The Ground Between

Everybody dies alone. - Malcolm Reynolds
Someone's carrying a bullet for you right now, and doesn't even know it. - the same

Alone, together. These are the two states of being between which we bounce back and forth. I guess that's not an accident, since whether we can ever truly be other than alone is one of those great questions that toss us around like a relentless wash cycle.

It's the reason that love is so compelling, I think. And by love I mean the idea of it, not the actuality, which (while also compelling) tends to be more three-dimensional, more like a plate of macaroni and cheese.

I'm not knocking macaroni and cheese. It's delicious. It's just that it's got more to do with satisfying ordinary needs than with feeding the yawning depths of the soul.

Maybe that's unfair. Maybe your soul really yearns for the blue box, and I should keep my weird analogies to myself. But mine, since we are talking about mine, has this feeling that nothing we do or say to one another can get beyond a certain barrier.

I'm a fan of barriers, actually - or at least of personal space. I don't like anyone to get too close, and I really don't want to see too very much of most people's insides. That's where the guts live - the icky bits.

But there's also this perennial urge to connect, to feel that we are understood and that we understand each other. To feel seen.

I don't know if that's really possible. I sometimes think, listening to music, that the artist - or maybe the song itself - sees, understands, is saying what I would say. But perhaps it's only that I've happened on the right music to match a moment. And is there much of a difference between those two things? I know that the role of art is to express something particular, a time, a place, an experience.

And that theoretically, some things are universal enough - or at least similar enough - that other people will go, "Oh yes, that's exactly it."

But I'm not sure that means we can reach each other. I've been in love before and still felt terribly alone, so I suppose feeling alone while being unattached isn't much of a shock.

Maybe it's like needing an interpreter - we can connect only by standing together on the same planet. The ground beneath us touches my feet and yours, and we are linked through it, but we can't ever quite touch each other directly.

So if art is our interpreter, what is sex?

A very dangerous place indeed. In art we may be reaching out, but in sex we're so close to begin with that sometimes we are hiding as much as possible. Ever have sex with someone but were afraid to meet their eyes? Yeah. The room can seem awfully full with two big souls swirling around above you. Sometimes it seems like the closer you are physically, the more careful you have to be not to let those two things meet.