mycelium

written for nova october 28th circa 11:40

i am reading 1984 right now, for a banned book club. i’m maybe 50 pages in, but throughout the book, there is this re-enforced idea of love being intrinsically against the party. junior anti-sex league, cryptic wet dreams, poets being killed and what not- love is against the party and creation is against the party unless these things are moderated by the party. i guess love is an act of creation- we are two things developing ourselves by contrasting our own against each-other, creating a third thing in the process, a distinct overlap of you and me, a new personality. i have known you for a very long time, so i feel that “you” have become “we”- and i have become an “our” as well. it is with much hesitance i confess that i toy with the idea of leaving you behind sometimes- new school, new town, cut myself off. i never get farther than two minutes into the fantasy before the nausea of it all takes over and i throw it aside. 

perhaps mycelium is the best way to describe this phenomenon i spoke of. we are spores grown, claimed ground, laced it with “roots” until it became our mycelium, we are connected and therefore distinct (to tie two things together you must know the starts and ends of them), and yet the same thing, or at least inseparable. ten years is not a long time, but it is long enough for the fruiting bodies of you and me to surface everywhere. there is no future in which i can run away from you, is it perhaps selfish to say that this is our world, our planet now? 

electrical currents become thoughts, (may) become words, become spit, become water, become the world. touch becomes skin, becomes skin cell, becomes dust, carried to wind that punctuates that which is not touched (but one might want to touch). these things become the world. the point being, if i were to abandon you (us), you (we) would never be gone, and lord i would know it. after that long, no matter how you try, detachment becomes harmful, to say the least. i’m sorry to say, i  think it would kill me. and what if you were to abandon me? i would still be sorry. there is no foreseeable scenario in which it is not my own responsibility- i curdled artificial brotherhood, compromised what was perhaps a real and true unspoken covenant of family. we like to pretend this is (we are) all blithe. i like to pretend my subconscious can be swallowed, but bile is a humor, so perhaps it is a blithe sort of thing. 

i short circuit right around this part. i want you to be. i want you to briefly separate yourself from the union of us for an opinion not warped. i need to remind myself that you love me regardless, and it scares me because it renders you someone who will lie for the sake of emotional compromise. sometimes it feels like i have spent so much time over the past several years anticipating you hurting me that i want you to hurt me. i want you to be disgusted with me- it is easier to explain and understand than the probable truth of the matter.