Relationships, Fruits and Poetry

Mutual Agreements

(Note: for brevity, "agree to" means "agree to give best effort to")

If you agree to stay in contact with me, then I agree to respect the time we are away from each other.

Alternate wording:
If you agree to not avoid me, then I agree to not suspect you're avoiding me.

If you agree to not have [what makes our relationship unique] with someone else without my permission, I agree to do this also.


So this person I like...

Sometimes, I can reduce my problems to a simple one: Act or Do Not Act.

Right now, (I think) I have an opportunity to get into a stable relationship. This would be awesome, except that I'm going away for the summer. Also, I don't know this person very well yet. Oh, and as usual, I'm thinking too much further than I am.

So I need to find out if this person:

• would be receptive to beginning a relationship with me;
  
• would rather a long-term relationship than short-term; and
  
• would be willing to go four months without me.

Are relationships really so easy? Is it really just...agreement?

"I agree to pursue a relationship with you. I agree to do this. I agree to do this. I agree not to do this... Allright, so it's settled!"

I mean, there's got to be something else...right? Love? Attraction?

Those aren't mandatory, are they? Familiarity can develop into attraction and perhaps love.


I often define cheating as: to share [whatever makes our relationship unique] with someone else without permission.

But what, realistically, could this [whatever] be?

Sex? Ability to communicate? Allowing eachother access to.... to what? Is like a password? ...

"You hold a piece of me now, and you may do with it as you please. I hold a piece of you, too, and it is similarly mine to do with as I please. The hope here is that we will take these pieces and treat them as we would ourselves--or better. At worst, we do this for fear the other will do something nasty in retaliation to our inattention."

Hmm...


What is it I even think I want?

An open relationship?
To come home to someone after Kingston?... To fool around with girls (or guys) in Kingston and have someone to come home to?

That's pretty selfish...

But if this person also wouldn't mind this... Then it would only benefit us both. Else, we'd just not pursue the relationship. Right? ...Right?


Action

One of my friends said that guys who like a girl will tend to like that girl for a while (if they *truly* like her anyway). So waiting out is a very safe action.

However, if the feeling is mutual (ie: he likes me back), then waiting will be frustrating for the both of us. But not that frustrating, I'd imagine.

My biggest problem, I think, is that I'm too forward and too fast about relationships. I want too fast.


Sadness?

When I'm with someone--or fantasising to imitate reality--I get sad, and suddenly.

Why do I get sad?

I think part of it is a feeling of...ephemeral-ness, that this wonderful moment is fleeting. "Everything is wonderful now, and now is over."

Do I believe I'll ever find...fulfilment in a relationship? I don't think so... Why is that?

I think I've stopped believing in that sort of fulfilment. I think I now believe in "making" the relationship work--that both/all parties have to make concessions, that people don't "just" fit together. I dunno, maybe there is someone I "fit" with, but what are the chances I'll meet this person? Slim. More likely, I'll find a person I want to be with, who wants to be with me, and we're both willing to make effort to be together. I just have to make sure I do make an effort...



In other news!

Food

I've discovered dates--the fruit! Also, figs!


Unrelated

I've also rediscovered D. H. Lawrence's poetry:

Figs
by D. H. Lawrence

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.
Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.

But the vulgar way
Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

Every fruit has its secret.

The fig is a very secretive fruit.
As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:
And it seems male.
But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit:
The fissure, the yoni,
The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

Involved,
Inturned,
The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;
And but one orifice.

The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.
Symbols.

There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;
Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

It was always a secret.
That's how it should be, the female should always be secret.

There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough
Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;
Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,
Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems
Opening pledging heaven:
Here's to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!
The brave, adventurous rosaceae.
Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,
The milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,
Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won't taste it;
Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,
Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,
One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light;
Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,
Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,
Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilization, and fruiting
In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see
Till it's finished, and you're over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.

Till the drop of ripeness exudes,
And the year is over.

And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.
So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.
And the fig is finished, the year is over.

That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through purple slit
Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.
Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That's how women die too.

The year is fallen over-ripe,
The year of our women.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.
The secret is laid bare.
The rottenness soon sets in.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

When Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked
She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.
She'd been naked all her days before,
But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn't had the fact on her mind.

She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig leaves.
And women have been sewing ever since.
But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.
They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,
And they won't let us forget it.

Now, the secret
Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips
That laugh at the Lord's indignation.

What then, good Lord! cry the women.
We have kept our secret long enough.
We are a ripe fig.
Let us burst into affirmation.

They forget, ripe figs won't keep.
Ripe figs won't keep.
Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.
Ripe figs won't keep, won't keep in any clime.
What then, when women the world over have all bursten into self-assurance?
And bursten figs won't keep?


Peach
by D. H. Lawrence

Would you like to throw a stone at me?
Here, take all that's left of my peach.

Bloodred, deep;
Heaven knows how it came to pass.
Somebody's pound of flesh rendered up.

Wrinkled with secrets
And hard with the intention to keep them.

Why, from silvery peach-bloom,
From that shallow-silvery wine-glass on a short stem
This rolling, dropping, heavy glovule?

I am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it.

Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy?
Why hanging with such inordinate weight?
Why so indented?

Why the groove?
Why the lovely, bivalve roundness?
Why the ripple down the sphere?
Why the suggestion of incision?

Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball?
It would have been if man had made it.
Though I've eaten it now.

But it wasn't round and finished like a billiard ball;
And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me.
Here, you can have my peach stone.

Woots!

--Charlie