Pretty Far Out
Knowing me so I can know you
The knife spliced the second onion as insecurity smacked me in the chest. My lover had said it plain, not unkind. I don’t know where you’re coming from. The married person in me was like, the fuck? Nose diving to the gut floor. But then I realized it wasn’t me. It was someone named Fear. Speeding straight past the heart.
Days before in our same kitchen after three months apart, my partner mouthed a map of their own work across their body. Speaking from the embodied awareness that everything is currently above the neck and aching for enough distance to let it all drop into the heart. I was listening the way I always listen. Throat parallel the heart, hanging out in the eyes, reading the soul’s current. Doing so lit something up in me sideways. I have built a whole architecture out of mouths and guts and ears. I have yet to make room for the heart.
Blaring chopping, visceral with activation. Smaller and smaller pieces. Bigger and bigger feelings. It would only make sense for them to know every inch of me. Are we not married? Words dripping directly to the gut with nothing in the heart to slow it on its way. Except the gut gut-checking, summoning the brain’s neural pathways to switch lanes into curiosity. Into love. It was brain-gut magic almost instantly.
You know that mindless thing you say. Repeating something someone else said even though it contradicts what you actually meant. Revealing a structural lack of knowing. The crack in self-awareness. My therapist had me write down values I live by and ones I aspire to, and I subconsciously wrote the two lists backward.
Values I live by: creativity, pleasure, presence.
Values I aspire to live by: authenticity, care.
I can see why I got them mixed up, and why my lover was able to point it out. The ones I live by sit closest to my chest. I admire them, so I’d filed them as something I look toward rather than something I am or do. My aspirational values felt like they should already be intrinsic, like I should just know how to do them, when they’re in fact practices.
Hips carry the root because they’re the key to releasing shame. Move it through the gut so it can sit in the pussy, my lover jokes. We’ve been falling asleep to a far out dead voice. Like that feeling when something slips into the depths of your wiring and your frontal lobe is buzzing at the sheer thought of be here now.
I took a knee to admit I was speaking someone else’s tongue. Now that I am sledging through this practice, everything I say has a process charge around it. I ugly weep, mask off, staying true to my embarrassment. They palm my ear and cheek at the same time in a circular motion, one hand doing several kinds of listening. Whole foil gone. Being seen, humiliating, in the oldest sense of the word. Earth. Ground. Tilth.
Far out on something of a loose language grip, I watch my partner from above their softness, self-doubt and liberation sharing a current, integrated and disjointed and careful and reckless as a species. That full witness needs no translator, the split doing throat work.
Twelve weeks apart and I came back turned on toward the life we are building. My old self is walking itself toward its bamboo casket, unbothered. My new self in child-like wonder, pleased with where we ended up. May I keep going below the neck, discomfort the measure of length, long enough to be seen clearly. May I keep asking—not assuming, what I am looking at with my flesh and not my eyes.
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