dear amanda

Dear Amanda,
When we talked tonight after i read my memoir to you, i should have warned you more that anything i said was going to be out of focus. When i get in that emotional state where i'm literally trembling, i can laugh at myself, but it takes a while for me to settle into any normalcy. I was thrilled to keep talking though, and share the silly beauty of that moment with you.
One of my recent poems is about "tending your garden". Life is a series of choices, and for me, getting to a place where my choices are about simply tending my spirit's garden...away from the million and three distractions which pull on us...whose approval or love do we seek, what appetites compel us, what guilt or fear cripples us...to try and get to a place where i'm simply tending my garden, is a process that is perhaps never finished.
Those were the thoughts on my mind when i didn't take that teaching job those years ago. All too many of us know the feeling of second-guessing, the "what ifs"...but it wasn't even any kind of choice, that one. I don't know my path before it unfolds, but we've got to sift through all our shit, to feel these things. I was a happy free bird then, and getting tied down in that way wasn't my path. Not that i always know what to do...but when i'm balanced, choices are almost laughably easy.
Know what i did the following year, when i wasn't teaching at CCHS? Spent 70 hours a week running a theater named Orpheus. Not that garden-tending decisions need visible justification...they are right in and of themselves, even when they seem inexplicable to others. Most of us are too stupid or damaged to adequately care for our own gardens, much less someone else's.
I had the thought that my pain and emptiness lately may reflect a subconscious part of me that needs to become more tapped into anger, at capitalism perhaps, for me to create something as yet unknown. Or maybe i need to explore what being a not-so-nice guy really is like, for once in my life. How do women respond to a man who has an element of danger in him? Or what might i attract, as a wounded one? (a box of edible love, perhaps?)
Or maybe these are just silly thoughts floating around the periphery of my battered spirit.
It's funny though, i feel like i'm getting too used to warning women about my battered psyche...putting up the "DON'T FALL IN LOVE" sign. And yet even in that it feels like there's some hidden truth and benefit, inasmuch as our society heaps horrible baggage on the phenomena of attraction and falling in love.
Don't give up on Jeff. Even if he never needs me again, i suspect i'll never give up on him. I think, when writing the CCHS memoir, reading it to you was at the top of my desires, but third or fourth on that list was that Jeff might read it too. What i was trying to tell you, is that it's been a little hard these past couple months to not call you and interrogate you...what exactly did he say, can you give him something, etc....which reveals how out of balance i still am, years later. It's a wound, but a part of me i cherish. Sometimes joy needs to be paid for with an equal amount of sadness.
I love you so much.