The Wolf and I

I try so hard to think like a Wolf, to live for the here and now, to let the repercussions of the future waft past my mind as I feel the wind flow through my hair, my fur.  As I run in the forest, I pant misty breath, I breathe passion.  I am free.  But I am not a Wolf, I feel guilt, I feel illicit desire.  I dream.  I dream of the sparks and play with naked fire.  This means I am not a Wolf and this means that life is not simple.  I love a woman, this is normal, what is not normal is the way in which my life somehow resembles the phoney articles found on the problem pages of tacky magazines.  There are two concerns to this chaotic life; one is the guilt I feel over the dark ignorance in which I keep her.  I claim to love her and yet I steel her autonomy for the sole and selfish reason that I know where her self determination would take her if she knew the truth, if she knew where the Wolf in me had been running.  The second and important issue is that while I can deal with this guilt the respective co-existing cause can not.  She makes a triangle in which we are all friends and lovers, what prevents the completion of this trilogy is a final thread of physical bi-sexual love.  I do not know if it would be any easier if this final link existed, neither do I desire it.  So while she is happy to love and live a sordid life in which we share the breath of passion besides the moonlit pool, when this moon returns to its cosmic darkness our lies transform, our lives reform and we live the false existence of reality.  The chaotic tangle of confused emotions and self deception, the crystal clarity of my Wolf is lost and therefore so am I, I am trapped between Wolf and man, I am trapped in the reality of what is and can be.  I empathise with the myth and howl for his begotten soul.

*

Sometimes the pull is far too strong, sometimes I feel as if there is no human in me, no mundane rationality left.  This is why I ran beneath the moon that night, my urban forest swept along as my shadow pulsed back and forth between the periodic road-side light.  It was mid-winter and raining, my breath formed clouds as quickly as my face shattered through them in my headlong rush.  I had the scent of purpose and it was pungent to my senses.  I feared her mechanical monstrosity would prove to great a feat, for my feet.  But as I said, the Wolf in me was strong this night; I would run for that is all I could do.  Why worry about the possibilities, if I knew I couldn’t catch her would I stop running?  It is my Wolf that knows that success is not about winning and loosing, for these concepts are forgone conclusions, it is about never being beaten.  And so I ran, but even as I ran my mans mind raced ahead, ran into the future, the unknown, it sought the women which my legs were chasing.  I was being a fool and I knew it, I was dreaming of an existence that could not be.  What is the point I asked, there can be no point in a pointless endeavour.  I am but a foolish dreamer, running my nightmare.  My Wolf pushes harder, faster, I find my mind is drawn to the fatigue of my legs, the lack of oxygen in my lungs, I am focused once more, I command my body with the knowledge that I am running and staying in the same place while the world is being spun ever faster towards me.  My Wolf Knows that I can only run a certain speed but there is no limit to how fast we can spin the earth towards us.  I am free and I am focused, the lights blur, the sounds slur, I am an arrow and I fly fast and true.  This is how I arrive, you are mere metres from being lost to me but I catch you and my Wolf grins, worry not of the future that grin says, you must always get to the future before you can worry of it.  It is all about the here and now, ever changing incremental steps in time which we call the present.

And so there I stand, before your beautiful form, with complete sense of purpose but absolutely no means or method or even hope to achieve it.  My Wolf has done his job and now I am lost on my own, my commitment falters, I am but a fool, stood in the rain as you stare incredulously, questioningly.  But you do know, I know you knew.  I stand and shiver and tell you that I can’t stand the thought that I will never kiss you again, that I will never feel your lips or hold your body in those tender moments shared on the tiny pinnacle that is love.  I tell you I love your eyes and they mean the world to me, they are a world to me.  I am lost and confused and a cacophony of tangled thoughts thunders in my mind.  The water is ice against my skin but your words strike deeper than the cold could ever reach, they strike beyond the tangible, they strike within, and yet they only speak the reality of what can be.  But still they are like sharpened icicles stabbing the bubble, my bubble, which is the naivety of my childish hope, my Wolfs dream that anything is possible.  I am but a man and I begin to fall apart, what can one say against such logic, such defiant decisiveness that my actions are foolish?  A different time but not now, there is the simple irrefutable question of how?  Logistically indefensible, morally reprehensible.  And yet as she stood there with rain soaked hair I felt the pressure was more than I could take.  The tension as my mental, delusional reality began to break.  Enter the Wolf, I thank him for this.  Enter the logic of the moment and the beauty of the present.  If this is it, if this is the moment when there is no more dream, then let us live the dream while we can.  Why, my Wolf asks, why worry that this can never be, why worry about the future before you are there.  You are here, and you are here now.  She is here, and she is here now.  We have run hard for it to be so, let us live for the here and now.

And so we stood and kissed our final kiss, amidst the rain soaked misery I close my eyes and I taste her lips.  Every rain drop stops, frozen one may say.  My Wolf grins at me and I smile, and nod my understanding.  I absorb every detail.  I know I am stood on the brink, the very edge of my abyss, but as I balance precariously I savour the kiss.  On the platform of my current bliss I love the moment.  The rain, the ice, the warmth of her mouth, the slight tilt of her head as our noses brush and our lips meet, so pure, so sweet.  The drop of water poised to drip from my hair, to fall with me over the precipice, into that abyss.  It all comes crashing back, my last kiss.  Falling, freezing, final.  I thank my Wolf, turn and head on home, alone.

