overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of it all, without having to control that beauty by turning it into an object of masturbation, and jerking it off. Parallely, I feel a need to let the web of relationships I had formed to remove my loneliness; I am feeling a need to drown in that web. I don’t want anything from anyone anymore; I just need to feel that exquisite feeling which comes from self-abnegation. To perform one’s duty to others, expecting nothing, no love, in return, it is alike medieval and sensuous. I yearn to abandon myself, and abandon my desires; I want to flow out in the web because now I know that only by becoming a river can one purify oneself, cleanse myself of the guilt I have incurred in raising expectations I could not fulfil, in giving love yet poisoning it with selfishness. I want to lose my self. I want to be free from myself. I want to be one with the images, and look beyond them, beyond the dense layers of metaphors and promises, illusions of permanence and power in which I had bound myself, into Existence, bare existence, stretching like a smooth sheet in which I have lost myself. I felt a great desire today to kneel down. I don’t want to strip everything anymore, I don’t need to make everyone naked anymore, I don’t need to know myself anymore. Most of all, I want to be washed away by desire without wanting to control it, and especially by this desire to serve. I want my ego to die. To die is the greatest romance, that is why all true romances end in tragedy. When you have nothing more left to keep for yourself, are you not dead? When you love, are you not dead? When you make love, when you peak, is it not called the little death? And when you come alive again after the little death, or when you wake after sleep, is there not an overwhelming melancholy? Is it not the melancholy, the regret of being alive? But I am not talking of physical death when I speak of what I want, what I am, yearning to, experience, but the greater death, the spiritual death. The physical death, suicide as it is wrongly called, is not the death of the self, the literal meaning of suicide, but only the final, last and most successful, attempt to mark out one’s existence. Only those who desire life too well can commit suicide.

One cannot be active unless one surrenders. He who surrenders can do anything for he is freed from all rules, all confinements. One cannot experience desire unless one has abandoned oneself to the danger of desiring. Those who live in the world have never known desire, those who have left it feel it but cannot give it a name. To see something beautiful without wanting to f-ck it, to experience the glorious moment when everything becomes hued with beauty because at last one has let go of all hang-ups, to see a nipple exposed to the air and it brush one’s lips, without any urgent need to touch that, it feels as though I were tied to a bed, two hands and two feet tied to the bedposts, unable to take control, unable to possess, have you ever felt it? It is glorious. To orgasm again and again, but not allowing the body to intervene, to climax again and again while the flesh is rigidly confined so that the soul can take over, the body and the mind receives such pleasures then, they are washed away, it seems as though I were floating and tides were passing over me, as though I had become an ocean of bliss. To see beautiful creatures, to see creatures in love without wishing to possess them, till all creatures become beautiful because desires are robbed of their specificity, desire for this and not that, for this curve and not that, for this hardness and not that, desires fly away, run amok, desiring everything like little children who have not been taught that is beautiful and that is not, it is glorious. To sink in pleasure, it is glorious. To feel that pain is pleasure when it is incurred to serve others, it is glorious. To feel that death is the sweetest bliss when one dies for one’s beloved, it is glorious. To feel the pain of seeing something beautiful but not having it, it is glorious. To acknowledge that pain and not strive to possess that beauty, or to substitute that beauty by something which one has and can therefore control, it is glorious. To reject images and seek the Real, it is glorious. To drown in images wanting never to reach the surface, feeling the pain that images bring, it is glorious. To feel pain, it is glorious. To see beauty covered by a veil, knowing one can never penetrate, it is glorious.

I knelt down today. It was glorious. If I ever meet Him someday, I would kneel down and forget myself. It would be glorious.

~scio