Have you ever seen the rain?

Love is a scary thing and I guess we have to hide from it sometimes.  Sometimes I go to great lengths to avoid the exact thing that I want more than anything.  I am crazy, I know.

I fall in love far too frequently and the dangers of this sordid act of abundant love has finally manifest as violence.  As I told one of the Koreans at The Ranch, the one who told me I have "kind eyes", "I have a lot of love to give; maybe too much."

Just as water flows into our body through the mouth and out as urine, just as we receive stimuli and express ourselves, so it is that the more love we allow in the more love we have to share.  I am not deluded in my experience of a universe full of love.  This is what I naturally encounter and despite the conclusions of my ego I am not unique in this experience.

I do choose openness and I do not understand why someone would choose to include me in their game of opening themselves up and then guarding the door.  Sometimes it's too scary to become close to someone via intimacy and honesty, so obsessive confrontational attention is employed.  In this world the physical fight is the act of making love that all such intense relationships must eventually reach as a breaking of the tension, as a climax and release.

Sadly, in my world there is a fear of the fight and a revulsion of physical pain.  Otherwise perhaps I would have chosen to fulfill the destiny of my union with the self-proclaimed Alpha Male who has captured my mind more in my hate for him than in the love that preceded it.

And now that I have conveniently distanced myself from his violence and aura of hatred in some guise of self-preservation I find myself missing him more than anyone in that brief family of cherry-picking and joy-riding.

Did his love suddenly become hate or are the two not so different after all?  Is his behaviour any more strange than my responding to his "love" with "love" and my responding to his "hate" with "hate"?  I do know that the +/- designations we apply to things are arbitrary.

So many times I wanted to touch him and did not.  I never told him about my homosexual nature because I knew he would not relate to this word as I used to.  He sensed it all, of course, it was never invisible.

He finally manifest this apparently mutual desire to touch one another and establish our connection firmly in the physical world; he manifest in the way that he could; he manifest in a way I never would have; he manifest what we both desired and what I could not and I rejected his as he would have rejected my physical advances.

It never occurred to me until now that the hate might be love and that what I am running away from is perhaps not as honourable or justified as I thought.  My emotions are the best guide I have in this world but it's not until they  have passed that they make any sense to me.  It's not until I have made unalterable decisions, such as the decision to reject and escape his "inappropriate" attention, that I am able to reconsider the complexity of the situation and my morally neutral part in it.

I also realise that this beautiful linguistic realisation could not have been shared in the context of emotional repression both twins are in the habit of perpetuating.

I am a stronger man as a result of his love and a wiser man as a result of his hate.  I can only hope that my loving presence briefly in his life enriched his person, that my hate was the response he wanted to his violence and that he remembers me fondly.  Hopefully when I see him again my ego won't dictate my response and maybe I'll even get a hug from him and his brother.

If I am sorry for anything it is that I did not fight him.  Perhaps he would not have beaten me to within an inch of my life as he is likely physically capable.  Perhaps he would instead have drawn the line where we are evenly matched and our anger could have been channeled into passion.

Perhaps it is not so anomalous that in between the two times he physically attacked me he told me, "Your smile is a sign of true happiness and it brings happiness to everyone around you."  Or that as the rain poured, amidst the craziness and the flooding and the maggots of The Ranch, he pulled me aside to sing,
  I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?
  I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain
  comin' down on a sunny day?