I wish there was a better word for “relationship”. It’s the “ship” part that feels constricted. This defined vehicle to be steered in a predetermined direction, that follows the course of society’s expectations, in a specific trajectory. Limited. Linear. To arrive at the destination of Happily Ever After! To sail away into the sunset. Somewhere over the rainbow. To the place where my dreams come true… in my relation-ship…
But I want more than a ship. I want a shape that fits us in the ever-changing shape we exist in. Embracing the energy of movement that is some version of us, moment to moment. Motion in progress. Undefinable in perpetuity. More than just one thing. Non-linear. In all our complicated mess of butterfly-becoming. As we are.
I don’t want to ship myself off, packaged, and ready for a male to unpack and explore. What’s inside her box? There’s nothing neat about my human experience. It’s sometimes delicious complex and sometimes painfully confusing, so why am I always trying to streamline the processes? It’s the limitations and tightness of constraints that cause me all my tremendous pain. My fixation to hop on board…
But if I had a new shape, I won’t fall into it or even step up into it, it would self-create surrounding us. Embracing us as we shift and change, fluid, and light. Like an aura. Permeable to allowing compassion in, and permeable to letting judgment flow out.
When I’m fixated on the ship, I’m sinking. Drowning in a sea of chaos, too full, with nowhere to go. No safe harbor. I’m going overboard in my desperation. I capsize, jump ship, have titanic split-ups, out of the blue, again and again.
Are you in or out? Tell me! I need to know! The ship is sailing and you better get on board or get off!
I need another way to travel? To navigate love. What are my alternatives? Maybe there’s something away from all polar opposite options. Something more than my extreme versions of only two major choices to be made?
I want to create a relation-shape that fits us (whoever we are) as we discover and rediscover ourselves. Meeting each version for the first time, because it is the first time in this particular incarnation. A million combinations of multi-color. And shades, and shapes, and spaces in between.
I crave this perfect shape to contain my totality. I’d love it to be a place for two. But first, it has to be a comfortable size to fit my complexity. A shape to embrace all the fragmented parts that I’m only, just, now, piecing back together. I won’t shrink myself smaller for it. It needs to be expandable.
The limitations of a ship aren’t built to travel to the transcendent places I hope to explore. Into the vastness, love can take us. That’s the adventure I’d like to go on. Those are the places I want to visit.
Letting love flow as the life-force connector. Undefined movement as its definition.
No breaking down of each other’s walls, no boundary construction necessary, as the shape is an internal and external symbiosis. Like a lava lamp. Moving as we move. Changing as we change. Ever expansive.
This is the shape I crave to surround us with. An invisible magnetic field in which possibilities are endless and hope lives…
The world can keep its ships. That voyage, with those rights of passage, are places I no longer wish to visit.
I choose relation-shapes. For each of us to create our own.
