Betrayal

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Recommended: Sexuality and gender in society today

Betrayal

1.Desire

It is easy to fall in love with bodies. I Breathe skin, lose time to anticipation and pleasure, hair, lips, thighs; tangled in another person, I am lost in a jungle. Transcendence. Society teaches us to break a body down: we love legs, butts, breasts; we take images and splice them into the form of our perfect desire. Like Pygmalion we are desperate to breathe life into our conception of beauty, our imagination of a perfect creature. Reality is easily redrawn around a body whose presence in a place reorganizes the map of the world. Nothing exists but the texture of skin, its taste thick in the mind's imagination. Against our animal world, ideas and numbers seem strange, misplaced, insignificant to desire and love, to connecting with another's warmth. Trying to fulfill a fantasy, it is the dreamer who is recreated. It is time that is filled in.

2. Characters

To a moment we are only characters. In this moment: David, the long-term boyfriend (now). Moa, at first betrayer, then clown, then you (then). There is the self who perceives, creates, and ultimately longs for the deep and endless fall of vertigo (lost between the now and then). And there is Love, so mysterious and evasive that I sometimes believe it is a character, alive, weaving tendrils around us (love plays with time).

But the descriptions might switch names. I could be the clown, and it could be you who plunges yourself into vertigo. And maybe only one character could play all the parts. There are several combinations to fit several moods (this is my version that fits my now).

3. Eternity

The moment has a way of leaking into other moments.

Other moments with other lovers leak into the memory.

The lovers, like muddying watercolors, swirl into each other.

I wonder if I only have relationships with myself.

I ask myself the same question over and over till it feels like I am banging my head against a wall, "What do I want?" I look into my heart but it is hard to see through the haze of time and desire. Sartre writes that we are indoctrinated with the values of our societies. We can never be or know ourselves till we escape these. Sartre draws one single path to freedom, this is radical choice, choosing something totally unconnected to anything, in practice this could only be a random choice.

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