*

I do not fully comprehend the meaning of alone for on this windy day I am placed in perspective.  No, I am pushed. The Wolf in me laughs and knows the truth of folly.  I am a man and so attempt to think as he, to comprehend a state of mind where there is no future to live, let alone see.  As I attempt to become him I see I am a man, I shelter from the wind and tread a lonely street, I hunger for the passion of those eyes I’ll never meet.  This is my life and it is desperate, I am lonely and alone.  I realise man is weak, man is not a fighter nor a champion.  Without the Wolf I too would be lost, the Wolf is my strength, my sanity, the steel within.  He had no Wolf, he had no steel, left with only the man he was lost and alone, no beast to atone for his sins and so his weakness shone, and now he’s gone.  If he had but fought; not worried of the past or craved for the future, instead just lived.  But this is the job of my Wolf, to me it seems he was an empty shell for the life within is empty without the Wolf.  He needed an inner beast, a companion at least.  It is strange that he was able to die in the present by predicting and causing his death in the future, this I do not understand.  So I laugh with the Wolf at his folly while appreciating my own predicament in a new light of triviality, but instantly I am scorned.  My Wolf is serious about everything, and nothing is trivial.  Every scent is a life and death decision, every action is a choice and living is not about dying for there are many ways to die, you can die without being dead.  He died before he was dead and look where that got him, dead.  So I am cautioned not to be content with being alive because this means nothing, I must live and not merely exist otherwise I am dead.  These are my Wolfs concepts and I accept them, embrace them.  And yet when I am alone in my mind I tremble in fear, not for my own emphasised mortality, but for everyone else’s.  I am selfish in thought that it is I who would have to continue living with your death.

*

We stood and worried once you and I, we had met in secrete, in seclusion.  Do you remember our words, our conclusion?  The risk we ran of living the lie.  Our passion, our love, our illicit desire lived only within us, you and I held everything that we had together, every secret, every confirmation of what we shared.  If you or I died tomorrow then imagine the loss that we could never express, the sorrow.  Imagine the devastation of a lover’s death experienced in a world where no one could understand the magnitude of our grief.  That was a special meeting, we stood and held each other close, we kissed your passionate kiss while thinking of these feelings that we would miss, together in our misery.  We shared that moment in a way that made my Wolf proud, but this time my Wolf did not understand, we lived for that moment in fear of a future.  Every moment together was always the last but this time we embraced with the intensity that there was no tomorrow, here we saw the difference between ending our folly and an eternal end, the feeling fuelled our passion, our wild abandon.  The human in her was too strong, she left with a final kiss telling me how much she wanted to come run through the forest, hair flying free, panting cold mist, breathing passion, “If I die tomorrow then remember that I love you” I told her, I pleaded to her, “And I you” whispered as she turned and returned to the world of reality, the living lie.

I am also human, and to exercise caution, the lust and love of friendship and passion are collared, and the leash is held tight.  Conflicting feelings, man and Wolf, they often fight and it is bitter, for the Wolf has teeth and will happily bite.  I juggle like a clown, the love of one, the passion of another, the Wolf and the man, the devil, the lover.  It is words I juggle, and with words I deceive, even the Wolf must be tricked if I am to continue my love affair without there being an affair, for who would want to create an affair of an affair?  Not I.  I often find that I love them both and my Wolf spurs me on, at times I ride his grey back and we streak between the trees, leash flapping in the wind.  I should tell the one that I keep in the shadows, I feel as though I could light her life with this knowledge, that she would understand and join me in a trilateral union.  If only she could open her eyes, could realise and release her Wolf, and then we could all love in the present, and the future would follow, would flow?  I am man enough to know the folly of this canine lie, in despair I stare at the sky, beside me my Wolf rolls in the sand of the barren landscape in which I so often stand when there is no solution.  When there is only despair. 

The future flew and now has flown.  There was a peaceful day, I remember the colours.  I walked that day with her in hand; we lived for the moment, no future planned, pending, painful.  We were in a bubble, a break in time where we could exist, no collared passion, no guilt.  My Wolf rested that day, off his leash and allowed to play.  Occasionally I would glance at him stalking the butterflies through the grass, relaxed, untaxed.  This day held no icy rain or words of pain, we were good together you and I.  Do you remember the glorious sun?  Do you remember what you said as you looked at me and described it shining on my hair?  “Gorgeous”, I smiled and you liked my smile, I could sense my Wolfs happiness as he grinned at the simplicity of the pure joy which I had attained.  No moral block, no emotion retained, unbridled love.  We climbed a tree that day, stood in the branches, held in its arms.  Embraced by it and each other, the park below, a green grassy meadow which we stood above, floating in our bubble.  We kissed your passionate kiss that day, I stored the memories so I could relive, replay.  All in case this was once and for all truly the last of our dreams, our final bubble.  And so it was, it seems.