So Complicated, So Simple

It was 7:56 as I pulled into the parking spot. A sloppy parallel job but the sun was setting and the lights were turning on. The mosquitos were floating around our heads as I shoved a drink in your hand so that when the music started you were settled under the trees. We had left 45 minutes early - with our full glam cut in half and the braids in your curls loose - time wasted as I took us to the wrong location - time burned speeding in between the barriers of the Dallas Toll Roads. But it didn't matter now. This was your moment.

I didn't know much about what I got myself into but anywhere with you feels like home. As we were standing in the matted grass and the amp started humming, the hairs on my arms stood up with the electricity that was flowing in the empty space. The sunset painted the portrait behind the stage, adding to the amber hues of the broken diodes in the stage lights. Behind us there's a small ferris wheel. As the moon rises, there's another strip of LED lights that make themselves known, hollowly illuminating the hair of the people gathered around us. Hues of pink float with the geese overhead, as the man on stage sings of door frames with your name engraved in them.

I still don't know much, but as I fall into the scenery I realize I don't need to. I feel present for the first time in months. My hands are warmed by your skin. I look at the people around us, different couples, friends, photographers, singers, dancers. So many people I will never know, so many people that will never know me. I've been stuck with the feeling that no one really knows me. I get scared that no one wants to know me. Maybe I’m too complicated, maybe I’m too simple. Maybe I don't really know the people around me like I think that I do. As I’m standing in this place that I've never been to, with these people I've never met, I still wonder what role they are playing in my life. In our relationship.

You look happier than ever.

We never get to feel comfortable. Our entire relationship was built on discomfort, shaped by other people's shame and misconceptions. We aren't allowed to be seen together in public unless we are out of town, or in a space that welcomes us. A little like this one. Still, the way that we feel about each other stays the same, whether public or private. Having a relationship so controversial helps you to learn boundaries. Ones that you set and ones that are set on you. There are certain things you can't control - how others perceive you, how they take the news that doesn't really apply to them and build a connection to themselves. I find it so interesting how the mind works to relate when in reality, how much of the life we live really pertains to how we live it. I sit here, listening to this music from an artist I’ve never heard and I try to know what it's like to be him. To stand on the stage and pour my heart out to people who are searching to be known. To be able to imagine themselves in his shoes too. Some of them may also be searching to be known by the artist - a parasocial understanding that for this short time we all are breathing the same air. Never will there be a moment like this again where the stars above our heads will be the same or the bugs in the ground in the same place, but because I am here and you are there and we chose this - we experience the connection that I seek so deeply.

You and I shouldn't get along the way that we do. Other than our hobbies and love for live music, we are complete opposites. Comically so. The kind of opposites that philosophers will study in the future. It's never been about the way that you see me though, it's about the way that I never had to explain myself to you. More often you're explaining my actions to me. There's a part of myself in you. Not because I want there to be or because you necessarily want to be a part of me either, but because you see me beyond what you know about me. Our connection is so much more than the mind can comprehend. Deep down there's an emotional understanding. I've tried to break down what that really means to me and how I could really express what I feel on paper, but I don't think it's something I “know”. It is something that when your eyes shine in the light of the sun - I just understand.

Just like this moment with you and all these people. We move beyond what we know and we find the deeper meaning of connection. Connection doesn't require you to know - but to understand. The mind needs to be quiet to allow the soul to reach out and intertwine with other searching souls, dancing in the stage lights that pull the senses into deprivation. Lights that fill the senses so full that they no longer work. Leaving you only with the pieces of another's soul whom you've never met, but know more deeply than you know yourself. It's never really been about being known but the desire to feel understood. In the end it's all a feeling. We thrive off our senses so deeply - why not allow the senses that are within us to do the describing, rather than what our feeble minds try to create. It's complicated, but simple. Like trees in the wind, complicated roots and simple products. If we took the world around us and simplified it, how much more would we really know? What would we really experience?

As the light of the stars starts shining, and the music starts to fade - I’m left with the understanding that I will never experience this again. This was our moment.