Letters, Public Disclosure, and the Discontents of (De)Contextualization

i remember his letter. as warm and comforting as recycled long-johns my mama "scent" along with her love. i remember that it made me smile. i was scrappin for some trace of a boy who wasn't so scarred by love that he could adequately respond. i've lost sight of that hopeful energy. i was heartbroken beyond the break: the house i was building with someone, a mansion memory; the man who welcomed me to share it, as haunting as an imaginary best friend who promises never to leave but does. i loved a'shar more than he'll ever recognize. never thought I'd actually bring a man home to moms and say "he's it". so i'm still healing.

this letter was my new friend's disclosure-- I suppose some response to the various revelations in my "red dirt revival". when you write memoir, you are sometimes not prepared for people who will think they know you because they've "read" you-- people who will fail to see you beyond their "reading" and who will not make room for your 7th breath or the ways you overcome your own self-circumscription. through the warmth of his letter and the exchanges that followed, I did feel that i'd gained a friend. i was appreciative. i get a lot of letters and while I know I don't respond to them all with letters, I do know that I've said "thank you" in some small way; and if I have not, i hope that it was charged to my disorganization or schedule and not my heart.

we had a number of conversations by phone about his letter. a writer, i struggled with how to respond to it. there was something in it that hinted to a desire for a deeper knowing. and perhaps i could not find the courage or cop-out to say, "I'm not attracted to you that way", or simply, "i have not found courage to try to love again." so I kept his letter near my ritual space where I prayed for time and isolation to be band-aids for my heart-hurt. i'd resolved that the only person i could love was some black boy i'd claimed as my soul mate back in 1997 and who continued to make knight "appearances" (shining armor if he happened to be "feeling me" at the moment). it felt safer to try to love somebody whose love was so crudely unrequited and non-reciprocal. i wouldn't have to be the "bad guy" and could continue sulking in self-indulgent pity with my "black men ain't shit" manifestos. but i have to wake to myself everyday. I don't believe that "black men ain't shit". That would be suicide. i do remember entrusting this new friend with some very private thoughts about my longings for a reconnection with my unrequited soul-mate, not as a hint of my unavailability, but was a way to share a piece of me beyond the ways I showed up in my artistic products. I feel that the ways we respond to unrequited love are, perhaps, the greatest testimonies or our capacity to love. it's ironic now. this letter about my loving some other boy wasn't about him, so i suppose it didn't count towards the getting to know each other *credits*. he claims that I don't know him. I don't think he knows me either.

we continued to have conversations, email, IM, though the phone calls died down between the thousands of miles between us and other preoccupations. i didn't consider that my non-response to his letter would be a thorn in our friendship. it would be the psychoanalytic "event" through which all other actions would be judged. i don't tend to operate that way-- holding people to the expectation of my desire, so it's tough for me to understand. i have been the victim of my own failure to act as others have desired. I'm a believer in "compersion", in the excesses of unconditional loving-- even when everything around us suggests that we love "because" or love "in order that". it's a task to check your expectations of those you love... realizing that no one really owes you anything... and that not getting what you desire, has everything to do with you, and less with the person you desire. my friend, who'd written this beautiful letter, surely had a preconceived notion of what would qualify as a response. I don't know that anything short of reciprocating his desire would have sufficed. I am sorry for the fallout, for miscalculations in my judgment, maybe even for the intensity of my preoccupations after a failed relationship and the pitiful attempts to be with someone who didn't want me. I am not sorry for not feeling the same way.

we recently saw each other again. he continues to be a supporter of my work, though i'm not clear anymore if it's about his own phantasm of the ways I satisfy his desire for me or if he's genuinely interested in me beyond the ways i'm consistent with his envisioning. he recently made it clear that he does not like hip hop, which, because I am an emcee, i found interesting... and this spiraled into a conversation about the ability to like or love people outside of our projections for them. it explains why he never responded about the (complimentary) CD i sent to him-- another inadequate self-disclosure I didn't get right. he's made comments before of people not being who he desired them to be... and it occurred to me why I might have been fearful of responding to his letter. His "aggression" is about a dynamic. it's the father the little boy is so afraid of not pleasing that he becomes stuck on stuck-- unable to find the confidence in his agency to displease, move beyond what others want for him, become his own man. he knows someone else i'm close with and has articulated his distaste for this person for not corroborating his desire. it's a thread in his way of thinking that honestly baffles me. for whatever ways I've longed people to show up for me, I have not held them as failures or inadequate for not doing so. people get to be the people they are, where they are, and I have to own what's going on with me if i cannot accept them for that.

we discussed these differences. i felt i learned a lot about him in that conversation, for all the ways we differ in our approach to "knowing"... but i did not anticipate that my suggestion that he was "aggressive" would become the decontextualized subject of his blog. I honestly felt a bit hurt and misrepresented, though he didn't disclose my identity. it was if he was looking for a jury of empaths to corroborate his feeling that "it's [my] loss", or that I wasn't deserving or worth the friendship in the first place. And he did get that: a chorus of sirens rebuking the non-responsive ghost of letters past. but it felt really wrong. I'm a bitter, aggressive, black phaggot sometimes. so I'm ghostbustin'.

all in all, i still have love for the guy. i don't think we will be able to have a functional friendship anytime in the near future. he seems to be always looking for my failure to show up in accordance with his "desire"... and so i remain like the letter i still haven't found words to write: hesitant, cautious, scared of misspells, bad grammar, or just plain not getting the answer right. it's not "aggression" it's the dynamic of those who cannot accept people where they "be". And I've had to own that my response to it, is MY shit! I'm working on clearing my eyes of the stench. i need to smell myself more clearly. LOL. I've been a good friend, I have a lot of people who love me, and I'm very deserving of a lot of good things. Now i just gotta really believe it so that people's blogs don't become emotional setbacks for my progress.

i have learned a bit about myself through these recent disclosures. this big little boy, like that letter that I may someday find words to respond to (whether or not it meets his "approval") is, very simply, a work in progress.

tim'm t. west
1.12.05