To be honest, I'm not sure I was ever totally present in my life, not since I was a child, not since I began looking more toward the future than the unhappy moments at hand. I used to escape to the future from an unhappy present and sad, sorrowful past. I time travelled, chose alternate realities. My disassociation was an abandonment of the body for the mind. The future became the only thing worth living for. The only problem with living for the future however, or last least one problem, mine, is that by it's nature, tomorrow never comes. We are always living today. And to force myself constantly to the edge of tomorrow, required that I be a ghost in both worlds, this one and that.
I am not sure all the reasons for the why of this long and particular silence. I keep the peeling away the onion-like layers of reasons, hoping to find the heart of it. Today, I might have stumbled on the true, deep why of it. It came while reading a quote from a book by Umberto Eco, called The Book of Legendary Lands. I have not read the book, although I think I must. Legendary lands as metaphors for love seems perfect for my history and nature. It is my story, the quest for a true and fitting love. It has always been my tomorrow.
"Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself. Out of a hope in a possible future, many people are prepared to make enormous sacrifices, and maybe even die, led on by prophets, visionaries, charismatic preachers, and spellbinders who fire the minds of their followers with the vision of a future heaven on Earth (or elsewhere)."
My guess is that this quote may not have hit you as it did me, as if the gods themselves were whispering in my ear, as if I at last had an answer to a puzzling question. It struck me, that I loved a man, exactly in this way, created a legendary land of him and us that became far more real to me than the reality of him and us. And then came the realization that perhaps love for me is like this. A lifetime of fiction making and story telling has made me prefer the written to the real, the fiction to the non-fiction. It becomes a flow, takes on a life of its own, and you become willing, more than willing to make huge sacrifices in order to achieve that utopia, whomever he might be.
My current relationship was no different in its beginnings. I leaped believing I was going to sail into the sunset, into happily ever after. It is how I have always leaped, love taking me where I would normally fear to tread. I didn't really make changes unless I had a love to prompt me. I didn't love myself enough to do it for me. I always had to be driven by another.
My heart attack forced me into the present. Suddenly the future was less possible, less probable. I could count on now but I couldn't really count on the future. I started to re-inhabit my body. I started to live each day in all its mundanity and its glory. I gave up my legendary lands, not even knowing I did so, and faced reality with all its messy miracles. I will confess its depressed me, the loss of the imaginary that was more real than life. And I suspect my slow stirring to share here again and to write my stories suggests I may be coming to terms with abandoning utopia for something more real. Maybe this is growing up. Or maybe it is just one more step in the process of individuation. I will know more I think when I read the book or perhaps when the gods deign to speak to me again and whisper truths I cannot yet see.
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