My worst enemy

What do I know better than to ask for?

I have been walking like Quasimodo

It takes me fifteen minutes to get out of bed

Is this the fabled movement teacher I pretend to be

I want to move like I once did

With no reverence and no fear

No purpose

Those stories would come later. Rationales added to explain and justify or motivate something that at one point in my life needed no such thing. That lived so freely as a part of me. A dancer in the empty commons of the council of me.

Don’t make me beg for a body without pain

I’d trade anything right now

For a day without this pain

And some part of me knows that some people live like this always

And that maybe in two days I’ll be back to normal.

And this sat in my notes for a week and a half. Some part of me knew this wasn’t it even though in my pain it was all I wanted.

So I thought on it. Wishing my deepest desire that I could never ask for was to arrive at the end of my practice. That I had learned finally how to be an old man with a cane, limping with a smile on his face.

Surely there is something to be said for finding joy and harmony in challenge versus being pleasant, ignorant, or unaffected in a perfect environment.

But no. This was not that. And my next thought felt too dark to share. So poignant and precise and forbidden for me. It took me the rest of the week, well after recovery to muster the courage to write the truth I now know.

What do I know better than to ask for?

I know better than to ask for my enemy to be punished for my crimes. What I would give for my heart to be softened to the tender humanity of the people for whom my heart is closed. Oh to surrender to that without losing myself. And yet that is not what I’d ask

if I could ask

what I could never ask.

If I did

It would be for me to be caught red handed for the fraud I am and for the ensuing trials and tribulations to play out such that I am left innocent in the eyes of all, and they guilty. That they are tormented for all they know me to be, and in those moments even then, doubt my guilt. Me eternally vindicated. And my enemy eternally condemned. This is what I would ask for. This is what I could never let myself ask for.

There’s a fire in my belly for this fantasy that I’ve never seen before, because I’ve never given myself permission to look there in me.

I know I see violence and revenge served indiscriminately in this world. free samples on every corner. And I have turned my nose up at every opportunity. But here, in the gutter with the discarded sample cups, the floor of Costco cold strains smooth yet harsh against the skin in my cheek, under these fluorescent lights I can smell it, and my mouth waters.

Is this permission or acceptance? Can I be an addict without ever trying a drug?

I spent the whole time here thinking I was thinking of someone else, a specific person for whom every forgiveness is replaced with a new trespass days, weeks, months later. For whom I have restrained great anger.

And then I ask myself if it’s true. If I hate that person most?

The truth is that the person for whom my heart is most closed is not them, but me.

And that my revenge is a slow and ever present threat at erosion, that I have masterminded my own destruction more sinister and precise than my success.

It plans in secret moments, it keeps me up at night, it feeds me the most delicious poison, it distracts me from the life I love with the most fascinating stories, and some deep and trusting part of me accepts it graciously. Loves it tenderly. And could never give it up.

Those are the scattered remains. Not discarded rubbish from eager others, carelessly let to overflow the garbage can. No that is the result of my compulsive sampling on the ground, the concrete on my face the only sensation proving this moment is real as I see the disheveled pile.

It’s a long cold look at a life that is almost put together. And almost falling apart.

So it’s not to ask for a life without pain. Or joy despite pain. It seems somehow my greatest most forbidden wish is to punish my enemy. And that all this time, never spoken, I have been granting it to myself, over and over again, all along.