Told to Wear Red

Image by Jochen Burghardt

by Masha Tupitsyn

21 February

Love like a needle in a haystack.

1.We’re yelling at each other over the phone. He says he’s at work and only has minutes before he has to teach. It’s essentially a break up of a relationship that never starts or finishes. That is already deep in motion, but has only ever been called a friendship. The kind between a man and a woman you might be lucky to get once in real adulthood. “I love everything about you,” he shouts in a hush. “I love your fucking brain and I love your fucking ass.” I don’t hear the ass part. So I calm down enough to say, “What did you say?” He says, “Never mind.” I say, “No say what you said. I couldn’t hear you.” He says, whispers, so other people can’t hear him at work, “I said I love your brain and I love your ass.” He’s incensed. What he says is sweet, but I hate him in that moment. And the way he perfectly balances his appreciation of me, so holistically, mind/body, erotic, just makes me feel angrier. It’s infuriating the way he says the right things but never thinks he’s the right person. It’s also important that we can fight. That he fights for/with me. Fighting can be an act of love. A way through.

2.At the party, I won’t even look at you. You force your everything is okay act on me so hard, I just get angrier and angier. You keep insisting on how you’re polite and I’m not in this battle. I tell you that you wound people in other ways. You wound them structurally. I just shoot bullets in the air in protest. I never compromise. Certainly not on true feelings. You keep walking away. Having “fun”, looking for alcohol to drink, like a careless adolescent. You’re so immature and lazy about life sometimes. The lame party is enough for you, is an evasion you cling to, while I want everything. The biggest love. More from life. People interrupt us a lot, our rolling argument, ongoing for weeks, which we try to be quiet about. Then your annoyingly hyper friend arrives. You leave the room. I stay in the room. I start dancing with C and a few other strays. We actually begin to have fun. I’m wearing my 1940s red satin Canadian high school jacket. Earlier that day, I was told to wear red. I am reminded again, after a long time of not doing it, how dancing is everything. The only social grace/catharsis left. You walk back in. So does the other idiot who is pretending I’m not there. You both try to pretend like you’re not watching me dance. You’ve both kissed me at different times. You both act like you can’t see me. Like you don’t want to. Like you don’t want me. Men can’t deal with anything.

3.Today, upon the recommendation of a Tarot reader, I went to a crystal and plant shop on East 10th street that I’ve had my eye on for the past two months. I always walk by. Never in. The Tarot reader told me to get 3 red stones that would draw on all my fire energy—fire for warmth, not destruction, which I’ve been feeling lately. She said, “You have the kind of fire that never goes out.” It’s similar to what you always say with, “Your energy is amazing. You always have it. It never goes away.” Today my mother wrote, “It’s amazing, you’re still innocent like a teenager. You never lose it, even with age.” I went to the crystal shop. I asked the shop owner about all the red stones the Tarot reader told me to get. He sweetly showed me those along with some others. I held and displayed them all in my left hand as I walked through the store with him, my hand open. He showed me both raw and polished rubies. Aquamarine, my birth stone. I bought 4 raw stones. I chose a red pouch for them. The cashier said, “Everyone’s aura has a 3 foot radius. So as long as the stones are always that close to you.” “What is rose quartz for?” I asked, before I decided to buy it. “Love,” he said. “And reconciliation.”

5 Mar

Kisses that feel holy. That melt in your mouth like a Eucharist wafer.

People who don’t just have sex, but understand what it means to have sex. Who are sex.

The bar was so perfectly dark. I’d never been to a bar that dark before. It had almost no light, making it so intimate, calm, soft. Like the bottom of the ocean.

With my True Node in Scorpio/3rd house, my whole life is about talking to people. My whole life is about people.

“To spend the whole night with someone is agape. Is ethical.” (Gillian Rose). We’ve got it backwards.

The meaning of a kiss is also the meaning of a person.

At the gym today, I laid down on a mat, in an empty room, after cardio, and listened to Appearances from Trent Reznor’s Gone Girl with my eyes closed.

If touch has a sound, it is this, I thought.

The sky is steel blue now. The color of post-millennial cars. But also something supremely old, like sharks.

A yellow blue, when the sun hits the water.

Even if you say bad things about me, or we never see each other again, I will know that you don’t mean it. You just don’t know how. Love is here to teach us. But time is running out.

8 Mar

I come out of the bathroom at the bar. You are standing in the hallway at the ATM machine taking money out. Are you there on purpose? You are the kind of person who would be. We are briefly alone. I tell you that you seem angry and upset. Guarded. We’ve known each other for 3 days. I don’t know how to not tell people what I see. Similarly, you say something about how carefully you are paying attention to me. This is the third version I have seen of you and this one hits me hard. It’s still hitting me hard. You say, “I see you and I just want to protect myself. I think you’re dangerous.” You are leaving to go back home to LA in less than 12 hours. I don’t understand why you think a woman who is not your lover, or your girlfriend, whom you have known for 3 days and never have to see again after tonight, is dangerous. You don’t have the courage (or the time) to tell me the reason. Or worse, you don’t know the reason. You are too busy blaming me.

I need to gorge on old romantic film comedies to escape this modern hell.

 Crossposted with Love Dog.