He asks the question again, after the Bushmills gets passed a second time: “What the f*** is it?  Why can’t men and women just get along?  Is it sex that is always screwing things up?”

I want to give a good answer, something witty and profound…often wondering the same thing myself, but all I can honestly think about is taking off his clothes, and what I might find underneath all those layers.

Two days and a night of drunken sex later, after one of his college students dies in a climbing accident, he asks the question again, and somehow, this time, it all seems more serious and weighted, and still I can only think of crawling back into his bed to f*** and talk and laugh and cry….

He says there is only one thing he is sure of in this life and that is that he will die.  And, between birth and death, who knows what the f*** might happen, or what it is all about.  He says life is a f***ing trip, and I agree, and he says there was no way, in his wildest thoughts, he could have imagined the day he just had — talking with the parents of the student who died, showing them the ledge where he fell.

I sat in his little bunkhouse room by the wood stove while he did his neti pot over the sink….one side, then the other.  He was suddenly inspired to use one because the father had given him advice on allergies before thanking him and leaving to go back east to bury his son.

Later that night, I caught a clip of Osho’s advising us not to build our house on a bridge…

The guy interpreting the clip talked of emotions and how we shouldn’t invest in them, should not build our house around them, because they pass, if we let them.

A few days later, a bit drunk, and naked again, I lay pressed up against him, nipples to his back, my arms and legs wrapped around as much of his 6 foot 2 inch body as I could, and I held him while he cried.

I thought of how many houses we build, not just of emotions, but houses of import and pomp, walls of rationalizations that imprison our hearts to avoid being vulnerable…whether it be our spiritual beliefs, our titles or our moral barometer of how things should and shouldn’t be….

Our anger, confusion, our denial… our seeking of shelter in a house, not only built on a bridge….but built on a bridge made of dust that has already been blown to the wind and I love this man for his ability to break…

…to simply not know.

 

 

~

Editor: Braja

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