Walking into your younger skin.

There's been drama in my life over the last month. Many entries here have been heavily filtered as to not complicate the drama. Those not privy to filtered posts shouldn't worry...anything worth expressing from those weeks will find its way into my public words in time. That's just how my skull works. Nothing gets 100% filtered out: things just get re-routed.

This morning I skyped with my past.

Praveen.

We don't get in touch often. Years pass. I'm a little unsure of when the last time we communicated that didn't involve a major life event/realization for one of us.

I know we talked when my apartment was being hit with aftershocks every hour. I know there was typing when I returned from seeing Damien for the last time. I know we talked on the phone when I was coming to grips with what happened to me at Legend; he heard me both in the warm lie of denial and the spiral of darkness that followed. I can't say for certain that we haven't been in touch during more mundane moments of our lives. Moments near emotional touch points survive longer because those mental pathways get tamped down on each revisit.

Did we date? Yes.
Was it passionate, confusing, emotional and wonderfully everything? Yes
Was it confused, untimely, impossible and painful? Of course.

We did regrettable things. In time regrets became rounded. We absorbed them into who we are. We grew around them.

Talking to him, like talking to anyone I’ve been close to from any time in my life, does increase the rate at which I suddenly find myself in yesterday’s skin, reliving a movement that occurred years ago in another place.

Today, after we spoke, I stepped into a moment nearly 12 years ago…

I was entering Four Star Video Heaven where we both worked. I was there to pick up some videos and leave. We weren’t together yet… we were still circling each other warily not sure what to think or do. He asked me how my trip down to Florida had gone, it was polite chitchat.

I didn’t respond appropriately. I did the verbal equivalent of reaching into my chest, pulling my heart out, waving it about until everything near me was spattered, and then looking around as if to say “Well, what do you think of that!?”…weeks later I asked him a similar question and got a nearly identical inappropriate response of naked emotion from him.

…and then I was back on the street, walking to my apartment.

In a choreography I’m working on there’s a heart-related gesture. I pop my chest in a way that suggests my heart leaving my body and being held, lightly, in my own hand. I releasing my heart outward to the audience but at the very end snap shut my hand to save a bit of it for myself. I return my hand, quietly, to my chest.

I’ve changed since the video store days. I don’t splash my emotions everywhere without regards to the consequences. I still reveal myself with words but it’s a quieter process of exposure. In the past I’d tear off my clothing in long sentences until I was naked and then cock my eyebrow at you.

Praveen and I haven’t changed together, we haven’t had enough contact to do anything “together”, but our separate paths have had parallel moments.

Talking to each other used to mean that in addition to “catching up” we’d discuss parts of our past relationship. We’d allude to too-late realizations, self-consciously joke and generally checked on if our current hypothesis of who we were in relationships matched up to who we had been.

This time we didn’t re-examine our past together. We talked about what we’ve been learning about ourselves in the last year or so… but without the need to directly plug it back into that time together. We didn’t talk with an eye as to who we were as lovers then or with what our reconnecting “means”.

That intangible thing that brought us together was real. It is real but it isn’t an urgent thing to be acted on it a specific way. It doesn’t loom over us, or haunt us, or drive us. It’s just there.

This morning was good. It wasn’t re-connecting. It wasn’t getting to know each other again. It was connecting.

So much of my last month has revolved around drama amplified by how people did or didn’t communicate that I’ve needed to feel like I can speak, be heard, be understood and that I can do the same for someone else.

My day didn’t end there …but as I said, I no longer feel the need to expose all of myself at once.

Goodnight.