Moab v2

I mean, it isn't like I haven't had the time for verbose surges in this vein, is it? That'd be delusional to suggest. I have time for cigarettes on the balcony and bowls of chips. I have time for talk shows and conversations and pretending to be a vampire. I have time for treading the boards and assuming somebody else's skin, and I have time to write terrible prose that doesn't encapsulate the outpouring that I am now attempting to engineer, seeking the right combination of words that aren't mundane, this lingual exploration. That's the rub, though - my tendancies lie towards taking purely commonplace words and making them say extraordinary things. I've lost my passion for the extraordinary - for words that feel right in my mouth and on the page. I've lost that verve, that desire, that wonderful possessive feel that one gains from using words that aren't normal, aren't commonplace.

So it is, I believe, with romance.

Once upon a time I had time for the extraordinary - words like writhe and roughage and fondle, words like vibrancy and occluded and omnipotent. Indeed, I had the opposite problem - I would find that I couldn't use a simple word when a particularly verbose and powerful collection of letters suggested itself to me. This is probably a symptom of my romantic entanglements of my adolescence - I would not settle for the mundane, the ordinary or the safe - I fell in love with a bisexual boy with a shock of blonde hair and an attitude of confusion, I fucked a teacher's son, I flirted outrageously with homophobic louts who would do me physical harm if given the slightest opportunity. There is no opportunity given to an adolescent to settle for anything less than the extraordinary - no quarter given to him by himself. He's his own worst enemy and he damages himself in the pursuit of the fantastical, the unnatural, the baffling. As he matures, this drive, this desire to entangle himself with the strange and the fanatical - I say fanatical rather than fantastical because that is the nature of teenage romance, all-encompassing and inflaming and destructive, not just fundamentally other - this desire morphs, matures...and lessens. He settles for safe, for reliable, for kindness rather than passion, for dependable rather than callous. I do not in any way suggest that this transformation is for the negative - indeed, the only individual capable of sustaining such self-destructive passions is the adolescent. Nor do I suggest that he loses all capacity to feel high emotions and make paradoxical, confusing decisions - love is love, after all, and lust is lust, and between the two a man can be driven to diabolical and confusing ends regardless of his age or disposition.

All I am suggesting is that in the transition from fanatical fantastic to secure and manageable, something beautiful is lost. Something that can only be found in the eye of a young man or woman as he looks upon his or her Beloved, something that is in and of itself Beautiful (capitalization necessary). What it is, I can no longer quantify, for I have lost it, and I will never regain it. But whatever it was, it marked me forever. Perhaps that was the purpose for it coming into being in the first place - the knowledge that it has passed and gone and will never return, and the desire to recapture it.