[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>]

Sunday, November 25, 2001

Zerogamy

I had lunch with Andrew* the other day, in implicit honor of my pending departure. (Sometimes I wonder if I would ever see my friends in person if none of us ever left town.) When the topic of relationship styles came up, I declared my own preferences to be somewhat more traditional than his. He was surprised by this and informed me, much to my chagrin, that he's been portraying my outlook as a sort of psycho polyamory. Andrew*'s own style, I roughly recall him saying, is more of a serial monogamy, ala Guinevere, characterized by a desire for focused monogamous relationships of finite duration.

My own "more traditional" preference, by contrast, is for something more eternal than that. For whatever reason, my daydreams since childhood have placed me with a girl/woman so familiar as to be irreplaceable. So much so, sometimes I wonder if my heart is not beyond the reach of mortals, its spirit long whisked away by my own imagination, leaving the real world nothing but this piece of flopping meat in my chest. But then, my life is all about bringing my dreams into reality... yet here is something I cannot make--I can only hope to find. It is a dream of fate rather than skill, a game of roulette I was born into. And I hate games of chance.

The less traditional aspect of my outlook is that I don't want eternity by fiat, I want it by nature. Brittle rules and naive optimism breed dishonesty and disappointment, so contractual monogamy is right out. But there is no goal of contractual monogamy which isn't better met by genuine caring and consideration. And further, there's a certain unshakable confidence that comes from wanting nothing more than what flows naturally. Honesty is the key. When both people are open books, the future is a given.

It all seems so simple, as if I ought to just walk around the corner and there she'll be, a dreamer, and a doer, the bright eyes of a little girl with the wisdom of an ancient behind them, forging forward through life at a mere stroll that somehow still makes the rest of the world look stationary by comparison. "What is within your grasp?" "Everything." "What do you want?" "Everything."

Everything.

That is all.

It seems so simple.

The current leader in my dream auction is to buy a plot of land in Maui with a stream and a view, to design and build a beautiful house on it--one with secret passages, huge windows, and generally excessive use of the third dimension (lofts, layers, ladders, bridges, and so on)--and to live there composing music, designing creatures, cooking nirvana, and playing in the ocean and jungle. You'd think I could find someone with a sufficiently compatible dream in the running, but it seems everyone has grown out of this particular dream but me. I'm even open to equally compelling dreams -- to pick up and travel the world, to spend a year on the south poll, to conquer a small country, you name it. Something new, something enjoyable, something creative. Something that is beyond question living, and never just getting by.

It seems so straightforward, so objective, so obvious, and yet everybody's idea of living is different, their priorities drawn from a different hat. Tastes, needs, desires, and encumbrances generated by that same damned roulette wheel that plays havoc on my life. How many random variables have to align for real synergy to emerge, and what are the odds of that?

It's a recipe for Zerogamy, it seems. But it's that, or my dreams.

[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>]