In the past few weeks and months, as in the past few years, I've lived an extraordinary series of mostly-unrelated events. They've been varied and crazy, giving rise to a whole new batch of Stephanecdotes, as well as providing some serious fodder for each of a few planned new books. Sometimes they were things I sought—Mardi Gras with Hammer and Lady Hammer and Glee and Roadkill—as research for a new project. Sometimes they were utterly random—the dozen balloons floating colorfully into the rising sun over Atlanta. And sometimes they were fated—like a lightning bolt straight to the ass.
Fate can be a fickle little bitch.
As I wrote both here and in Persona Non Grata:
I'm a firm believer in Fate. Some things are fated in the sense that there's only one viable choice, based on all of the previous choices you've made. There's nowhere else to go but here, because you've come from there, and that makes it feel important. But I also believe in Fate as an outside, blinding force. Maybe it's because of other people's choices, maybe it's sheer dumb luck, but it feels like divine intervention, twisting and turning you wildly or slightly. Either way, you can't help but look at what it wants you to see.
I'm adamant that Fate is what brought me to so many watershed moments in my life, as in Tierney's. My forty years have been significant and stellar, even when splattered with the remnants of my heart. She hasn't stopped working her magic, or so I'd thought. Then I was given a series of gifts, only some of which I was able (read: allowed) to keep for any significant length of time. But I did and am continuing to do my best to take those simple lessons learned and move forward.
So what now?
In the aftermath of several recent events, I was shocked to realize that I'm really, really scared to move forward again. While I do actually have a choice in the matter, I refuse to be still any longer than necessary. It's just not who I am. But in my search for a deeper, more profound experience in which to immerse myself and fully comprehend, I am in a cycle of seeking out more varied experiences, in search of my next rabbit hole. Given the things I've done and the people I've known, how the hell am I ever going to top this?
It's not that there's a competition, with myself or anyone else. I don't feel especially driven to do more things. Those actions and events are simply a delivery vehicle for experience and understanding—a mode of enveloping me in deeper learning and the psychic tinkering I so love.
Some of these things I've lived, especially in the last three years, have left me with my bars set very high—the problem being that someone else placed them way over my head, just out of my reach. And for an Amazon, that's pretty damn high. Unfortunately, I have no control over where those bars rest.
After the events of even my year so far, I feel taunted by what I want, that it was and sometimes is so damn close. But when I reach for it, it falls away like sand. Over and over, I'm in someone else's sandbox, but it's warm and velvety and strangely soothing, so I keep digging deeper.
Okay, Fate: challenge me. Dare me. Give me reason and excuse to reach again, to reach for something bigger and better, something truer and more astonishing. Because I know there's something there for me to learn, something important and pressing and profound, I will all but destroy myself to get to that locus, to that kernel of truth at the center. It's something that's just for me, and sometimes I have to step into the journey through Hell to gain it.
Even in my brashness, I am fearful that I will never again reach those same heights and depths of learning and love and sex and hope, that I have somehow stumbled upon something (and someone) so exquisitely good that any future attempts will, at the very least, fall short of those expectations. The worst case scenario is that even trying to match that will be cataclysmic to my heart and soul, if only because it's doomed to be a fruitless effort. While I know the real joy should be in the journey and not the destination, the last thing I want for the last half of my life is boredom and unfulfilment.
"Maybe the point is to be happy and content in what you do have, to enjoy the person you're actually with as fully as possible," Queen Frostine advised. "Maybe that's your ultimate goal."
That feels like settling, though, and I don't ever want to do that again. As selfish and strong-willed as I am, I will actually compromise when the need arises. I am very good at negotiating settlement, in general, though that's rarely so successful with my heart. While my ideal isn't perfection, what if my idyllic can only ever fall short of faded and dreamy memory?
I knew what I wanted; I seemed to have it within my careful grasp. Not as an object or a trophy, but as a treasure that was tarnished and neglected and buried under so damn much rubble, trying desperately to breathe under the crush of years. But it slipped back into the sand and seems to be washing out with the tide. So now I have to walk the shoreline again, combing through seaweed and jellyfish and craggy, broken shells, hoping to find another pearl yet afraid all I'll have are slimy oysters.
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