Thursday, November 16, 2006

Personal to... you know who you are.

And just like *that* he was gone. As abruptly as he came into my life he vanished -- in a whisper and an email.

Every so often, maybe a few times in our small lives, we meet someone whose presence changes us forever. I do not yet know in exactly what capacity I am altered, but I know I will never be the same again.

I'm not good at 'goodbyes,' though lord knows I've had enough practice at them -- far too much practice, really -- so I will let Walt Whitman do it for me:


Now, dearest comrade, lift me to your face;
We must separate a while -- here, take from my lips this kiss.
Whoever you are, I give it especially to you.
So long! -- and I hope we shall meet again...



(Calm down; i'm not talking about the Pirate. All is well on that front.)

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's not the beagle, is it? I am worried about that beagle.

Moominmama said...

that's sweet, TB, but no, it's not the beagle. (clever as she is she's never quite got the hang of email.) the Easter Beagle is fine. ish. since you asked...

a few weeks ago she lost control of her bladder. i don't mean once or twice, i mean her bladder just quit. permanantly. there was talk about putting her down, but it seemed like a really crummy reason to do so when otherwise she was still enjoying a high quality of life, albeit a slow one. turns out there's a medication for bladder function which is working rather well, and there are puppy piddle pads in the bathrooms for when she can't make it outside (or won't go out because it's too bleeding cold and she ain't got no fur left). so that's one problem solved (temporarily), but she is 14 1/2 years old, and we expect the rest of her organs to follow her bladder any day now. she might make it to christmas, she might not. i'm sure she won't see another Easter. it's all very depressing. but thanks for showing your concern.

Anonymous said...

not the Pirate
oh thank goodness for that. You had me worried then.

Unknown said...

Yikes - don't scare like that. Any clues as to the identity?

Anonymous said...

And? as usual, you've said too much and not enough...

Karen said...

This post (and the comments about the Easter Beagle) makes me very sad.

Moominmama said...

cookie: if it HAD been, there would have been a lot more in this post: ranting, raving, anger, angst, humiliation, suicide threats, etc. but this has none of that. i've lost a dear friend because of shitty timing and cicumstances of life. it's just sad.

hannah: that's rich coming from you! who's the MC then, huh?

helena: and unlike usual, that's all i'm going to say about it.

karen: yeah, mee too. i could do with a good hug about now.

Unknown said...

Yeah - thought that might come back to bite me... Well played!

Anonymous said...

"take from my lips this kiss"....no, no ,no.It shouldn't be thus. See "a stolen kiss". Kissing must be proferred, given, offered. A presumptuous guy leans across a coffee table and steals a kiss, what has he gained ? The knowledge of the softness of your lips ? Something he could guess anyway from the way the light sheens from the quality of the skin adorning your neck, cladding its muscles. Has he learned from a stolen kiss that which is contained in your heart ? No, he has not. Has he learned that the softest initiation , yeilding to progressive defiant firmness betrays your sexual instincts in the sack,or suspended from the chandelier ? Nope, he has not. A stolen kiss , a taken kiss,a claimed kiss, a kiss won in a bet, is no kiss at all.Perhaps kissing, real kissing, the softest kiss in the history of the world bar none, to the most forceful, demanding muscular meeting of lips, tongues, secretions in three historic acts is the most intimate thing we can give another, more so than even orgasming in another's presence, but as such does it have to be the the entry to the gates of everything else? Can it not be isolated, can it not stand in abstract isolation? Like a snowflake, no less marvellous , no less unique for its brief lifespan .I kiss , therefore I am. Does it have to be the herald of betrayal, or a slippery slope, no pun intended , to the next step? Perhaps that's why he went ? To paraphrase Butch to Sundance................... "who was that guy ?".

Moominmama said...

Interesting, D'Artagnan; you've interpreted that line in a completely different way than the light in which I read it. I see "take from my lips this kiss" as an offering, a gift, a surrender, not an invitation to theft. (But even that begs the question that if the theft is invited, is it still theft? Is the handbag stolen if the woman leaves it on a table in a cafe' and deliberately turns her back to the street urchin who's been staring at her for 10 minutes?) I read it exactly as the proffering you describe.

You are correct in that a kiss is the most intimate exchange, in many ways more personal even than mutual orgasms. As such it is not the herald of betrayal, the harbinger, it is the betrayal itself. It is not the top of the slippery slope, it is the landing at the bottom, the place from which it is impossible to climb back up again. It is a point of no return. How could I have kissed his lips and still embraced the Pirate upon his return, the taste of another man still on my mouth? I could not.

Is that why he left? Perhaps. I have some notion as to why, but I may never know the deepest recesses of his heart. Who was that guy? Why, that was the Lone Ranger!

Anonymous said...

Women are from Venus, musketeers are from Mars. T'was it ever thus ?
"And with a kiss, I die....." Row hard tomorrow. xx

Moominmama said...

Did you know that in the 17th c "die" was a euphamism for orgasm? (Based on the belief at the time that a man's life span was pre-determined, and he life force was contained in his semen. thus, each time he ejaculated, he lost a little more of his life force and knocked some time off his life span, bringning him that much closer to death.) So even in that most tragic of lines, at the climax of Shakespeare's most beloved tragedy, "die" is a comic pun leading both to literal death and implying death by sex.


I will row my goddamn fucking brains out. X

Anonymous said...

Of course I did. Who do you think you're dealing with here ?