Fences

My counselor tells me that boundaries are not like the concrete walls of penitentiaries with barbed wire on top and prison guards with Mini-14’s, waiting to murder the misdirected motives of any mindless wanderer that comes within five miles of the line.

“Boundaries are like fences, Lydia, like the strings of white picket posts that mark the outer edges of people’s property.

Fences enable you to talk to people, Lydia. To lean along the side and chat with friendly neighbors in the afternoons.

And you’re not supposed to shoot them if their elbow pokes across the other side. They’re not like Napoleon or certain Russian presidents who are trying to win the whole world in the game of Risk.

They’re not trying to rob you — they just want to get to know you from the other side of the fence.

And maybe, if you decide to let them in, from the sofa of your living room.”

I just wish that I could build fences like that with you.

But every time that I get close enough to smell the charcoal of your backyard barbecue, I choke because I’m afraid of falling again.

Not for you, but around you — losing myself in your gravitational pull, dancing around your desires in the orbital insanity of trying to make you happy.

When I’m around you, I’m afraid to take off my spacesuit, lest you suck the life out of me again—the difference that makes me me and you you that I’ve worked so hard to define.

And so I try to pull away, producing an opposite and equal reaction, before I bounce right back to you again—your hopeless, human boomerang.

You see, love unites what is different, and yet you criticize me every time that I show you that we are not the same.

God did not create fractional people. So two broken halves do not make a fucking whole, but only a crooked picture of reality.

Yet people use love as an excuse for their blindness, and then call it quits when they begin to stumble, never realizing that it takes effort for four different feet to walk in the same direction.

When I’m intimate with you, when I bear my beating heart, with all its scabbed up snags and snares, I feel so unprotected — homeless on your doorstep, longing to be let in.

I must look so pitiful that you can’t help but wound me yet again, insensitive with your insecurities, you poison my mind with your twisted fantasies of who I should really be.

And so I force the inmate of my soul to hide behind a fortress of hurt and misconceptions, planning answers to your presupposed questions based on my perceptions of you through my telescope.

You look much more manageable from far away than from up close.

I once heard hell described as every human being living all alone — millions of miles apart from each other.

I believe that it would be because they never learned to build fences, and to talk with one another in the afternoon.